Archive | February, 2010

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.

Monitor This, Forget That — “The Monitoring Continuum”

One of the most contentious posts ever on Dose of Digital was my post about social media monitoring for pharma and healthcare. The title alone was enough to set some people off: Pharma Should Forget About Social Media Monitoring. The point of that post was 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. On the other hand, if you’re going to punch back (i.e., respond to discussions) or are taking some punches so you can win in the later rounds (i.e., informing future strategy), like Rocky fighting Clubber Lang, then go for it. Monitor all you want.

I only hope you don’t end up as bloodied as this. It ain’t pretty out there.

To save you from another beating in the ring, today’s post is going  to try to dissuade you once again from “monitoring” until you’re ready. I’ll take a different angle today though. The title of this post should give you some idea: “Monitor This, Forget That.” What I’m not going to give you is a list of social media sites that are more important than others. You won’t see: “Twitter is more important than Facebook” or “iGuard is more significant than WebMD” (even if they are). Instead, I want to tell you where you should be looking FOR FREE before you spend your time and (a lot) your company’s hard-earned money on a “traditional” monitoring solution.

Before I go forward, one caveat: I think social media monitoring is an extremely valuable tool that ANY brand can benefit from. I also think that the vast majority of of monitoring solutions and tools that are available are well worth their cost. True, some are better than others and some are easier to use or more comprehensive than others. I’m not discussing what the best monitoring solution is today (in a rare showing of restraint and common sense). What I am doing is telling you to forget about these social media monitoring solutions until you do everything else that I spell out below. After you check all of these boxes AND have a plan for what you’re going to do with all your findings from your monitoring effort then go forth and monitor. Until then, start there…er…here.

The inspiration for this post was PostRank. You’ll notice a little widget in the right column of this blog from PostRank, which shows posts ranked by “engagement.” I won’t get into a ton of detail on how they figure out “engagement,” but it’s common sense when you strip it down. Essentially, what they are measuring is if people are engaging with your posts and to what degree. Rather than simply counting clicks or tweets and giving everything the same value, PostRank does something different. They assign each different engagement type a different value based on how much effort it takes. For example, clicking a link in that widget over there doesn’t take much work compared to writing a rebuttal blog post about a similar topic (but do feel free to click away). A tweet about a new post doesn’t require nearly the effort as leaving a comment about that post. Each engagement, or activity gets assigned points based on how much effort it takes. What you end up with is a list of the posts in which other people invested the most time. Those should be the best posts.

So, from that I got to thinking, what if you only monitored those discussions from customers that took the most effort to create? Wouldn’t you get the most insight from these people? Wouldn’t they be your most passionate customers who care the most about your brand (positive or negative)? Wouldn’t their level of effort be an indicator for how important their insight might be? In other words, is there a “Monitoring Continuum” that you should pay close attention to so that you can find those highly engaged customers who give you very key pieces of information that cannot be ignored? Looking back on my brand experience, I think there is.

For healthcare, here’s how I see the Monitoring Continuum:

Dose of Digital Monitoring Continuum

The activities at the top are those that I consider to require the most amount of effort and, therefore, engagement. Those towards the bottom require less effort and amount to less engagement. A few clarifying points to explain the logic of where I put things on this chart.

  • In general, electronic activities require less effort.
  • Creating something from scratch requires more effort.
  • Anything directly addressed to you requires more effort than simply sending out a “rant” or praise. For example, to create a tweet addressed to your Twitter name (and “@”) requires that the customer first figure out what the company’s Twitter name is.

One critical observation is that you don’t need a complex social media monitoring solution to keep track of the activities that require the most engagement. In fact, all but the three lowest can be done simply and easily and are likely already monitored. For example, when someone writes, calls or emails you, I’m assuming that someone at your company monitors all of that. To see if someone publishes something about your brand, you’ll cover 95% of what’s out there with a simple Google Alert and you can check MedWatch periodically to see which new events have been reported.

So, my question is not “Is your company monitoring all of these sources?” it’s “Are YOU monitoring all of these sources?” That is, do you see every letter that comes into your company about your brand? Do you get a regular report of the feedback that people give about your brand to your call center? Do you check your Google Alerts everyday for new information (don’t even tell me you don’t have this set up)? Feedback that we get from customers in the “old fashioned” way can be extremely valuable because it comes from passionate customers who have a very strong point of view and, likely, interesting observations about how to improve your brand. Yet most marketers I know simply ignore these sources.

Why? Three reasons. First, it’s simply not as “sexy” as a complex “dashboard” system that monitors brand mentions in real-time with some fancy visualizations. Second, many marketers aren’t on the “distribution list” for feedback from these other sources. That is, the call center doesn’t think to call or email you with updates about your brand at most companies. And finally, third, these sources of feedback are dismissed as coming from people who aren’t brand targets or are not influential.

Allow me to start with the last one and work backwards. Surprise! Your “target” customer probably isn’t who you think it is (or who you want it to be). Chances are if you’re selling a pharma brand (especially one for a chronic condition), your customer isn’t on Twitter, but they do write letters. Anyone who can publish something about your brand is influential. Period. They themselves might not be, but they need only reach one person who is and that counts about the same (ever read a letter to the editor?). To the second reason, if you’re not getting updates from your call center (including physical mail, email, phone calls, and online contact forms), get them now. You might have to agree to have the customer’s actual name removed from the correspondence for privacy reasons (that’s fine, it doesn’t matter), but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have access to this information. And when it comes to “sexy,” in case you haven’t noticed, a lot of what we do isn’t sexy. It’s “in the trenches” and not particularly glamorous on most days, but that’s what it takes to get things done as a marketer in a big company…so, get over yourself. What’s more sexy? Hitting your numbers or having a really cool monitoring application to show to people?

If you’re truly interested in monitoring what people are saying about your brand, start with the sources you already have at your disposal. Many of these sources are likely to include feedback from some of your most engaged, passionate customers. Pay attention to what they have to say. A tweet in the dark is nothing compared to the heart that goes into a good, old-fashioned letter. When was the last time you read one?