Social Media Wiki

16 Social Media Precedent Setters

Dose of Digital Mini White Paper

prec·e·dent

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1.  a legal decision or form of proceeding serving as an authoritative rule or pattern in future similar or analogous cases.

2. any act, decision, or case that serves as a guide orjustification for subsequent situations.

(via Dictionary.com)

When it comes time to get your social media idea approved within your company, you’ve got a lot of people who need to sign off. It starts with your boss and probably department or brand head. Then you move to legal and regulatory folks and, ultimately, maybe even senior executives all the way up to the CEO (yes, I’ve seen this required). When you go to those conversations, you’re going to need three pieces of information that will help sell your case. Each group is going to want something a little different, so here’s what you need. You’re going to need to prove that your program:

  • will have some positive impact on the brand or company
  • is a better option than some other tactics you can employ
  • won’t cause legal issues later on

For the sake of this post, you’re on your own for the first two and, of course, for any of these, “proving” these facts is going to be tricky if not impossible. But as you’ve probably experienced, you need to get as close to “proof” as is possible without a time machine. Depending on whose approve you seek, they’ll be interested in one or more of these three areas, so be prepared with each. For today’s post, I’m going to help you with number three (and feel free to check out my presentation “6 Steps to Getting Your Healthcare Social Media Idea Approved” for some more details).

While I can’t tell you for certain what is legal and what’s not in social media, I am going to help you by showing you a bunch of examples of companies that have come before you and haven’t gotten in trouble (yet). Of course, as investment product fine print states, past performance does not indicate future results. In other words, just because there hasn’t been any legal or regulatory issues with these programs yet, I can’t promise that there won’t ever be. Regulators can be tough to predict, as you probably know.

For the sake of this list, I figured I’d take one of the most heavily regulated and conservative industries out there and use their programs as examples to show you what precedent exists for different types of social media programs. That industry? Pharmaceuticals. Having worked with clients in financial services, spirits, and many other regulated industries, no one has quite the complex regulatory rules and systems as pharma. So, if they can do it, you should be able to as well. Your industry might be as regulated as pharma, but probably isn’t more regulated. So, this seemed like a good industry to use as the precedent.

Browse the list and look for the social media program you want to do and I’ll give you several examples and links for each where a pharma company is already doing it. If you’re looking for even more examples after you get through this, then try out the Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki where you’ll find around 350 pharma and healthcare industry social media examples.

Blogs

Let’s start off slow. A good place to start is with a blog. It’s a great way to create quality content that people are looking for, does wonders for search engine optimization, and is a good first step to opening a discussion with your customers. Since you can control who comments and what they comment about by pre-moderating comments before publishing,  you control all the risk. Getting approval for the posts before they go live and, if necessary (but not recommended), for each comment that is published is a sure-fire way to cut your risk to almost zero. Here are a few pharma companies that are currently blogging:

JNJ BTW – Johnson & Johnson’s corporate blog

AZ Health Connections – AstraZeneca’s corporate blog

More than Medicine – GSK’s corporate blog

Think Science Now – Pfizer’s company blog focused on research and development

YouTube

Okay, getting a bit more adventurous, let’s move onto YouTube. For this one, I’m talking about posting videos and having a channel. The next question is whether or not you’ll allow comments and Likes and Dislikes (yes, you should allow all of this). So, each of the precedent examples here are cases where the company allows commenting and rating AND also responds to comments. You can choose to allow less, but this is the “best case” scenario, so anything less should be less risky. If you’re looking for some advice on how to manage this channel, then check out my recent post: How One Pharma Company Successfully Manages YouTube.

Johnson & Johnson Health Channel – This is the channel housing all of J&J’s videos (which altogether have more than 2.3 million views). To get an idea of how J&J interacts with commenters, take a look at the comments and responses from J&J (jnjhealth) on this video.

Novartis Flu Flix – The J&J example should be all the precedent you need, but here’s another approach. Novartis ran a contest back in 2007 (yes, way back then) inviting people to submit their videos about the flu. The content intro video alone has had nearly 800,000 views. So, yes, you can have a user-generated video contest or program. This doesn’t mean that you necessarily should, but it’s possible. This precedent extends beyond just YouTube and shows how you can run a program like this in a compliant way.

