In the next few sentences I’m going to (attempt) compare pharmaceutical social media and Rage Against the Machine.  Bear with me on this; I swear I’m going somewhere.  Rage Against the Machine was a band that rose to success largely on its ability to passionately vocalize tenuous political issues.  The band prided itself on voicing the things that nobody wanted to say and putting songs out there that didn’t conform to the “best practices” outlined by record labels.  Just like any industry, there is a clear recipe for success in the music industry and Rage Against the Machine wasn’t it.

See where I am going with this?  In their infancy, pharma social media marketers needed a bit of a “Rage Against the Machine” mentality.  Marketing best practices said nothing about direct engagement with the patient, letting go of brand control and moving away from mass audiences to more targeted engagement.  The very premise of social media marketing ran counter to many established marketing norms—it bucked “the establishment.”

Here’s the catch though: You know what happened to Rage Against the Machine?  They broke up despite their overwhelming success.  The band broke up because the decision-making process had fallen apart and they felt like they were straying too far from their original intention (this is where the comparison falls apart a bit, but you get the point!).

How does social media marketing as a discipline avoid the same fate as Rage Against the Machine?  Stop working against the machine.  Social media marketers have always proudly displayed a cavalier attitude—believing they were changing the way companies marketed and interacted.  But cavalier attitudes are not always the best way to enact change.

At a pharmaceutical company, there is a very methodical process that needs to occur long before social media engagement is ever reached.  Want to engage with patients on forums?  Better check the FDA guidelines on that one and write a new company policy for engagement?  Think you might see a few adverse events?  You need to write a new policy on how to handle adverse events reported through social media channels.  Have aspirations of responding to comments on Facebook and through Twitter?  You better devise a response plan for each medium and consider who has the approval power to maintain a consistent flow of communication.

Authentic engagement is always a laudable goal in social media.  But you can’t focus on just engagement when working with pharmaceutical companies.  You should be adept at writing social media policy, running training sessions, understanding AE reporting protocols and running robust listening programs.  These are the building blocks of social media success and they fall right in line with what pharma companies have always done.  Will you swim with or against the current?

Healthcare marketers are accustomed to dealing with segmented target markets. A target market can be defined as a region, disease state, patient, physician, hospital, insurance provider, etc. … There are no shortage of audiences for healthcare marketers. In that sense, pharmaceutical companies are used to taking a broadly defined target market and slicing and dicing it a number of different ways. But are they prepared for the next wave of strategy required in today’s communications environment—microstrategy?

Typically, marketers evaluate their target market and then develop a strategy based on the demographics of that market. Makes sense right? It does, but developing a microstrategy requires a deeper level of analysis and planning to understand beyond the broadly defined target market. Microstrategy is making a concerted effort to understand what types of information individuals are seeking, how they prefer to receive it and from what sources.

The need for microstrategy comes on the heels of the emergence of social media. In most cases, even when a market is divided by segment, there is still a broadcast-style approach to communicating with that audience. Problem is: consumers no longer find that acceptable as a sole source of communication with a company. Consumers demand interaction. Consumers expect more from a brand and are more-than-willing to open their wallets for those that have developed that connection.

Not surprisingly, developing a microstrategy is both time consuming and difficult. Surely a marketer can’t develop a strategy for each individual in a target market. All the analytical tools and manpower in the world can’t keep up with the pace at which new information becomes available. So where does this leave marketers? On the one hand, consumers demand individual attention and on the other, companies are ill-equipped to provide that level of attention. Ultimately, a healthcare marketer needs to put together a microstrategy focused on understanding the consumption of information in each of their target markets and a plan of action to become an active participant in facilitating that consumption.

There is no denying that microstrategy is a significant undertaking that goes well beyond the current level of analysis needed to form a marketing plan. Many marketers are scared off by the thought of having to develop this level of understanding in order to execute a successful marketing plan. The response is to forego microstrategy planning entirely. Bad move. Think of microstrategy like influencer relations. By understanding a target market’s consumption of information and the key influencers in that process, a brand or company can become an integral cog in that process.

Daunting? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely. If companies fail to incorporate microstrategy into their planning process, people will gladly turn their attention to those that do.

In a recent conversation I had at a pharmaceutical social media conference, an attendee was relaying a discussion they had with a social media zealot.  The social media zealot asserted that as social media grew in importance, it would diminish the need for pharmaceutical sales reps.  That’s right, social media is so powerful it will wipe out the need for pharmaceutical sales reps entirely (insert sarcastic tone here).

Folks, it’s these kinds of false promises that prevent social media from being taken seriously.  And you wonder why seasoned executives scoff at job titles like “social media lead.”  If claims like the above continue to make the rounds, then the skeptics will undoubtedly be proven right—social media will be just a fad.  Unfortunately, this is just one example of many that exemplifies the over-promising that takes place in the world of social media.

