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9 Simple Steps to Getting Started in Social Media

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It’s clear that more and more companies are getting the green light from their leadership teams to get started in social media. That’s right…you’ve fought long and hard and patiently explained the rationale. You’ve shown examples (including a bunch from the Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki) and statistics and even set out some clear objectives. Whatever you did…it worked. You’ve got the green light. Question is: what now?

When it’s finally time to get started, here are the simple steps you need to follow.

9 Simple Steps to Getting Started in Social Media

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  1. Define business objectives
  2. Monitor with intent
  3. Choose the proper platforms
  4. Secure and create profiles
  5. Learn the lingo
  6. Dive in
  7. Go offline
  8. Track your progress
  9. Automate

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1. Define business objectives

No, you can’t skip this one. It’s probably the least “sexy” of the nine steps, but it’s also probably the most important and will help define what you do in the next 8 steps. Ultimately, it will be the difference between a successful social media effort and a failure. There are a couple of questions you need to ask yourself as part of this step.

First: Why social media? Why now?

If you don’t have good reasons for this beyond “we just want to try some stuff,” then forget it. You’ll probably be better off spending your time and money elsewhere.

Second: What do you want to accomplish?

This is a bit of a trick question. DO NOT define a “social media strategy.” You should not have a social media strategy. Instead, you should brand objectives. This might  be something like “increase market share to 25% by December 2010,” for example. In order to achieve these objectives, you’ve put together a set of strategies that will get you to those objectives. To deliver those strategies, you’ve come up with a number of tactics. Social media is one of those tactics. Nothing more, nothing less. If you create a social media strategy, it’s highly likely that your social media efforts won’t line up with your overall business objectives. This will make it even harder to measure the impact of these efforts or will outright fail. Perhaps you need social media, perhaps you don’t. Look at it as part of a larger marketing plan to figure this out.

2. Monitor with intent

I’ve talked quite a bit about social media monitoring on this blog including Pharma Should Forget About Social Media Monitoring and Monitor This, Forget That — “The Monitoring Continuum.” Catch up on those two posts to get my entire take on monitoring. For those looking for the short version, monitoring is important, but you need to ensure that you have a purpose for that monitoring. One important quote:

“The point [is] not that everyone should truly forget about monitoring, but that they should forget about it if they don’t plan on doing anything with what they find. In other words, if you’re not going to respond to discussions or don’t have a FORMAL plan to use what you find in some research setting (presumably to inform some brand strategy), then you’re wasting your money. Monitoring for the sake of monitoring or to “see what people are saying about your brand” (my favorite consultant quote) is useless. It’s a bit like getting punched in the face to see if it hurts. I’ll save you the time…it does.”

Of course, since you’re ready to get started in social media, you have a reason to monitor. First, you need to get a gist for the volume and tone of discussions about your brand, but more importantly, you want to figure out where most and the most significant discussions are taking place. That’s a formal goal. A simple one, but still a formal goal.You don’t need to spend a fortune on this. Instead, for this purpose, you can rely on free tools such as Google Alerts, Social Mention, or Who’s Talkin.

That leads us to the next step.

3. Choose the proper platforms

This is where you’re going to pick the platforms where you’ll participate. There are a number of factors you’ll need to consider here. First, the discussion volume you measured in step 2 should be a big factor. Second, you need to consider where your target audience is online. It’s likely that these two will overlap, but not necessarily. What digital tools (including social media) are your key targets using online? Some of you know that I have a “mini-book” in the works that will help with this step (tentatively called “Digital Savviness”). If you want to know more about this or be informed when it’s completed, head over to the Digital Savviness page.

Another consideration here is how you might be received if you do participate in discussion. Are outside brands welcome? Is there a formal way for them to participate? Check this all out before you dive right in and start chatting it up. The final consideration is your risk tolerance. Each different social media platform has a slightly different risk profile. I’m referring to regulatory risks here. Specifically, the more open the platform, the more risk. For example, it might look like this, with riskier platforms on the left. The less you can control the discussion, the greater the risk.

Determine what your company’s risk tolerance looks like and factor that into your platform decision.

4. Secure and create profiles

Another seemingly simple, but somehow regularly overlooked step in the process is this one. Once you’ve settled on the platforms, then your first step needs to be to lock down your brand names. What you’re trying to prevent is squatters from stealing your brand names and, at best, locking you out or, at worst, posing as you while doing significant damage to your brand. Go out to the sites you’ve targeted and see if your brand names are available. If so, great. Secure the profiles now. Not next week or tomorrow…now. You’ll thank me later. If your brand name is taken by someone else, you’ll need to dig a bit further to see if you can secure it from them. Each platform has different rules here with some being more willing to help you get back your trademarks and others just the opposite. If you don’t do this early, you end up with this:

Suffice it to say, this isn’t the actual Pfizer (though the image of “big pharma” enjoying Family Guy makes me smile). For the record, the actual Pfizer account on Twitter is @pfizer_news.

Rather than going to each site one by one, you can use a service like KnowEm, which will secure your name on hundreds of social media sites (for a fee). This is great for locking in profiles even on those sites that you might not have any intent of using at this point, but you never know what you might want to do in the future. Better safe than sorry.

After you lock in the right user name, spend some time on this next part: creating profiles. I can’t express the importance of this enough. What I’m referring to is completing those profile boxes like “About you” and “Websites” and adding a picture of yourself (or your brand). You know the ones I mean. You probably haven’t done this on most sites. There are a number of reasons why you should. First, on Twitter for example, many people will not follow someone who does not have a competed profile. This means picture, description, and website (like mine). Second, most of these profiles on social media platforms are indexed by search engines. If you’re like most companies, you can use all the help you can get in the way of search engine optimization. Take it where you can get it.

5. Learn the lingo

Nothing will end your social media foray quicker than not playing by the rules. That is, you need to participate in way that follows the accepted norms of that site. (There are a bunch of other rules that healthcare folks need to follow. You can get them from this presentation: Annotated Version of Healthcare and Social Media…Know the Rules (784 downloads).) A big piece of this is learning the terms of service (TOS) for the site you’re interested in. These TOS documents will include things like what’s considered spam and other obvious violations, but it will also cover more subtle, but equally important guidelines.

