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Archive for the ‘Pharmaceutical Online Marketing’ category

Social Media ROI: Uncovering a Combination of Leading and Lagging Indicators

March 23rd, 2011

Economists have long used a combination of lagging and leading indicators to come up with an accurate picture of the economy. As the name implies, a lagging indicator provides a quantitative measure over a period of time. It is a great tool for looking back at a period of time and measuring an outcome. A leading indicator is more of short-term measure of success that offers some predictive insight into future outcomes.

For example, in the world of economy, things like the average prime rate charged by banks and the length of unemployment are lagging indicators. They are a clear sign on whether or not the economy is expanding or contracting. For leading indicators, economists turn to metrics like stock market performance and building permits to get an early look at what might be on the horizon.

Combining leading and lagging indicators is not a perfect measurement equation, but it does provide a fairly complete picture.

However, when it comes to business, and particularly social media, most measurement equations tend to look only at lagging indicators. Of course, the most obvious offender is the dreaded ROI. ROI is the definition of a lagging indicator. It measures the amount your investment returned over a specific period of time. It measures campaigns.

ROI is a great measurement, and one that shouldn’t be discarded—but it also shouldn’t be the sole measure of performance. If ROI is the only measure you are using to judge the performance of your social media efforts, how do you know mid-stream that something isn’t working? How do you adjust your strategies and tactics when it becomes evident that something isn’t working? The answer is simple—you can’t. Measuring only ROI gives a good indication on success or failure. But it doesn’t allow you to change course before a problem derails your entire social media effort.

Moving forward, you should look to augment ROI with leading indicators to provide a complete picture of your social media efforts. Notice that I said ‘augment ‘in the previous sentence and not replace. You may find some social media wingnuts out there suggesting you rid yourselves of ROI all together. I am not that naïve. However, I do realize that ROI is an imperfect measure and requires additional insight to provide the most complete picture possible.

What leading indicators are you using to measure social media success?

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Posted in Pharmaceutical Online Marketing, Pharmaceutical Social Media, Return on Health

Mobile Technology: The Untapped Healthcare Social Media Frontier

March 21st, 2011

Last week I wrote about the emergence of mobile apps as the new shiny object in pharmaceutical social media. Because of the potential of mobile technology, marketers are left drooling at the implications it could have for the pharmaceutical industry.

But despite the fact that the potential is there, it still remains as largely untapped frontier. True, there are a number of mobile healthcare apps already on the market but it hasn’t reached the level of mass adoption—we are still very much in the bleeding-edge phase of development. Why is that? Why is it that despite so much potential some companies are holding back from this untapped frontier?

Perhaps part of the hesitation is that they are heeding lessons learned from past endeavors. Sometimes it’s better to be a fast follower than the first to market. Some pharmaceutical marketers might be holding back to see how mobile technology is applied by other companies before moving in. In addition, the research on the effectiveness of mobile technology to motivate behavioral change is scant. Until the effectiveness is proven beyond a mere hypothesis, some healthcare companies will remain reluctant.

But I’d venture to guess that the biggest hurdle to more widespread adoption of mobile technology by pharmaceutical companies is “silo thinking.” By silo thinking I mean that most companies are evaluating the benefits of mobile technology through a narrow lens. In most cases, that narrow lens is marketing. Marketers lead the mobile technology conversation and it is always from the viewpoint of how to better push messages to the patient. But that’s only one piece of the puzzle when it comes to mobile applications. Because of its ubiquitous, always-on nature, pharmaceutical companies have an opportunity to leverage mobile technology across various pieces of the business. Instead of a marketing tool, mobile should be viewed as what it’s always been—a communications tool. When viewed a communications tool, the applications for the technology become much more abundant. For example, mobile can help with marketing, arming the sales force with real-time information, communicating with physicians, patient adherence, communicating recall information and as an anti-counterfeiting measure to name a few. Single-function technologies rarely gain support inside pharmaceutical companies. In order to begin to see a more advanced and widespread use of mobile, the conversation needs to evolved beyond its benefit to marketing.

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Posted in Mobile Healthcare Marketing, Pharmaceutical Crisis Communications, Pharmaceutical Online Marketing, Pharmaceutical Social Media

Tags: Mobile Healthcare Marketing Pharmaceutical marketing Pharmaceutical Social Media

Avoiding the Dreaded Follow and Forget on Facebook

March 17th, 2011

Contrary to popular belief, launching a Facebook page, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry, requires a lot of upfront work. A healthcare brand manager doesn’t wake up on Monday and dream up the idea of a Facebook page and see it through to fruition by Wednesday. Decisions like what language needs to be on the landing page, what the design layout will be and what level of discussion to allow needs to be considered before jumping in. And all of this content needs to go through the regulatory/compliance department for approval. It’s no small feat to get a Facebook page launched.

