Any good sales person or marketer will tell you that speaking the language of your target audience is crucial for success.  No, I’m not talking about the dialects of countries; I am talking about the communication protocols that emerge at companies, within departments and across industries.  A new employee joining a company will quickly conform to the language of the organization.  A technology consultant will dispense of bits and bytes in favor of profit margin and revenue when speaking to a line of business manager.  A soldier will forego describing IEDs and Bravo Company when addressing a civilian.

Where am I going with this?  As social media advocates, we’ve largely failed at speaking the language of the frameworks pharmaceutical marketers are accustomed to hearing.  We apparently are one of the few sets of people that “don’t know where our bread is buttered.”  Tired clichés aside, as marketers that believe in social media, it is incumbent upon us to adapt our language to accommodate different audiences (in this sense, audiences refers to internal audiences that need to buy-in).  But therein is the challenge.  In trying to sell the concept and benefits of social media, you have a plethora of audiences to consider: marketing, legal, compliance and IT to name a few.  Finding a “standard language” for the buy-in process is a near impossible task.

Scratch that—it’s an impossible task.  Because the task is so daunting, rather than confront it we’ve tended to stick to the language we created.  And we wonder why social media adoption in healthcare has moved at a snail’s pace.

Instead of evangelizing, we need to be educating.  Rather that standing pat, we need to find middle ground.  The adoption of social media in pharmaceutical circles relies in part on our ability to message to each internal audience.  The failure to do so up until this point is ironic when you consider the nature of social media.  We preach the need for a personalized message on social media platforms.  We demand one-to-one interaction.  But when it comes to crafting a message for internal audiences we stick to muddled terms like influencer relations and sentiment analysis.  One more tired cliché for you: social media folks are afflicted with the “cobbler’s children don’t have shoes” syndrome.  A business executive could give a hoot about sentiment analysis unless you can demonstrate why that matters for his or her business.  How is not being on social media costing that company money?

So much energy has been poured in to defining the platform and effective communications that we’ve neglected our own imperative to create a unique message for our own audiences.

• Previous Entry: Evaluating Pharmaceutical Twitter Accounts
• Next Entry: Hoarding Knowledge Does not Equate to Power