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9 Simple Steps to Getting Started in Social Media

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It’s clear that more and more companies are getting the green light from their leadership teams to get started in social media. That’s right…you’ve fought long and hard and patiently explained the rationale. You’ve shown examples (including a bunch from the Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki) and statistics and even set out some clear objectives. Whatever you did…it worked. You’ve got the green light. Question is: what now?

When it’s finally time to get started, here are the simple steps you need to follow.

9 Simple Steps to Getting Started in Social Media

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  1. Define business objectives
  2. Monitor with intent
  3. Choose the proper platforms
  4. Secure and create profiles
  5. Learn the lingo
  6. Dive in
  7. Go offline
  8. Track your progress
  9. Automate

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1. Define business objectives

No, you can’t skip this one. It’s probably the least “sexy” of the nine steps, but it’s also probably the most important and will help define what you do in the next 8 steps. Ultimately, it will be the difference between a successful social media effort and a failure. There are a couple of questions you need to ask yourself as part of this step.

First: Why social media? Why now?

If you don’t have good reasons for this beyond “we just want to try some stuff,” then forget it. You’ll probably be better off spending your time and money elsewhere.

Second: What do you want to accomplish?

This is a bit of a trick question. DO NOT define a “social media strategy.” You should not have a social media strategy. Instead, you should brand objectives. This might  be something like “increase market share to 25% by December 2010,” for example. In order to achieve these objectives, you’ve put together a set of strategies that will get you to those objectives. To deliver those strategies, you’ve come up with a number of tactics. Social media is one of those tactics. Nothing more, nothing less. If you create a social media strategy, it’s highly likely that your social media efforts won’t line up with your overall business objectives. This will make it even harder to measure the impact of these efforts or will outright fail. Perhaps you need social media, perhaps you don’t. Look at it as part of a larger marketing plan to figure this out.

2. Monitor with intent

I’ve talked quite a bit about social media monitoring on this blog including Pharma Should Forget About Social Media Monitoring and Monitor This, Forget That — “The Monitoring Continuum.” Catch up on those two posts to get my entire take on monitoring. For those looking for the short version, monitoring is important, but you need to ensure that you have a purpose for that monitoring. One important quote:

“The point [is] 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.”

Of course, since you’re ready to get started in social media, you have a reason to monitor. First, you need to get a gist for the volume and tone of discussions about your brand, but more importantly, you want to figure out where most and the most significant discussions are taking place. That’s a formal goal. A simple one, but still a formal goal.You don’t need to spend a fortune on this. Instead, for this purpose, you can rely on free tools such as Google Alerts, Social Mention, or Who’s Talkin.

That leads us to the next step.

3. Choose the proper platforms

This is where you’re going to pick the platforms where you’ll participate. There are a number of factors you’ll need to consider here. First, the discussion volume you measured in step 2 should be a big factor. Second, you need to consider where your target audience is online. It’s likely that these two will overlap, but not necessarily. What digital tools (including social media) are your key targets using online? Some of you know that I have a “mini-book” in the works that will help with this step (tentatively called “Digital Savviness”). If you want to know more about this or be informed when it’s completed, head over to the Digital Savviness page.

Another consideration here is how you might be received if you do participate in discussion. Are outside brands welcome? Is there a formal way for them to participate? Check this all out before you dive right in and start chatting it up. The final consideration is your risk tolerance. Each different social media platform has a slightly different risk profile. I’m referring to regulatory risks here. Specifically, the more open the platform, the more risk. For example, it might look like this, with riskier platforms on the left. The less you can control the discussion, the greater the risk.

Determine what your company’s risk tolerance looks like and factor that into your platform decision.

4. Secure and create profiles

Another seemingly simple, but somehow regularly overlooked step in the process is this one. Once you’ve settled on the platforms, then your first step needs to be to lock down your brand names. What you’re trying to prevent is squatters from stealing your brand names and, at best, locking you out or, at worst, posing as you while doing significant damage to your brand. Go out to the sites you’ve targeted and see if your brand names are available. If so, great. Secure the profiles now. Not next week or tomorrow…now. You’ll thank me later. If your brand name is taken by someone else, you’ll need to dig a bit further to see if you can secure it from them. Each platform has different rules here with some being more willing to help you get back your trademarks and others just the opposite. If you don’t do this early, you end up with this:

Suffice it to say, this isn’t the actual Pfizer (though the image of “big pharma” enjoying Family Guy makes me smile). For the record, the actual Pfizer account on Twitter is @pfizer_news.

Rather than going to each site one by one, you can use a service like KnowEm, which will secure your name on hundreds of social media sites (for a fee). This is great for locking in profiles even on those sites that you might not have any intent of using at this point, but you never know what you might want to do in the future. Better safe than sorry.

After you lock in the right user name, spend some time on this next part: creating profiles. I can’t express the importance of this enough. What I’m referring to is completing those profile boxes like “About you” and “Websites” and adding a picture of yourself (or your brand). You know the ones I mean. You probably haven’t done this on most sites. There are a number of reasons why you should. First, on Twitter for example, many people will not follow someone who does not have a competed profile. This means picture, description, and website (like mine). Second, most of these profiles on social media platforms are indexed by search engines. If you’re like most companies, you can use all the help you can get in the way of search engine optimization. Take it where you can get it.

5. Learn the lingo

Nothing will end your social media foray quicker than not playing by the rules. That is, you need to participate in way that follows the accepted norms of that site. (There are a bunch of other rules that healthcare folks need to follow. You can get them from this presentation: Annotated Version of Healthcare and Social Media…Know the Rules (775 downloads).) A big piece of this is learning the terms of service (TOS) for the site you’re interested in. These TOS documents will include things like what’s considered spam and other obvious violations, but it will also cover more subtle, but equally important guidelines.

Case in point. If you are planning to edit your company’s article on Wikipedia, do you know how to properly do it? Sure, you can simply go and edit it, but I can assure you that your changes will be undone almost instantly. If it’s your company, according to the accepted norms of Wikipedia, you have a conflict of interest and should follow the guidelines they clearly define. This explains that you shouldn’t edit the page directly, but rather should use the discussion (talk) pages and include this tag on your entry:

If you dont’ follow these rules, you’ll quickly find the community “mob” making you into an outcast. Beyond rules, you need to understand the way people talk and the jargon they use. If you don’t know what an “RT” or the “#” symbol means in Twitter, study up before you get involved. If you don’t know, look it up. Even better, observe some of the community’s leaders. You’ll also find that these leaders (in general) are open to helping new people use the site correctly, so ask questions. They’ll appreciate that you value their opinion and that you want to play by the rules.

6. Dive in

We’ve come to the fun part. After months (or years) of wrangling with your regulatory team and studying the different communities, you’re finally ready to actually go online and participate. One major recommendation for this step is to participate personally first. That is, try out everything you’ve learned as a regular person and not a brand. Do this with using personal accounts. This will give you a little leeway to make some mistakes without damaging your brand.

When it comes to finally participating on behalf of your brand, there’s one simple rule that I like to follow when figuring out what to do or say and what not to do or say. The “Golden Rule” tells us that we should treat others as we’d like to be treated. My social media “Platinum Rule” is basically the same, but with a key difference. Here it is: Act as if YOU are watching. That’s right. You. If you’ve gotten this far in getting your idea approved, you’re probably pretty smart and know a bit about marketing. You’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. You’ve seen it as a marketer and as a consumer. So, here’s what you do. Take a look at what you’re planning on doing and think how you’d honestly react if another brand did the same thing. Would you roll your eyes and quickly log out or would you find it interesting and useful? If you’re honest with yourself, you can be your best critic here, but it requires being honest. Bring your normal dose of skepticism and cynicism just as you would as a consumer and apply that to what you’re about to do. How does it fit?

If you still can’t tell, then send it to me and I’ll give you the honest truth.

7. Go offline

After you’ve had some success and are starting to get a following and some good reactions from your social media efforts its time to take it offline. I know that sounds like counterintuitive advice after all the effort you’ve put in to get online, but hear me out. I’m not saying to abandon your online efforts. Rather, I’m saying you should augment them with some offline work as well. While the relationships we form solely online can be useful, there’s still no substitute for meeting in person like humans have for hundreds of thousands of years. It’s simpler to communicate and often easier to build deeper levels of trust since you can see and read someone’s behavior and create deeper mental connections as well.

That’s not to say that you should invite all of your Twitter followers over to your house or all of your brand’s Facebook Fans to your headquarters, but from time to time you can bring together several key influencers from your network for a face-to-face, in-depth discussion. You can do this when you travel to different cities by putting together a “Tweetup” or making it a formal meeting with other members of your company. Either way, know that you can only go so far in a relationship with another person without meeting that person in real life.

8. Track your progress

I won’t get into how specifically to measure your social media efforts here, that’s a series of separate posts. The bottom line is that you need to measure your efforts opposite pre-defined goals. The pre-defined part is the key here. It’s possible to meet just about any goal that you come up with after the fact, so those don’t count. Whatever you choose to use as objectives for your efforts, define them ahead of time and create a plan to track your progress against them. This will allow you to not only gauge success and failure, but also to make adjustments while you’re still running the program. Keep the good (and add more) and throw out the bad. A good measurement plan will give you guidance on how to make changes on the fly.