Facebook

Maybe I should have put this one first since Facebook seems to be what everyone is talking about and seems to be the place to be for brands these days. In any event, pharma has been on Facebook for a while going back to 2007 with Merck’s Take a Step Against Cervical Cancer Facebook page for Gardasil. Most pharma efforts on Facebook are very conservative, which means nearly every one has a Wall that is closed for commenting (and, therefore, Likes as well). Of course, as the page admin you can post-moderate comments and user posts on the Wall in Facebook. That is, you can remove them after they are published. This is different than blogs and YouTube where you can pre-moderate comments, so some companies are a bit nervous about this. There are a bunch of examples of pharma using Facebook on the Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki so I won’t duplicate them here except to point out one example that go farther than most.

The Coalition to Prevent Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT) – One of only a handful of pharma Facebook Pages (though this is actually a group technically) that allows members to post on the Wall and comment on posts made by the company. Perhaps not surprisingly, this group took the silver Dosie Award in 2010 in the Facebook category.

Twitter

What’s a discussion about social media without Twitter? It seems like nearly every company has jumped onto Twitter either as a way to further disseminate their content or to engage directly with customers. Pharma companies have done both. Once again, you’ll find a ton of examples on the Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki (almost 60 in fact). The majority of these are corporate level accounts of which my favorites include: @jnjcomm, @boehringer, @roche_com, and @pfizer_news.

There are also a handful of brand-level Twitter accounts with the most well-known being @racewithinsulin from Novo Nordisk, which is a branded account for their insulin product Levemir. Here’s the first branded tweet from a pharma company:

It’s more than a year old now and no Warning Letter from the FDA, so they must be doing it right. One other interesting use of Twitter from pharma comes from AstraZeneca who is responding to people on Twitter who either have concerns about the cost of their products or are mentioning adverse events. Take a look at @azhelps and to get an idea of how they’re doing this. I think it’s a simple solution with low risk, but potentially big impact.

@azhelps on Twitter

Communities

Rather than use someone else’s platform, why not just create your own place for discussions about your brand? Is this possible in a highly regulated environment? The answer is apparently “yes” based on a number of examples that are out there. In the pharma industry, the two that leap to mind for me are Children with Diabetes and PKU.com. Both are what you might call “unbranded,” as they aren’t based around a specific product (i.e., hosted on a product website). These two sites work well for two reasons. First, they are almost completely unmoderated. That is, people can say what they want and talk about what they want without being restricted. If you are going to try to host your own community, you have to allow this otherwise people will go somewhere that they can do this. Second, is that both of these sites create a valuable resource that isn’t (or wasn’t) available elsewhere. There isn’t another place online to talk just with other parents of kids with diabetes. There isn’t another definitive source for information about PKU.

So, if you’re thinking about creating a community, make sure that it satisfies both of these conditions otherwise you should forget about it. If you want some more rationale why check out my post: Crushing Pharma’s Digital Marketing Dreams–Part 1.

There are your precedent setters. Take those with you next time you have to head upstairs to the CEO’s office then take a look at my “9 Simple Steps to Getting Started in Social Media” once they sign off on your idea.

If you’re looking for more about social media in pharma, register for the 2010 E-patient Connections Conference. This year’s conference features three different tracks: mobile, gaming, and, yes, social. I’m co-chairing the Social Pharmer track, so expect a different approach compared to the regular conferences you’re used to.

I’m also teaching a tutorial the day before the conference called “Social Media Accelerator.” This will be an interactive workshop that will provide a quick way to catch up on social media in healthcare, including a review of the most and least effective social media marketing programs across industries. You’ll learn about the social media platforms used by patients and physicians and discuss opportunities and challenges of social media marketing, including within the context of DDMAC regulations. You’ll leave with a “best practice” process for creating and approving social media programs within your organization. Bring your questions, as there will be some good discussion time.

