Jon,
Great post. I like your distinction between social media and platforms. I will join the cause and observe your moratorium for the next month. As for your your call for input that’s outside these 10 topics, I made 7 observations at a recent pharma conference that I think avoid your top 10: The real reasons why pharma fumbles in social media: FDA and EU regulations are the least of pharma’s challenges.( http://bit.ly/a1KVuv )

I don’t attend as many pharma conferences as you, but I thank you for articulating what many of us who work in this area are feeling. Truth is, the same could be said for non-pharma social media conferences as well. – Sean

Hi, Jon: Thanks for this post and a good one as always. I personally don’t disagree and also had noticed the amount of redundancies across digital pharma conferences. There ARE some nuances of progress, though. People are talking about “how” to do social media instead of “why.” People are explaining how to measure it instead of saying “just do it.” Case studies are a little more robust. Successes are being experienced.

And I think those of us that watch closely drink our own kool-aid a little too much. What I mean is that you and I and many others that blog/tweet/speak on these topics have heard it all before. But sadly there are still too many pharma marketers/communicators that don’t attend conferences or read blogs and have never been on Twitter … and haven’t heard any of these yet.

So I’m sorry but I’m not going to use the badge. I for one am going to look for ways to keep the conversation going … but hopefully move it forward. Thanks for your thought-provoking post!

Great post! As I’m working with people who say things like “Yes, I’ve heard of this Facebook from my kids” everyday, it’ll be pretty easy for me to stick to not mentioning those 10 things for the next month. I’ll probably be too busy explaning them what social media actually IS anyway.

Let’s be honest the only reason that there are so many conferences is that because they are a source of revenue. The people who present are not Linchpins but more of the same pharma establishment that is stuck in marketing of the past. It’s time to start asking the hard questions like how do we move from mass marketing to marketing to the individual ? It’s amazing that in an age when so many people are using the Internet for health that pharma still relies heavily on TV and starves the online marketing budget. Well said Jonathan we need more people to come into the light

I’m with Johanna! Wonderful innovative ideas from you as always, but seriously, there are so many people out there – which amazes me to no end – who are not even on the social media page, let alone the social media and pharma page. The power of connecting through social networks of any kind is lost on many people. So, sure, I would be happy to cover other aspects of the pharma social media topic, but please don’t make me stop shouting about it to those who are not getting it!! It’s not the answer to world peace, but it is definitely a defining factor for our culture and the social culture of the future.

Wendy, another small sign of progress: At this week’s CBI pharma social media conference, about half of the room was made up of folks from the MLR side of the business — who, as you mention, are new to the conversation and in this case were looking for ways they could help make social media work at their organizations. I definitely noticed a shift from the traditional group of brand managers/marketers and early adopters. I hope that bringing new voices into the discussion on the pharma side means companies are that much closer to figuring out how they can get involved and do it right.

Jon,I thought I was becoming jaded and cynical in my old age, but apparently we share similar, heretical (?) feelings about SM. My #1 aversion is your #6, because if there’s one thing guaranteed to baffle a brand team it’s a SM strategy (or digital strategy) that’s pitched as a separate entity to the brand strategy.

One observation that I always throw into the debate to put a realistic perspective on SM is that the percentage of marketing spend allocated to it is vanishingly small.

On the positive side, I’m convinced that SM will increasingly provide pharma with opportunities to meaningfully engage the medical profession in ways that do not involve sales forces.

Keep up the provocation!

Sweet God! I really needed this posting this morning – along with a cup of coffee and a serious belly laugh, a great way to start a Friday morning. Truth served up with a hearty dose of humor is a much needed thing. Well said, well written, well done, my friend!!

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Jonathan Richman, Andrew Spong and Andrew Spong, Sean Duffy. Sean Duffy said: Great post: “10 Things I’m Tired of Hearing About Pharma Social Media” from @jonmrich http://bit.ly/dtsPvA #socpharm [...]

Hi Jonathan,

As someone who is responsible for a fair few of these conferences, who may have even started the whole thing off a few years ago, and who is sure his company must be ‘one of the five’ mentioned in the first paragraph here, I feel I must comment.