If you’re looking for some advice on how to measure ROI for social media, check out this Mashable post that contains a ton of great resources. If you’re stuck on how to measure your social media efforts, here are 100 different options.

9. Automate

Last but not least…automation. While some of you are breathing a sigh of relief that the hard work is over, I’m not talking about that kind of automation. I’m not recommending you simply run your RSS feeds into all your social media profiles and walk away. Quite the opposite. What I mean by automate is to make social media participation automatic. There are three key parts to this: integrate social media as a standard marketing channel, implement tools that make it easier for more people to participate and manage, and make participation a standard part of your day.

As I’ve already said, don’t create a social media strategy, but rather add it to your list of tactics to deliver the strategies you already have in place. Use tools like CoTweet for Twitter to allow multiple people to use and manage one account (and provide better service to consumers). Lastly, you’re participation (and your brand’s) can’t be a one time affair. It needs to be ongoing. The best way to do this is to make it a standard part of your day. If you’re one of those people that only look at email at set times of the day, set a time for social media as well. If you aren’t one of these people, then find another set time. This will both ensure that you actually do it and also limit the amount of time, so you aren’t spending too much. Everything in moderation.

Those are the nine steps. Follow them and you’ll be among the best. I’ve created a PowerPoint presentation that covers the information in this post, so that you can share it with your colleagues at your next company meeting (or whatever you think makes sense). It’s basically the hugely abridged version of this post. If you’re interested in getting a copy,head over to the Dose of Digital Fan Page on Facebook. Fans get all the content from this blog plus sneak previews and exclusive content like this PowerPoint. You can get the link to download the presentation right from the Dose of Digital Facebook Fan page (check out the Wall).

10 Healthcare Dinosaurs Digital Technology Will Make Extinct

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Dinosaurs

It’ll probably come as no surprise to find out that I’m a big advocate for the increased use of digital technologies in healthcare. And it’s not just in marketing where I think a greater use of digital is not only inevitable, but also in nearly every facet of the healthcare system. It’s essential to improving healthcare for everyone. Over the past five years, the industry has changed dramatically as more and more digital technologies have replaced “traditional” ones. Some have been for the better and others still have a ways to go before we can decide if we’re better off.

As we look into the future a bit, I’ve noticed that some of the things that we all stereotypically associate with our healthcare system are starting to go away and are being replaced with digital technologies. Some things have already been replaced completely or are close to being extinct while others are just starting their descent. I’ve tried to predict the future before with varying degrees of success (such as my paper “The Future of Pharma Digital Marketing” (671 downloads), so here’s yet another look into our digital future. For each item below, I’ve given a guess at when I see each disappearing for good. Please feel free to leave your comments on what you agree or disagree with (I’m sure they’ll be plenty of the latter) and what you think I’m missing. Here they are in order of my predicted extinction:

10 Healthcare Dinosaurs Digital Technology Will Make Extinct

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1. Pharma Brand Facebook Pages — 2-3 years

My first entry in this forward-looking post is likely the opposite of what you expected. While more and more brands and pharma companies move onto Facebook (check out the full list on the Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki), and as we await some guidelines from the FDA that could make it far easier for companies to participate in social media, I’m heading in the opposite direction. That’s right, dead before it even lived. To be clear, I’m not saying that all social media participation will go away, but just this one tactic. There are very few pharma brands currently on Facebook, as most have taken the “unbranded” or corporate approach where the drug isn’t mentioned. This is smart. Outside the regulatory hurdles and risks that exist, there’s another good reason not to have a Facebook page for your pharma brand. Recall that the main way these pages work is that people become “fans,” which essentially subscribes them to whatever content you put out via their News Feed. Many non-pharma brands have done this spectacularly well and gathered massive numbers of Fans on Facebook (like Pringles, the largest brand-created page on Facebook, which our agency, Bridge Worldwide, helped pull together). But, here’s the difference. When someone becomes your Fan, they announce it as an update to all their friends on Facebook automatically. That’s fine when they tell the world that they’ve just become a fan of Pringles. However, it doesn’t work for most other products, especially pharma drugs. Are you ever going to see this?

Facebook status update valtrex

Doubtful. The biggest pharma Facebook page actually is for a brand, Gardasil. However, you’ll notice that people aren’t being asked to become fans of Gardasil, but rather “Take a Step Against Cervical Cancer.” Who isn’t against cervical cancer? It’s a clever way to make it more likely that someone will become your friend, but don’t take advantage of it. By the way, now’s a good time to join the Dose of Digital Facebook Page.

2. Paper “detail” aids — 3-5 years

You’ll notice that paper is going to take quite a hit  in this list and it should. Not only is it incredibly expensive to produce (the final product, that is), it’s also completely inflexible. Once you print it, you can’t change it. Most pharma companies still send their sales teams out into the field with printed information to share with their physicians. Some have adopted electronic presentations that reps can show in their laptops. These have much more interaction and can include media such as video, which makes them far more engaging than paper. In addition, the information can be updated instantly when something changes at a negligible cost. One problem I do see here came while I was working with a major pharma company who adopted all electronic detail aids only to go back to paper. The system they were using was so unwieldy that it was prone to crashing during presentations on a very regular basis (not good when you have less than a minute to show something to a doctor). In analyzing why this was happening, it was pretty obvious. The system (which will go nameless, but is used by many pharma companies) used a massive amount of CPU resources meaning that it rarely ever worked the way it should. These proprietary platforms also mean that only a handful of companies can create content for them, which overly inflates the price and excludes some of the best creative shops from working with you. There’s no reason for this. Create a simple presentation shell and make the content in Flash (plus XML) and make it possible for anyone to create content for you. Some companies have ditched these proprietary systems and replaced them with what I just described and are much happier. Number 3 on this list should be “Proprietary electronic detailing platforms,” but it’s not…

3. Single-purpose medical devices — 5  years

People have begun to monitor more about their health than ever before. Whether you have some sort of disease or not, this tracking is becoming more common. This could be a simple analog pedometer or something much more advanced like Nike+. Either way, even completely healthy people are gathering data about themselves. Of course for many with chronic conditions, this type of tracking is an everyday affair (and hassle). Diabetes is a condition that immediately springs to mind, as many diabetics must regularly test and track their blood glucose levels. For this, they carry around a device that does this…and only this. Apple has already envisioned a future where this isn’t necessary. The testing is, of course, but carrying around another device isn’t. Many people (and many more will) already carry around a very capable computer in their pocket everyday in the form of a smartphone, so why not combine the two…a blood glucose monitor as part of your phone?

iphone glucose meter

Apple introduced this concept when they released their version 2.0 software for the iPhone, but we don’t quite have this on the market yet. There are already integrations for the iPhone for sleep tracking and many other conditions, but expect many more in the future that are designed to eliminate single-purpose electronic devices.

4. Pharma Brand Websites — 5-7 years

Interesting prediction from a guy who works for a digital agency that, among other things, makes brand websites. I’m not saying that websites will go away, but I do think a certain kind of site will start to fade away. I’m talking about pharma brand.com sites (e.g., lipitor.com). Already, most people get their drug information from third party sites like WebMD or even product reviews from sites like iGuard. There’s really very little reason to go to most pharma brand website these days. Some of the sites out there do serve a purpose, but a sales pitch about the product isn’t it and isn’t why people come. Most visitors come to find very specific bits of information about our products, but we make it hard for them to find it. Perhaps they come to find out about a certain side effect or to find out if there’s some sort of co-pay assistance. Why do we hide this behind page after page of product messages and the same four types of stock photos (a subject for a future post)? Brand websites need to behave more like Google today than a product-selling page. That means that searching (and being able to find) specific items has to be a priority. Keep in mind that many of the people visiting are already on your product, so what are you trying to sell them? More of the content on disease conditions that pharma companies have accumulated at considerable expense will become the key focus. So, as brand.com sites go away or lessen in importance, disease condition sites from pharma companies will take their place.

5. Paper prescriptions — 5-7 years

Already common in many practices and institutions, little pieces of paper that we take to our local pharmacy in order to get our medications are destined to be a thing of the past in the near future. Electronic medical records (EMRs) will of course speed the death of this ancient practice, but it’s advancing on its own whether or not EMRs become the norm. However, there’s still quite a bit of inefficiency in this part of the system as you still have to drive to the pharmacy to pick up your pills. Mail order pharmacy services have increased dramatically, but have a long way to go, but will dominate in the future for those on chronic medications. Today, however, many of these programs are so difficult to sign up for that people simply pass on the option. For those of you out there that administer these programs and who are trying to convert retail pharmacy users to mail order, consider this: most people would call their pharmacy every month to get a refill, drive there, get out of their car to actually pay for the medication, drive home AND pay a premium to do all this versus having it sent to their house automatically at a lower cost via mail order. That ought to tell you that you need to fix the sign up process.

