Of course, pharmaceutical social media fanatics immediately started giggling for joy at the introduction of another social media platform to reach patients.  But this got me thinking, what social media platforms are you overlooking in your engagement strategy?  Everyone trots out plans bursting with Facebook, YouTube and Twitter; but what about the underrated or ignored?

In some ways, WebMD falls into that category.  The once-mighty health knowledge portal has been eclipsed (in mindshare) by the likes of Google and Bing Health.  Rarely do social media strategies incorporate the need for communicating on WebMD as an engagement tactic.  The question is: why not?  You have a captive audience of people that are clearly “health information seekers.”  If there ever was a community of people open to receiving information on health topics, WebMD would be that community.

The same holds true for Yahoo! Answers.  Yahoo! Answers is not bantered about as a social media tool of choice.  Why?  It’s not the shiny object (remember; heed my warning on shiny object syndrome, a health risk in its own right). And while it’s not one of the trendy tools when it comes to social media, it can be an effective platform to foster engagement.  That is our goal isn’t it?

Take a look at this recent search for the term Melanoma:

These results are based on a search conducted today that returned well over 100 results from the past 7 days.  Of course, some of these results are not relevant, but there is no denying the number of people interested in learning more about Melanoma.  This presents an opportunity for healthcare companies to share its information on the topic.  It has to be done delicately given the sensitive nature of the topic; but it can be done.  For example, if a pharmaceutical company established a microsite dedicated to educating patients and their families on living with Melanoma, they could offer that up as a resource (with full disclosure as to who they are).  Isn’t this the type of information that the folks scouring Yahoo! Answers would find useful?

In developing social media strategies, we focus our attention on the new tools of the day.  What this really amounts to is diverting our attention from other forms of engagement that are sitting squarely in front of our eyes.  WebMD and Yahoo! Answers are just two such examples—what other social media platforms are we being distracted from due to shiny object syndrome?

Today, the PhRMA turned up the pressure on the FDA by putting a bit of marketing muscle behind its FDA comments. Knowing full well that few people would take the time to read the entire 16-page document that makes up the PhRMA’s comments to the FDA, the organization issued a statement containing only the highlights.

As expected, the statement built the case on why social media is an important tool for pharmaceutical companies.  The PhRMA highlighted that more patients than ever before are going online to access health information and healthcare companies have a responsibility to ensure that information is timely and accurate.

From there, the PhRMA took an interesting approach to forcing the FDA’s hand.  They went with what I will call the “if you can do it why can’t we” approach.

Behold: “What’s more, the Agency should avoid chilling manufacturers’ responsible communication about their medical products and should permit them to take full advantage of the same technologies that the FDA and the White House use – including blogs, video, search and such social networking sites as Twitter™ – to communicate important health information directly to patients and their doctors.”

That’s fairly strong language for an organization that tends to tilt toward the conservative when it comes to messaging.  There are a number of sections in the PhRMA’s public comments to the FDA that read very similar.  Bravo!  They are dead on when it comes to this topic.  The FDA has demonstrated through its actions that it sees the value provided by social media in communicating information to doctors, patients and other relevant healthcare audiences.  The PhRMA is just conveniently pointing that out.

Pharmaceutical companies engaging in social media should do so only if they have more value to add to the community than they extract.  They should not be there solely to push product and should focus on the Return on Health of the patient.  This means a commitment to creating better health outcomes for patients by providing more access to information.  The PhRMA is not-so-subtly driving this message home and attempting to place added pressure on the FDA. I for one hope it works!

Put the building blocks in place for effective social media

If you survey the landscape of pharmaceutical social media, the most prominent examples are the companies that have carved out a large swath of social media real estate.  You will see microsites, YouTube channels and mobile applications.  To some, it can be disheartening and overwhelming when you calculate the amount of time and money that is sunk into these efforts.

But fear not, large-scale healthcare social media efforts do not have to happen overnight.  I have advocated here before that a slow and steady approach to social media is prudent—particularly in the regulation-heavy environment of the pharmaceutical industry.  A phased-out approach allows you to put the building blocks in place, and it also has the added bonus of spreading out the cost.  Social media does not have to be exorbitantly expensive out of the gates.

