See a cold coming and you can stop it. SSP, a 250 year old Japanese pharmaceutical company, is doing just that. It’s called Kazemill, which means "see the cold." Using Twitter, Kazemill collects Tweets about coughing, fever, runny or stuffed noses, chills, sore throats and headaches. This builds a picture on the website of where the cold is, how it’s moving, and what its symptoms are. Chemists and shops can stock the right amount of the right drugs at the right time: before the cold hits. Consumers can buy remedies they’re about to need. Epidemics are avoided because SSP can distribute proactively. And next, Kazemill goes global. Germans preparing for the pollen moving in from France. In Hong Kong lozenges bought for a sore throat from winds in China. Flu vaccines shipped to Venezuela before the virus makes it out of Brazil.And there’s more to come.

The Kazemill website was launched as part of the SSP website on November 1, 2010. A major print campaign across Japanese newspapers was implemented according to the following schedule:Advertisement 1Dec 4: Chugoku Shimbun Nishi-Nihon Shimbun Kahoku ShinpoDec 5: Chunichi Shimbun Yomiuri Shimbun Nihon Keizai ShimbunAdvertisement 2Jan 5: Nihon Keizai Shimbun Yomiuri Shimbun In addition, as a result of the customizable data feature of the Kazemill website, countless POP promotions containing local, symptom-specific information have been created by pharmacies across Japan.

Even before its launch, Kazemill received generous coverage from both online and print media. It was covered in newspapers and Japan’s number one business magazine, "Nikkei Business," which described it as a groundbreaking marketing technique. More than 3000 internet media such as Yahoo/MSN covered Kazemill, describing it as a breakthrough in converting Twitter noise into powerful information. As a result, traffic to the SSP website surged to fifty times higher than normal on the day of the Kazemill launch. Recent events in Japan have made up-to-date data collection impossible. However, Kazemill showed positive impact at launch. PR generated for SSP, word-of-mouth among website visitors, and demand for SSP products (especially the over-the-counter cold drug S-TAC), reflected that impact.