Sermo is a well capitalized community site for physicians with a really cool model for monetization. They generate revenue by charging third parties between 100K and 500K USD annually to access physicians’ anonymized comments and polling data via a client portal. Some have the ability to create a client posting to which doctors can directly respond - this is probably reserved for those paying the higher fees. Subscribers include financial institutions, health care organizations, and governmental bodies.
Monetization is predicated on cultivating an active community, as it is in any other social or professional networking site. So how is Sermo growing their community?
They pay existing members to refer their colleagues. The price per head is 20 usd (link opens new window), paid via an Amazon gift certificate. This is spam, stealthy, but still spam. True believers are going to promote a product or service if they think it’s really that good, with no incentives, and they will make sure all of their friends know. Sermo is probably having difficulty identifying evangelists, so they’re trying to grease the wheels. That may mean that the product isn’t being received as well as they hoped.
This begs the question: how many of Sermo’s 70K registered users are actually active? Are their registrants coming back a second time? Sites define active users in several ways, I like Facebook’s: at least one visit per month. Sermo doesn’t publish this information, which is curious. That’s a stat you really want to promote if it’s solid, and keep under wraps if it’s not.
Does that mean Sermo has a paucity of active members? I’m not sure, but they’re giving cash incentives to promote user generated content (link opens new window): submitting case studies (100 USD), the first to correctly diagnose the disease or identify a radiographic finding suggested by the case study (100 USD), and voting on the “correct” answer among several submitted answers (50 USD, awarded randomly, not to the first voter). Sermo also pays their members for participating in certain surveys (30 USD). This is all bad news from a community building perspective.
I suppose if the cash award is significant, then it does matter. Resident physicians who make between 30K and 50K USD may contemplate selling out their friends for 20 bucks or being active members for cash incentives, but certainly not attending docs who make 120K USD or more, depending on the specialty. Maybe Sermo is focusing on residents, hoping they’ll continue to use the site once they become attendings. I don’t think that will pan out unless the service proves to be useful within the context of a medical practice - it certainly isn’t now. If docs found it valuable, Sermo wouldn’t have considered doling out cash.
It’s easy for me to rail on what Sermo’s doing wrong, but people with serious money have backed them. And technically, I work for a competitor in their space, so take what I write with a grain of salt.