First, let’s start with why some social media engagement strategies are so expensive.  It’s just like the economics class you took in college; there is a significant barrier to entry for elaborate social media programs.  The development of a microsite to house the piles of interactive content you have recently developed does not come cheap.  The sheer cost of developing the site, let alone maintaining it, can turn many companies away.  Once you have the site up, you have to provide resources for consistent engagement.  It’s not social if you aren’t engaging.  This too comes at a price.  So you can see why the larger foothold a pharmaceutical company places in social media the more the tab balloons.  In addition to added price comes added risk.  This is not to say these strategies are flawed.  Quite the contrary.  But building up to this level of social media engagement both maximizes effectiveness at each phase and minimizes sticker shock.

While the barrier to entry for something like a microsite might be high, the majority of social media platforms have minimal to zero barriers to entry.  The general purpose of developing a microsite is to house and publish different types of content, share educational material and interact directly with customers.  A couple of problems: many companies starting out in social media do not have the brand muscle to direct people back to a newly established site.  Instead, a better approach is to realize that people have already staked out their congregating places on line.  Why not go where they are and provide content of value?  My agency’s principal (and my boss), uses the analogy of leaving a trail of bread crumbs.  That trail will be followed and people will find their way back to the origin.  If you must have a social media hub, why not consider setting up a presence on Facebook?  Here you can post videos, relevant news articles, engage with customers and share your industry commentary.  Oh, and did I mention, it’s free?

Look, social media is hard and any way you chose to engage is going to cost money and demand expertise.  The point is: don’t shy away from giving social media a shot because you only see monolithic companies with monolithic budgets to match giving it a try.  There are building blocks to getting to that point—pillars that are critical for success.

Pharma cos. should not play gatekeeper in social media

As an industry, we’ve generally agreed upon the fact that the greatest contribution of a pharmaceutical company to social media is making its information more widely available.  Health information seekers are scouring the Internet for credible resources on disease states and treatment options.  The healthcare companies willing to fill that void in social media have a unique opportunity.

There’s one problem.  The pharmaceutical industry is not one that is accustomed to sharing an abundance of information.  It runs counter to their culture where drugs are dreamed up by white-coated scientists in some far-flung lab.  Their efforts, if brought to market, represent a billion or more dollars in time, energy and resources.  This is not something any pharmaceutical company is willing to give up just to enhance the information pool of social media platforms.  Nor should they.

A common misnomer about healthcare companies participating in social media is that in order to create value, they need to fork over proprietary information.  That simply is not true.  As mentioned above, the years, brainpower and sheer dollar amount that is poured into bringing a drug to market is not something that should be handed over lightly.  But it doesn’t have to be part of the discussion.  In fact, patients on social media platforms don’t give a hoot about that kind of information.  They want to know what it means.  Why should they care?  How can this help them to better understand and improve their health?

That’s a philosophy pharmaceutical companies should be able to get on board with.  And while historically speaking, the industry might not dole out information freely, that is changing.  As I stated before, this is a sea change, not a fad.  Healthcare companies are increasingly seeking to uncover partners that help them spread out the risk of bringing a drug to market.  These alliances involve shared research and close collaboration.  The culture is changing and it’s aligning more closely with social media.

The problem some pharmaceutical companies face is that they think like scientists.  They create a new compound and want to hoard all of the information associated with that compound.  In their minds, acting as the information gatekeeper amounts to power.  In this new era, information still equates to power—but it should be in the hands of the patients, not the pharmaceutical companies.

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.

And while I did gather data for this post, my survey of healthcare Twitter accounts will be less focused on the analytical side and more focused on pulling out some general observations and putting them in the context of helping to move the industry forward.  Plus, I can’t put together graphs that are nearly as sharp as the ones Silja put together.