Firstly, I agree with your educational points, which can possibly be summarised as ‘it’s not the use of the platform or a juvenile social media ‘splurge’ that will be some kind of panacea for your failing brands, it’s better definition of brand objectives, the actual idea and the overall execution across many channels that will define how successful you are.’

However I really disagree that the answer is to say ‘so I’m not going to be involved in the conversation’ and pull back from conferences, which are merely a gathering of people who are interested in a topic. Richard Meyer is right – we at eyeforpharma run conferences because there is spending in that area and therefore profit to be made, even if that’s not the only thing we care about – but we do have to be somewhat ‘mainstream’ in our choice of topics in order to attract people. We build our agendas simply on what people are saying they want.

But if you’re finding that the conversation is getting a little tired and even wrong, then I would argue that, quite simply, the correct messages aren’t getting through. And so surely we must all redouble our efforts to make sure those messages actually do proliferate, rather than disengaging altogether, and support the many new people who are entering the fray to look beyond the seductively easy and simple presences on twitter and thinking they have done what they need to do.

Social media spending is increasing but it is also becoming more mainstream and no longer the mere responsibility of some junior marketing assistant. This means it will increasingly be considered part of the marketing mix and C-level executives will increasingly make sure that the fundamentals of good marketing, messages and genuine strategy will be part of any spend in digital areas. As the possibilities of what can be done online increase (especially if the FDA guidelines are vague as we all expect, while new platforms emerge) then this adherence to the fundamentals will be all the more important.

So at eyeforpharma we are actually putting most of our own effort & investment (and in fact restructuring our whole operation) around a Marketing (not eMarketing) conference which includes as just one part of it the online channels, even though it has actually been easier in the past to draw an audience from an exclusive online / social media focus. Hopefully that will be more useful for everyone in the long term.

Our eMarketing conference will still exist and will still be popular for some time however.

The other thing you can’t really ask people to do is not to dip their toe in the water, which your point 7 gets dangerously close to saying – especially as you’ve said plenty of times that to learn about social media you just need to throw yourself in. Nobody has their whole online intention worked out the first time they create a facebook page, and I’m sure you didn’t either. Understanding the channel by edging towards tentative experiments is still quite important for anyone new to this stuff; it’s still useful to know what facebook can and can’t do.

Finally if all the above is true, why have you recently become Director of Social Media? If Social Media shouldn’t be a channel or a strategy in its own right, why does that make sense? On this last point I’m merely curious!

[...] Richman wrote a killer posting on the 10 things he’s tired of hearing in pharma social media and Sweet God was this needed!! Jon, you can’t see us, but I promise I am not the only one [...]

Thank you! FINALLY!!! i get that a lot of pharma-industry folks are still in the process of learning the 101s of all this digital stuff – but after a year+ of the same talking points on the topic, it’s nice to read that someone actually sees how tired it’s all getting. honestly, THANK YOU!

Jon,
Well done!

I too have been feeling like the conversations are getting stale and have spent the last few months focusing on ‘getting my work done!’…but i do know that there are many marketing and pharma people out there who still have yet to embark on social media learning and exploration…for themselves and/or their brands…Having said that, here is another pet peeve of mine for consideration…

-Social Media is more than just a facebook or twitter platform or tactic, it requires a change in the way we think…a change to more openess etc. Social media has had a dramatic impact on the way we think and our context…for our customers, patients too…bugs me when we continue to put it into a new ‘silo’ and look at it so separately from other brand endeavors…As we well know, everything impacts everything else and social media impacts the way we react to something now in a different way than we might have a few years ago…kind of like the internet was a few years ago…it was a separate silo…as you said, everything needs to revolve around the brand objectives and strategies and how each can have a positive or negative impact on them and the patient pathway….

-also agree on #7…its not about big or small but about doing something with meaning and that can have a positive impact on people’s lives…and their engagement…not just doing something small so you can present to management that you’ve ‘done’ social media…and can now cross it off your list…
Happy Friday!