6. Massive healthcare portals — 5-7 years

Healthcare information online is dominated by a few players today. Sites in the WebMD and Everyday Health networks make up a big share of the healthcare-related traffic online. This is starting to change. There are a couple of factors at work here. First, search engines are getting into the healthcare content business by including basic information as part of the results for many healthcare-related searches. In fact, for many people, there’s no reason to go beyond the information that Google and Bing (Yahoo! is far behind here) serve up automatically (check out my post: “How Google and Bing Plan to Eliminate the Need for WebMD (and Your Website)” for more details on why). Since the search engines can supply much of the basic information about most diseases there’s no reason to look much further unless you need highly specialized information. However, for some conditions and some people this specialized information is going to be required. This might mean turning to a knowledgeable community that is full of others with a similar condition, such as Tu Diabetes or PKU.com. That’s community, but what if you just want information to research on your own? In most cases, highly specialized, detailed, credible, and unbiased information doesn’t exist. That is, finding very deep content on a specific condition that is approachable for your average person isn’t easy to find and certainly isn’t found in one place. There are two ends of the spectrum out there where most online content fits: general information written at a 5th-7th grade level and highly specific information written for physicians. Where’s the stuff in the middle for someone who wants more than what they get on WebMD, but doesn’t want to read the New England Journal of Medicine? This will come in the near future.

7. In-Office Doctor Visits — 8-10 years

Once again, a futuristic idea that already is happening. I talked about this in a post called “How Pharma Can Cut Out the “Middleman” (aka “The Doctor”). It’s already possible to see a physician without leaving your house at any hour of the day. By no means is this a mainstream idea today, but it will become more and more common in the future. For some conditions, you’ll still need to see a doctor in person so they can do some diagnostic things that require you being in the same room, but many chronic conditions and follow ups could be handled at a distance. Ironically, one other trend that is leading to fewer in-office doctor visits comes from the past. House calls. More physicians are starting to once again make house calls (at a price) just like they did fifty years ago. Some have even switched their entire practice to this model. When you combine these trends together, it leads to only one conclusion, which is a dramatic decrease in in-person visits to the doctor.

8. Paper medical records — 8-10 years

This was an obvious prediction, as it’s talked about quite a bit now in mainstream media. We’re already well on our way to never seeing another piece of paper in a doctor’s office. Some large institutions are already largely “paperless,” but many are much further behind. As part of the recent economic stimulus programs here in the US, a large sum of money (~$10-15 billion depending on who’s counting) was allocated to making our system paperless. We’ve got a long way to go, but the process is underway. Despite these government and local physician level efforts, many people have already given up on expecting their doctor or insurance company to keep their records for them so Microsoft HealthVault and Google Health have come forward to give you a free and easy way to do it. On top of this, some smart hospitals like Cleveland Clinic have already partnered with Google rather than expecting people to maintain their records in multiple places (e.g., Cleveland Clinic’s site AND Google Health).

9. Clinical trials — 15-20 years

Before all the scientists reading this get all upset, let me finish (or start). Clinical trials are an integral part of the healthcare system. They are used to define what medical treatment is the right one (or most right) for specific patients at a specific time. Without these trials, it would be anyone’s guess as to which treatments were the best option in a given situation. However, they are frighteningly expensive and take a long time. It’s possible to replicate some clinical trial results right now without the time and expense. To be sure, these don’t have the same rigor, nor, in most cases, the same scientific validity, but they could help prevent us from heading down the wrong path and wasting time and resources on a larger study. Sites like Patients Like Me and Cure Together gather a great deal of information on their users and make it possible to use “simple” math to find correlations between diseases or treatments. CureTogether has been able to do this (and matched the accuracy of much larger studies) simply based on the data of several thousand people. Imagine if everyone’s records are electronic and there are millions of people who volunteer their data for these types of analyses. There are links between diseases that we can’t even imagine today that will be found this way. Patients Like Me, where users input their progress on a regular basis, makes it possible to do “real-time” trials with large numbers of patients almost instantly (such as this one for lithium use in ALS). Read more about this in my post “Can Social Media Improve Your Health and Save Your Life?”

Patients Like Me Lithium Study

10. Healthcare Privacy — 25 years

I saved the most controversial for last because I think it will take the longest to achieve. However, I also think that it will have the biggest effect on our society’s health in the long-term. Recently, I was at an amazing brainstorming-type meeting held by a healthcare company that I wish I could tell you more about, but due to confidentiality agreements I can’t. What I can tell you is that I heard some amazing predictions for the future, but one really stuck with me. At one point, someone came out with this very eloquent quote that shut up a room of very opinionated people for a while (including me): “In the future, the less private you are, the longer you’ll live.” Think about that for a second. Imagine that you could choose (you don’t have to participate if you don’t want) to release information about your health and in exchange you’d receive highly personalized recommendations on treatments, which diseases you likely have already or are likely to get, and maybe even how long you’ll live. Would you do it? Our current society norms say to keep everything about our health private and today there are practical reasons for this (like insurance denials). But in the future, you might not be able to discriminated against because of preexisting conditions (it’s already part of Obama’s healthcare plan today). If you give up your data, it can be pooled with millions (or billions) of others that through some mathematical analysis can tell you everything about your current and future health. This would include which drugs are likely to work for you and which diseases you are likely to develop. It’s an extension of what CureTogether has just started to explore. Power their concept with billions of data points and it becomes a difficult to imagine database.

That’s my list of 10 for now. They’re sure to change when I look back on this next year. Some of these predictions will come true before my predicted dates and others might never happen. As a healthcare marketer, it’s important that you know what’s coming and to figure out not only how to prepare for it when the future does arrive, but what you can do to make it happen.

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.

The Seven Uses of Social Media in Business — The 7 “C”s

Whether it be healthcare or any other industry, different companies have come up with and rely on different uses of social media to meet their brand objectives. After surveying a bunch of different social media programs (including the hundreds found on the Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki), I figured out that for the nearly infinite number of final executions, there are really only seven distinct uses of social media in business. Seven might sound like a lot, but it’s nothing compared to the number of channels within social media from Facebook to Wordpress to Flickr to Foursquare and so on (see a hundred or so on Wikipedia). Whatever channel marketers ultimately decide to use to bring their social media idea to life and meet their brand objectives (I know, that last bit sounds almost crazy), they’re trying to do one of seven things with social media. Keep in mind that these seven things overlap a bit, but you’ll see how they are distinct.

If you think there’s one I’m missing, then let me know in the comments.

To make it easy to remember, the seven things all start with “C”, hence the sub-title of this post “The 7 ‘Cs”” [that's a punctuation nightmare]. I should note that these are actually in some order, as I tried to order them by the frequency of use by the healthcare industry. For each use, I’ve included what I see as the pros and cons of each. [Also, for those who are Facebook Fans of Dose of Digital, part of the benefit of being a Fan is that you get occasional exclusive content. This is one of those times. If you want a PowerPOINT version of this post to share with others, instructions for how to download it are now posted for Fans. Not a Fan? Go to Facebook and become one.]

The 7 Cs of Social Media Usage

  • Communicating
  • Cause Support/Sponsorship
  • Contests
  • Consumer Research
  • Connecting Others
  • Customer Service
  • Community Building

Communicating

Novartis Twitter

This is a fairly generous use of the term communicating, which to many people typically implies a two-way dialogue. However, the true meaning of communication is all about “conveying information.” And that’s what most marketers who use social media are doing. They are communicating. I suppose every one of the other Cs could also be characterized as communicating in some way, so for the purposes of this example, I’m talking about communicating a message in one direction: in other words, broadcasting. Many companies who have started using Twitter use it in this way: the one-way communication of information. Basically, it’s used as another channel to get out news about their company.

  • Pro: Gets message out to the masses with potential to spread virally
  • Con: No interaction with community, the opposite of “social”

Cause Support/Sponsorship

Gardasil Facebook

Helping out a cause such as a patient support society or other non-profit organization is another common use of social media for marketers especially in healthcare. It’s a smart approach if you think about it and its how several brands have managed to get as many “Fans” as they have. There are a bunch of good examples of this in healthcare including programs like EMD Serono/Pfizer’s use of MS Champions in Facebook.

The most impressive example to me is another use of Facebook and it’s Merck’s program for Gardasil. I’m not impressed with the page or content per se, but rather the very smart angle they’ve taken with their Fan page. Cleverly, Merck didn’t create a Gardasil brand page and ask people to become a fan of their brand. That would look a bit funny in someone’s news feed. Who wants to broadcast to the world that they’re friends with a “big pharma” product that also happens to be a vaccine. You can easily imagine that you wouldn’t have too many takers. So, Merck went in a different direction and created a “semi” unbranded page called Take a Step Against Cervical Cancer. Instead of asking people to be a fan of Gardasil, they ask you to be a fan of fighting cervical cancer. Who among us isn’t against cervical cancer? 108,000 fans later (an impressive amount for any brand, much less a pharma brand), the strategy seems to have worked.