For my research, I relied mostly on Jonathan Richman’s unbelievably helpful Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki to identify as many healthcare Twitter accounts as possible.  For the purposes of this post, I evaluated 39 Twitter accounts.  After pouring through the data, Tweets and usage, I was able to boil it down to a five key lessons:

1.)    People Care: The average number of followers for a Twitter account in my sample size was 1,290.  That’s a pretty healthy number when you consider that pharma accounts only followed 421 people back on average and had an average total Tweets number of 57.  The follow-back rate of 31 percent and infrequent Tweets does not warrant the hefty followers number that pharma has garnered.  So why the high number?  People care.  It’s certainly debatable what types of people are currently following the Twitter accounts of life sciences companies (marketers, social media advocates, journalists, etc…).  But it’s hard to question that there is a genuine interest in the foray of pharmaceutical companies into social media.  Take the Bristol-Myers Squibb Twitter account for example.  BMS has established a presence on Twitter with a corporate handle, but has yet to send out a single Tweet or follow a single user.  Despite that, 642 people have followed BMS based on the mere fact that it has set up shop in Twitter land.  People care—pharma just need to demonstrate it does as well.

2.)    Lots of Back Patting: It’s no secret that pharmaceutical companies are entering uncharted waters when engaging on Twitter.  This lack of familiarity is only compounded by the fact that regulatory challenges make the water excessively choppy.  The response from pharmaceutical companies has been to skew so far in the other direction that the value of their content is diminished.  Paralyzed by a fear of interacting with patients, encountering adverse events or mentioning a brand, healthcare companies have tended to stick to promoting “safe” content such as company press releases.  There is nothing wrong with directing people to your company news page on occasion, but the problem is that for many companies, this represents the majority of their Twitter account.  You should offer something of value on Twitter that is unique to that user group—not something that can be found by scouring the wires.

3.)    Single-Use Accounts Gain Ground: Perhaps it’s a product of an excessively fragmented industry, but what I will refer to as “single-use” accounts seem to be gaining in popularity.  What I mean is accounts that are geared toward a specific type of content (SanofiTV), or were established as a result of a specific event (McNeil Recall) or serve a single function (AZHelps).  This is not to say that single-use accounts are ill advised.  Quite the contrary.  If used properly, single-use accounts can have a very positive impact.  However, there is a danger with relying on single-use accounts for your foray into social media.  There is a potential to treat social media more as a campaign than a sustained engagement.  Social media requires a sustained effort to add more value to the community than you extract.  That’s tough to achieve if people know you are only there for a single purpose or for a defined period of time.  However, uses like the McNeil Recall example and AZHelps are good examples of companies acknowledging the unique platform provided by social media in being able to directly engage with the patient.

4.)    Corporate Accounts without Human Identity or Interaction: The large majority of healthcare Twitter accounts lack any type of personal identity.  This misses an opportunity to bring a human element to the brand.  Is it a coincidence that two of the best examples of pharmaceutical companies on Twitter (Johnson and Johnson and Boehringer) have individuals behind the account?  I tend to doubt it.  Not to mention, the follow-back rates of 44% and 63% of J&J and Boehringer easily outpace the industry average.  The lesson?  Engagement in social media demands some form of interaction.  When dealing with health, that interaction is almost always of a personal nature.  Without a personal side to your corporate Twitter account, you are missing out on a key benefit of social media.

5.)    This is Just a Test: The infrequency of Tweets and the general tone of the content suggests that most pharmaceutical companies are just testing the social media waters with Twitter.  That’s okay.  While it points to a flawed social media strategy in the short-term, it also maximizes chances of future success.  Why?  Because as I have harped on before, we need social media realists, not purists.  A social media realist understands that in order to gain general acceptance at an organization or within an industry, you have to play by their rules.  That means, taking things slow and proving the model before you fully immerse yourself in the world of social media.

So you’ve made the decision to jumpstart your social media efforts.  Good for you.  You’ve surveyed the scene, understand the relevant communities that have formed and pounded out a pile of useful content to share.  But then it suddenly dawns on you: “social media is hard work, I can’t do this alone—what should my internal team look like.”

Good question.  One of the most frequent questions I get is centered on how to structure an internal social media team for success.  For pharmaceutical and biotech companies, structuring a social media team involves a few wrinkles due to regulatory and legal restrictions.  The above is certainly a dramatization of the conversation that occurs, but it’s not that far from what most companies experience.  There is often an “internal champion” that fights the good fight, wins approval and then deals with the resource problem later.  It’s a survival instinct.  These internal champions realize that they are often fighting an uphill battle—one that will only become steeper with additional moving parts.