If you’re a marketer and you have never been on Twitter or Facebook or haven’t heard of Twitter of Facebook then you have no right to call yourself a marketer and you are obviously are deaf/blind to the reality of the changes in marketing which are effecting every consumers product and brand.
Now for the thought that people are talking about “how to do it” and “how to measure social media” that to is bullshit. It’s bull because social media is part of a new way of thinking about marketing, a new way to think about marketing that is very much needed within the inbred pharma marketing world. http://www.worldofdtcmarketing.com/files/28ebd9cb57c56481d979b5d01312c11d-1128.html

Those are 7 great observations that I think are all very true. It’s a good place to start looking as a way to get past talking about the 10 things and instead moving onto 10 more.

I’m with you that there are those out there that haven’t heard it all before and we have some responsibility to get the word out. However, I’m not sure they haven’t heard it because of a lack of opportunity. Rather, it’s pretty intentional at this point. It would be hard to be a pharma marketer and not see anything about social media. If you’ve missed it all, then it’s been on purpose. If this is the case, then apparently our (me included) arguments aren’t working and we need something else to convince them to come along.

That is a good sign. As I’ve always said, “it takes a village to approve a pharma marketing program.” If the regulatory people don’t buy into the concept or understand the nuances, there’s no way you can expect them to approve a new idea.

Explaining what social media is would be a really interesting conversation with someone who really has no idea what the answer is. I think you’ll quickly devolve into these 10 areas though…it’s inevitable.

I’m with you, Rich. Of course, pharma isn’t the only industry relying on TV. Our company works with companies in a lot of different industries that still feel this way. Sometimes, they’re correct to do this especially if the digital marketing ideas that are being developed for them are terrible. I’d stick with TV too in that case. A fair warning that maybe you shouldn’t have the same agency do your TV ads and your digital executions.

Ah, but I do want you to stop shouting about it to those who are not getting it. If they aren’t getting it by now, then I’d argue that we aren’t shouting the right things. Maybe we (counting myself) haven’t been compelling enough and need a new story to better explain the what and why of social media. I’m looking at myself to change instead of them.

You said:”I’m convinced that SM will increasingly provide pharma with opportunities to meaningfully engage the medical profession in ways that do not involve sales forces.”

I think this is likely to be true, but it’s probably a lot different than what your average pharma marketer is thinking right now. They’re looking for reach and frequency, just like the sales model, but that’s not how it’ll work on social media.

I agree that it can’t be separate, which is why I’m so against creating a “social media strategy”. I’m hoping it doesn’t go into another silo, but my early read isn’t encouraging. On the plus side, I do see a lot of different silos fighting for control of it. Maybe that means that someone thinks it’s important.

Thanks for the post and of course your humor and wit. I’m in agreement that the subject feels over discussed yet in some regard this may be due to the very nature of our day-to-day roles and the tools we use to communicate.

With that said, I meet with new clients all the time that are still grasping to understand what social media can do for them. Just this week, I heard the term “holy grail”– not once but twice. However, just this morning, I spent time with a client discussing objectives for successful clinical trial recruitment and indeed we may find an opportunity to weave social media into the tactical mix to support the overall objectives of the program.

Next week, I’m hosting a luncheon at Digital Pharma West and presenting a social media topic. The session is called Social Media Engagement: Ingredients for Success. I’ve been lucky enough to work with clients that have gotten past the top 10 you’ve listed and are a part of the 350 engagers.

I’ve witnessed meetings with the CEO and PRC team members sitting together – literally rolling up their sleeves to come up with solutions to engage. I’m excited to share how we’re helping make it happen.

My agenda topics range from “experience it yourself” (which frankly, too few are doing)to “think big!”

So yes, I’m tired of hearing the top 10 you listed but I’m hopeful that we’ll start to see pharma become better engagers.

There’s a lot of room for improvement and people like you are critical to helping educate and provide smart solutions to the still skeptical.

Thank you, Jon, I needed this post!

It is true, I have felt the same conference fatigue. I encouraged the organizers of the two most recent digi conferences I went to, to set up two tracks on social media: beginners and advanced

In EU, we still need a lot of beginner level teaching to go through the basics and bring ppl up to speed on why and how to engage in social media. Unfortunately, this is to the detriment of talking about the advanced stuff and you end up in a spiral where you explain everything all over again every time.

Thanks for the post, I am not sure yet, whether I will use your batch, simply, because I have to reflect and think about it first.