  • Pro: Low barrier for people to “Fan,” easier for people to share
  • Con: Limited (if any) connection with the brand, platform often “owned” by third-parties

Contests

Novartis Flu Flix

There are a number of these types of programs out there and they’re common in many industries. The typical idea is to have users submit a video or story about a specific topic, conduct some sort of judging process, and then announce the winners (and award some prizes). Interestingly enough, this category is one of the pharma industry’s first forays into social media, back in 2007. Way back then, before every pharma company was on YouTube, Novartis sponsored a contest called Flu Flix. The contest was designed to help raise awareness of the flu and why it’s important to get vaccinated. (Funny that we’re doing the same thing three years later, no?) This contest’s introduction video alone has had nearly 800,000 views. As best I can figure, this is the most popular pharma YouTube video ever by about a factor of about 40. Of all the entries they received, they picked 60 as finalists. Here’s the contest introduction video:

Other examples include AstraZeneca’s contest on YouTube for Symbicort (contest now over). These programs can be great if people actually participate. They participate in two ways. First, actually submitting content to the contest and, second, voting or commenting on other submissions. Many contests I see cut out the last part and the “winners” are picked by the company. This misses a huge opportunity. If voting helps determine the winners, then those who entered will encourage their friends to vote, which means that they’re doing your marketing for you. In addition, it’s important to connect the contest to the brand benefits. Don’t just have a contest for the sake of having one. Naturally, we think the Official Sponsor program does all of this pretty well.

  • Pro: Good exposure to the brand, highly participatory, can spread among networks
  • Con: Little opportunity for product messaging (especially clinical ones), potential lack of a connection with product benefits

Consumer Research

Patients Like Me Epilepsy Community

Nearly everything in social media can be monitored. I won’t get into the pros and cons of monitoring social media here, but feel free to read more about it in my post “Pharma Should Forget About Social Media Monitoring“. If you are monitoring and not planning on responding, that’s fine, but be sure to use the information you find while monitoring. Essentially, you have a giant market research study going on. You can see what people think about your brand and how they talk about and treat the conditions in which you’re most interested. UCB has gone one step further in partnering with Patients Like Me to create a new epilepsy community that they can monitor to find out how people treat epilepsy. As a maker of epilepsy treatments, they clearly have an interest in the information that a community like this can yield.

  • Pro: A huge amount of information is available, “real-world” data
  • Con: Adverse event reporting issues, can be expensive to set up and maintain

Connecting Others

Epilepsy Empowerment

There’s no question that, from a regulatory standpoint, it would be difficult for a pharma brand to set up a branded community centered around one of their products. What’s more, who is going to join this community? For example, why would anyone join the Lipitor community on the Lipitor.com website, when there are plenty of neutral third-party communities out there? Answer: they wouldn’t. However, it’s possible to connect people without having an on-site community. Consider how Epilepsy Empowerment works. This is a site created by Valient Pharmaceuticals (who makes an epilepsy treatment), but you don’t see any mention of the brands. Instead, they’ve created a service for those with epilepsy and those who care for them. Rather than have discussions on the site (which some people don’t like to do whether it is pharma owned or not), Epilepsy Empowerment basically matches people together with those who have a similar profile and allows them to share off-site contact information. It’s up to the participants to decide how to communicate after this. Maybe via email, maybe via phone or perhaps something else. Bayer’s Betaplus program operates under a similar model, but with trained moderators supplied by Bayer involved in the calls.

  • Pro: Greater participation as people see this as a more independent from the brand, lower regulatory risk
  • Con: Limited connection with the brand, brand typically has no participation, control, or exposure to the conversation, connections between users often random, some liability risk

Customer Service

@azhelps on Twitter

While very common in other industries, the healthcare industry has only just started to supply some customer service via social media. Twitter seems to be a popular place for customer service since it also happens to be a place where people tend to complain and need customer service. Companies like Comcast and Best Buy have each gotten both great press and good results from the customer service they’re providing via Twitter. One pharma company who is doing this now is AstraZeneca. Basically, it’s a pilot now, but here’s how it works: AZ monitors Twitter for tweets that mention Nexium and refer to either an adverse event or the cost of the medication. When one is found (about one a week), AZ responds with the tweet seen above (yes, the same one for everyone). This tweet invites people to connect with folks in AZ’s call center who can handle these types of questions and supply solutions. Some argue that AZ should engage more by giving the answer on Twitter. I’m not so sure. It’s pretty hard to give all the relevant information about a product assistance program in 140 characters. This is a good start.

Remember: doing this type of customer service in social media doesn’t just affect the person who you respond to; others will see your response as well. In addition, if someone complained about you on Twitter, they’ll like tweet about the great service you provided if you do solve their problem.

  • Pro: Can stop “firestorms” before they start, shows brand’s sophistication with the channel, low-cost of entry
  • Con: Problems not solved publicly, action is required by customer

Community Building

PKU.com

The final way social media is used by companies is to create communities. Similar to “Connect Others” above, this one is about creating a community from scratch that is related to your brand or disease state. These communities can literally be created from scratch, meaning they don’t reside on third-part platform like Facebook or Ning, which can be leveraged to host the community (and handle the backend technology). The latter, of course, is more cost-effective, but offers less control. As I mentioned earlier, it’s difficult, if impossible, for a pharma company to create a community-related specifically to it’s brand. However, a few companies have shown it can be done for unbranded, disease-related communities.

The single best source of information about the rare disease PKU is on an unbranded community created by Biomarin called PKU.com. Biomarin makes Kuvan, a treatment for this disease. There’s a great community on this site and Biomarin made it happen. They don’t appear to be involved really in any way except for their company logo appearing on a few pages. Apparently, if you provide enough value, people will come. If you do it right and put patients first, they’ll come. And stay. You’ll have to resist the temptation to try to control the conversation.

  • Pro: (if unbranded) Limited connection with the brand (a plus for regulatory), great research opportunities
  • Con: Limited (if any) connection with the brand (a minus for marketers), expensive to set up custom community, recruitment

Those are the seven ways social media is being used. As I said before, if I’m missing something, just leave a comment. As a reminder, for those who are Facebook Fans of Dose of Digital, part of the benefit of being a Fan is that you get occasional exclusive content. This is one of those times. If you want a PowerPOINT version of this post to share with others, instructions for how to download it are now posted for Fans. Not a Fan? Go to Facebook and become one.

14 Things That Will Inspire Your Digital Marketing in 2010

Dose of Digital Mini White Paper

As you catch up on all the emails you missed over the holidays and wonder where to start on your massive list of “to-dos,” I’m going to recommend you take a moment for a quick read. Today’s post is really simple. It’s not another “XYZs of the DECADE!” or “The Most Important Things of 2010″ type post, of which I’m sure you’re seeing plenty.

Instead, I wanted to start you off with some things that are sure to recharge your creative thinking. I plan to show you things that might amuse, inspire, upset, annoy, confuse, encourage, frustrate, and all of these at once. While I typically write about healthcare related topics, this post is for every marketer out there.  There are quite a few healthcare examples included (I can’t help it), but the vast majority have nothing whatsoever to do with healthcare.

What you aren’t going to get here is a list of things to do. I’m not going to show you a bunch of ideas to copy. You’re going to have to work a bit to figure out the applicability to your industry. In the end, I’m sharing many of these to simply expand your thinking and force you to look at things a bit differently. You’ll also probably come across a few resources that might just make your job simpler in 2010. You may have seen some of these before, but hopefully, they still make an impact.

I’ve tried to loosely bunch things together into “topics.” It sort of worked, so allow me a little poetic license.

14 Things That Will Inspire Your Digital Marketing in 2010

Simplicity

  • Been in a drugstore aisle lately? Did you feel slightly overwhelmed with the choices? You walked into the store with an aliment and wanted a solution. Maybe your allergies were acting up. Where’s the allergy section? Which of the thousand products do you need? The online buying options on sites like Drugstore.com can be equally overwhelming and frustrating. Enter Help Remedies (their homepage below)…

Help Remedies

They have a handful of products (you’ll notice that some are duplicates). There are no brand names. Rather, each product is named based on the aliment it treats. Each treatment uses common, generic medications (loratadine [aka: Claritin] for allergies, for example) in simple packaging at a fixed ($4) price.

Make it simple for people to find what they need to fix their problem. Nothing more, nothing less.

  • Sometimes we really over-think things. In our efforts to make things more simple, we have the opposite effect. The more complex idea, the less likely you are execute it successfully. At the same time, the complex execution of your complex idea is more likely to leave your consumers confused and frustrated.

For Windows users out there, you probably hate that little strip at the bottom of your monitor–”The Taskbar”

Windows Taskbar

Did you ever notice that you can’t move around the programs in that taskbar? I have and it annoyed me to no end. But Microsoft allowed no way to do this in Windows XP. Rather than a massively complex program or huge upgrade to Windows, someone (not a Microsoft employee) decided to simply write a tiny little script that makes those programs movable. Meet Taskbar Shuffle. It’s a tiny 640k-sized “program” that fixes something that Microsoft hasn’t. Sometimes a massive project or update isn’t necessary when you need a simple solution.

