Many of you know what I’m talking about in the title of this post. Many of you don’t. This post is for you. I had an epiphany today that provided a simple solution to help get healthcare marketing to move faster towards digital technologies. Read on.

First off, what’s a Digital Native and what’s the counterpart, the Digital Immigrant? Marc Prensky coined these terms to help explain a phenomenon he was seeing in the education system (download the overview here). Basically, there were two groups, students and teachers. For many years, there was always a bit of a disconnect between these two groups simply because of age and maturity (?). However, all in all, there wasn’t much of a difference as the students eventually grew to be very similar and behave similarly to their teachers. But, at some point, this changed. Students and teachers suddenly had a much bigger gap between them. The cause? Digital technologies.

Kids who grew up starting in the early-90s were born with all of the digital technologies that us “older” folks had to learn. To them, there’s always been email, the Internet always existed, and everyone always had a mobile phone. I didn’t have any of this stuff as a kid. So, now mix these kids who are Digital Natives and have used these technologies all their lives with Digital Immigrants (their teachers) who have not. What do you get? Two groups of people talking a completely different language. Two groups who work differently and solve problems in unique ways.

So why should you care about all this? Well, I think one of the major reasons why pharma hasn’t embraced digital is because it’s completely made up of Digital Immigrants. Set aside all the regulatory issues, all the measurement questions, and every other objection you can come up with. In the end, I realized it comes back to one thing. You’re all Immigrants.

How can you tell if you’re a Digital Immigrant? Marc gave some good examples in his review, so if you’ve done any of these, you’re a Digital Immigrant:

• Printed out your email (or had your administrative assistant print it out for you–even worse)
• You need to print out a document written on the computer in order to edit it (rather than just editing on the screen)
• You’ve brought people physically into your office to see an interesting web site (rather than just sending them the URL). 
• The “Did you get my email?” phone call

I could add to Marc’s list forever, but you get the idea. I think we can stipulate that the vast majority of the readers of this blog are Digital Immigrants. So, I applaud your efforts to learn more and to reduce, as Marc puts it, your “accent.” From my personal experience working in pharma, I can tell you that your average brand manager and even associate brand managers are all Digital Immigrants simply based on when they grew up. This is not to mention the senior managers who are the parents and grandparents of the first Digital Natives.

I’m technically a Digital Immigrant. I also know that I was among the youngest Brand Leaders at AstraZeneca when I was there meaning that there weren’t any Digital Natives around. Why is this a problem? I’ve said many times before (most recently in my presentation on Social Media Principles) that one critical step necessary to really understanding which digital platforms make sense for a marketing campaign is understanding the options. Not knowing the options. Understanding the options. It’s one thing to know what Twitter is, but it’s another to really understand how it works. It’s the finer points that often make these platforms most valuable. Digital Immigrants don’t inherently understand digital platforms. They have to learn them and this take a lot of time and effort. Time that most healthcare brand managers don’t have and effort that they simply can’t spare. I get it. 

I’ve got a solution. Hire some natives. Now’s a great time of year for this. College graduates are looking for jobs and students are looking for internships. Hire them. Hire them as your “translator” to convert digital to your language. Hire them to explain the finer points to you. Hire them to develop the completely fresh ideas that utilize digital that you simply can’t imagine. Don’t let them run off unsupervised. In fact, pair them with someone experienced and let them both learn from each other. Give your new staff of Digital Natives one instruction when they start…”Tell us what we’re missing.” Forget that they don’t have healthcare experience. They’ve got other experience that you can never have.

If you want to learn more about Digital Natives before you go out and hire anyone, Harvard has an entire project dedicated to just this. If you want to simply “rent” some Digital Natives, we’ve got some available here at Bridge Worldwide. Just contact me and we’ll send some over.

Possibly related posts (auto-generated):

1. Using Digital to Address the Needs of Caregivers
2. Welcome Readers to Dose of Digital
3. Ten Digital Marketing Ideas Pharma Companies Will Never Try (But Should)