Case in point. If you are planning to edit your company’s article on Wikipedia, do you know how to properly do it? Sure, you can simply go and edit it, but I can assure you that your changes will be undone almost instantly. If it’s your company, according to the accepted norms of Wikipedia, you have a conflict of interest and should follow the guidelines they clearly define. This explains that you shouldn’t edit the page directly, but rather should use the discussion (talk) pages and include this tag on your entry:

If you dont’ follow these rules, you’ll quickly find the community “mob” making you into an outcast. Beyond rules, you need to understand the way people talk and the jargon they use. If you don’t know what an “RT” or the “#” symbol means in Twitter, study up before you get involved. If you don’t know, look it up. Even better, observe some of the community’s leaders. You’ll also find that these leaders (in general) are open to helping new people use the site correctly, so ask questions. They’ll appreciate that you value their opinion and that you want to play by the rules.

6. Dive in

We’ve come to the fun part. After months (or years) of wrangling with your regulatory team and studying the different communities, you’re finally ready to actually go online and participate. One major recommendation for this step is to participate personally first. That is, try out everything you’ve learned as a regular person and not a brand. Do this with using personal accounts. This will give you a little leeway to make some mistakes without damaging your brand.

When it comes to finally participating on behalf of your brand, there’s one simple rule that I like to follow when figuring out what to do or say and what not to do or say. The “Golden Rule” tells us that we should treat others as we’d like to be treated. My social media “Platinum Rule” is basically the same, but with a key difference. Here it is: Act as if YOU are watching. That’s right. You. If you’ve gotten this far in getting your idea approved, you’re probably pretty smart and know a bit about marketing. You’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. You’ve seen it as a marketer and as a consumer. So, here’s what you do. Take a look at what you’re planning on doing and think how you’d honestly react if another brand did the same thing. Would you roll your eyes and quickly log out or would you find it interesting and useful? If you’re honest with yourself, you can be your best critic here, but it requires being honest. Bring your normal dose of skepticism and cynicism just as you would as a consumer and apply that to what you’re about to do. How does it fit?

If you still can’t tell, then send it to me and I’ll give you the honest truth.

7. Go offline

After you’ve had some success and are starting to get a following and some good reactions from your social media efforts its time to take it offline. I know that sounds like counterintuitive advice after all the effort you’ve put in to get online, but hear me out. I’m not saying to abandon your online efforts. Rather, I’m saying you should augment them with some offline work as well. While the relationships we form solely online can be useful, there’s still no substitute for meeting in person like humans have for hundreds of thousands of years. It’s simpler to communicate and often easier to build deeper levels of trust since you can see and read someone’s behavior and create deeper mental connections as well.

That’s not to say that you should invite all of your Twitter followers over to your house or all of your brand’s Facebook Fans to your headquarters, but from time to time you can bring together several key influencers from your network for a face-to-face, in-depth discussion. You can do this when you travel to different cities by putting together a “Tweetup” or making it a formal meeting with other members of your company. Either way, know that you can only go so far in a relationship with another person without meeting that person in real life.

8. Track your progress

I won’t get into how specifically to measure your social media efforts here, that’s a series of separate posts. The bottom line is that you need to measure your efforts opposite pre-defined goals. The pre-defined part is the key here. It’s possible to meet just about any goal that you come up with after the fact, so those don’t count. Whatever you choose to use as objectives for your efforts, define them ahead of time and create a plan to track your progress against them. This will allow you to not only gauge success and failure, but also to make adjustments while you’re still running the program. Keep the good (and add more) and throw out the bad. A good measurement plan will give you guidance on how to make changes on the fly.

If you’re looking for some advice on how to measure ROI for social media, check out this Mashable post that contains a ton of great resources. If you’re stuck on how to measure your social media efforts, here are 100 different options.

9. Automate

Last but not least…automation. While some of you are breathing a sigh of relief that the hard work is over, I’m not talking about that kind of automation. I’m not recommending you simply run your RSS feeds into all your social media profiles and walk away. Quite the opposite. What I mean by automate is to make social media participation automatic. There are three key parts to this: integrate social media as a standard marketing channel, implement tools that make it easier for more people to participate and manage, and make participation a standard part of your day.

As I’ve already said, don’t create a social media strategy, but rather add it to your list of tactics to deliver the strategies you already have in place. Use tools like CoTweet for Twitter to allow multiple people to use and manage one account (and provide better service to consumers). Lastly, you’re participation (and your brand’s) can’t be a one time affair. It needs to be ongoing. The best way to do this is to make it a standard part of your day. If you’re one of those people that only look at email at set times of the day, set a time for social media as well. If you aren’t one of these people, then find another set time. This will both ensure that you actually do it and also limit the amount of time, so you aren’t spending too much. Everything in moderation.

Those are the nine steps. Follow them and you’ll be among the best. I’ve created a PowerPoint presentation that covers the information in this post, so that you can share it with your colleagues at your next company meeting (or whatever you think makes sense). It’s basically the hugely abridged version of this post. If you’re interested in getting a copy,head over to the Dose of Digital Fan Page on Facebook. Fans get all the content from this blog plus sneak previews and exclusive content like this PowerPoint. You can get the link to download the presentation right from the Dose of Digital Facebook Fan page (check out the Wall).

Ockham’s Razor Meets Pharma Marketing

Ockham’s Razor: Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate; “Plurality should not be posited without necessity.” The principle gives precedence to simplicity; of two competing theories, the simplest explanation of an entity is to be preferred. (via Encyclopedia Brittanica).

In the past few weeks, I’ve had the same question from a few different people, so I figured I’d try to answer it here as well. It’s deceptively simple question, but one that has a few marketing traps which anyone could fall into. Here’s the basic question…I’ll paraphrase:

“We have this new drug coming out that’s not yet approved, how can we use social media to build awareness for it prior to launch?”

Short answer: you can’t.

