Three things to like about the conference so far…

1) Bix, the restaurant we ate at last night with our friends from Allegiance Health and BrandActive. A jazzy supper club with an entrance tucked down an alley somewhere in downtown San Francisco, the food was excellent and the speak-easy ambiance perfect. I am the furthest thing from a food critic, but the Ceviche was unbelievable.

2) Free CRM. Yes, that’s right, a free Customer Relationship Management solution. Sounds like a gimmick, right? Offered by some folks I have deep respect for at Reach 3 out of Madison, WI, “CRM Launch” allows healthcare marketers to leverage the company’s proprietary healthcare segmentation models and communication technologies to implement CRM (the catch, if you want to call it that, is that resulting marcom tools such as direct mail, must flow through their offering). I’m not shilling for the product – I actually have no idea how it works or how well it works. I just love the concept. CRM, like brand building or call centers, is an example of the more sophisticated approaches our industry needs to embrace. Providing healthcare marketers who otherwise can’t afford full CRM systems or can’t convince others of the value of such a system with this option is a great way to help the industry along. Assuming the service is as robust as it seems, now there literally is no reason not to employ this critical strategy.

3) Web 2.0 is a bad, bad thing. Not my words, but those of author Andrew Keen, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture (read his blog for more). Keen was the keynote speaker this morning, and offered some fairly radical opinions on how Web 2.0 offerings such as Google, YouTube, Wikipedia and the blogosphere have led to the false belief that just because everyone can contribute, we all have equally valuable things to say. (Sounds eerily similar to the desktop publishing revolution that ushered in the misconception that just because you had an Apple computer with Quark Express, you were qualified to be a designer). This “democratization” of the Internet serves to remove all the filters for what’s true, what’s accurate, what’s smart, and what’s expert. He stresses that in fact, most people are not qualified to speak on most topics (a perusal of the comments section on most any web-based newspaper article seems to verify this point). He points to the “empowered patient” as an example of this, with her printed wikipedia pages and pharma ads, trying to dictate to a physician (who has spent years in school and practice) on what’s best for them clinically.

His advice? Don’t give in, don’t allow the masses to generate content they’re not qualified to generate, given they aren’t filtered, edited, or experts. Whether you agree or not with this rant against the democratization of the Internet that is Web 2.0, Keen definitely provides some points to ponder. (Like, where does this blog sit given that contention? hmmmmm.)