One of the things that was the biggest change for me was the availability of a new solution to the problem. Before this solution (more on that in a moment), you had to choose between having quality META tags (including the description tag) that could be used by search engines in their results pages or social sharing tools. Typically, META descriptions include information about what the product does, but doesn’t include any fair balance (because of space limitations). These META descriptions are what many sharing tools use by default and this is what happened in Novartis’ case. The content that was shared lacked fair balance because the balance was not present in the META tags.
Today, I’m pleased to announce that companies no longer have to choose. You can now keep your META data unchanged along with every other visible element of your site and still have social sharing buttons. You can control exactly what content is shared when any of these buttons are used. How is this possible? Immediately after this Warning Letter was made public, I started talking to the folks at ShareThis to see if we could figure out a way to better control the shared content while not impacting anything else. Remarkably, in just a couple of weeks, the team at ShareThis was able to change their tools to make all of this possible. Here’s a press release from my company, Bridge Worldwide, and ShareThis explaining what we did in more detail: ShareThis and Bridge Worldwide Social Sharing Tools Press Release.
The short explanation the changes is this: ShareThis now supports the Open Graph protocol (the same one used for the Facebook Like buttons). By adding open graph tags to content pages, ShareThis buttons will now recognize this data to be used in sharing. This allows site owners to specify what content is shared.
For me, ShareThis was an obvious choice to deliver this new functionality for a few reasons: it only takes a couple of lines of code to add ShareThis buttons to any site (plus the open graph tags), you can select buttons representing 50+ different sharing sites (and customize the look of the buttons), their robust reporting and analytics tools, and the fact that ShareThis is the most recognized sharing service online (400+ million people a month, 850,000+ sites use it), so I know it’s reliable and recognized all over the Internet. And, of course, it’s free to anyone who wants to add it to their site.
Based on all of this, and a new view of the real issues raised in the FDA Warning Letter, here are our updated recommendations to pharma and healthcare companies (and any other company in any regulated industry) regarding social sharing: Digital Alert-Bridge Worldwide-Social Sharing in Regulated Industries(908 downloads)
We welcome your views and opinions on these new recommendations and also any comments you have on the enhancements to ShareThis. Adding ShareThis and the tags is a very simple process that any developer should be able to handle. However, if you would like to hear how our company, Bridge Worldwide, can help with the process (working with ShareThis), please feel free to contact me.
It’s been a while and many of you have asked what happened to the update you’ve submitted, so here they are. Welcome to the latest update to the Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki. The last update came in late June, so it’s been a while. Thanks to everyone for your patience.
This month’s update includes 37 new additions to the wiki bringing the total to almost 650 entries. Some highlights from this month:
Six new HCP communities
Seven new Facebook pages
Two new corporate blogs (including one from Lilly)
Seven new industry Twitter accounts
Instructions for recommending an addition to the Wiki are included on the page. A couple things to consider before you submit. Currently, we’re not adding hospitals or healthcare groups (such as large physician group practices). The main reason for this is because there’s a great source for this already in Ed Bennett’s Hospital Social Networking List. In addition, I’m happy to include your blog (especially for you “industry observers”) on the list, but I ask that it be somewhat established before you ask for it to be included. There’s no set rule, but 10 posts as a minimum is probably a good rule of thumb. Also for “industry observers,” there’s currently not a place for your Facebook, YouTube, etc. page. For now, it’s just your blogs and Twitter accounts. If you have questions, just contact me.
If I sent you a note saying that you’d be included in the next update and you don’t see your listing, please contact me and I can explain why it was not included.
If you’re someone who’s really interested in the wiki, then you probably will enjoy the upcoming 2010 e-Patient Connections Conference. I’ll be chairing the “Social Pharmer” track along with Shwen Gwee from Vertex Pharmaceuticals. It’s next week, so you’ve only got a few more days left to register.
For those who didn’t attend this conference last year (its debut), expect another top notch event with a slate of great speakers on numerous topics (plus some nice gifts).
You can also register for my pre-conference workshop: “The Social Media Accelerator.” This highly interactive workshop provides 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.
You can register now 2010 e-Patient Connections Conference. Readers of this blog get $300 off registration if you use code “rx2010″ when you register. [Disclosure: I am co-chair for this conference and I receive a referral fee for registrations from this blog.]
Supporting the Wiki
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.
Click the “Recommend” button at the top of the page to share this page on Facebook.
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://t11.me/HCT-ER. (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.)
A while back, I wrote a post called “Why Your Facebook Page Doesn’t Exist,” which got a good response, but made a few people a bit nervous. I’m back to make more people even more nervous today. If you thought having a Facebook page that no one really ever saw was bad, how about if I tell you that no one sees your emails either? Ugh.
Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that day may be close courtesy of your friends at Google. With little fanfare, a couple of weeks ago, Google launched Priority Inbox for Gmail. Here’s a quick overview of what it is:
Two things…first, if you use Gmail, I guarantee you just went and activated this. Second, if you use email marketing for your brand or company, that video probably made you a bit uneasy. I activated this the second I heard about it and couldn’t wait to see how it worked. It didn’t disappoint. For those who didn’t watch the video, what Priority Inbox does (as its name suggests) is prioritize your email messages by highlighting the ones it deems most important. These most important emails move to the top of the list to a section called “Important and Unread” regardless of when they were received. It looks like this:
Handy, eh? How does it work? Simple really. Google took its really great spam filter and basically told it to do the exact opposite. Instead of finding the most useless messages (spam), find the most important. Its a brilliant little tweak that works really well. For now, this only works on the Web version of Gmail, but the concept is too powerful for it to remain exclusively there for long. Nearly every email platform and corporate email provider has spam filtering, so how long before they make the same tweak as Google and offer this same prioritization? For providers looking to grab some corporate market share, this is a nice feature that any client would probably like to add.
I can say that in my two weeks of using Priority Inbox I’ve noticed two things. First, it works almost perfectly, meaning it doesn’t categorize much incorrectly. You can correct it when it does so that it gets even smarter, so by now it’s running almost flawlessly for me. Second, all I could think about when I was using this was when I could get the same thing for my corporate email account on Outlook. It might be a little while, but know that it’s coming.
As a marketer, and one who works for a digital marketing agency that manages a lot of CRM programs for a lot of clients that includes a lot of email, Priority Inbox both excites me and scares the hell out of me. To be sure, for all the noise about social media, I’m still a big fan of email (see here: “Pharma Can Use Email Marketing to Improve…Everything“). Why am I a big fan with all the buzz about social media? Simple. Email sells cases. Period. It works. For now (and this might change in the very near future), there are very few tactics that can deliver as immediate, predictable, and measurable results as email marketing. Having said that, Google might just be out to change all that.
Remember, Google’s goal is to get you to use more of Google products. So, they continuously make them better and introduce new ones. As you use it more, guess what? You see more text ads that you eventually click on. When you do, cha-ching, money for Google. It’s a system that works really well for them and, frankly, for me as a consumer. It’s a fine tradeoff to be able to use Gmail for free seeing as it’s something I would gladly pay quite a bit for. Google’s goal is not to get your brand’s email opened or clicked. Their goal is to make Gmail better. Better means that it’s quicker and easier to use. One of the best ways to make it quicker is to help people sort out all the junk and get to the important stuff.
As you can see, there are a bunch of commercial emails that filled up my email inbox for just one day. One other thing…none of them are read. I don’t care about any of them. For most, I don’t remember when I even signed up for them and, frankly, I’m too lazy to unsubscribe from them (check out the cartoon at the end of this post for some additional perspective). Google knows this. So, with Priority Inbox, I never have to even address these anymore or worry about losing an important email amongst the clutter. In the two weeks of using Priority Inbox, only one commercial email has ended up in my “Important and Unread” section of Gmail. One out of probably 150. I’m not totally sure why that one ended up there, so I told Gmail not to make the same mistake in the future, which I’m certain won’t be a problem.
If you’re using email marketing for your brand or company, you should be a little nervous. The point you should notice by now is that I’m (and your other subscribers) likely not seeing your email. I’m not seeing it because Google doesn’t think it’s important to me. They’re right. While Google has marked some important messages with normal status, I can fix this by marking them as Important, so that the filter does a little better next time. I’ve done this for about 10 messages in the past two weeks. I can tell you that not once have I done this with a commercial email. I’ve also realized that I haven’t missed a single one. I haven’t been wondering where my email from company X is or when my regularly update from company Y is coming.
How does Google figure out which emails are important and which aren’t? Here’s how they explain it: “Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most (if you email Bob a lot, a message from Bob is probably important) and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over).” So, if you’re a marketer and want me to see your email, get me to do the following:
Open your email
Reply to your email
Send you an email
Easy, right?
Nope. You probably notice the problem. There aren’t really any commercial email campaigns out there that invite people to respond back to the email (in fact, most explicitly tell you not to reply) and there isn’t any reason why I’d send an email your company’s email program. Let’s assume those are out of your control. There might be some other factors, too. Google doesn’t like to give away the full algorithm for any of its products so that no one can game the system. However, you can probably assume that clicking on a link in an email is probably important, but we don’t know for sure. So, the one factor that you know is important and you can affect is open rate.