Because of this rigorous process, there is often a tendency to view the launch of a Facebook page as the finish line. But I have some news most brand managers probably don’t want to hear—the launch is only the starting line.

The problem with this approach is that it leads to the dreaded “follow and forget.” Of course, the goal is not to rack up likes on Facebook from people that never again visit your page. I’d venture to guess that part of the follow and forget problem stems from this idea that reaching the launch phase means you’ve done your job. As a result, engaging content begins to wane, attention from brand managers decreases and page visits plummet. Why should your Facebook followers come back to your page if you don’t give them a reason to do so? They shouldn’t and they won’t.

Instead of allowing your Facebook page to fall into obscurity, plan for the months following launch and continually measure against established benchmarks. Create a content calendar that outlines when content will post, who owns the creation of that content and what purpose it will serve. While creating that content, be sure to vary the format. Rather than simply posting short messages, think about sharing interesting news articles, recording podcasts, posting videos and running a poll. People view Facebook as a destination for interaction not as just a news portal—treat it as such.

The follow and forget syndrome is one of the biggest problems pharmaceutical companies face when diving into social media. To avoid it: adjust expectations on what engaging on Facebook means. Put the right team in place to manage the content creation burden and continually measure the impact of your efforts. As I said above, the public launch of a Faceoook page is the start line, not the finish line. In fact, if done properly, there is no finish line.

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Posted in Pharmaceutical Online Marketing, Pharmaceutical Social Media

Tags: Pharma on Facebook Pharmaceutical Online Marketing Pharmaceutical Social Media

How Simplicity and Uniqueness Lead to Pharma Social Media Success

March 16th, 2011

Think about the most successful online properties in the world. Which ones come to mind as having the meteoric rise that typifies a new online phenomenon? Online entities like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Twitter all fit the bill. What do they all have in common?

Simplicity and an individual experience.

The first one is easy to understand and Google is the best illustration of how simplicity drives interaction. At a time when search engines jammed their home pages full of ads, content and clutter in an effort to become a portal destination, Google took the opposite approach. Google wiped its homepage clear of anything other than a search bar. Of course, we all know how the rest of the story goes. Google conquered every search engine it encountered (show of hands, who remembers Northern Light?) and is now far more than a search company. Google’s rise to prominence was due in part to its simplicity.

The idea of an individual experience is a bit more difficult to understand. These online platforms take in millions of unique visitors—how could they provide a unique experience to each person? Because each and every time you interact with these online properties, you are getting something different. Not only are you getting something different, you are getting exactly what YOU want. If you perform a search on Google, it spits back information designed for YOUR consumption, if you sign up for Twitter, YOU choose who to follow and what you are interested in seeing. Consumers now demand an individual experience.

The implications to healthcare social media are obvious, yet, rarely played out. Many pharmaceutical social media strategies start with an assessment of what assets a company has on hand and how to best utilize those in a social media setting. Following the Google model, it would be far better to understand what the individual wants and then figure out how to create that content. The first model is based on what a company wants to create in social media; the second model is based on what the individual wants to hear through social media channels. It’s a critical distinction.

As a healthcare company, consider first the patient path as it relates to your company/brand. How does that path play out online and how can you provide useful, engaging information every step of the way? This will give you some indication of what the patient wants. As a pharma company, if you merely look at the assets you have on hand you will either focus your efforts on a single point along the patient path (i.e. only when they need you) or you will push out content that is irrelevant to the community. Both mistakes will quickly lead to social media failure.

If the likes of Google and Amazon have taught us anything it’s that developing a presence online based on the individual is the new model for success. It’s like downhill skiing on ice skates—at first glance they seem like they are for similar surfaces—but the end result won’t turn out well.

11 comments »

Posted in Pharmaceutical Online Marketing, Pharmaceutical Social Media

Tags: Healthcare social media Pharmaceutical marketing Pharmaceutical Social Media

The Mobile App Conundrum

March 15th, 2011

I recently participated in a brainstorm where a story was relayed about an executive that was desperate to come up with a mobile app. The exec set a goal for the marketing team: “launch a mobile app by the end of this quarter.” The executive didn’t specify what purpose the app should serve, or the underlying business purpose that drove the need for an app—just that one should be available quickly.