Technology

  • What’s the “proper way” to use YouTube? You post a video and direct people to it, right? Maybe you embed the video in your site and you sit back and hope that people see it. Well, that’s one way to use it, but that might not be the most engaging for your customers. How about looking at YouTube a bit differently?

Did you know you could do this with YouTube? I’ll bet you didn’t and I’ll further bet that you probably watched the second video in the series and the third (and probably more). It’s an engaging use of the technology. Try not to be confined by how you think about the technology. Instead, investigate what’s possible and see if it’s applicable to what you’re trying to accomplish.

Speaking of rethinking YouTube, why not put your entire website on YouTube? Not all of your videos, your entire site. What’s that you say? You don’t want to pay the outrageous “partnership” fees in order to have your own page. No problem. That’s not what I’m even talking about. I mean putting your entire site into a video. Think there’s no way to do it? Tell that to the folks at Boone-Oakley. They didn’t get that memo.

Make technology your friend. How? You’ve got to invest some time in learning it for yourself. That means more than just reading a blog post about it. It means using it. Do you think the Boone-Oakley people used YouTube for the first time while making this video (er, website)? No. They likely use it all the time and figured out some interesting things you can do with the technology and they put it all together.

  • Blogging is really hard, right? Just the set-up alone is enough to deter most people. Then the thought of using some complex platform and hosting and editing and getting the graphics  just right (and on and on) is enough to ensure that there aren’t too many regular bloggers out there. I’ve seen companies send hundreds of thousands of dollars setting up their blog only to watch them do one or two posts and give up. Blogging takes time to write posts and think of interesting topics, but it shouldn’t take time to set up or actually use. Meet Posterous. If you can use email, you’ve got a blog. Here’s how complex it is to have a Posterous blog:

Posterous Set Up and Blogging

See for yourself. Right now (I’ll wait), send an email to post@posterous.com. Attach a picture if you’d like or an MP3. Add a little text and see what happens.

Congratulations, you’re a blogger.

Engagement

  • Do you have a lot of boring data lying around? You’ve probably got stacks of binders filled with it and an entire section of your hard drive dedicated to spreadsheets. Do you really use any of this data? Did any of it really change the way people do things where you work? Did any of it help serve your customers better? What I’ve found from a lot of data is that it’s unactionable (if that’s a word). You can’t do anything based on the findings. That’s one problem. But let’s assume your data is actionable. The next step is to explain it to everyone else at your company. That’s not easy. Data is boring (sorry, analytics friends). However, the presentation of that data doesn’t need to be.

After watching this, do you promise to never again show a PowerPoint slide with a spreadsheet embedded within it, and then say, “You can’t read this, but…”

Good.

  • Tired of car commercials? I am…have been for years. So, I’m glad to see that they’re using my money (via government bailouts) to make even more. They’re worse than ever of course, but only slightly. So, do you think I can get you to watch a five minute commercial for a car? No? I accept your challenge. Check this out from Volkswagon of Brazil for the Eos and come back (warning: make sure your connected to a solid broadband connection…you’ll need it).

So, how much did you watch? You’ve got to give them credit for “forcing” you to pay attention throughout in an entertaining and challenging way. How are you encouraging people to watch your content all the way through? Is it ever good enough that they should watch it all the way through? [Thanks to Adverblog for the heads up on this one.]

Creatitivy

  • By now just about everyone has seen this next video. If you’re a digital marketing and you haven’t, you’ve got a lot of catching up to do. So, for those who have seen it, my apologies, but watch it again. It’s that good.

Instead of spending millions on TV and print advertising, in 2006, Dove took a different approach. It created “Evolution” (credit to our sister agency Ogilvy Toronto). It was a “simple” video all to support a campaign that would later be called “The Campaign for Real Beauty.” This concept was borne out of research the agency did that showed that 50% of women say that their body “disgusts them.” 50%. “Disgusts them.” Clearly, there was an opportunity to change that. So, with little hype (and no mass media buying), “Evolution” was launched.

If that doesn’t stop you for a minute, I’m not sure what will. That video, thanks to a massive viral spread, has been seen more than 500 million times. How much would it cost you for 500 million impressions? How about 500 million impressions on people who WANTED to see your commercial? $500,000? $1,000,000? $3,000,000? Nope. Try $50,000. That’s how much “Evolution” cost to create. Sure, not everything is “Evolution,” but you probably don’t need 500 million views of your video. However, you probably want more than the few hundred or few thousand your videos have now.

That’s your inspiration. That’s the best of the best. If you intend to create a video that people will watch and spread to others, this is your guide. Watch your video and then watch “Evolution.” Close? If not, keep working.

  • If you read this blog regularly, I know you’ve seen this next one, but I’m going to show it to you again. Everything you do can be creative. That means that even the lowly banner ad can be creative. What’s that you say? It’s not possible to make a banner ad that people want to see and click? Try this one on for size:

Told you so. Even banner ads can be good. The ad for Pringles you just saw (and probably clicked a bunch of times) was the winner of the Gold Cyber Lion at the Cannes Advertising Festival this past year. It’s the highest honor you can get for digital work…and it was a banner ad. [Fair balance, my company, Bridge Worldwide, created that banner for Pringles (we are the digital agency of record for the brand).]

Yes, even your banner ads can show some creative thinking. “Can Hands” isn’t appropriate for everyone, but the thinking that lead to it should be required for everyone.

  • Coming up with the next big idea is hard. There’s only a finite number of people at your company and the time they each have to spend on thinking is pretty limited. But, no one knows your market or products as well as you do, right? What about your customers? Don’t they have a pretty good sense of where your brand should go? They certainly have a good idea of where they want it to go and that’s worth paying attention to. Moreover, they might be the ones to give you the next big idea.

Both Dell (with Ideastorm) and Starbucks (with My Starbucks Idea) are two companies that have figured this out (along with many others). Dell has implemented 390 ideas that were submitted and voted for on the site. Starbucks has done more than 50. Cost to these companies? Nearly free. It’s really just the time investment from a handful of employees. How much would you pay for the next big idea and to have an ongoing discussion with engaged customers about how to improve your brand?

Community

I think there are two problems with this idea. First, who wants to join a community owned and maintained by a pharma company that’s likely to be laced with brand selling messages? People don’t trust “big pharma,” so to think that they’ll be willing to have open and honest conversations when they know that “big pharma” is watching and potentially controlling what they say is a ridiculous notion. Second, why join a pharma-owned community when there are so many that aren’t controlled by pharma companies? Yet, this is one of the first things that pharma marketers want to do.

Okay, I get it. You want to do it regardless of what I say. Fine. Here’s my only request: make your community better than what’s out there. If it is better, then people might join up even if “big pharma” owns and controls it. If you’re not going to make it better, it’s a waste of time and resources. Need to know what your comparators are? No problem. If you want to see what true community engagement looks like, then look no further than Tu Diabetes. There are more than 12,000 members and it has an extremely engaged and active community. It’s alive and you can tell right away that you’re dealing with a group of people who are passionate about an issue. By the way…interested in knowing what they think about pharma or healthcare companies participating in their community? You should be. Check out this thread all about it. Think you’ll be welcomed with open arms?

Need another example? How about Patients Like Me? If you’re thinking about including tracking tools in your community, this is the gold standard (in healthcare at least). Not only are the tools used by a very large percentage of users (and used regularly), the data that people provide are used to help others determine the best treatment for their disease. Are you willing to provide this kind of help on your website even if it’s help that might include telling someone to stop taking your treatment? If not, then your community doesn’t stack up well.

Patients Like Me Profile

Everything Else

I’ve got a few more that didn’t quite fit into a neat category, so I’m lumping them together here as things you should know about (and likely don’t). Some of these are simply to show you some really interesting technologies just for the “wow” factor and others are essential to being a good digital marketer.

  • If you haven’t figured out how to incorporate Facebook Connect into what you’re doing, then you’re missing out. Of course, many marketers have figured it out and now use Facebook Connect. If you aren’t familiar with it, then check out this primer from Facebook (be sure to check out all the tabs). Very simply: “With Facebook Connect, users can easily share your content and their actions with their friends on Facebook. As these friends discover your content, they click back to your site, engaging with your content and completing the viral loop.” Think of it as a way to connectyour site with Facebook. People share you site’s content with their friends on Facebook and these friends, hopefully, come check out your site for themselves.

And that’s the way most marketers have used this very powerful tool. They simply make it easier to share links on Facebook and pray that others click on them. However, Facebook Connect is far more powerful than that. When you give permission for a site or application to use your data, they have access to everything your friends do. This means all your updates, your pictures, your information (job, interestes, etc.) to name a few. What you do with this information can be pretty amazing. Think completely customized experiences.

If you want a great example of how you can use Facebook Connect to create a VERY memorable experience, then you should try the Discovery Channel’s Frenzied Watersused to publicize its “Shark Week” or Activision’s The Prototype Experience to promote its platform game, Prototype. CAUTION: you might not like the ending of the former and you might be a tad bothered by the latter if you’re not a fan of first-person shooter games and the storylines behind them. If you want to see some other, more tame, examples, check out this post from Mashable.

