For the first few weeks everything is humming along like a well-oiled machine.  You engage regularly via Twitter, have quickly cultivated a base of patients on Facebook and have managed to churn out several blog posts.  Everything was going swimmingly as enthusiasm ran high.  But slowly, something changed.  The pace of followers decreased, posts don’t seem to come to life as readily and your Twitter engagement gets pushed to the backburner as that budget meeting looms.

What happened?

Your pharma social media strategy met the fate of many that have gone before it—a lack of content creation.  What started out well-intentioned and maybe even well-planned met its match.  Content creation: where pharma social media goes to die.

Social media programs often start out with the best intentions.  But what many people fail to realize is that social media is difficult.  It takes dedication.  It takes time and it takes internal resources.  It’s not as simple as simple as throwing up a couple of random 140 character thoughts every once in a while.

Content creation is a long slog.  Before you make the commitment to social media, survey the content you already have in house.  If you have a vault of videos that have gone untouched, that might be a good place to start.  Do you have an internal newsletter that might transition well to an external blog?  Think about using that as part of your content creation strategy.  And as rudimentary as it sounds, consider creating an editorial calendar to outline predefined topics for blog posts and assign authors.  This will create some accountability at the outset.  Eventually, you won’t need the calendar as a set of people will become engaged and motivated to post on their own.  But that won’t happen overnight and creating some urgency through a set timeline of posts will keep momentum moving forward.

Content creation is in many respects the linchpin of social media engagement.  It is a wonder then that it often spells the demise of many efforts.

That was a satisfying piece of information in the sense that I’ve long trumpeted the need for social media strategies focused on the Return on Health of the patient.  It’s always nice to affirm that you are not crazy.  It was frustrating because what I heard from the table was it was a need mostly going unmet. What became apparent to me during our dinner was that this is not a problem that can be solved by pharmaceutical companies in isolation.  Just like pharmaceutical social media engagement should not take place in a vacuum, creating a healthcare system where the patient is empowered to play a larger role in the decision-making process requires systems thinking.

Pharmaceutical companies can lead the charge in part because of their unique access to information but also because of their substantial sphere of influence.  Pharmaceutical companies have access to the best information available on treatment options, dealing with side effects and current research.  Like it or not, they also have pull on capital hill, with insurance providers, in the doctor’s office and with the patient.  Pharmaceutical companies must serve as the catalyst to empowering the patient.

But the process can’t stop there.  As agency people, we tend to focus our energies on swaying the folks that write the checks.  In order to truly empower the patient, we need to broaden our field of vision.  How can we expect the empowered patient to achieve a good outcome when doctors are incentivized to see more patients and not spend more time with patients?  What good is an empowered patient if she can’t find information on the latest clinical trials on her rare disease because search algorithms do not lend themselves to uncovering that information?  What’s the use of an empowered patient if doctors are not trained to take input?

I admit I am raising a problem far too complex for me to solve—something that requires brains far smarter than mine.  But I am smart enough to realize that pharmaceutical companies engaging in social media alone will not empower the patient—we need the collaboration of lawmakers, insurance providers, hospitals, doctors and patients.

Even with this complexity, it all centers on the patient.

I recently watched a video on the kitchen-gadget company Oxo.  While you may not expect it at first glance, Oxo is widely regarded as a world-class product design organization.  It’s the kind of company that routinely thinks of ideas of the: “why the heck didn’t I think of that variety?”  The video was on the company’s design philosophy and had a quote that struck me as particularly interesting: “We are a culture of nitpickers; we have to be to get it right.”

The idea behind the nitpicking philosophy is that every product-design decision is put through a firing squad of questioning.  Only if you try to poke holes in your own concept will you ultimately create the best product possible—no detail is too small.  Of course, most people when pressed would say they loathe working with nitpickers.  They slow down the process, obsess over small details and can’t see the big picture are the common complaints.  But in pharmaceutical social media, a healthy does of nitpicking might be just what the doctor ordered.