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Mark Walker, Capstrat Health. Capstrat Health said: Takeaway from this post: "Social media isn’t the answer to pharma’s marketing woes" #healthcare http://capstr.at/03 [...]

All great points, Paul. I’ll try to tackle them one at a time.

I can’t recall right now if your company was “one of the 5″ referenced in my post, but to your point, it’s fairly likely. Regarding the conferences, you said: “But if you’re finding that the conversation is getting a little tired and even wrong, then I would argue that, quite simply, the correct messages aren’t getting through.” I completely agree. Here’s the thing…if the message isn’t getting through, that would tell me that we have to do something different. Getting the same people in the room to say the same things isn’t cutting it. Instead, let’s focus on what we’d LIKE to be hearing in social media (coming in a post later this week) instead of what we’re tired of hearing about. The definition of insanity, as they say, is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. If we’re wanting a different result, then we should be trying something different at these conferences instead of repeating ourselves (including me, who has repeated himself a lot).

I like the idea of a more integrated conference covering the marketing mix and not just one channel. The latter risks that platforms receive their own strategies and tactics and makes it likely that they won’t deliver overall marketing goals. So, I’m with you on this and will look forward to attending!

You also said: “The other thing you can’t really ask people to do is not to dip their toe in the water, which your point 7 gets dangerously close to saying – especially as you’ve said plenty of times that to learn about social media you just need to throw yourself in.” Let me clarify a bit. First, I’m not sure that I’ve anywhere said that you should just jump into social media with your brand. I have said a few times that you should jump in personally. This is, experiment as yourself with personal accounts and not with your brand. The big point is to avoid jumping into social media with your brands simply to check a box and to say that you have. That’s a waste of time and money, but it happens all the time. If there’s planned learning that will take place or an experiment with some hypotheses that you’re trying to prove, I’m all for it. You can’t experiment too much and make too many mistakes with your brand, but get your feet wet with your own reputation first.

Great question on your final point: “why have you recently become Director of Social Media? If Social Media shouldn’t be a channel or a strategy in its own right, why does that make sense?” The simple answer to ensure that social media is effectively integrated across all the work we do with our our clients. It’s not to create a stand alone strategy by any sense. But, to ensure we have the right people in place, solid POVs, an integrated approached (strategically and technologically), and that everyone at our agency shares the same level of expertise in this important channel, we thought it was important to have one person oversee these efforts. Perhaps as social media becomes more integrated than what it is today, I’ll work my way out of a job. That’s okay if what I’m envisioning for my company’s future in social media comes to pass.

Thanks for the well-considered comments and challenge.

Hi Jonathan,

Pleased to hear that you’re putting together some ‘likes’ in the next post. Always good to counterbalance with positive suggestions.

But as I say, a conference is merely a room full of people coming together to discuss something. Why is it that they have become people saying the same things to each other? Why doesn’t anyone say anything different? Are we all sheep?

My view is that if you can’t make any headway when in a room full of people and you’re talking to them face-to-face, when can you? What can inspire a real maturing of the argument and some better projects?

So I’d appreciate any suggestions you have in terms of conferences. As I say, I kicked this whole conferences thing off, when it really was the basics that everyone was grappling with (in fact the first event was called eDetailing…) and I’m very keen to innovate further. I have some good ideas but I’d like to hear yours also.

[Note that the only way in which we create our conference programmes is by simply and openly asking pharma managers what they want to hear. This ensures the programme is relevant and interesting to that very audience. However sometimes you need to go beyond that, or you'll compromise the experts by retaining the junior folks. Now is one of those times.]

Thanks for clarifying the other points. I’m not totally sure about the notion that your personal brand is for experimenting and your company’s brand isn’t – there are many experiments you simply can’t do with only your personal brand – but obviously I agree there’s no point in doing something which looks (and is) pathetic as you’ll only harm that brand.

I’ll write about the Bridge presentation at Cannes in a post of my own, but it was definitely in my top 3 of the week.

My simple suggestions for conferences like yours are this: First: create a “beginner” and an “advanced” version. The beginner version covers everything in this post…again. This way, the people who are totally new and haven’t heard it yet can hear it. In the advanced version, you avoid everything in this post and cover the types of things I’m going to be writing about later this week (or early next).