  • All right, here’s a little technology “wow-factor” you can share with your friends. Try out Photosynth from Microsoft. Try clicking on different parts of the image, zooming in and out, and scrolling around. Essentially, Photosynth takes hundreds of photos of a single place and stitches them all together so that you can view the place from multiple angles almost as a 3D experience. Can you come up with a way to use this technology for your next promotion? [note: this embed won't work properly if you're viewing in "mobile" mode or email].

  • Slightly less cool, but more likely to impact you day-to-day is Get Satisfaction. What is it? In their words: “Get Satisfaction is a direct connection between people and companies that fosters problem-solving, promotes sharing, and builds up relationships. Get Satisfaction is open, transparent, and free. Tens of thousands of companies use this neutral space to support customers, exchange ideas, and get feedback about their products and services. Everyone is invited and encouraged to participate.”

In my words, it’s a place where people are complaining about your brand and looking to each other to solve the problems they are having. Well, that’s what’s going on if you’re not there. You could be there though. You could be officially representing your company or brand and answering questions as they come in and cutting down on unchecked, Internet-based, brand firestorms. Is anyone talking about your brand and looking for answers right now? Go to the site and check it out (use the search box in the upper right).

If they are talking about your company or products, I’d recommend getting officially involved. To me, this service started as a tool for small, start-ups to help them manage customer service, while big companies relied on their call centers. But now, big companies are joining in because their customers are used to going to and using Get Satisfaction. Big companies like who? How about Nike and Microsoft for starters?

  • And finally, to close this out, I thought a glimpse into the future was necessary. Here it is:

Hearts Built to Order

What is it? Here’s the description from Popular Science’s The Year’s Most Amazing Scientific Images (number 24): “A dead heart beats again, thanks to the efforts of scientists at the University of Minnesota. To rebuild and reanimate the organ, which was harvested from a rat, scientists first stripped the old heart cells away with a detergent typically found in shampoos. That left behind a collagen matrix—the protein fibers that hold groups of cells together and help give organs their overall shape—which they then reseeded with heart cells from a newborn rat. They attached the organ to electrodes and waited. Then it happened: The heart started to beat regularly.”

Wow. If that doesn’t inspire you to think that anything is possible, I’m not sure what will. Best of luck for an inspired 2010.

Monitoring Adverse Events in Social Media for Pharma’s Biggest Brands: Hopeless Task or Simple Project?

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Hopeless Task?

Today’s post was co-written with Melissa Davies, Healthcare Research Director at Nielsen in the Online Division.

Key Points Summary (detailed post follows)

  • Reportable adverse events are far less common than most people suspect. There are only approximately 166 reportable adverse events per day recorded across the entire pharma industry.
  • Even for the biggest pharma brands, there are very few discussion happening online that include a mention about the brand. Only 36 per day for the biggest selling drug in the world, Lipitor.
  • When you consider the number of discussions that might have a reportable adverse event, it would take a long time to find one for most brands. For example, you can expect one reportable adverse event every 2 weeks for Lipitor (for the site monitored in this study).
  • For many pharma companies, it would be difficult, but not impossible to do this monitoring in house, as some automatic filtering could simplify things. Using call center employees, who are already trained in how to handle these discussions makes sense.
  • There are three categories of discussions that need to be screened: those you could skim past relatively quickly, those that might give pause for thought but could probably be filed away or handled with pre-approved response language, and those that may require escalation depending on the company’s social media and customer response policies. The time required to screen all discussions depends on the mix of these categories.
  • Companies need to determine what and why they are monitoring. This means determining if you’ll monitor only your sites or which 3rd party sites as well. Finding adverse events isn’t the only reason. Correcting misinformation, understanding patient needs, and engaging in dialogue (e.g., answering questions) are also reasons.
  • If companies are only monitoring their properties, expect a very low number of discussions and even few discussions that might be considered reportable adverse events.

Detailed Post

In a first for Dose of Digital, today’s post was co-written with Melissa Davies, Healthcare Research Director at Nielsen in the Online Division. Not familiar with Melissa, you say? I bet you’re familiar with her work especially if you’re  a regular reader of this blog. Melissa was the lead author for the now famous “1 in 500″ white paper about the incidence of adverse events (AEs) in social media. This is the report that showed the Internet isn’t chock full of reportable adverse events just waiting for the first unsuspecting pharma company to happen by and be crushed by the deluge. Rather, Melissa and her team’s work showed that only 1 in 500 (0.2%) randomly selected discussions (blogs, comments, forum posts, etc.) contained all four criteria required by the FDA to be considered a reportable adverse event. If you want more detail on this then check out my post The Myth of Adverse Event Reporting and definitely get the original paper (PDF) from Nielsen now as well.

Those are some pretty strong credentials to help me out with a follow up to my recent post 166 Reportable Adverse Events Equals One Red Herring. To create that post, I asked Melissa to supply some more information about the original Nielsen study. The reason for this is because in discussions with many people from the pharma industry, I discovered that many knew the “1 in 500″ stat, but remained concerned about the volume of AEs out there. Their rationale was simple: 0.2% of, say, 50 billion is still a pretty big number. Without knowing the number of total discussions, the 0.2% number doesn’t mean much. That meant figuring out how many new discussions are generated each day (and it’s not 50 billion).

The answer came from Melissa, who dug a bit into Nielsen’s database to answer a seemingly simple question: how many new pieces of healthcare-related content are generated each day online? Nielsen monitors 1,350 sites that it considers to be healthcare-specific (and millions of non-healthcare sites too). Looking at these 1,350 sites over time showed that, on average, there are more than 83,000 new pieces of content generated each day on these healthcare-specific sites. So, at least we know it’s not 50 billion.

That was the inspiration for my post. 0.2% X 83,000 = 166. There are 166 reportable adverse events generated each day for the entire pharma industry to handle. 166 isn’t a lot to me when you divide the work to manage these events across all the companies out there. Yes, larger companies are likely to have more and controversial products might also have more, but 166 for everyone to share is a pretty manageable number.

Almost immediately after this post went live, I was contacted by several pharma companies looking for some more information. Specifically, many weren’t convinced that it was quite this simple. That is, it may be one thing for Nielsen to scan through 500 messages and come up with 0.2% and to show the total volume, but it’s quite another for a pharma company to screen the more than 83,000 new pieces of content by hand themselves each day. How could one company possibly screen every single one of these pieces of content each day to find the few bits that refer to their products? What time commitment would be required to find these needles in all these virtual haystacks? When it comes to a particular brand, should they expect to find a few adverse events? Dozens? Hundreds?

I saw another objection to social media igniting before my eyes, so I decided to stomp out the flames before they got out of control.

I went back to Melissa and asked if they’d be interested in doing some more detailed analysis to show that the volume of drug mentions for any brand is quite manageable. They agreed and the result is this post. As I mentioned already, quite a few companies asked me after my “166″ post for the volume of discussions for their products. However, as this is how the folks at Nielsen make a living, we weren’t able to do with this. Instead, we decided to do a random selection of three companies from the top ten US pharma companies. The winners of this little lottery were Lilly, GSK, and Pfizer.

For each company, Nielsen looked at the top-selling products for this analysis. From their dataset of healthcare-specific websites, Nielsen BuzzMetrics collected, on average, more than 83,000 new discussions per day for the first half of 2009. Within this, there are a number of discussions about theses top-selling products. So, without further fanfare, here’s a look at the average number of discussions per day for the top five brands from each of the selected companies:

[Click on the image for a larger view]

Average Brand Buzz Per Day for Select Top Pharma Brands

Across these 15 brands, there are an average of 45.4 online discussions per day incorporating a brand mention. The volume of discussion can vary widely by brand. One interesting revelation: top sellers are not necessarily the most-buzzed brands. Lipitor and Advair, for example, are the two best-selling drugs among the 15 brands in the US (in dollar sales) and yet fall squarely in the middle of the pack for mentions. The top-mentioned product was Lyrica, which came in at number 8 of 15 in product sales.

Of course, there are many factors that can affect conversation volume, including disease state. It is interesting to see that some of the products you might expect to have a lot of volume based on their “controversial” nature don’t rise to the top. Cialis and Celebrex immediately come to mind. For the former, you might expect more off-color discussions cropping up, which would drive volume, but keep in mind, Nielsen only reviewed healthcare-specific sites for this analysis (so, any mention of Cialis on, say, PerezHilton.com, isn’t going to show up). In addition, mentions that included obvious spam terms such as “buy online” were excluded. For Celebrex, you might expect more volume based on the product’s past controversies. This doesn’t appear to be the case. However, volume can also change suddenly – when there is news about a brand (bad or good), a new market entrant, a public event related to the condition (Breast Cancer Awareness Month), etc.

So, that’s the raw data, the question now becomes: If a pharmaceutical brand wanted to monitor all of this discussion for things like adverse events, claim expansion, misinformation – or even just to understand what consumers are saying about the brand – can it be done in a practical manner?

