Social media listening is an important step on the path to online engagement.  This is a process that is crucial for all brands but even more pivotal for pharmaceutical companies.  Most listening exercises are set up with an eye toward devising a social media engagement strategy.  Naturally, the information gleaned from social media listening will identify any exiting content gaps a brand might be able to fill.

Embarking on an online listening project solely as a means to create a full-scale engagement strategy is an adequate approach.  But as I’ve touched on time and time again here, when we put social media in a vacuum we run the risk of becoming irrelevant.  So where else can the intelligence of social listening support brand marketing efforts?  Extending that even further, where can social listening break outside of the marketing department and provide value across the brand?

It doesn’t take a huge leap of faith to see obvious opportunities for social media listening to help inform marketing efforts beyond just creating an engagement strategy.  Despite this, social media listening as a mechanism to augment market research is overlooked.  When you are dealing with large pharmaceutical brands there is likely a dedicated market research team.  If you are not careful, social media listening can feel like a competitive threat to their function and role inside the brand.  Of course, it’s not a threat and as social media marketers we should work hand-in-hand to determine what market research needs from us and how we can augment their process—not supplant it.  Through your online listening, you might find that people talk about the symptoms associated with a brand differently than you imagined.  The conversation online might in fact be more colloquial than clinical.  This type of simple intelligence can have big implications for your brand marketing strategy.

This is just one simple, easy example of extending social media listening beyond serving as a bridge to engagement.  Social media is a strategic function of an organization’s engagement strategy.  However, marketers too often think about social media in a silo.  Market research is an easy connection point to demonstrate and extend the value of social media beyond just engagement.

What happens when social media policy changes on a dime?

One of the unspoken occupational hazards of social media is the fact that many of our strategies are contingent upon the whims of the platforms and communities we operate within. What happens when one of the social media platforms changes the game?

For a pharmaceutical company engaging in social media, a slight shift could require drastic changes in social media strategy. It’s no secret that Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms have demonstrated a propensity to change policies on a dime. Decisions that Facebook makes on privacy settings or changes Twitter makes to who has access to the firehouse can cause panic amongst the pharmaceutical companies operating within those communities.

People seem to forget that companies such as Facebook and Twitter are businesses too.  If a policy change is going to provide more data for advertisers or attract more page views, they are going to do it without blinking an eye.  It’s all in the name of profit.

So where does that leave the pharmaceutical industry that has sought to exact some measure of control in social media? Where does it leave a cautious industry that has designed a whole strategy aimed at staying compliant with current regulations?  If a social network can change its tune at any moment—how does a tepid industry stay prepared?

Plan better.

At a recent conference I attended I listened to a session on global implementation of a pharmaceutical social media marketing program. The session addressed the challenges of dealing with different regulations across country boundaries. The point of view shared was that you should find the most restrictive regulations and use that as your benchmark—ensuring you are in compliance in less rigid regulatory environments. In the case of the social media platform that can change its guidelines at any moment, the opposite is true. Plan for the current environment, but have a contingency plan for what you will do if the game changes. Don’t be forced into reacting to changes, address them before they even arise. Plan for the moment when social media becomes entirely community and conversation driven with no pre-moderation options.

What is your contingency plan if a conservative approach to social media is no longer an option?  There will certainly be naysayers inside the organization that will want to peel back social media engagement as a result of looser restrictions on social media platforms.  Be prepared to convince them that pulling out of these communities is the wrong decision.  Demonstrate that you have planned for this scenario and have a plan in place to step up your monitoring capabilities, fit an AE-reporting framework into the existing escalation procedures of the company and prove the benefit to continued involvement.

Changes on social media platforms will continue to occur—whether to existing sites or emerging.  Don’t be caught off guard.

Call it a scare tactic if you will.  A common refrain heard around pharmaceutical social media circles is that conversations are happening online about your brand or company whether you like it or not—you may as well join the chatter.  The logic goes like this: if you are marketing a new treatment for cancer, it is likely that patients, caregivers and healthcare providers are showing their interest in both the disease and brand online.  Shouldn’t you want to be a part of that conversation?

This is a commonly used method for describing the value proposition of social media.  By focusing on the lost opportunity of intercepting and shaping conversations, social media professionals hope to convince skeptical marketers that it’s time to engage.

By ignoring conversations happening online, a brand is absolutely missing out on an opportunity to connect with patients, offer engaging content and pinpoint an information gap.  Of course, there are two sides to the same coin and focusing on the lost opportunity is not always the best way to convert skeptics into believers.  It is worthwhile to think beyond the lost opportunity and consider the fact that you may lose your brand entirely.  That’s a whole lot more than an opportunity squandered (talk about scare tactic).

Here is the choice facing marketers: shape or be shaped by the conversation.  Social media enthusiasts would interject here with the tired cliché, “you can longer control your brand, the people control your brand!”  For the most part, I agree, but if there’s zero semblance of control, why are we spinning our wheels talking about strategy setting, issues management and authentic engagement?  A social media strategy is not close your eyes, plug your ears and see what happens.

By engaging, you are shaping the conversation and shaping the brand.  The very ACT of engagement is a brand attribute.  Social media engagement is not about control in terms of precise messages, but you are able to gain some control over your public image.  For a pharmaceutical company, social media allows the brand to commit to hearing feedback, to show its dedication to health, to demonstrate its ability to respond to patient issues and to show a human-side of a company in an industry that deals with deeply personal issues.  Sounds like worthwhile brand attributes huh?

If you choose to ignore reality, you will not only lose a patient, your brand image will be tarnished and perhaps irreparably damaged.   What will you do, shape or be shaped?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.