Register for the conference and use code “rx2010” (no quotes) and you’ll get $300 off. Sign up before August 31 when the price goes up again. As a further incentive (as if you need one), everyone who registers gets a free Zeo Personal Sleep Coach system and some other great gifts too. Special offer: register this week for the conference using this code and I’ll give you one hour of one-on-one consulting on your brand. Just let me know via the contact page that you registered and we can schedule the hour.

Dose of Digital Heading to SXSW…Maybe

Every year, digital marketing geeks (like me) descend upon Austin, Texas for a conference called South by Southwest, a.k.a. SXSW. What started as a music and then film festival, the conference’s biggest draw is now the “Interactive” category. That’s where you’ll find all the latest digital innovations that everyone is talking about. Typically, there hasn’t been a whole lot at SXSW focused on healthcare. But SXSW 2011 will feature a one-day health track for the first time.

Why am I telling you this? Each year SXSW selects the sessions and speakers for the conference from submissions by combining input from the SXSW staff, an advisory board, and us…the public. Anyone can submit a proposal for consideration. This year there were 2,800 submissions across the three categories of film, music, and interactive. I submitted a presentation about a topic that I have a lot of passion for and have written about a number of times on this blog. It’s also the topic that I’m going to cover in the book I plan to actually start writing someday soon (info on the topic below).

My request to each of you is for your support. It’s simple. Head over to my proposal on the SXSW “Panel Picker” site and give it a thumbs up and leave a comment. From what sources have told me, the comments are even more important than the votes, so since you’re already there, please leave a comment too. It might take you one minute if you’re not registered (to prevent voting fraud). If you’re already registered, it’ll take 10 seconds.

I know, I know. Registering. Voting. Commenting. What a pain.

I’d rather not beg, but I will try to lay some guilt on you.

If you’ve gotten something useful from this blog in the past (like, say, the Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki, which probably includes a link to your blog/site/Twitter), then maybe you can do is take a look at my proposal and vote for it if you like it.

A cheap tactic, I know, but that’s the best I could come up with. So, that link once more: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/5499

I’d recommend voting now, as it’s only open for a limited time.

By now you’re probably wondering what you’re voting for. Here’s my submission:

Your Computer Is the Next Wonder Drug

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A few times each year, the press buzzes about the latest scientific advance that will someday cure any one of the diseases we fear the most. Nearly every one of these will turn out to be nothing more than a news story and far from a pill that can help improve our health. We spend hundreds of millions of dollars every day on research, as we struggle to find the “magic bullet” that will rid the world of conditions such as cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. We almost never find the magic. While the big, historic scientific advances may be what dominate the headlines, in the end, it’s the small improvements and better utilization of the technology we have already have that will ultimately lengthen our lives and improve its quality.

These technologies don’t come from labs filled with test tubes or cell cultures, but rather from labs filled with computers and the programs that run them. In the future, it will be digital technologies that prevent, treat, and finally cure diseases and not the latest “blockbuster” drug that has yet to be discovered (and might never be). Digital technologies can already help us understand which treatments are best for us, what diseases pose the greatest risk, and how diseases spread among us. They can improve our interactions with doctors and improve access to care for everyone. Instead of waiting for the next miracle drug to be developed, you might find the miracle was there all along right inside the computer you use every day.

Questions answered from this presentation:

  1. How math (and not science) will transform the future of disease diagnosis and treatment?
  2. Which technologies will fundamentally change the way people gather information about their health, whenever and however they want it?
  3. How will advances in technology for healthcare lead to a greater willingness in people to give up their healthcare privacy?
  4. What changes in technology will completely change the way we manage and track our health and how we share that information with others?
  5. When will technology improve access to and and the quality of healthcare for everyone who needs it?

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If that sounds good to you, whether you’re attending SXSW or not,  I’d love to have your support for my proposal.

And if you’re feeling really generous, feel free to send out a tweet, update your LinkedIn status, or click the Like button on this post to spread the word to your social networks.

Thanks in advance for your support.

UPDATE (8/12): Thanks to Rohit Bhargava for including my submission in his “25 SXSW 2011 Panel Ideas Worth Getting Excited About”

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Digital Alert and Reco: FDA Warns Novartis Over Facebook Sharing

[UPDATE, Sept. 29, 2010: Our recommendations and guidance have changed since we made this post. Check out this latest post for the update.]