Medium answer: maybe, if…

Long answer: [see the rest of this post]

What I’m not going to address in this post are the legalities of whether or not there’s a legal way to do this. Clearly, promoting a drug before it’s approved is a huge violation and one that’s really easy to enforce. Yes, there are ways you can tell people the new drug name (but not what it does). And you can tell people about a new treatment coming for a certain condition (sort of). I’m not here today to discuss how you can do this without getting into trouble. I try not to give legal advice here on Dose of Digital…I’ve got enough problems without creating more for you.

So, for the sake of this post, let’s assume that you can tell people that your company is about to release a new drug for a certain condition. You can’t say the name and the condition together, but you can tell people more about the condition. For example,this is the message you want to get out via social media: “Company X is about to release the first new treatment for asthma in 10 years.” (It’s a scenario, not real life, so play along).

At this point, you’re probably coming up with a million ways to do this via social media. You’ll seed discussion groups, contact influential bloggers, get something going on Sermo to reach physicians, maybe start a Twitter account to talk about asthma issues, a Facebook page for people with asthma, and so on.

All of these may be perfectly fine. Some of them may even work. But, to be sure, it won’t be simple. Because it’s social media, expect that your regulatory group is going to make it extra tough on you (recall that you haven’t launched yet). Despite the hundreds of examples of pharma and healthcare companies using social media, you know it’s going to be a long battle. But maybe social media is a good approach. You might find some people who are open to your message and perhaps it’s compelling enough for them to send to others.

But is there a better, simpler alternative?

Instead of the immediate jump to social media, how about going with something simpler? Something that you know hasn’t been a problem to get approved in the past. Something that already has a built-in audience of people open to your messages. Where would you find this? Apply the Ockham’s Razor principle and you’ll get your answer. Email.

Yes, good old-fashioned email. It’s not as sexy as social media, but it’s certainly the simplest and probably most effective first step. Why email? With email, you can control the message quite a bit more. By this I mean that you aren’t constrained to a set number of characters. You can also add whatever media you want and as much information as you think is appropriate. With many social media channels, the person would have to clickthrough in order to get a lot of the details. With email, you can put it all right in front of them in the way you want. Email is even shareable. Recall the forward button…that’s sharing. It may not spread virally like you might (assuming you’re very fortunate) hope for in social media, but the sharing is more targeted. That is, if you choose to forward an email to someone, you likely think that it contains some information that’s very applicable to their situation. In social media, you share very broadly (i.e., to everyone) without thinking about the applicability to each and everyone in your network. In other words, email allows for “targeted sharing.” I’ve professed my “affection” for using email marketing in pharma in the past (Pharma Can Use Email Marketing to Improve…Everything) and I’m doing it again. In keeping with the Ockham’s Razor theme, the simplest solution is oftenwhat should be preferred.

But who are you going to email? With social media, you might already have a built in audience of hundreds or maybe thousands of followers. But where to start with email? Perhaps a good place is your giant opt-in database where you probably have millions.

Nearly every single pharma company program I’ve seen online has as part of their sign-up language (or a specific opt in) something about receiving future communications from the company about new developments that “might interest me.” Here are just a few:

GSK includes the opt-in for related information within the rest of the standard opt in language.

GSK opt in

For Pfizer and AZ, there’s a separate opt in for additional communications:

Pfizer opt in

AstraZeneca Opt in

Amgen goes another step further and asks for which conditions you might want other information.

Amgen opt in 1 Amgen opt in 2

Bottom line: your database is full of people who have opted in to receive new information from you. There might be hundreds of thousands or even millions…far more than your social media following. In some cases, they’ve opted in to specifically hear about new products. Why wouldn’t you start with these folks to get the word out about your new product? Why not target all the people in your database with asthma to tell them about your new asthma product? Since these people have already opted in to receive information from you, there are two things that you already know. First, they must trust you and be open to hearing from you otherwise they wouldn’t have supplied this personal  information to you in the first place. Second, you know that they are people who are fairly engaged in their own healthcare (or someone else’s for whom they care for). When you combine these two factors, you have a group of people who are the most open to your message. They are likely to be your biggest advocates and least likely to ignore what you send them. This is especially true when you compare them to a list of “followers” in social media who may have limited engagement with you and who may follow you, but would prefer that you don’t follow them. This is what you get with social media. Your audience is of much more questionable value. And yes, while all the people you email may not be candidates for your new product, the same could certainly be said about any social media effort you undertake.

One final plus for email marketing in this case: measurement and analytics. While you can measure the impact of your social media efforts (if you set it up correctly), you’ll find it far easier to track the impact of your email campaign. So, for all of you who are always demanding some “ROI” information, email is probably your better bet.

Maybe social media could be a good tactic to get the word out about our soon-to-be approved asthma product, but does it really make sense to be the place to start? The simplest solution should always be preferred mainly because it’s often the best one. Keep that in mind for all your digital marketing and you’ll likely find yourself with more hits than misses.

The 10 Scariest Pharma and Healthcare YouTube Videos

A while back I wrote a post called “8 Tips to Help You Own YouTube’s Search Results.” I wrote that post for a number of reasons, but one of the main reasons was because I was very disappointed by many of the videos that showed up at the top of YouTube searches for health-related topics. For pharma and healthcare companies, physicians, and consumers, these videos can be classified as nothing but scary. They aren’t scary in a “Friday the 13th” sort of way, but rather scary in that these are the videos that people are seeing when they search for common medical conditions or treatments on YouTube. They are scary in that this is the advice and information they likely include in their treatment decision making process. I’m doing this post today to further emphasize what’s at stake if we aren’t ensuring that high quality, high credibility content is showing up at the top of YouTube search results.

You might be saying, “This is all fine, but no one searches for health information on YouTube.” As I mentioned in my original post: “Alex Iskold, from Adaptive Blue, wrote a great article about how video might just be the future of search in his article “Is YouTube the Next Google?‘ One of the points from his article that struck me: “Kids no longer learn about the world by reading text. Like the television generation, they are absorbing the world through their visual sense. But there is a big difference. Television was programmed and inflexible. YouTube is completely micro-chunked and on demand. Kids can search for what they need anytime. This is different, and powerful.” The takeaway for you as a marketer? If YouTube isn’t the way people find information about your brands now, it will be in the future.”

