Marketing professionals are big on positioning statements.  We love talking about value propositions and key differentiators.  Give us a pen and paper and we can churn out SWOT analyses all day long.  But when it comes to pharmaceutical social media, discipline is all too often abandoned in favor of a shoot-from-the-hip attitude.

Just like any form of communications, social media requires discipline, patience and strategy.  Despite its seemingly spontaneous nature, there should be a clear strategy and stated objective.  Rather than approaching social media efforts as an opportunity to “increase brand awareness by reaching more consumers,” let’s start at an even more basic level.  In pharmaceutical social media: what is your mission statement?

It might seem like a return to that Marketing Communications 101 class you took back in college, but I can assure you that your pharmaceutical social media efforts will benefit from a “mission statement.”  I have long stated that a healthcare company’s involvement in social media should focus on the patient. The rules of communication on social media platforms render the old rules of marketing irrelevant.  It’s not about pushing a message to the masses but about connecting with a key set of individuals.  This is a radical shift in thinking that requires pharmaceutical companies to start from square one and consider what they learned in that Marketing 101 class.

Businesses write mission statements, why shouldn’t your internal social media team?  When penning your mission statement for social media dispense of marketing lingo.  Don’t use this as an opportunity to put benchmarks for success and outline metrics.  That’s not the purpose of a mission statement.

The mission statement should serve as an opportunity to answer the elusive question: “why am I here?”  In some industries this is a less critical question, but when you are dealing with health, it’s an imperative question to answer.  In writing your social media mission statement, consider how you became involved in the project, what the motivating factors were and how that will determine the strategy you outline.  The mission statement that you come up with should serve as a guide book.  It can be a document that is circulated at a  minimum to the individuals that are part of the company-sanctioned social media efforts and at a maximum company-wide as part of establishing social media guidelines.  The goal of honing in on a social media mission statement is to determine the key values your company will uphold and your reason for participating.   Thinking about it in this way will help to ensure you stay on track and always engage transparently and ethically.  Consider this your code of conduct.

So why are you here?  What is your mission statement for pharmaceutical social media?

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