To start, some filtering can be used to automate part of the process. For example, messages can be filtered for mentions of brand keywords. That’s what was done for this analysis. Nielsen filtered the more than 83,000 messages and pulled out only those messages that contained one of the 15 products selected for this analysis. It’s a very simple filter that every basic screening and monitoring tool can handle. The rationale for filtering out discussions that don’t contain a mention of a brand is that with this, you can’t have a reportable adverse event.

The next step is then sifting through all the mentions of your brand. The chart below shows how many discussions per day, on average, each brand would have to manage. For Cialis, about 17 discussions would have to be screened each day. For Lyrica, on the other hand, 132 discussions per day would have to be screened.

When you apply the “1 in 500″ statistic to these numbers, you get a better sense of how often a reportable adverse event is likely to show up.

[Click the image to enlarge]

Number of Days of Mentions to Find One Adverse Event

Translation: It takes a long time before a discussion with a reportable adverse event pops up. For example, it would take almost a month’s (29.6 days) worth of discussions to find one Geodon reportable adverse event. At the same time, you might expect to find one for Cymbalta every 5 days or so. Two things come to mind: first, that’s a lot of discussions to review without finding anything. Second, rather than being a deluge of  reportable adverse events, most brands aren’t even talked about that much making it much less likely that there are reportable AEs out there that you’re missing.

Since you might have to go through quite a few discussions to find one that requires your attention, let’s see at what the screening process might look like. First, the time required will vary greatly. Some discussions can almost instantly be determined not to have a reportable AE, while others are going to require some more time and attention.

Taking a look at some of the discussions seen for Lyrica (the most mentioned of the brands reviewed), you can basically group the discussions into one of three categories: those you could skim past relatively quickly (as they lack even the most basic information), those that might give pause for thought but could probably be filed away or handled with pre-approved response language (if you were doing actual outreach and engagement), and those that may require escalation depending on the company’s social media and customer response policies (these are the Discussions with potential reportable adverse events).

Here’s one of each from Lyrica [note: quotes are unedited]:

Skim past quickly: “i am doing much better thanks hun…i have neuropathy and use lyrica as well as ativan it does help me / lyrica helps with fibro….my very best to you and hubby…happy holidays sweetie” – from healingwell.com

Requires some thinking: “Aren’t they basically the same drug? Lyrica is just FAR more powerful than Neurontin? My Neuro explained Lyrica is 8x more powerful than Neurontin and if he up’s the Neruontin and makes an equiv. does it will be about the same response?” – from neurotalk.psychcentral.com

Might require escalation: “I am on my second try with Lyrica. I am on 75mg twice a day. I had dizzyness and blurred vision both times. The dizzyness has subsided, but the blurry vision is still there. I am on my 3rd week and so far I haven’t noticed any pain relief. Using it in combination with Nortriptylene and Lorcet for nerve pain in my ribs.” – from healingwell.com

So, the screening and coding for the 132 Lyrica discussions might only take a few minutes or could take an entire day and several people’s efforts if they are sufficiently complex. It all depends on how many of each category you have.

Beyond simply filtering for brand names, it’s possible to automate the process by looking for keywords related to known side effects, and/or keywords related to negative perception. However, this step brings up two key challenges. First is that any unknown side effects (which are the ones a brand might be most interested in discovering through this process) are the true “needles in the haystack” since they will likely not be covered by established keywords. That is, you’re not likely to find the unexpected and serious events that can really impact public health if only look for known side effects. Second is the challenge of using natural-language processing to accurately detect sentiment around healthcare messages. The nuances and unique considerations within healthcare discussion make it very tough to train a computer to digest what patients and caregivers care most about. Many monitoring companies, including Nielsen BuzzMetrics, use keywords to identify messages about a brand, and then use manual analysis to read and code messages for sentiment and topics of discussion. Manual analysis means that someone has to go through all the messages by hand at some point and determine what’s important and what’s not.

A pharmaceutical company could consider doing analysis process internally. Social media messages could be automatically screened for mentions of particular brand names, and then sent to a team within the company for review and follow-up action, if warranted. Within BuzzMetrics, they typically find that an analyst can read and code about 100 messages per day. That doesn’t include any internal routing or follow-up communications with original posters that a pharma company might want its employees to do, which would take additional time. An ideal group to handle this at pharma companies are those people already staffing your call center and who deal with adverse event reports received via phone (and other product inquiries). While they aren’t on a call or otherwise have a lull in the action, each person can review a handful of messages and determine if any need action. If they do find one, then the information is already in the hands of the right people at the company. Call center reps are trained on which issues they can handle directly and which need to be escalated. They understand the chain of command. They have established scripts to use over the phone, and some of this language (or key themes from it) can translate to the online world. And, of key importance, they know how to interact one-to-one with customers – which is really what social media is all about.

Let’s also keep one thing in mind. This volume of mentions is basically for all the social media discussions on all the health-related sites on the Internet (English-speaking only). These sites range from massive (like WebMD) to personal blogs with small followings. So, if you choose to monitor everything out there, this data shows what you can expect. However, under the current regulations, you are not required nor obligated to monitor third-party sites unless you are somehow connected with the site (as a sponsor, etc.). This means that you are only required to manage the sites that you maintain, own, or otherwise control in some way. This includes assets like your brand websites, any blogs, YouTube channels, Twitter (if someone DMs or replies directly to you), Facebook pages, and unbranded disease information and community sites. If you already have any of these, you know that you aren’t going to get a huge volume of discussions whether they be blog comments or YouTube comments. Most of the pharma social media programs that I’ve seen have received only a handful of comments over their entire lifetime. Even the most ambitious and well-known properties such as J&J’s BTW blog (the best healthcare industry blog IMO) don’t get very many comments. Their last 10 posts have 13 comments combined (and 6 of these came from Marc Monseau’s post “What’s the ROI?”). That’s 13 comments since October 27…not a lot to monitor. Of course, J&J might have gotten more comments than this and a few were removed in moderation, but based on what I know of this blog very, very few comments are not published.

The next question is: “why?” Why are you screening and scanning the entire Internet looking for adverse events? The answer might be simple. Perhaps you want to know what people are saying about your brand to help direct future communications. Maybe you’re actually going to talk back and not just listen in. You might also want to listen everywhere because of a genuine desire (whether legally required or not) to know everything you can about the safety of your product. You might be looking just to check for unexpected adverse events. Isn’t it better to find out early about a serious adverse event that keeps occurring and, yet, wasn’t seen in clinical trials? The longer you wait, the more lawsuits get lined up. Of course, more important than the legal issues, the longer you wait or the longer it takes to discover a new, serious adverse event, the more people who could be harmed or killed by the product.

Perhaps the other answer to “why?” might simply be to provide better service to customers by better understanding them. Not just to know about harmful effects, but to know about questions, misinformation, patient concerns about the medication, or about disease treatment in general. You can see from this and many other analyses that there isn’t a high volume of AEs in online conversation, so if we move past that, maybe better serving patients should be the ultimate goal of monitoring online discussions.

We’ve found that most companies actually do want to monitor everything that’s out there (before you do, read my post Why Pharma Should Forget About Social Media Monitoring), but they either lack a purpose behind their monitoring or they’re concerned about what they’ll find. The latter concern includes worrying about how to manage the volume of messages that are out there. However, this analysis shows that the volume isn’t unmanageable even for the biggest pharma brands and perhaps eliminates one more barrier to pharma and healthcare companies first observing and then participating in the discussions happening all around them.

The 7 Golden Rules in Digital Relationship Marketing

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This is part two of a series on relationship marketing. Please check out the first post,  7 Biggest Mistakes in Digital Relationship Marketing, and make sure you’re not committing any of these before figuring out how to fix them. That post will also give you a bit more background on relationship marketing, but I’ll include a brief overview here as well.

[PS: If you're looking for more on my take of how relationship marketing and pharma fit together, then check out my white paper on "The Future of Digital Relationship Marketing in Pharma." It's the most downloaded white paper on Dose of Digital.]

Here’s our definition of relationship marketing (courtesy of our Chief Marketing Strategist, Bob Gilbreath):

“Relationship marketing is ongoing, direct, added-value communication.”

Ongoing: It’s a rhythm of regular, expected communication.

Direct: It doesn’t mean buying media, but owning it: You have permission to communicate, and it can be done in many forms.

Added Value: The marketing itself fills a need; usually, the greater the value to the customer, the greater the ROI.

That last one is important: “fills a need.” If you’re not doing that, then you’re probably just annoying your customers.

So, to ensure you’re not doing this, I’m going to share with you what I call the 7 Golden Rules of Digital Relationship Marketing. This is your list of “what to do.” Follow these seven rules and you’ll be well on your way to a very successful program.

One note, some people refer to relationship marketing as CRM, or customer relationship marketing (or management). For the purposes of this post, I’m saying they are the same thing.