If that doesn’t convince you or get you moving right now on this, then consider how Google now treats video content. You might have noticed that for many Google searches, you’ll find not only websites in the search results, but also news results, images and, of course, video. Google calls this “Universal Search.” What this means is that a video that ordinarily might never be seen by anyone because it was attached to an insignificant website, can suddenly find its way onto the front page of Google as a video result. Suddenly, the video you didn’t have to worry about is being seen by thousands. Here’s an example for a search for “downhill skiing” (in honor of the Olympics). I highlighted the video results in the red box:

Google Universal Search Downhill Skiing

I’m going to assume you now see why YouTube videos are important and why it’s important to optimize your videos so that they show up towards the top of the YouTube search results (PS: YouTube is the number 2 search engine in the world…more than Yahoo! and Bing put together).

So, which scary videos show up towards the top of the YouTube search results for healthcare or pharma related searches? For this analysis, I looked at only the top 5 videos in the search results ranked by relevance (the default YouTube search and what Google uses for Universal Search).

Without any further delay…

[Note: if you're reading this via email or RSS reader, the videos might not appear, click through to the full article to check them out]

The 10 Scariest Pharma and Healthcare YouTube Videos

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1. “Flu”

The flu was certainly a dominate fixture in healthcare over the past six months and it led to bitter arguments for and against vaccination. One of the biggest “scandals” remains the number one search result in YouTube despite quite a bit of controversy (see the next video after this).

Not the kind of PR you’re looking for if you manufacture vaccines or are trying to convince people that vaccination is safe and effective. This is all that most people will ever see, but for those who dig a bit further, you’ll find this video:

Good news for Desiree, but still bad news for vaccinations of all kinds since the original video is still what shows up in search results.

2. “Nexium”

This is the number 4 search result for “Nexium” (the 2nd biggest selling drug in the world) on YouTube. It’s the 4th most “relevant” according to YouTube’s algorithm and it’s nothing but a spam video for illegal Nexium. Attention AstraZeneca: I expect to see this fixed within the next month.

3. “Lipitor”

I just showed what things look like on YouTube for the #2 drug in the world. What about the number one drug? I think the title of the video says it all. This is the number 5 search result for “Lipitor” on YouTube.

4. “Erectile Dysfunction”

I was admittedly a bit hesitant to see what YouTube had to offer for this search, but was pleasantly surprised by the lack of obvious jokes that could have been shared via video. Instead, I’ll call your attention to the number 4 search result. As a favor to you, my dedicated readers, I sat through all 9 excruciatingly boring minutes of this to make sure it was clean, so you can “enjoy” it at work. The video is touting a natural herb that’s, of course, never been tested in a clinical trial, but, as they say, it’s been used for hundreds of years, so it must be safe.

5. “Asthma”

I’d love to embed the video I found for asthma, but Animal Planet has prohibited embedding. Yes, I said Animal Planet. “What in the world does Animal Planet have to do with asthma?,” you ask. Well, I wasn’t sure either, but if you check out the 4th result in YouTube you’ll know. It’s not for the faint at heart…I’ll warn you now. No animals are harmed in the video unless you count hundreds of thousands of tiny fish as animals. Check out: Weird, True and Freaky / Asthma Cure

6. “Allergies”

A familiar face pops up again for allergies. This time a video from Dr. Bellonzi is the number one result. In fact, he shows up for a bunch of different conditions, but I’ll stop at this one.

7. “Celebrex”

Looks like I’ll be keeping the people at Pfizer busy after this post because here’s one for Celebrex. There are actually a lot of similar videos for many of the drug names on YouTube, but this is one of the highest ranking that I could find. In an ironic nod to many pharma companies, this law firm has disabled ratings and reviews for this video.

8. “High Cholesterol”

Many of the people appearing in the videos you’ve seen so far that purport to be physicians actually aren’t. I know…big surprise. However, this next video features an actual M.D.. He’s sharing some info on “why having high cholesterol isn’t always bad.” While almost all of what he says is pretty well accurate (statin manufacturers might disagree), the problem is that most people aren’t listening for the important caveats that are either subtle or missing altogether. For many, that means that the take away message is that they don’t need to worry about high cholesterol. Not good.

9. “Diabetes”

I think anyone with diabetes or a loved one with the disease will largely agree that it isn’t a laughing matter. So, while having a dance from Wilford Brimley show up as the number 4 result for diabetes isn’t necessarily dangerous, there’s a big missed opportunity here. Instead of seeing this video, I’m thinking something more educational would be welcomed by most people searching for “diabetes” on YouTube.

10. ???

Here’s your chance to contribute to the list. You’ve probably seen a bunch of videos that belong on this list, so please share them in the comments. I’ll pull out the best few and update the post (and give you a little credit too). Try to only submit videos that show up in the top 5 search results. Include what you searched for and the URL for the video. There will be a prize for the “best” one. What prize? I’m not completely sure, but I haven’t disappointed yet.

If you’re not at all happy with the content you’re seeing on YouTube for treatments or conditions that are important to your company, there are things you can do to fix the situation. Chance are that you already have a lot of content, but likely you haven’t chosen to share it via YouTube. I’d encourage you to chance your mind on this. More people will see your video if you put it on YouTube versus leaving it buried in your website. If you don’t want people embedding your video or you want to present it in a certain context, then you can disable embedding. You can moderate comments…basically, you can control it all. Once you figure out that you’re going to share your videos, read my article “8 Tips to Help You Own YouTube’s Search Results” to give them the best shot at showing up at the top of YouTube’s search results.

10 Healthcare Dinosaurs Digital Technology Will Make Extinct

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Dinosaurs

It’ll probably come as no surprise to find out that I’m a big advocate for the increased use of digital technologies in healthcare. And it’s not just in marketing where I think a greater use of digital is not only inevitable, but also in nearly every facet of the healthcare system. It’s essential to improving healthcare for everyone. Over the past five years, the industry has changed dramatically as more and more digital technologies have replaced “traditional” ones. Some have been for the better and others still have a ways to go before we can decide if we’re better off.