So let me lay it out for you plain and simple.  No, social media alone will not boost revenues 20%.  Social media will not cover up the misdeeds of a company.  Social media will not replace advertising, traditional public relations or other forms of marketing entirely.  And for goodness sakes, social media surely will not sweep brand problems under the rug.  Will it change the role of each of these disciplines, along with other business units across a company (including sales)?  Yes.  But to think a wholesale extinction of certain jobs is on the horizon because of social media adoption borders on the absurd.

In an excitement to pad their pockets, many social media advocates are selling promises they simply can’t keep.  The good news is, most social media buyers now understand that there are risks involved in social media and it’s not some magic elixir.  The bad news is; these types of statements paint all of us in a negative light.  To earn a seat at the strategy table with branding, advertising and traditional PR, we have to get out of this stage of outsized promises.

Social media is a lot of things—a silver bullet it is not.  And if anyone tells you otherwise, put the phone down and give me a call.

Recently I was working on a social media research project for a large healthcare company.  The task was simple: take a look across a variety of social media platforms and identify the most active blogs, Twitter personalities, Facebook groups, etc…and then determine why people were flocking to these sites and what information they were seeking.

Easy enough.

This wasn’t a unique assignment; I’ve seen dozens of similar requests.  These types of reports tend to focus on platforms—what is the most prominent group on Facebook?  But as I worked through my research it became abundantly clear that focusing on platforms is the wrong approach.  Instead of focusing on Facebook and Twitter, we should be focusing our efforts on identifying influencers.

This is a better approach for a few reasons.  For starters, social media is about 1:1 interactions.  Focusing on influencers rather than platforms puts the attention on building relationships and not on the social network of the day.  In addition, most of the key influencers in a given space have a significant presence across platforms.  It’s rare that you will find a well-respected, vocal presence on Twitter that doesn’t have a blog.  Influencers are highly regarded because of what they have to say, not where they say it.

Beyond focusing on building relationships, focusing on influencers rather than platforms shifts the focus away from the mentality that social media is about the tools.  Instead, social media is about the individuals, how they communicate and what they have to share.  Once you identify an influencer, you can then begin to understand how they reached that position and what content you can offer that would be valuable to that person.

Focusing on influencer relations demands an integrated approach to social media.  Rather than formulating a strategy for Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, you are forced to develop an umbrella strategy to form relationships with influencers.  Of course, this demands mircrostrategies on how to engage with each influencer (and you wonder why social media takes so much time and effort?).  By taking the focus off platforms, you remove some of the temptation to blindly chase after tools simply because it’s the hot social network of the day—maybe Facebook is not the right place for your business.

Social media platforms are important.  They are where the masses congregate and share information.  But as a company in the early stages of drafting a social media strategy, start off by thinking about influencers and you will find your way to the right platform.

This is the time of year when lists abound.  There is a top ten list for just about everything and pharmaceutical social media is no different.  So rather than offer up my obligatory “eleven things to watch for 2011” or a slew of predictions on what to expect, I thought I would offer up my one hope for 2011.

My one hope for 2011 is that it’s not the year of pharmaceutical social media.

With some form of social media guidance likely to come in the first quarter of 2011, surely this will be the year of social media for healthcare companies.  Not so fast—and that’s a good thing.

2011 will not be the year of social media—it will be the year that the idea of social media as a stand-alone strategy vanishes.  General acceptance of social media as a tool has already occurred.  Better still, many companies are realizing that social media takes careful planning and a well-thought out strategy.  However, for the most part, the social media strategy is  currently dreamt up in a vacuum.  In 2011, companies will begin to realize that not only is it necessary to put a social media strategy in place, it is critical to ensure that strategy is part of the larger brand and corporate initiatives.

Moving forward, rather than one internal champion, we will begin to see a far more integrated approach to social media.  Brand managers will join corporate communications managers, compliance officers and executives at the same table.  Social media planning will start with questions like: “what is our corporate strategy in 2011 and how can social media support that?”  This is in stark contrast to today’s favored approach: “we need social media, what’s our strategy?”

In order for social media to succeed in the pharmaceutical space (or any space for that matter) it has to be bigger than a strategy cooked up in isolation.  This is one of the primary ills plaguing social media currently.  It is a fringe tool marginalized to the outskirts of company/budget/team.

2011 will be the year that changes—or so I hope.

Yesterday I wrote a post about the social media resource problem.  The idea is that many companies naively believe that it takes little to no resources to engage in social media.  In a similar vein, there is a misconception that social media is easy and is the work of junior staff.