Let me explain.  Ask a pharmaceutical executive to describe a typical social media person and you will get something that describes a person long on creative juices but short on strategy and project management skills.  This results in an abundance of “big ideas” with little idea of how to implement those ideas or the business drivers that make that a reasonable course of action.  This creates false promises and failed programs.

A culture of nitpickers would approach this process differently.  Once a big idea is pinpointed, the next question is: “does this make sense given the goals we have (presumably) outlined?”  This would be followed by a series of detail-oriented questions that delve into the minutia of a social media engagement.  Should we allow comments?  If so, should they be pre-approved or in real time?  What will the terms of engagement be?  What are grounds for deleting a comment?  How will we handle adverse events or a disgruntled patient?  You get the picture.

Creating a culture of nitpickers is not about stifling innovation—just ask Steve Jobs.  Jobs is the Grand Poobah of nitpicking and few would accuse Apple of a lack of innovation.  It’s about marrying the “big ideas” with the “little details.”  Pharmaceutical social media is too often happening with only big ideas and no concern for the details.  Maybe it’s time we start acting like the company that invented rubber-handled potato peelers and become a culture of nitpickers.

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.

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.

It’s no secret that agencies are let go for a variety of reasons that range from the completely justifiable to the head scratchers.  The average retention rate of clients in the PR business is something in the neighborhood of 12-16 months depending on which reports you choose to believe (I am happy to report SHIFT’s is much longer!).  With such a revolving door, one must wonder: what drives a pharmaceutical company to fire its social media agency?

There is no definitive list of reasons that leads to an agency getting the boot.  It can be a result of missed metrics, poor strategy outlines, faulty execution, budget constraints, etc…And while the list is long, I’d venture to guess that there are two primary buckets that cause a pharma company to fire its social media agency—false promises made by the agency and unreasonable expectations of the pharmaceutical company (sometimes one causes the other).  We’ll take these one at a time.

False Promises Made by the Agency

I touched on this one a bit in yesterday’s post.  Too often, agencies walk into a pitch eager to win business and selling whatever they think the company at the other side of the table wants to buy.  They do this without regard for whether or not they believe they can deliver on those lofty promises.  Why?  They don’t care.  The goal is to win the business and earn a quick buck—not create sustained value.  This breeds the thinking that social media is a silver bullet.  With people out there selling it as such, it is no wonder that some marketers think that social media has the ability to mask existing problems.  It does not.  Because agencies are selling false hope, when they can’t deliver on that hope, they get the axe—justifiably.

A good social media agency will outline challenging goals, but not make promises of a brand remake over night.  A good agency will highlight the risks of engaging in social media and have a plan in place to mitigate those risks and deal with them when they arise.  Most importantly, a good social media agency will say “no”.  They won’t be afraid to tell you if your strategy is off base, or if your line of thinking will fall down when engaging with a community online.  If your social media agency is afraid to tell you “no” I can almost assure you the program will fail.  False promises are a quick way to the unemployment line and only makes the job of legitimate agencies that much more difficult.

Unreasonable Expectations of the Pharmaceutical Company

The message I have been trumpeting recently, along with others, is that social media does not shovel problems under the rug—it rips the rug off the floor.  If a company walks into a social media engagement thinking that it can distance itself from product problems or damaging messaging it is sorely mistaken.  The more likely result is the social media community will expose that problem quicker than you ever thought was possible.  And not only will it be exposed, it will run rampant until you step up and offer a solution.  The thing people often forget about social media is that it acts as one giant neighborhood watch.  Phonies are uncovered, bad products are rooted out and shifty salesmen are pinpointed.  It’s not a comfortable place to be if you have skeletons in the closet.

Unfortunately, some pharmaceutical companies are willing to throw caution to the wind and hope social media can work miracles.  When those miracles fail to materialize, the social media takes the fall.  Sure, it is the job of the agency to steer the client in the right direction and set appropriate expectations, but sometimes it is not enough.  In those cases, the pharma company is bound to fail because it simply demands too much.

The Lesson?