Last week, the FDA issued a Warning Letter for the website for their drug, Tasigna. The main issue in the violation was content that was shared via social media. The Tasigna site had Facebook sharing buttons that, like other sites, automatically generate content for sharing. The content of this content is what the FDA cited. This content is drawn from META description tags on the website. These tags are invisible to visitors, but are used by search engines.

The FDA argues that the content in these META tags should include fair balance (risks, side effects, warnings, etc.) since they had the drug name and indication. The FDA did not have an issue with Facebook sharing in of itself, but rather the content that the site generates automatically, which cannot be changed by the user.

This is a potentially serious issue for all pharma marketers, but one that isn’t as bad as it seems on the surface. Several team members and I here at Bridge Worldwide prepared a response document that details the issues raised in the FDA Warning Letter and also our recommendations on how to deal with the issues FDA brings up in the letter.

You can download a copy of the document here:

(UPDATED: 9/29: Please download our updated recommendations here: Digital Alert-Bridge Worldwide-Social Sharing in Regulated Industries (796 downloads)

We welcome your comments and please feel free to share with your colleagues. As always, if you find it useful, please send out a tweet or Like this post so that others get a chance to see it too.

Some other good commentaries on this issue can be found here:

FDA demonstrates their ignorance of social media with letter to Novartis — Rich Meyer

Digitas Health Facebook Regulatory Alert — Digitas Health

Implications of FDA’s Warning Letter to Novartis Regarding Facebook Share Widget – John Mack

4 Mistakes You Make By Playing Not to Lose in Social Media

For those who play chess regularly, you know that if you play the game making moves that are designed to keep you from losing, you never actually end up winning. You can’t win with defense alone. This concept goes well beyond chess and is why we say things like: “The best defense is a good offense.” So, if we can all agree on that, then for what purpose am I writing this? Today I want to show you why you’re actually doing this when it comes to your brand’s marketing and, in particular, when it comes to social media.

The reality is that by playing not to lose, you completely prevent yourself from ever getting ahead, trying new things, and ultimately winning. You can define winning however you want whether it’s abstract like helping make the world a better place or something very concrete like increasing market share by 5 points. It doesn’t matter. The same rules apply. In order to win, you have to play to win. To better understand this, let me show you what happens when you play not to lose when it comes to marketing. Playing this way causes you to make four critical mistakes.

1. Playing only defense. When it comes to social media, I review a lot of plans for a lot of brands both formally and informally. I read a lot of case studies of successes and failures. Most of the social media programs I see (especially from healthcare and pharma companies) are purely defensive. They are programs that are done simply to keep pace with a competitor or exist only to respond to someone if absolutely necessary. They also are generally closed with no interaction allowed between customers and the brand. This is playing not to lose. You will never advance your brand forward (or make any money) doing this. If that’s okay with you, skip to the next paragraph. If you’re still here, consider this: what if all of your marketing plans were defensive in nature? No new ideas, no leading edge thinking, no calculated risks. Where would your brand be? Playing defense isn’t enough in any channel including social media.

2. Narrowing your thinking. “So, how are we going to use YouTube here?” Whenever I hear a question like this I cringe. It’s usually a sign that whatever idea follows is going to lack creativity and innovation. It has to by nature. If you approach either your internal team or your agency partners and ask, “What are we going to do on YouTube [or whatever other platform you want]?”, it signals to them a narrowed focus. It’s the ultimate, constraining box that you can cram someone into. Instead of starting this way, how about asking, “How do we solve this problem we’re having with the brand?” If you open the discussion that way, people are encouraged to apply some innovative thinking and creativity because they aren’t constrained to one platform or tactic. This might mean that YouTube makes sense or it might not. Remember that your goal is to solve your business problems and meet your brand objectives, not to check off as many social media platforms as you can.

3. Selling the wrong thing upstairs. CEOs these days have a tough job. They have a bunch of stakeholders that they must answer to and each of these has a different motivation and priority. For the vast majority of CEOs, their job is to grow the company. Typically, this means growing revenue and profit. Because of this, a CEO cannot afford to play not to lose. Not to lose means breaking even, doing the same as last year (if you’re lucky). That’s a surefire way to find yourself out of a job as CEO. This is one of the big reasons why your CEO isn’t interested in your social media programs. It’s why they don’t have more high-level support.