As we look into the future a bit, I’ve noticed that some of the things that we all stereotypically associate with our healthcare system are starting to go away and are being replaced with digital technologies. Some things have already been replaced completely or are close to being extinct while others are just starting their descent. I’ve tried to predict the future before with varying degrees of success (such as my paper “The Future of Pharma Digital Marketing” (675 downloads), so here’s yet another look into our digital future. For each item below, I’ve given a guess at when I see each disappearing for good. Please feel free to leave your comments on what you agree or disagree with (I’m sure they’ll be plenty of the latter) and what you think I’m missing. Here they are in order of my predicted extinction:

10 Healthcare Dinosaurs Digital Technology Will Make Extinct

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1. Pharma Brand Facebook Pages — 2-3 years

My first entry in this forward-looking post is likely the opposite of what you expected. While more and more brands and pharma companies move onto Facebook (check out the full list on the Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki), and as we await some guidelines from the FDA that could make it far easier for companies to participate in social media, I’m heading in the opposite direction. That’s right, dead before it even lived. To be clear, I’m not saying that all social media participation will go away, but just this one tactic. There are very few pharma brands currently on Facebook, as most have taken the “unbranded” or corporate approach where the drug isn’t mentioned. This is smart. Outside the regulatory hurdles and risks that exist, there’s another good reason not to have a Facebook page for your pharma brand. Recall that the main way these pages work is that people become “fans,” which essentially subscribes them to whatever content you put out via their News Feed. Many non-pharma brands have done this spectacularly well and gathered massive numbers of Fans on Facebook (like Pringles, the largest brand-created page on Facebook, which our agency, Bridge Worldwide, helped pull together). But, here’s the difference. When someone becomes your Fan, they announce it as an update to all their friends on Facebook automatically. That’s fine when they tell the world that they’ve just become a fan of Pringles. However, it doesn’t work for most other products, especially pharma drugs. Are you ever going to see this?

Facebook status update valtrex

Doubtful. The biggest pharma Facebook page actually is for a brand, Gardasil. However, you’ll notice that people aren’t being asked to become fans of Gardasil, but rather “Take a Step Against Cervical Cancer.” Who isn’t against cervical cancer? It’s a clever way to make it more likely that someone will become your friend, but don’t take advantage of it. By the way, now’s a good time to join the Dose of Digital Facebook Page.

2. Paper “detail” aids — 3-5 years

You’ll notice that paper is going to take quite a hit  in this list and it should. Not only is it incredibly expensive to produce (the final product, that is), it’s also completely inflexible. Once you print it, you can’t change it. Most pharma companies still send their sales teams out into the field with printed information to share with their physicians. Some have adopted electronic presentations that reps can show in their laptops. These have much more interaction and can include media such as video, which makes them far more engaging than paper. In addition, the information can be updated instantly when something changes at a negligible cost. One problem I do see here came while I was working with a major pharma company who adopted all electronic detail aids only to go back to paper. The system they were using was so unwieldy that it was prone to crashing during presentations on a very regular basis (not good when you have less than a minute to show something to a doctor). In analyzing why this was happening, it was pretty obvious. The system (which will go nameless, but is used by many pharma companies) used a massive amount of CPU resources meaning that it rarely ever worked the way it should. These proprietary platforms also mean that only a handful of companies can create content for them, which overly inflates the price and excludes some of the best creative shops from working with you. There’s no reason for this. Create a simple presentation shell and make the content in Flash (plus XML) and make it possible for anyone to create content for you. Some companies have ditched these proprietary systems and replaced them with what I just described and are much happier. Number 3 on this list should be “Proprietary electronic detailing platforms,” but it’s not…

3. Single-purpose medical devices — 5  years

People have begun to monitor more about their health than ever before. Whether you have some sort of disease or not, this tracking is becoming more common. This could be a simple analog pedometer or something much more advanced like Nike+. Either way, even completely healthy people are gathering data about themselves. Of course for many with chronic conditions, this type of tracking is an everyday affair (and hassle). Diabetes is a condition that immediately springs to mind, as many diabetics must regularly test and track their blood glucose levels. For this, they carry around a device that does this…and only this. Apple has already envisioned a future where this isn’t necessary. The testing is, of course, but carrying around another device isn’t. Many people (and many more will) already carry around a very capable computer in their pocket everyday in the form of a smartphone, so why not combine the two…a blood glucose monitor as part of your phone?

iphone glucose meter

Apple introduced this concept when they released their version 2.0 software for the iPhone, but we don’t quite have this on the market yet. There are already integrations for the iPhone for sleep tracking and many other conditions, but expect many more in the future that are designed to eliminate single-purpose electronic devices.

4. Pharma Brand Websites — 5-7 years

Interesting prediction from a guy who works for a digital agency that, among other things, makes brand websites. I’m not saying that websites will go away, but I do think a certain kind of site will start to fade away. I’m talking about pharma brand.com sites (e.g., lipitor.com). Already, most people get their drug information from third party sites like WebMD or even product reviews from sites like iGuard. There’s really very little reason to go to most pharma brand website these days. Some of the sites out there do serve a purpose, but a sales pitch about the product isn’t it and isn’t why people come. Most visitors come to find very specific bits of information about our products, but we make it hard for them to find it. Perhaps they come to find out about a certain side effect or to find out if there’s some sort of co-pay assistance. Why do we hide this behind page after page of product messages and the same four types of stock photos (a subject for a future post)? Brand websites need to behave more like Google today than a product-selling page. That means that searching (and being able to find) specific items has to be a priority. Keep in mind that many of the people visiting are already on your product, so what are you trying to sell them? More of the content on disease conditions that pharma companies have accumulated at considerable expense will become the key focus. So, as brand.com sites go away or lessen in importance, disease condition sites from pharma companies will take their place.

5. Paper prescriptions — 5-7 years

Already common in many practices and institutions, little pieces of paper that we take to our local pharmacy in order to get our medications are destined to be a thing of the past in the near future. Electronic medical records (EMRs) will of course speed the death of this ancient practice, but it’s advancing on its own whether or not EMRs become the norm. However, there’s still quite a bit of inefficiency in this part of the system as you still have to drive to the pharmacy to pick up your pills. Mail order pharmacy services have increased dramatically, but have a long way to go, but will dominate in the future for those on chronic medications. Today, however, many of these programs are so difficult to sign up for that people simply pass on the option. For those of you out there that administer these programs and who are trying to convert retail pharmacy users to mail order, consider this: most people would call their pharmacy every month to get a refill, drive there, get out of their car to actually pay for the medication, drive home AND pay a premium to do all this versus having it sent to their house automatically at a lower cost via mail order. That ought to tell you that you need to fix the sign up process.