Admittedly, I am an agency guy.  By definition, I am part of the external team (a part that, as you might expect, I think is an integral cog in the wheel).  That being said, I think I’ve developed a broad enough view of the landscape to observe the “ideal scenario” and the “real-world scenario.”

If there is a so-called definitive piece of work on this topic, it comes from Jeremiah Owyang at the Altimeter Group.  Jeremiah places internal social media teams into three buckets: the tire, the tower and the hub and spoke.  Essentially, Jeremiah believes that social media teams either form on the fringes of a company (the tire), centrally located in isolation (the tower) or with a central source that facilitates efforts to relevant departments in a company (hub and spoke).  Jeremiah’s conclusion is that the hub and spoke is the ideal scenario for structuring an internal social media team.

My own anecdotal evidence supports that theory.  A hub and spoke model for social media teams allows for a more cohesive strategy that cuts across departments.  It also provides ample opportunity for a variety of customer touchpoints to get involved in social media.  As I have reiterated endlessly, social media should not occur in isolation and the hub and spoke model is one mechanism to prevent that from occurring.  It would like something like this:

That’s the ideal scenario, but is it feasible in the real-world? Yes and no.  Consider a pharmaceutical company embarking on a social media engagement strategy.  It would be great if that company were able to involve all key stakeholders right out of the gate.  But the reality is: many will be in “prove it to me mode” first.  As such, in a practical sense, the most likely (not best, but probably most efficient) way to start a social media engagement is in the tower model.  Generally speaking, that central command will be in corporate communications.  Corporate communications, by its nature, sits at the center of an organization and is in a unique position to get access to content.  This provides a bit more control, establishes a mission control and sets the benchmark and template for success for those “prove it to me” people.  The added benefit of having the tower located in corporate communications is that it can be easily transitioned into the hub of a better defined hub and spoke model.

Social media is in many ways still a developing medium.  Because of that, people are so laser-focused on the execution piece they neglect the resources needed to make that execution possible.  Social media takes time.  It takes resources and it takes commitment.  But you don’t have to tackle it all at once.  Start with the tower and you’ll find your way to the hub and spoke.

Marketing programs are often made of disparate parts

I’ve been preaching the importance of looking at biotech and pharma social media as part of an integrated marketing plan.  Often times this isn’t the case.  Part of that is because social media is still a fringe marketing tactic, and as such, tends to take root in isolation at the fringes of a company.  In addition, some marketers are lulled into thinking that social media is easy and devoid of strategy because of its ad hoc nature.  Effective social media engagements acknowledge that it is only one piece of the market puzzle and must be run in concert with those pieces—not in isolation.

Chief among those integral marketing tactics is boosting your performance in organic search results.  Want proof?  eMarketer today released the results of a study indicating 95% of organic search referrals to a Website come from the first page of search results.  What does that mean?  If your Website, or at least a piece of content from your Website, does not appear on the first page of search results it’s highly unlikely a person will find your page naturally.  If you consider that 80% of online sessions begin with search, that’s a chance you should not dare to take.

Does that mean you should drop everything and pour your entire available budget into boosting organic search results?  Of course not.  I point to this study as an illustration of two points:

1. Despite the frequency with which I write about social media—it is not the only game in town.  It is important, but without a full marketing plan that includes search engine optimization; it is useless.
2. More importantly, marketers need to not only be aware of other portions of the marketing mix, but incorporate them into their strategy.  Knowing that 95% of organic search referrals come from the first page of results should have a significant impact on your social media strategy.  Have you analyzed the keywords that are most relevant to your audience and incorporated them into your content creation efforts?  Does your social media content drive people back to its intended destination?  By answering some of these questions, you can ensure that your social media efforts align and bolster the SEO strategy.