This is likely the misconception that leads many to believe that when engaging an agency to help with social media efforts it should come cheap.  And before I go any further, I will acknowledge the obvious elephant in the room—I’m an agency guy that has a significant stake in the game.   Fair enough.  That said, as someone that works at an agency, I can also pull back the curtain a bit and provide a glimpse at how a social media program actually operates on the agency side.

So let me dispel this myth—when you hire an agency (maybe even mine, SHIFT Communications) the work is not farmed out to a team of junior staffers and college interns.  No, we don’t have a team of young guns just waiting for their next project.  Quite the contrary.  Unlike traditional PR where a lot of the heavy lifting such as database development, coverage tracking and reporting are done by the junior staff, social media is a bit more top heavy.  This means that you are not getting an allotment of billable hours on the cheap.  Instead, you are getting a mixture of the full team’s attention with a heavy dose of the higher-billed team members.

Why?  Because in order for social media to be a success, there is a level of strategy, analysis of information and real-time decision making that should not be left to the junior staff.  Putting the demands of social media on those that are still learning the ropes is not only risky, it’s unfair.  Junior staff members of course have a huge role to play in any social media engagement.  They can serve as the eyes and ears for monitoring purposes, help to identify new key influencers and spot possible trouble spots before they bubble to the surface.

When you hire an agency for your social media engagement, don’t expect to only get the time of entry-level employees.  Social media is no longer a tool marginalized on the outskirts of a marketing program.  Because of its strategic nature, the constant attention required and the high expectations of the customer—social media is very much in the hands of the senior team at an agency.  So yea, that VP you met at your pitch will be playing a significant role on the account—would you want it any other way?

A few common phrases you might hear when talking about how to budget, strategize and allocate resources for a healthcare social media effort.

• “We can just hire an intern, they know all about Facebook.”
• “How much time could it possibly take to get a 140 character message out there?  These two sentences alone are more than 140 characters—piece of cake.”
• “YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are all free, why should I pay anyone to manage that?”
• “We see this as a corporate communications function so let’s just assign it to our corporate communications director.  What?  Added compensation?  This is part of the new job description, she certainly has the time.”

Of course, these are all a bit tongue-in-cheek but you get the gist.  There is a common misunderstanding about the amount of resources required to effectively engage in social media.  Rich Meyer wrote a post today that points to an eMarketer report that says this perception might be shifting.  The report indicates that 41.6% of marketers list time and resources as the biggest barrier to entry for social media.  Not surprisingly then, 37.8% of marketers list “not allocating proper time and resources” as the biggest mistake they made in social media.

At this point, it seems like beating a dead horse, but social media is not easy.  Before you ever get involved, you need to properly plan, set a strategy and align your internal social media team.  These are just the building blocks of starting a social media engagement and don’t even scratch the surface of the planning required for success.

I’ve made this analogy several times before, but it bears repeating in the context of the resource question.  Social media can be boiled down to the simple dynamics of a relationship.  In its simplest form, social media is starting new relationships, building on existing ones and fostering long-lasting bonds.  It sounds a lot like relationships in our real lives doesn’t it?  Like any relationship, social media takes commitment, honesty and above all else—hard work.

And like any relationship, social media is not easy, but the payoff is rewarding.

Last week I spoke at the Advanced Learning Institute’s Social Media for Pharma Conference.  In one of the breakout sessions I was a part of, a debate ensued on whether or not “social media” is the right term to describe a company’s online engagement with its identified audience.

Social media is a term that fits well with the current business lexicon.  Media relations, media buys, etc…are all standard ingredients in the marketing mix.  Within that context, it’s easy to see why social media was the term assigned to this increasingly vital part of a company’s marketing strategy.  ‘Social’ accurately describes the two-way conversation piece of the puzzle and ‘media’ covers the delivery mechanism.  Case closed.

The problem for the group I was with was that the term ‘social media’ elicited a poor reaction from their pharmaceutical colleagues.  Because pharmaceutical companies are keenly aware of the traditional aspects of the marketing mix, the thinking was that the terms ‘social media’ would be too closely tied to traditional efforts and therefore be seen as an extension of current efforts.  Rather than helping to overcome the education hurdle, some feared this actually contributed to the problem.

Alternative ideas that were floated were terms like ‘social relationships,’ ‘social engagement,’ and ‘relationship engagement strategies.’

I understand the motivation behind finding a different name that more accurately reflects the goal of social media.  We certainly don’t want to tempt the untrained marketer into treating social media like any other marketing channel.  The goal of renaming ‘social media’ is to deemphasize the ‘media’ and emphasize the ‘social.’  At its core, social media is about establishing a relationship with your target audience.  It’s about forming a two-way conversation and moving away from the one-directional means of communications of days gone by.

Is social media the perfect term?  Probably not.  But part of the goal is not only to evangelize, but to educate.  Working within the confines of the current business language helps to define social media in terms that are accessible to the business executive.  Terms like ‘relationship engagement strategies’ are not part of language of most business executives and therefore marginalize social media to the fringes.

