Earlier this year, Google announced its latest product, Google Wave, and positioned it as a revolutionary way to communicate and collaborate on projects. Although not much was known about Google Wave in the first few months after the announcement, executives did share that Google Wave would give users the following features:
- The ability to share documents in multiple formats. Much like Gmail’s share feature, text documents, videos, maps and other files can easily be transferred without the worrying about file size;
- Real-time collaboration allowing users in different locations to edit documents simultaneously and discuss the edits;
- Replay options that allow new members to replay conversations and see how the project evolved over time;
- Natural-language capabilities which provide word suggestions and spell check; and
- Options to extend Google Wave invitations to others and to embed one wave in another.
With these features and the brand power of Google, hundreds of thousands of people signed up to beta test Google Wave and in late September the first 100,000 people were invited to join the Wave. From that invitation, Mashable published a short video about the features they had been able to test and how they predicted it being used.
Even though the platform is still classified as a beta, and it is not open to the general public, discussion has already started about how this platform will transform communication. So how will this new network change the way that healthcare marketers work? For all marketers, it means that edits and work can be done more instantly and with full disclosure about how the project got to the point that it is at that moment. With the replay feature, everyone who is invited to the “wave” will have a full understanding about the scope of the project, and a way to see what options have already been tested on the project. Since people can invite others to Google Wave, people who would not typically work on the project could be asked to contribute ideas, which could help take the project in a different direction.
These changes to healthcare marketing are certainly not going to be the only ones that occur because of Google Wave. As more comes out about the features and applications of the platform, people will continue to find new ways to use Google Wave as a marketing tool and develop new approaches to marketing because of it.