Second, regarding asking pharma managers about what they want to hear, I don’t envy your position. On one hand, you have to sell tickets, which means giving people what they want. If you come up with some seemingly off the wall program, you’ll probably hurt your attendance even if it’s exactly the program people should be watching. Related to that, I’d argue that many of the people you’re asking for input regarding the program content aren’t the people who are in a position to tell you the right things. Naturally, they’ll want you to cover the things they’ve heard about, but aren’t too familiar with and they’ll want to hear from other pharma people who have done something in the past in social media. The result? The same conference as last quarter. Check out the speakers list of the past 10 conferences on this topic and I think you’ll see the same names (including my own), which probably isn’t the answer. For people who don’t know a lot about this topic, they aren’t in the position to give you the big idea of what might make the conference truly different and advance the thinking.

Here’s what I think is the reality…most of the people at these conferences would be better off hearing about the social media approach and tactics of, say, P&G or Red Bull or any other company that’s widely considered to have their act together in both digital marketing and social media. No, what they say won’t be all about pharma, but that’s where the new ideas come from. Pharma (whether rightly or wrongly) is way behind other industries in these two areas, so confining the discussion every time to just our industry is extremely limiting. But, what pharma manager is going to tell you that they want to hear from the marketing director of Red Bull? None, because they believe (generally, but not everyone) that what Red Bull can do or chooses to do doesn’t apply to them. Granted, pharma can’t and shouldn’t do a lot of the same social media tactics as Red Bull, but they can learn a lot from the process that went into creating these tactics. They can learn a lot from the advanced platforms, techniques, and technologies that they are using as well. It’s where pharma will be in 5 years anyway, why wait?

Bottom line is that, in my opinion, someone who knows nothing (or very little) about a topic really isn’t in the position to create a training program about that topic. They don’t know what they don’t know and don’t know what they should know. It’s like having me create a curriculum for structural engineering in order to build a bridge. I’ve seen a couple of shows on The Discover Channel about these sorts of things and read an article in Popular Mechanics, but I’m fairly sure that my curriculum would be missing quite a bit if I’m the one left in charge of figuring out what should be included.

Jonathan, Paul, You two should be having this debate live at a conference. I’d be all ears and I dare say many others would be too!

In my view, based on recent experience of hosting both a digital marketing and a PR conference in parallel in my own pharma headquarters, getting significant traction on event value was indeed achieved through not having the same people in the room saying the same things. In my case, I was able to persuade a significant number of brand managers to attend, speak, join round-table discussions, and generally contribute in ways that would not have been possible at an off-site e-marketing conference. Some contributions from pure-blooded marketeers were controversial and refreshingly critical. All this supports your intention Paul of hosting more integrated marketing events in future; I would plead that you advance even further with your thinking and eliminate ‘digital tracks’ altogether.

[...] [...]

Brilliant.

[...] a week and a half ago, I wrote a post called “10 Things I’m Tired of Hearing About Pharma Social Media.” As you might imagine, it stirred up a little controversy (check out the comments and [...]

So much of what you say in here applies to every other industry, not just Pharma. I’ve been out here for about 2 years saying that social media is just a tactic, basically everything you say in #6 above, and then throughout the rest of the 10. For a while my main presentation was titled: “You are all doing social media wrong…and I really do think so” (http://bit.ly/bTl8Po) which reflected my frustration at what I was seeing out there. Great post.

[...] 10 Things I’m Tired of Hearing About Pharma Social Media [...]

[...] is an excellent post this morning on Jonathan Richman’s BLOG called “10 Things I’m Tired of Hearing About Pharma Social Media” that is a must read, especially for those of you who attend a lot of conferences.If [...]

Thanks for the comment. The thing I really loved from your presentation (which I’ll be borrowing and giving you the credit for, of course) is the line: “Today I’m going to mail out 1MM postcards.” As random as that pronouncement would be from a marketer, so is what most are doing in social media. Great analogy.

[...] the healthcare blogosphere lately, you should not have missed Jon’s brilliant white papers 10 Things I’m Tired of Hearing About Pharma Social Media followed by 10 Things I’d Like to Start Hearing About Pharma Social Media. Jim Lefevere added [...]