Do you have a strategy to fit into the community?
As has become painstakingly obvious, the standard of communicating in the business world has changed dramatically over the last few decades. First it was the advent of email and most recently the rise of what we’ll call “the digital communications era”—namely the ability to reach anybody, anytime, on any device. Text messages, Twitter and Facebook have accelerated this dynamic and fed our appetite for smaller and smaller bits of content.
The ripple effects of this change are widespread. Of course, the positive perspective is that work output is increased, productivity enhanced and the decision-making process accelerated. In addition, as we have chronicled here, social media opens up an entire new toolkit for the marketer. This is particularly true in the world of pharmaceutical marketing where customers are becoming increasingly wary of what they viewed to be nefarious efforts of pharma companies. They craved a more authentic interaction with companies that would disband the ads that seem to strike fear more than they provide useful information. Insert social media. Social media allows pharmaceutical companies to introduce a different dynamic to its marketing programs—one built on trust and transparency. In that sense, social media and micro content is a boon. However, it’s not all good.
There is a fundamental disconnect between the types of communication facilitated by social media and strategic marketing plans. The very nature of social media may be tempting marketers to put strategy on the backburner. When you boil it down, a person’s interaction on a social network is ad hoc. It’s not a planned, measured and calculated interaction. This is a dynamic that many marketers have yet to solve. How do you conform to the community norms of authenticity and put a strategic plan in place?
Unfortunately, too often marketers have opted for the wrong answer; either throwing strategy to the wind or going too far in the other direction and planning every interaction. The flaw in both approaches should be obvious. If a pharma marketer plans every single interaction he intends to have on social media his conversations will no doubt be manufactured. His very presence will be loaded with ulterior motives. However, if a marketer surveys the landscape and concludes that strategy and focus are not needed she too will fail. Strategizing every interaction may not be needed, but having a reason for being there is imperative. Rather than focusing on tactical plans to the minutest detail, pharma marketers should focus on decision-making frameworks that guide interactions in social media circles. Empower the faces of your social media presence to act with confidence.
In the old days in business, the standard form of communicating a message to a large group of people was writing a memo. Those memos were well-crafted, thought-out documents. They had to be. You couldn’t afford to be ambiguous in your message or marching orders—the medium did not allow it. Social media does allow for ambiguity and poorly defined communication.
Perhaps it’s time we took a page out of the 1980 playbook and apply it to social media.
As you may have seen, the newly minted pharma “Social Media Working Group” accepted the FDA’s invitation 
In my last post, I attempted to make the case that pharma social media is nothing new—just a form of relationship marketing using a different channel. In essence, sales reps have been making a living for decades based mostly on their ability to cultivate relationships. Those relationships are developed based on an exchange of value—the docs get access to information (and sometimes incentives) and the reps get a hefty commission. Without some sort of exchange of value, no relationship can function. In that sense, sales reps and social media programs are not all that different. Right?
Relationship marketing is really nothing new in the world of pharmaceutical companies. For decades, the industry has relied on the ability of its sales reps to form lasting relationships that pay off in the form of increased prescriptions. Say what you will about how the reps cultivated those relationships, but the fact is, they were able to tailor their information delivery to what doctors were seeking.
Working in the agency world is a little bit like the dating scene—if you are around it long enough, you are bound to get your heart broken (or wallet as the case may be) once or twice.
It’s no secret that social media is the trend of the day in pharmaceutical marketing. A combination of constant evangelism on the part of social media wingnuts (I mean advocates), an uptick in real-world examples from pharma companies and the FDA public hearing has vaulted social media into the limelight. Since attaining such prominence, social media seems to have a stranglehold on the marketing discussion (or maybe it’s that whole 
