ZURBlog is where we discuss product design, business and strategy.

We recently launched 5MinuteConsult.com for Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a business unit of Wolters Kluwer Health (say that five times quickly). The 5-Minute Clinical Consult is in it's 17th edition and is the medical professionals leading choice for trusted clinical content. It's a honor to work with a company that has a rich history- Lippincott is one of the oldest publishers in the United States and was founded in Philadelphia in 1792.

Social tools like Twitter and Delicious are typically associated with blogs and personal sites, but we decided in our project planning that they would be great for a number of business reasons:

1. We we're able to quickly integrate a few publishing tools without having to rely on their engineering team- this reduced the costs and overhead of bringing in another person.
2. The microsite can stay fresh with new content without much effort (5-10 minutes a day). It's a marketing site to drive clicks and centralize links in one location, so heavy content building is not necessary.
3. Using social tools instead of a custom CMS has the added benefit of creating inbound links on social websites (an SEO win). It also makes it easy to integrate these feeds across their other health related publishing properties.

Social tools are a simple way for businesses to get up and running quickly.