This anecdote raises two things to keep in mind when it comes to mobile:

1.) The Emergence of Mobile as the New Shiny Object: Social media has held the dubious distinction as the fad of the day for quite some time. Recently though, mobile seems to be moving up the list as the newest “gotta have it” technology. It’s easy to see why so many marketing professionals are enamored with the potential of mobile marketing. By its nature, mobile allows both location-based marketing and opt-in marketing. It’s far less of a fire hose than the internet at large and presumably provides a more captive audience. In addition, it’s expected that within the year, 50% of the U.S. will own a smartphone. More impressively, 72% of physicians currently use smartphones. Pharmaceutical marketers are tripping over themselves hoping to unleash the silver bullet to communicating with docs. The mobile app space is dripping with potential and will only continue to grow. Have you ever known a marketer that turns down potential, growth and functionality? I haven’t met one yet. But like the story above, some executives are getting ahead of themselves—forgetting to provide a clear business need for mobile applications.

2.) Mobile as a Fixed Asset: For all intents and purposes, a mobile app is a fixed asset. Once it’s launched, making wholesale changes can be difficult so you better get it right on the first shot. That doesn’t mean you should avoid them all together, but it does underscore the need for a careful and well-planned strategy. It makes moving forward without a stated business objective a dangerous proposition. What many executives want, and probably should opt for, is not an app at all. Instead, executives really want mobile browser functionality that can be launched from an “app” that lives on a mobile device. This is essentially mobile optimization with an app wrapper—it gets the job done.

By and large, mobile is an untapped frontier for healthcare companies. It has obvious applications for patient adherence, direct-to-patient communication, communicating recall information, connecting with doctors, enabling the sales force with better content, etc. But like any new initiative, the strategy has to justify the tool, not the other way around.

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Posted in Mobile Healthcare Marketing, Pharmaceutical Online Marketing, Pharmaceutical Social Media

Tags: Mobile Healthcare Marketing Pharmaceutical marketing Pharmaceutical Social Media

Don’t Throw Out Those Old Textbooks: Why Maslow and Drucker Still Matter

March 14th, 2011

In the rush to adopt social media, marketing folks seem to be throwing out the textbooks of yesteryear. Everyone is eager to adopt the new paradigm and dispense of old tactics. Abraham Maslow and Peter Drucker are probably rolling over in their graves. Make no mistake; social media represents one of the most fundamental shifts in how we communicate in the last 100 years, but it doesn’t mean you should forget everything you learned in business school up until this point.

Instead of unlearning the communications and management models that have prevailed for the last several decades, we should look to see how we can apply these to the current environment. As my colleague Bob Pearson states in his book, Pre-Commerce, most innovation is incremental and simply an iteration of an idea we’ve heard before. With that in mind, it would be a fool’s mistake to think past lessons are irrelevant. It’s the kind of mistake that has held some social media pros back up and isolated them to the fringes of the marketing department. Disregarding the prevailing wisdom of the day is a surefire way to get laughed right out of the boardroom. As communications professionals, we should strive to be a part of C-level discussions and that doesn’t happen without a pragmatic approach. Radical shifts are rarely thought of as pragmatic.

For example, Maslow’s “Theory of Human Motivation” may be even more relevant now than Maslow could have ever imagined. When has it ever been more important than now to understand human motivation? Psychological needs, safety, love and belonging, esteem and self actualization are all innate functions of any relationship. Maslow was even more of a visionary than anyone realized.

Likewise, things like the 4Ps of marketing still hold true. All of Peter Drucker’s principles of management—most of those still work.

The point of this post is less about spouting off traditional business theory and more about encouraging people not to get ahead of themselves. Careful, prudent strategy still works. Social media is still business, not just fun. Just because Twitter is 140 characters doesn’t mean you should just fire off messages without thought.

The wave of social media has caused many to critically evaluate their approach to communications. That’s a good thing. Many of the old models were either fundamentally broken or don’t scale to social media. But do yourself a favor; apply past lessons to your approach. You will thank me when you are sitting at the table across from the CEO and CMO making critical communications decisions.

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Posted in Pharmaceutical Online Marketing, Pharmaceutical Social Media

Tags: biotech social media Pharmaceutical marketing Pharmaceutical Social Media

The Value of Pre-Commerce to Pharma

March 11th, 2011

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to attend the Pre-Commerce Summit launching Bob Pearson’s book by the same name. The event was hosted by my colleagues at WCG and included a bevy of powerhouse speakers from Pfizer, Intel, Microsoft, Hershey’s and Thomson Reuters among others.

I know what you are thinking, what the heck is pre-commerce? In its simplest form, pre-commerce is based on the idea that e-commerce is centered on the transaction, which represents less than one percent of the time people spend online. The other 99 percent is referred to as “pre-commerce”—a time where customers make their own decisions to buy or support a brand before and after the transaction, with or without a company’s involvement. Think about that for a second. 99 percent of time spent online is spent doing something other than buying a product. That’s where your effort should be focused.