It’s all well and good to talk about an integrated marketing plan and the importance of a coherent strategy.  But an integrated marketing plan doesn’t mean a “consistent brand message.”  That might be a small slice of the pie but the most crucial piece is evaluating how each tactic influences and augments the other.  This is not done frequently enough in social media efforts.  Social media can have a profound impact on SEO, PR, brand engagement and awareness and customer support.  Marketers first need to start linking these efforts together rather than allowing them to persist in isolation.

“In this corner, weighing in at 140 pounds and hailing from behind a computer screen somewhere are the social media advocates.   In this corner, tipping the scales at 800 pounds, from Washington, D.C., the FDA.”

Except in a boxing match, when the bell sounds, the two opponents leaver their respective corners and meet in the middle.  Of course, when they get to the middle, they spend some time pounding on each other—but they work it out.  In what seems like an endless quest to convince the FDA that pharmaceutical and biotech companies have a place in social media, neither side has been willing to leave its corner frequently enough.  In fact, until the infamous November public hearing, both sides tended to stay outside the ring—let alone their own corners.

Each side of the debate is standing steadfastly to their core beliefs.  The social media proponents are calling for full transparency, authenticity and real-time engagement.  They want social media unencumbered by the bureaucracy, regulations and processes of the FDA.  But the FDA is sticking to its guns and wants to ensure fair balance, the communication of risk information, a plan for adverse event reporting and off-label usage discussion.  But if neither side is willing to budge from their respective corners, we are bound to remain at a standstill.

The good news is that the impasse seems to be thawing out a bit.  Folks like Fabio Gratton and John Mack are making efforts to seek the FDA’s input and find common ground.  The FDA too for its part has been a willing participant in this delicate dance.  In fact, if either side has been more willing to move off its original laurels it has been the FDA.  The FDA called the November public hearing (albeit after much prodding).  The FDA itself is on Twitter and has recently expressed a willingness to find some common ground.

Both the FDA, pharma companies and social media agencies need to find the middle ground.  Agencies can’t stubbornly insist that every interaction in social media has to be immediate.  At the same time, the FDA cannot hold healthcare companies responsible for monitoring the broad expanse of the Internet for adverse events.  Similarly, pharmaceutical companies need to realize that social media is not a platform for product promotion—but a platform for providing access to information.

Rather than standing in their respective corners and plotting the knockout punch, all stakeholders need to meet in the middle on a shared set of values.  What is it?  The patient.  The FDA’s primary concern is the safety and health of the patient.  The pharmaceutical company should be focused on finding better treatment options for the patient.  The social media agency, if it has the right mindset, should believe that social media can help provide better access to information for…you guessed it; the patient!  Only once common ground is agreed upon will there be any hope of moving pharmaceutical social media forward.

(Side note: every one of the above links is worth clicking on for a unique perspective on this topic.)

The debate on ROI for pharma social media has centered on the question of whether or not it is even the right form of measurement.  It’s a topic I have been railing against for months so I will be brief here. One major problem with ROI as it pertains to social media is that it is a lagging indicator. By its nature, it is designed to evaluate the success of a program, in financial terms, at a given point in time (usually the conclusion). There’s a fundamental flaw when you apply that approach to social media.  Social media is not a campaign—it’s an engagement.  ROI does a great job of measuring campaigns, but is a little less concrete when it comes to sustained efforts. When I measure a program, I want to know in process where there are shortcomings so I can adjust accordingly.  ROI fails to provide that ability.  It is useful as a tool to prove value after the fact and move forward. It also should not be dismissed off hand and certainly has a place in the measurement toolkit. Perhaps a better way to approach measurement is something I’ve termed Return on Health (ROH).  When developing an integrated marketing strategy, the first steps are less about concrete numbers and more about establishing a basic decision-making framework. The patient should be at the center of any pharmaceutical social media effort. With the patient at the center, you have established a framework that provides a clear and distinct guide as you seek to engage more actively in relevant communities.  Essentially, it boils down to a simple principle, have an outcome in mind and map your efforts based on how they will help achieve that outcome.

Let me be clear: social media should not escape measurement.  But to rely solely on ROI as the measure of success or failure is insufficient.  ROI is a point in time measurement.  More sophisticated measurements are needed to move the discussion forward when it comes to social media for pharmaceutical companies.