The important thing is that ‘social media’ is just a term.  What you call it matters little if you don’t start from the right premise.  Maybe we should focus less on what it’s called and more on how it helps to achieve our objectives?

This is not what I did on my break from my blogging.

As you’ve probably noticed, I took a bit of breather from this blogging thing.  I’d be lying if I said it was intentional. Between a flurry of end of year new business activity, keeping current clients happy, selling my house in Massachusetts and buying a house in New Jersey—things have been a bit nutty to say the least.

There was some benefit to my small sabbatical.  It provided me with better perspective.  One of the best pieces of career advice I ever received was to make sure you pick your head up from the day-to-day work and take in what’s going on at this very moment.  This break from blogging was an opportunity to do just that and enhance my view of the world of pharmaceutical social media.

Here are five valuable lessons that were reinforced during my break from blogging:

1.)    The Dangers of the Echo chamber: I’ve written before about the danger of allowing the pharmaceutical social media conversation to become an echo chamber.  It’s kind of like a whole bunch of conservatives tuning into Fox News every day—you are only reinforcing what you already believe.  Staying within the confines of the echo chamber is a great way to stroke your ego—but it’s a terrible way to win business and move the industry forward.

2.)    Questions of Internal Resources Prevail: The common belief is that a lack of guidance from the FDA (tick tock) is the primary roadblock to most pharmaceutical social media efforts.  While it certainly is an issue, more programs get tripped up at an even earlier juncture—who the heck is going to run this stuff?  Before social media programs get started, it’s critical that an internal social media team is aligned.

3.) Ownership is Still an Issue…But not the Way you Think: The problem of who owns social media is still a major question.  However, it’s not a question between PR, social media, digital or advertising agency that dominates the conversation.  The real question is should pharmaceutical social media live in marketing?  Or is it better suited for another piece of the business?

4.) Perception that Pharmaceutical Social Media is Overkill: In today’s economic environment, many the public at large would rather see pharmaceutical companies develop better research pipelines, flawless manufacturing facilities and improved patient assistance programs.  Many find it difficult to see the direct correlation between better health outcomes and pharmaceutical social media.

5.) Beg, Borrow and Steal: Numerous reports have indicated that spending on social media is on the rise.  This only tells part of the story.  True, companies are looking to ramp up social media efforts, but the overall budget isn’t expanding, it’s just being swiped from other areas.  This feeds into the problems of internal resources and who owns the program. Nobody wants their budget to suffer at the expense of social media—so budget wars continue.

Some of the issues raised above are a bit myopic in their approach to social media.  But that’s the thing about stepping outside the echo chamber to gain perspective.  It’s not about validating your own opinions, it’s not even about figuring out reality.  Perspective is understanding the reality of others.  The question is: how do we adjust?    

It’s no secret that I believe a strong pharmaceutical social media program centers on the patient.  Whether it is clinical operations, selling to physicians or dealing with insurance providers, a pharmaceutical company should be focused on better serving the needs of the patient.  This doesn’t imply physicians or other core audiences lack a place in social media (more on this in the coming days)—it simply means that the best pharmaceutical marketing efforts keep the core tenant of patient health front and center.

I’ve put forward the idea of Return on Health and highlighted the need to empower the empowered patient.  But this might fall on deaf ears without practical advice.  How can you ensure that the patient is at the center of your social media efforts?  What does this look like in practice as opposed to theory?

As a starting point, begin by asking how you made the determination that social media is a route worth considering.  If your motivation is that you are getting your lunch handed to you by a competitor, you are probably heading down the wrong path.  On the flip side, if you feel that treatment options for a specific disease state are being under or misrepresented by a competitor you are in a better position to engage in social media.  The point is this: the question you must consider is “how will this help better serve the needs of the patient?”

Now that you have committed to starting with the patient, how about involving the patient in the planning process?  Many companies talk about the need for patient engagement yet few involve them in the social media planning process.  A “patient advisory panel” can help direct the tactics of a social media engagement for pharmaceutical companies.  Rather than making educated guesses on what they want—make informed decisions.

With a better gauge of what patients actually want, you can start to direct your efforts to the appropriate platform.  Perhaps through patient communication and your own research you uncover the fact there is a glaring lack of information around a particular disease state.  This would indicate that the pharmaceutical company may need to create the hub for interaction.  However, you may also uncover that there are vibrant and active communities already existing that are only in need of a little direction or additional information.  If your focus is on the patient, it will be clear where the area of need is—as opposed to the area to exploit (which often guides marketing strategy).

These are just a few simple examples of what it looks like to put patients first in a social media engagement.  Of course, this only scratches the surface but serves to illustrate the need for patient involvement starts from the very outset of a social media program.