The new marketing model increases accountability on both the vendor and client side.  The days of arm’s length relationships are coming to a screeching halt.  In order to truly succeed in social media, you better have a true partnership.  Afterall, if you can’t master that relationship, you can forget about the new ones you will be forming through social media.

If you haven’t picked up on my thinly veiled metaphor just yet, social media is the bright light in this case.  In recent months, social media has been relegated to shiny object duty.  It’s the marketing tactic of the day being waived before pharma executives at every strategy session to increase patient engagement, raise brand awareness and break into new markets.  That’s a good thing.  The level of conversations that are occurring regarding social media is encouraging.  It indicates that pharmaceutical companies are slowly but surely buying into its potential.  But there is a fine line to walk between realistic potential and hype—we are getting dangerously close to the edge.

Social media enters into the hype zone when it causes otherwise level-headed marketers to write off alternative, viable marketing tactics.  And if they are not written off, they are certainly placed on the backburner.  As an aforementioned wingnut, I believe in the value of social media as much as the next guy.  But social media CANNOT exist in isolation.  It has to be conducted in the context of a larger marketing strategy that includes a broad range of tactics.  I’m a PR guy.  In fact, while I tout the benefits of social media on a regular basis, a large chunk of my work is dedicated to so-called traditional PR.  That’s right, writing press releases, reaching out to editors and forming relationships with the main-stream media.  Can you imagine?

(Warning, here comes a small commercial, bear with me, I think it is relevant).

At my agency, SHIFT Communications, we describe ourselves as a hybrid agency in the sense that we do both traditional PR and social media.  I think that’s crucial.  We do this not so we can sell both services, but because we firmly believe that social media, and traditional PR should happen in concert, not in isolation.

Social media is important.  It will only grow in importance as companies become better at engaging with relevant communities.  But remember, social media should not happen at the expense of the remaining parts of the marketing mix—even traditional PR.

In other words: it’s not me, it’s you.

But does this defeatist attitude merely create a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure?  Are we as marketers as much a part of the problem as the supposed hurdles we face?

It’s always prudent to evaluate the landscape before diving into any type of activity.  You wouldn’t jump on a ski lift one morning and head straight for a black diamond the first time you’ve ever donned a pair of skis.  The same holds true with pharma social media.  You don’t want to blindly approach social media without understanding the risks involved and the potential benefits.  But the key is: you should approach—even if it is cautiously.  The current mindset of some pharmaceutical marketers is akin to sticking your fingers in your ears and running in the other direction.

As an industry, we spend a lot of time evaluating the external factors that prevent successful social media campaigns.  Meanwhile, many of those external factors are trending in a favorable direction.  Conferences such as the ePatient Conference and Digital Pharma 2009 are sparking lively discussions on how social media can enhance pharmaceutical communications and improve patient outcomes.  Even the FDA is holding a public hearing on where social media fits into the new media landscape.

Rather than pointing the finger at all of the reasons we can’t use social media for pharmaceutical companies, maybe we should look at why we can.  More and better feedback from patients.  Real-time communication on key health issues.  A more complete understanding of the patient.  A dialogue on societal health issues, etc…

The challenges facing the pharmaceutical industry when it comes to social media are real and numerous.  I don’t dispute that fact.  But when they create the attitude of “why bother” marketers are predestined for failure.

That’s where PRforPharma.com comes in to the picture.  I hold no allusions that there are significant barriers to successfully implementing social media programs for pharmaceutical companies.  But I also firmly believe that it can be done with the right mix of strategy, determination and execution.

On this blog, I will attempt to address the challenges facing pharmaceutical companies when it comes to effectively utilizing social media and public relations.  I look forward to chatting with you!

One quick programming note: I posted a few old blog posts I wrote from various other blogs including SHIFT’s (my employer) staff blog, Slice.  I did this for a couple of reasons—not the least of which is to get some content up here in a hurry.  But more than that, I think these posts are indicative of how hard social media for pharma really is.  Some of these posts first appeared in 2007 and are still relevant today.  That alone should tell you something.  There are a lot of issues to grapple with and two years later we are still trying to solve the same problems.  Progress has been made, but there is a lot more to go.