If you present tactics that are completely defensive, with no clear path to somehow helping the company grow, it’s a tough sell to the CEO. Yet, that’s what we do. We put in front of them social media programs that are defensive in nature and ask them to devote their time and resources to help rally the company behind this channel. Why would a CEO do that? Every minute must be spent on growing the company. It’s very rare to find a defensive tactic that leads to growth. Until you’re ready to bring social media ideas to your CEO that are playing to win, you might as well forget about getting any C-level support.

4. Overestimating risk. We humans are very prone to this. We consistently inaccurately assess risk. “People exaggerate spectacular but rare risks and downplay common risks. They worry more about earthquakes than they do about slipping on the bathroom floor, even though the latter kills far more people than the former. Similarly, terrorism causes far more anxiety than common street crime, even though the latter claims many more lives. Many people believe that their children are at risk of being given poisoned candy by strangers at Halloween, even though there has been no documented case of this ever happening” [source: Bruce Schneier]. Mr. Schneier also points out that people both “underestimate risks they willingly take and overestimate risks in situations they can’t control” and “overestimate risks that are being talked about and remain an object of public scrutiny.” Reread that again just to be sure.

Hmmm…sound like anything you know? Any corollaries come to mind? We “overestimate risks in situations we can’t control”=We can’t control what people say about our brands in social media. We “overestimate risks that are being talked about and are objects of public scrutiny.” Hello. You’re reading this blog aren’t you? How many other articles about social media have you read in the past week?

We worry that people will make negative comments about our brands, even though, in general, they don’t care about our brand and they have much bigger things to worry about. We worry about adverse events being reported in healthcare even though they are very rare. Put the real risk into context by first asking: “what’s the absolute worst that can happen?” Assess how likely this scenario is to happen and then repeat. This time figure out what’s slightly less than the worst thing that can happen. Do this until you figure out something that is both a negative and is more likely than not to happen. It should take you a while to get to this point, but that’s the true risk.

What does offense look like instead of defense? Here’s an example from healthcare. Recently, sanofi-aventis had one of it’s Facebook pages “attacked” by a disgruntled patient of one of their products, Taxotere (a chemotherapy for various cancers). Defense is looks like this: you create your Facebook page complete with a massive algorithm to help moderators know exactly how to handle any possible situation and reaction from a visitor. You know exactly who you need to call if there’s a crisis. You know who has to approve what and how long it takes. You’ve got backups and backups of those backups. That’s defense. Nothing in there is offense. Yes, you might need some of this, but you need some offense too. In the case of sanofi-aventis’ page, offense would have looked like this to me. As one patient complains about the lingering side effects of Taxotere and attempts to hijack the discussion on your site, you activate your advocates.

Since you’ve been playing to win, you identified advocates for your product before any crisis came along. You’ve been talking with them to gather feedback to improve your programs and products, enhance relationships with key patient leaders, and a bunch more. That’s playing to win. Playing to win is critical in our example because it represents a way out of a difficult situation for sanofi-aventis. They could have simply contacted all of their advocates and asked them to weigh in on the discussion about how Taxotere helped save their lives. That’s offense. It’s thinking about how to win that sent you out to build your advocates and now you can use them to play offense when you really need a win.

So, are you playing to win or not to lose when it comes to your marketing? How about your use of social media? If it’s all done not to lose, it’s time to rethink your approach.

PS: Want to learn more about social media in pharma and healthcare? Then join me at E-Patient Connections 2010 conference, September 27-29, 2010 in Philadelphia. I’ll be co-chairing the “Social Pharmer” track and also doing a pre-conference tutorial called “Social Media Accelerator.” You can register for the entire conference (including the tutorial) here. Use code “rx2010″ to get a $300 discount. As a further incentive (as if you need one), everyone who registers gets a free Zeo Personal Sleep Coach system. [Disclosure: I receive a small referral fee for registrations from this blog.]