In the world of pharma and healthcare, this is slightly more complicated. In most cases, a patient is not going online to buy a medication. They are searching for information on a drug, seeking out a support network and turning to the counsel of others in similar situations. However, the idea of pre-commerce is still enormously relevant to pharmaceutical social media.

Every patient goes through the equivalent of what Bob refers to as “the supply chain of customer experience.” In healthcare, that supply chain of customer experience is a patient journey. In fact, that patient journey starts long before an individual needs your brand—it starts when they are healthy. Much of the current pharmaceutical social media efforts today focus on a single point in time. Most frequently, that point in time is after an individual is diagnosed. Along the patient continuum, most social media resources are directed at diagnosis, treatment and managing a disease. These are all critically important pieces of a patient’s experience with your brand, but they come rather late in the process.

Instead, the idea of pre-commerce suggests that not only should you be thinking about your customer, in this case the patient, at the point in time they consume your product, but you should be interacting with them long before they ever become your patient. In some ways, this is what we’ve been saying all along here—that patient interactions are a relationship where campaign thinking falls flat. Relationships take work over an extended period of time.

Think of it this way—in your personal relationships, if you have a situation where you need advice or comfort—who do you turn to, the person you met last week or the person you’ve known for years? That’s the basic tenant of pre-commerce. Pharmaceutical companies need to examine and understand the path their patients take to treatment and begin to engage with them along each milestone. Relationships form over time, not in time of crisis.

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Posted in Pharmaceutical Online Marketing, Pharmaceutical Social Media

Tags: Pharmaceutical marketing Pharmaceutical Social Media

The Case for Influencer Relations

January 5th, 2011

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.

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Posted in FDA and Pharma Social Media, Pharmacetuical Public Relations, Pharmaceutical Crisis Communications, Pharmaceutical Online Marketing, Pharmaceutical Social Media

Tags: FDA and Pharma Social Media Pharmaceutical PR Pharmaceutical Social Media

The Social Media Resource Problem

December 21st, 2010

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.

4 comments »

Posted in FDA and Pharma Social Media, Pharmacetuical Public Relations, Pharmaceutical Online Marketing, Pharmaceutical Social Media

Tags: FDA and Pharma Social Media Pharmaceutical marketing Pharmaceutical PR Pharmaceutical Social Media

Will FDA Guidance Open the Pharma Social Media Flood Gates?

December 17th, 2010

On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal Health Blog posted a small blurb about a Deloitte study on the number of pharmaceutical companies involved in social media. According to the report: “while 41% of respondents say their company currently uses online social networks to seek or disseminate information, and 21% say it plans to, 38% say it has no plans to do so.”

The basic premise of the post was to spotlight the pharmaceutical industry as overwhelmingly reluctant to get involved in social media. Call me an optimist, but when I saw those numbers my reaction was: “You mean to tell me that 68% percent of pharma companies either already are in involved in social media or have plans to? Holy smokes!” Rather than a commentary on how far behind pharmaceutical companies are, this should be viewed as a commentary on how far they’ve come. Despite an uncertain regulatory environment, a cultural misalignment and a public filled with distrust for the industry, nearly 70% of pharmaceutical companies expect to be involved in social media within the next 12 months.

I’ll take it.

The WSJ post goes on to discuss the variety of reasons that are keeping pharmaceutical companies on the social media sidelines. And what a shocker…a lack of regulations is the clear winner.

There are two issues here:

1.) Regulations are certainly a big hurdle, but they are not the only one, nor are they the biggest one. Look no further than innovative examples such as the Novo Nordisk Race with Insulin campaign on Twitter. As today’s TIME article points out, the company found an innovative way to engage with its audience despite the murky regulatory picture. It’s not impossible. The notion that a lack of clear guidance is the only thing holding pharmaceutical companies back is misleading.

2.) Yes, it’s true that FDA guidance may come any day now. But don’t expect that guidance to paint a clear picture of how pharmaceutical companies should engage on social media platforms. For one, that guidance will be a draft—not the last word on the subject. In addition, it will be guidance, not clear rules. There is a very real chance the regulatory environment could become more difficult to manage—not less.

Ultimately, the numbers of obstacles impeding a pharmaceutical social media engagement are many. But they are not insurmountable and they don’t start and end with guidance from the FDA. As evidenced by the Novo Nordisk campaign, the industry is making strides, but don’t expect that pace to accelerate rapidly once we hear from the FDA.

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Posted in FDA and Pharma Social Media, Pharmaceutical Online Marketing, Pharmaceutical Social Media