6. Massive healthcare portals — 5-7 years

Healthcare information online is dominated by a few players today. Sites in the WebMD and Everyday Health networks make up a big share of the healthcare-related traffic online. This is starting to change. There are a couple of factors at work here. First, search engines are getting into the healthcare content business by including basic information as part of the results for many healthcare-related searches. In fact, for many people, there’s no reason to go beyond the information that Google and Bing (Yahoo! is far behind here) serve up automatically (check out my post: “How Google and Bing Plan to Eliminate the Need for WebMD (and Your Website)” for more details on why). Since the search engines can supply much of the basic information about most diseases there’s no reason to look much further unless you need highly specialized information. However, for some conditions and some people this specialized information is going to be required. This might mean turning to a knowledgeable community that is full of others with a similar condition, such as Tu Diabetes or PKU.com. That’s community, but what if you just want information to research on your own? In most cases, highly specialized, detailed, credible, and unbiased information doesn’t exist. That is, finding very deep content on a specific condition that is approachable for your average person isn’t easy to find and certainly isn’t found in one place. There are two ends of the spectrum out there where most online content fits: general information written at a 5th-7th grade level and highly specific information written for physicians. Where’s the stuff in the middle for someone who wants more than what they get on WebMD, but doesn’t want to read the New England Journal of Medicine? This will come in the near future.

7. In-Office Doctor Visits — 8-10 years

Once again, a futuristic idea that already is happening. I talked about this in a post called “How Pharma Can Cut Out the “Middleman” (aka “The Doctor”). It’s already possible to see a physician without leaving your house at any hour of the day. By no means is this a mainstream idea today, but it will become more and more common in the future. For some conditions, you’ll still need to see a doctor in person so they can do some diagnostic things that require you being in the same room, but many chronic conditions and follow ups could be handled at a distance. Ironically, one other trend that is leading to fewer in-office doctor visits comes from the past. House calls. More physicians are starting to once again make house calls (at a price) just like they did fifty years ago. Some have even switched their entire practice to this model. When you combine these trends together, it leads to only one conclusion, which is a dramatic decrease in in-person visits to the doctor.

8. Paper medical records — 8-10 years

This was an obvious prediction, as it’s talked about quite a bit now in mainstream media. We’re already well on our way to never seeing another piece of paper in a doctor’s office. Some large institutions are already largely “paperless,” but many are much further behind. As part of the recent economic stimulus programs here in the US, a large sum of money (~$10-15 billion depending on who’s counting) was allocated to making our system paperless. We’ve got a long way to go, but the process is underway. Despite these government and local physician level efforts, many people have already given up on expecting their doctor or insurance company to keep their records for them so Microsoft HealthVault and Google Health have come forward to give you a free and easy way to do it. On top of this, some smart hospitals like Cleveland Clinic have already partnered with Google rather than expecting people to maintain their records in multiple places (e.g., Cleveland Clinic’s site AND Google Health).

9. Clinical trials — 15-20 years

Before all the scientists reading this get all upset, let me finish (or start). Clinical trials are an integral part of the healthcare system. They are used to define what medical treatment is the right one (or most right) for specific patients at a specific time. Without these trials, it would be anyone’s guess as to which treatments were the best option in a given situation. However, they are frighteningly expensive and take a long time. It’s possible to replicate some clinical trial results right now without the time and expense. To be sure, these don’t have the same rigor, nor, in most cases, the same scientific validity, but they could help prevent us from heading down the wrong path and wasting time and resources on a larger study. Sites like Patients Like Me and Cure Together gather a great deal of information on their users and make it possible to use “simple” math to find correlations between diseases or treatments. CureTogether has been able to do this (and matched the accuracy of much larger studies) simply based on the data of several thousand people. Imagine if everyone’s records are electronic and there are millions of people who volunteer their data for these types of analyses. There are links between diseases that we can’t even imagine today that will be found this way. Patients Like Me, where users input their progress on a regular basis, makes it possible to do “real-time” trials with large numbers of patients almost instantly (such as this one for lithium use in ALS). Read more about this in my post “Can Social Media Improve Your Health and Save Your Life?”

Patients Like Me Lithium Study

10. Healthcare Privacy — 25 years

I saved the most controversial for last because I think it will take the longest to achieve. However, I also think that it will have the biggest effect on our society’s health in the long-term. Recently, I was at an amazing brainstorming-type meeting held by a healthcare company that I wish I could tell you more about, but due to confidentiality agreements I can’t. What I can tell you is that I heard some amazing predictions for the future, but one really stuck with me. At one point, someone came out with this very eloquent quote that shut up a room of very opinionated people for a while (including me): “In the future, the less private you are, the longer you’ll live.” Think about that for a second. Imagine that you could choose (you don’t have to participate if you don’t want) to release information about your health and in exchange you’d receive highly personalized recommendations on treatments, which diseases you likely have already or are likely to get, and maybe even how long you’ll live. Would you do it? Our current society norms say to keep everything about our health private and today there are practical reasons for this (like insurance denials). But in the future, you might not be able to discriminated against because of preexisting conditions (it’s already part of Obama’s healthcare plan today). If you give up your data, it can be pooled with millions (or billions) of others that through some mathematical analysis can tell you everything about your current and future health. This would include which drugs are likely to work for you and which diseases you are likely to develop. It’s an extension of what CureTogether has just started to explore. Power their concept with billions of data points and it becomes a difficult to imagine database.

That’s my list of 10 for now. They’re sure to change when I look back on this next year. Some of these predictions will come true before my predicted dates and others might never happen. As a healthcare marketer, it’s important that you know what’s coming and to figure out not only how to prepare for it when the future does arrive, but what you can do to make it happen.

Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki One Year Anniversary!

It’s official. The Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki is one year old today. If you’re wondering what it looked like back in February of 2009, you can check out the Wiki Classic. You’ll see that there wasn’t much to it back then with just a handful of links and most categories completely missing any examples. Since then, the list has grown immensely thanks to your contributions. My how things change in a year. The growth of the Wiki certainly corresponds with the growth of social media in the industry and I hope that the Wiki made it easier for people to get their social media ideas approved by showing that others have tried and succeed (legally) in this space.

There are now more than 330 examples from pharma and healthcare companies and about another 180 links to resources from industry observers (e.g., blogs like this one). Grand total: 510 pharma and healthcare social media examples for you to review.

Today I’m adding 35 more items to the wiki.

A few highlights:

  • PEER Network from United Therapeutics Corporation
  • 6 new Facebook pages including two that have Walls that are open to comments: Acuvue and Zicam
  • 3 new YouTube Channels
  • 5 new Twitter accounts

You’ll note that I’ve now separated corporate-level Twitter accounts and brand-level Twitter accounts. One other change: I’ve removed iPhone apps for now. I know there are more out there from pharma and healthcare companies than I listed, but I didn’t include many of them. The rationale was that they weren’t “social” by design (nor intended to be). Since that’s the main entry criteria for the Wiki, they didn’t seem to fit. I’m planning  a new home for all these apps in the near future. Stay tuned.

Special thanks to all the contributors to this month’s update including (in no particular order): @arlyi, @roskadigital, @RosettaHC, @shikhvarger, Kru Research, Sam Walmsley, @eileenobrien, @WendyBlackburn, and @davidlrothman. And some extra thanks to everyone who has contributed to the wiki or recommended it to someone over the past year.

Here’s the link to the wiki. Instructions for recommending an addition are on the page:

Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki

If I sent you a note saying that you’d be included in the next update and you don’t see your listing, you’re in the queue for the next one.

Many of you have asked what you can do to support the wiki, as you’ve found it so useful. Well, there are a few things you can do since you asked:

  • First and foremost, without your contributions, the wiki wouldn’t be what it is today and it would quickly become outdated. You can submit your recommendations for inclusion (including your own site) using this form.
  • Share with your network. Here are some shortcuts: Send a tweet, update your LinkedIn or Facebook status, and/or whatever your preferred means of sharing is. You can just copy and paste this: “Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki. http://su.pr/20M8CB. (via @jonmrich)”
  • Write about it. Feel free to blog about the wiki and use some of the examples in case studies or presentations you’re developing.
  • Get a badge. That’s right, if you’re listed on the wiki, you can now add a badge to your site to show that you’ve made it to the list. We’ve created a couple of options to choose from. (If you’re not listed and think you should be, see the first bullet above on how to do that.)

Option 1

Dose of Digital Pharma and Social Media Wiki Badge v1

Copy and paste the code below onto your site:

<form><a href="http://www.doseofdigital.com/healthcare-pharma-social-media-wiki/" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.doseofdigital.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/doseofdigitalwikibadge1.jpg"/></a></form>

Option 2

Dose of Digital Pharma and Social Media Wiki Badge v2

Copy and paste the code below onto your site:

<form><a href="http://www.doseofdigital.com/healthcare-pharma-social-media-wiki/" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.doseofdigital.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/doseofdigitalwikibadge2.jpg"/></a></form>

Again, thank you all for your contributions. If you have any suggestions on how to improve the wiki, please let me know.

10 Sneaky Marketing Tactics You Need to Avoid

Every once and a while, I get approached to write an article for a non-healthcare publication. I like to do these because they help ensure that I don’t get too narrowly focused on healthcare and pharma and lose track of everything else out there in digital marketing. When iMedia Connection asked me to write an article about deceptive digital marketing tactics, I knew it was right up my alley.

The article was just published today as an “In Focus” article, which they do twice a week. That means you can see my mugshot right on the homepage of iMedia Connection if you head over there right now. If you missed it, here’s what you missed…not too exciting, I know.

Jonathan Richman iMedia Connection Article

The article is entitled: “10 Sneaky Marketing Tactics You Need to Avoid.” Suffice it to say, if you work for a pharma or healthcare company and you’re doing any of these, you need to stop immediately. I think the industry is already lacking enough in the trust department that you don’t need anything else to cast you in a negative light. The 10 sneaky tactics include: AstroTurfing,lucky guesses, anonymous cleanup, image manipulation, trapping visitors, an inability to cancel, stealing credentials, bundling, pulling the switch and, crafty SEO. Clickthrough to the full article to see what all these mean and to ensure you’re not doing any of them: “10 Sneaky Marketing Tactics You Need to Avoid.”

Are You Reminding Me or Annoying Me?

One of the very first areas I started blogging about on Dose of Digital dealt with medication compliance. After working on compliance challenges for my final two years at AstraZeneca before moving to my current job at Bridge Worldwide, I’d seen pretty much every tactic you could think of to improve compliance. So, this seemed like a natural place to start blogging. You can read my first post on this subject (from back in December 2008): “Glorified Alarm Clocks.”

Since then, I’ve written a few posts about compliance/adherence (yes, I know the difference, but won’t get into it here) issues. One of my favorites, “The Only Way Pharma Can Improve Compliance: Fun,” was a big hit with a number of people. I still believe that adding elements of fun (yes, even to serious diseases) helps people cope with their disease and better learn how to manage it. I think there are also many tactics that have very little impact on compliance for the vast majority of people and yet, they remains a very popular. One of these is the reminder. In fact, I wrote about this too a long time ago, but wanted to add some additional perspective.

On the surface, medication reminders seem like the perfect solution to the huge issue of compliance (i.e., the lack of it), which affects a huge proportion of people taking all manner of treatments. From drugs for asthma to allergies to high blood pressure and even cancer and birth control, many people simply don’t take their medications as they are prescribed. Importantly, they typically don’t take their medications for as long as they should especially when these are chronic, lifelong treatments. This is the case even for the most serious conditions. Take people with chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML). Prior to the release of Gleevec (from Novartis), studies showed that patients diagnosed with CML the “median survival time was 69 months.” In other words, half the patients lived more than 69 months and half less. That’s not a great prognosis. Enter Gleevec. A study from the NEJM showed that “the estimated overall survival of patients who received imatinib [Gleevec] as initial therapy was 89% at 60 months.” That is, almost 90% lived at least 60 months when starting with Gleevec versus about 50% prior to Gleevec.

