Archive | September, 2011
Sep 26th 2011 

Observations from a Week on the Road

Last week I had the opportunity to attend a couple of conferences and speak at each of them. I wanted to share both my presentations and my observations from these two trips. I think there’s a little something for everyone.

Conference one was ePatient Connections in Philadelphia to start off the week. As I’ve said before, this is one of my favorite conferences of the year for a few reasons. First, it’s a diverse audience and group of speakers. There is certainly a lot of healthcare-specific content, but there are also presentations from outside healthcare (including the keynote talk from Seth Godin). I’ll tell you why I think this is important later. Second, each speaker gets 15 minutes max. That means a fast-moving conference that keeps your interest. It means that you get just enough from the really good presentations and the bad ones are over soon enough. Fortunately, there aren’t too many bad ones at this conference, but I know you’ve seen them before at other conferences (especially when they last 45-60 minutes).
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Sep 14th 2011 

Pick Two — Healthcare Digital Marketing Challenge

You can’t have it all in life. You certainly can’t have it all when it comes to your digital marketing. It all comes down to choices. If you want one thing, you might have to sacrifice another. Oftentimes, this is because these choices seem to be mutually exclusive. A perfect example of this is illustrated in the triangle above (often referred to as the “Project Triangle“). For any given project, you can have any of the two characteristics seen at the points of the triangle, but you can’t get all three. For example, if you want it good and you need it fast, then expect for it to cost more because you’ll need to pay for additional help. You can have something fast and it can be cheap, but don’t expect it to be good.

These Pick Two triangles have become a bit of a meme on the Internet popping up in multiple places often with pretty humorous choices (I find myself on reddit to kill time fairly often). So, I thought I’d use this concept to illustrate some of the challenges I see today in healthcare digital marketing. More importantly, I’d like to bring us all a dose of reality when it comes to our marketing efforts. You can’t have it all. Frequently, that’s what companies want and what clients demand. So, consider this post a little reminder of what’s possible in most cases. Sure…sometimes it’s possible to have all three, but I don’t see it very often. Maybe that’s because it’s impossible or because there isn’t enough innovative thinking being applied to the problem (hint: consider looking outside of pharma sometimes). You be the judge.
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