Am I opening your emails? Probably not and no one else is either. According to Epsilon, email open rates are around 22% in their most recent data. Also, this data shows that the average click rate is 5.3% (down from last year) and yet the average volume of email sent per company is up 10.6% compared to last year. Bottom line, companies are sending more email and people are finding these emails less relevant. Combine this with the birth of Priority Inbox and it’s a potential perfect storm for companies relying on email marketing.
Putting Priority Inbox aside, one goal for your email program is obviously to get people to open the email and probably to click on it. Epsilon noted that “Consumers are much more likely to open messages that contain relevant content based on their past behavior and preferences.” Are you making content that is relevant to people? If you’re sending emails about the latest sales on dresses to your male customers, you’re probably not hitting this mark. That’s pretty easy to avoid. How about ensuring that you aren’t sending me emails for engagement rings since I’ve been married for almost (17 more days) 8 years? Those are just the basics. You need to invest a little to really understand your customers, record their preferences and past behavior, and create something that’s meaningful to them. It’s not impossible.
I’m not one to pat any airline’s marketing efforts on the back, but here’s a simple example of a highly individualized email from Delta in my post “Personalization and Individualization…What’s the Difference?“. This is all you need to do. If your current CRM database isn’t capable of collecting this type of information and automatically generating an email like Delta’s, then you need a new system. If it is capable and you’re not using it, start today (if you need help, feel free to contact me and find out how my company can help you).
For all you skeptics and cynics out there who are thinking that Priority Inbox isn’t worth getting nervous about, consider this. Gmail has more than 176 million users now (according to ComScore data). Go through your email database and see what percentage are Gmail users. I guarantee that it’s higher than what you’d expect. For my part, 16% of subscribers for the Dose of Digital White Paper and Presentation email list are Gmail users (PS: sign up here). Fortunately for me, these people must find the content of the emails relevant, as around 50% have opened one of the most recent emails I sent (which is around once every 4-6 weeks). This means that Google is more likely to put a future email I send in the Important and Unread section of these subscribers’ inboxes. If the emails aren’t relevant all of a sudden, I’d expect that to change pretty quickly.
And while, 176 millions users might not be enough to sway you (I’m not sure why though), rest assured that this type of feature will be coming to other email providers and platforms in the near future. Gmail today…everyone else tomorrow.
Besides creating better emails, what else can you do? I’ll give you one big tip that only those dedicated few who have made it all the way through this post are going to get. Thanks for sticking around. Okay, here it is. Right now, it seems like the thing to do now with email is to ask subscribers to Like you on Facebook or follow you Twitter. That’s fine. However, if you are like other marketers, you probably do more marketing via email than social media, so it’s critical to get the email stuff right before worrying about social media (this from me, who is “Director of Social Media”, so you know I think it’s important). So, how about asking your subscribers to do something different? Instead of asking them to Like you, how about asking them to increase the priority of your email?
What?
Assuming that your email didn’t land in the Important and Unread section of their Gmail, then you need to help ensure it does next time. You can do this by having them flag the message with a higher priority. If they do it, then the next time you send an email to this person it’ll likely appear in the Important and Unread section. I know what you’re thinking…that’s just one person…we’ve got thousands (or millions) in our database. Showing up in the priority section of one person’s inbox isn’t helping us. Well, you see Gmail is smarter than that. When enough people mark the same email as spam in Gmail or the same company’s emails are keep getting marked as spam by a bunch of people, guess what? Gmail eventually categorizes it as spam for everyone and sends it directly to your Gmail spam folder. Since Priority Inbox uses the same algorithms as Gmail’s spam filter, you can be fairly sure that it uses the same general idea. That is, if enough people increase the priority of a company’s emails, then eventually Gmail will classify them as important for everyone. So, maybe your next email should have a little diagram like this as a call to action.
If you read this and said to yourself, “that great, but it would annoy all the people who aren’t Gmail subscribers if we included this in an email to all of subscribers,” then you need a new email database or a new way of looking at the one you have. Even the most basic systems (including nearly-free Mailchimp, which I use for Dose of Digital) allow you to filter out people based on email address. So, create one version of your monthly email that goes to people with Gmail addresses that includes whatever content you want plus this new call to action. For those who don’t have a Gmail address, send them the usual. [PS: the next step is to stop sending requests for people to Like you on Facebook who don't have Facebook accounts or who already Like you (or do you?), but that's a post for another day.]
So, there are a few ideas of what to do to get ready for Priority Inbox from Gmail and at the same time make your email campaigns more effective. As some parting inspiration, here’s a great cartoon I found that gives you an idea of how not to conduct your email program. If this reminds you of your program, Priority Inbox is the least of your problems.
If you’re looking for more about digital marketing 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. 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.
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