So, you’d think that this would be the drug with the highest compliance rates. Right?

Wrong. A full third (33%) of Gleevec patients were non-adherent in one large study. Why? The authors added this fact: “Poor compliance was not related to length of treatment or to side effects of Gleevec. Poor compliance occurred despite the fact that patients knew they would be monitored for compliance, as they had signed a consent form for this purpose.” So, do you think they didn’t take their medication because they forgot? You have a disease that can kill you in months AND you know someone is checking to see if you’re taking your medication and you still forget? Sounds unlikely to me. I don’t think you can easily forget that you have CML.

From all the research I’ve read and been a part of, for most people, the drivers of compliance are related to the patient truly understanding the risks and benefits of their treatment and their willingness or openness to persuasion (notably, from a physician or other HCP). Hats off to Andrea LaFountain, who I worked with at AstraZeneca, and who pioneered a lot of this work (be sure to check her company out) and can explain it far better than I can.

So, in other words, reminders aren’t enough. They can be a component, but aren’t enough on their own. Yet, that’s what I see today…reminders. Reminder programs put forth as the cornerstone of improving compliance. I’m not suggesting that you forget about offering reminder services to your patients, but I am suggesting that you shouldn’t expect too much from them.

For today, I want to show you some of the reminder programs that are out there and highlight the good and the bad. I’ll also show you that it doesn’t need to be as complex as we sometimes make it out to be.

First, to the title of this post, “Are you reminding me or annoying me?” Many “reminder” programs are simply annoying programs. They are annoying because they aren’t smart and don’t learn from your actions (or lack of actions). Case in point (and the inspiration for this post), eTrack. Their first program is for ADHD and it tops my list for annoying. I signed up for this program after someone mentioned it on Twitter so I could see what it was all about.

After signing up, you can turn on reminders…oh wait…you don’t turn them on…they turn them on for you automatically…a personal pet peeve.

Not only do they turn on reminders, but they sign me up to get them twice a day, five days a week (and also sign me up for their newsletter). And, the reminders start coming…

You’ll notice that I haven’t even opened one yet and still, they keep coming. If someone never opens your email (and you can tell if you have a proper email delivery platform), when is enough enough? When should you give up, so that you avoid annoying your customers and finding yourself the subject of a blog post? Sure, you can’t always tell when someone opens an email (e.g., if they use the “preview pane”) or perhaps opening these emails isn’t important, as they only are supposed to jog your memory. Okay. Well then, how about stopping these emails when I don’t go to your site after, say, a week to input whether or not I took my medication? Isn’t that an indication that I don’t care or I’m not interested in your service?

One other major problem with this whole concept is that you have to remember to track your medication, which involves visiting a site everyday (or twice a day) to report whether or not you took your medication. Think about that for a moment. You can’t remember to take your medication, so I’m sending you reminders so that you remember to take your medication AND remember to visit another website to track it. In other words, now I have to remember two things, one of which has no bearing on my health whatsoever. That seems extremely unlikely to me and not a viable long-term solution. A reminder to be reminded. Odd.

PS: if you do opt me into your program, make it easy for me to opt out. For example, I should be able to reply to these annoying emails and say stop, but that’s not an option.

And how come these emails don’t actually remind me to take my medication? They remind me to track it on their site. If you really care about my outcomes, shouldn’t you encourage me to take my medication before you encourage me to visit your site. Just saying…

Some other options for reminders involve the use of text messages or SMS. Depending on the target audience for your product, I like these much better than the email reminders. I’ve seen a lot of expensive, complex SMS reminder programs in my day and have always argued that they shouldn’t be this difficult. Enter Free Rx Reminder. Simple…enter your medication, when you want to be reminded, and your mobile number and get an SMS at that time.

They even created a handy widget that anyone can embed on their site: You can try it out by visiting their site.

How simple was that? Did you pay a fortune for an SMS reminder system for your brand? I did once. Here’s what you get from them when the time you designated comes around:

Free Rx Reminder SMS 1

A couple of things I should point out. First, unlike eTrack, spelled out in the message is a simple way to opt-out. This is a must. You’ll also notice that I can reply with “MORE” and get additional information about discounts, so I checked it out and got this:

Free Rx Reminder SMS 2

I have no idea what this discount is nor how much it’s worth, but as a “customer” (I don’t take Nexium) I certainly would appreciate this. It would be nice to see exactly what the discount is ahead of time though.

One final reminder system involves using “push” notifications that are common on most smartphones today. For example, many applications let you set up push notifications to alert you when some new piece of information or message is available. Because it’s push, you don’t have to open the application to see what’s new. Instead, the update is “pushed” to your phone no matter what you’re doing. This is what a push alert looks like:

Notice that I didn’t need to be in the AP News application to get this, it just shows up on my screen when the server pushes it to my phone. This is another way to set up a reminder.

What you notice is missing from each of the examples I’ve shown you is a simple way to track that you actually took your medication (if this is important to you or you’re part of some program that needs this data). However, this can easily be incorporated into each reminder type. For email, you can include the option to reply to the message with “yes” or “no” (as in: did you take your medication today?). SMS could work the same way and allow you to reply with “yes” or “no.” For push notifications as part of an application, you can include an action in the push message. Check out how Remember the Milk does this for its application:

Remember the Milk Push Notification

You see here that you not only get the push notification, but also can open the application right from the notification. This could open a screen in the app where you click “yes” or “no.”

Of course, if all this is too complicated for you, then you could always just set up your own tracking application.

Bottom line: feel free to offer people the option of signing up for reminder services for your product, but don’t expect this service to solve your product’s compliance problems. Reminders can be one tactic in a series of options that could impact compliance, but reminders aren’t enough. If you do use reminders, please keep in mind these simple rules so that you ensure that you’re just reminding people and not annoying them.

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