So, here’s the list of what TO do:

7 Golden Rules in Digital Relationship Marketing

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  1. Sharing, partnering, endorsing
  2. Perfect pitch
  3. Personalized and individualized
  4. Keep it simple, stupid
  5. Members only
  6. Personal investment
  7. It’s not about you

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1. Sharing, partnering, endorsing

sharethisbox

If you are completely reliant on your own promotional efforts to increase enrollments in your program, then you’re missing a giant opportunity. At a bare minimum, you should include social sharing tools that make it easy for people to share your offers with others and encourage them to join your program. Incentive strategies, where you pay current members something for each new member they enroll, fit in here as well. Beyond social sharing, if your program is good enough, you can look towards industry groups and, in the case of healthcare, patient advocacy groups to grow your enrollment. If your program is valuable enough to their members, these groups will help you and will be your most effective enrollment tool. In the case of healthcare, physicians can become recruiters too if you show them how your program both benefits their patients and helps them to more easily manage these patients.

2. Perfect pitch


(Image from The Brand Builder Blog)

In order to keep people engaged over time, you have to communicate with them regularly (but not too regularly) and about things they care about at that moment. This is simple to achieve if you’re willing to do a little planning. Before building anything, plan out what you want to say and what channel you think is best to communicate it. From there figure out when it makes the most sense to communicate. For example, you probably should hold your stories about cold and flu until cold and flu season hits. Once you have these three pieces, then it’s simply a matter of laying it all out on a timeline.

Doing this accomplishes three things. First, it ensures that you’re covering your main points of communication and what your customers care about over a set time period. Second, it also serves as a commitment and motivation tool for you. Once you have it down in your timeline, you’re far more likely to actually do the work to launch the piece on time. It makes it far more tangible. Finally, having a quality timeline will help you make budget decisions should you receive more funding or (more likely) have some cut. You’ll be able to tell where you have additional capacity or where you can use some more.

3. Personalized and individualized

I’ve written about this before and spelled out what I think the difference is between these two terms (yes, there is a difference).

Personalization means adding some personally identifying information to your communications. This usually means putting someone’s name on the top of an email or direct mail piece. It’s remarkably simple to do with digital media and has become very simple (and cost effective) in print as well. Adding someone’s name to an email, for example, is much better than sending an email with “Dear Person” or “Dear Cancer Person.” I only joke because I have seen these before. I assume they were mistakes, but I saw them.

Individualization is something different. For our purposes, individualization means creating communications that are tailored for each and every individual person. The test to see if you’re sending out individualized messages is simple: does someone read what you sent and think, “Wow. They wrote this just for me.” If not, then it’s not individualized. This too can be really simple and more and more companies are embracing it. Here’s a great example that my colleague, Bob Gilbreath, wrote about on his Marketing with Meaning blog:

Delta Individualization Example

First, Delta included his name. Good. That’s personalization. However, then they go on and apologize for sticking him in a middle seat on his last flight and offer him some miles to say sorry. Interesting point to note, Bob didn’t ask for this or complain to Delta. They just did it. Delta knew the situation and sent an individualized response. Question: if Bob got this email and the 500 miles or another email that simply gave him 500 miles without the individualized touch, which would have more impact? Each results in the same value for him, 500 miles. But clearly the one that talks about his specific situation makes a lasting impression. So, you can’t just give away stuff and expect that to be enough. You have to make the extra effort to make it meaningful.

If you invest the time and effort to know what your customers are doing and what will be meaningful to them, then your communications will become more and more relevant to them. As they pass over hundreds of other emails they receive, but can’t remember why, yours will be the one that stands out.

4. Keep it simple, stupid

We marketers like to complicate stuff. One of these things I mentioned in the 7 Biggest Mistakes in Digital Relationship Marketing. It was number 4: Make it hard. Basically, if you make your enrollment process really difficult or make it a hugely daunting task to get any sort of individualized information, people just aren’t going to do it. So, you have to make it easy…simple, that is. Of course, our programs can be highly complex and necessitate a knowing a bunch of information in order to give good information back. That’s all right.

If your program requires a complex or lengthy process to yield the best information in return, you can’t just start with this. You need to start with a “light” version of your process to get people interested and engaged. Later on, you can add in something more complex once people are committed to your program and want to do even more with it.

For ConAgra Foods’ program Start Making Choices, our company (Bridge Worldwide), created two different ways to get individualized information. The first consists of just five questions on a simple slider bar design:

Start Making Choices Basic Survey

If people wanted the most individualized information (likely after seeing the quality information they received from the “light” survey) and their personal Balanced Life Index (BLI), then they are presented with a 23 question, multiple choice, survey. However, instead of making this question after question of text (or worse, 23 pages with one question each), we created an engaging design in which people swiftly entered all the relevant information. They did this because the questions were simple, but also the design kept them clicking and onto the next question, which kept dropout rates at a very low level.

Start Making Choices Full BLI Survey

5. Members only

Everyone likes being part of an exclusive club. They like the special perks that come along with membership and they like the prestige that comes with being a member. They like knowing that they’re getting something that everyone else can’t get. That’s just human nature. Do you belong to any clubs like this? Better question: do you wish you did?

Neiman Marcus InCircle

Take Neiman Marcus’ InCircle program. On the surface, it’s basically a rewards program. Spend this much, we give you this much. However, because it’s Neiman Marcus, they are also dealing with people who are members of a lot exclusive programs and for whom a $100 gift card isn’t that meaningful. Neiman Marcus needs to provide them much more. So, when you get to the President’s Circle (just spend $75,000 or more in a year), you get special offers that others don’t such as exclusive off-hour shopping events.

Not every program is like InCircle, but the concept is the same. You need to reward your customers who are part of your programs lavishly and regularly. They are your best customers, the ones that spend the most, and who talk about your products to others. They’re the most engaged, as evidenced by them joining your program in the first place. Keeping them your customer is an important priority. One note of caution, simply giving people incentives without changing their underlying attitude is one of the 7 Biggest Mistakes in Digital Relationship Marketing (number 5, Dollars don’t change everything).

Giving gifts to people in the healthcare space is pretty much prohibited either by company or government policy in most countries, so this makes it a bit more challenging. You have to think beyond gifts and consider things like access. This could be access to industry experts like, say, the leading physician in lung cancer treatment. If your patients are fighting lung cancer, they want to hear what this person has to say. Limiting it to members provides a special reward to those who have given you something (their business and trust) and also makes it possible to do more. You can do more because instead of spending $5 on a hundred thousand people to give them some tiny gift, you can spend the same amount and conduct a series of powerful programs (and even travel to where patients are). That’s just one example, but the point is clear. You can provide member benefits in any industry regardless of the specific regulations.

6. Personal investment

If people aren’t personally invested in your program, it’ll be a failure. Their investment is almost always their time (but can also be financial in the case of membership fees). Time is very valuable to people especially people who are fighting a disease. They don’t have time to invest on every website about their disease. They have to focus on one or two for the long-term and everything else is likely to be ignored.

People must invest their own time in order to be engaged with your program over time . There is only one way to get people to invest their time: give them something of value in exchange for their time. This doesn’t mean offering them rewards for coming back to your site or buying things. It means that your program should become more valuable to them for each minute they invest. A great example of this is Patients Like Me.

Patients Like Me Profile

The more information you provide about your disease (including tracking your progress and compliance with treatments everyday), the more you’ll learn about your disease. You’ll be able to track your progress against “the norm” and receive information on how to improve your situation. If you’re not willing to input this information up-front and over time, you won’t get much out of the site. However, if you are willing to do this, you receive a hugely valuable item in return: information on how to improve your health.

7. It’s not about you

This is a common sin committed by us marketers. I’ve talked about this before in the context of how to appropriately participate in social media. The same idea applies here. People inherently don’t care about your brand. Actually, they don’t care about your brand as much as you do. Because of this, creating a program that only features your brand is sure to be a failure. Instead, you need to balance your program with a mix of information about your brand and related information from which your customers are likely to get additional value.

P&G EverydaySolutions

P&G maintains one of the largest consumer databases in the world and is among the biggest users of relationship marketing. Our company works on Everyday Solutions, which is the central program for all of P&G’s products. It’s a single stop for brand offers and new product announcements, but there’s much more. There is also relevant content that matches with what each consumer has either said is an area or interest or whose behavior (pages visited, coupon offers redeemed, etc.) indicates that they are likely interested. In other words, people come to the site (or open emails or direct mail) not just for product offers and discounts, but also for other information. Those who initially come for offers see that there’s more to it than just a couple dollars off a certain purchase. This encourages them to return or to sign up for the program.

To be sure, the brands are prominently featured and are the focus of the program, but it’s not just one brand message after another. Every marketer wants to get in every core message at each customer “touch,” but that’s not necessarily a winning long-term strategy. There will be time for your messages if you can show people that your program is more than just a commercial.

Those are the 7 Golden Rules of Digital Relationship Marketing. Follow these and your program will be head and shoulders above nearly everything else out there. In case you missed them, be sure to check out the 7 Biggest Mistakes in Digital Relationship Marketing so you know what to avoid.

If you’d like a POWERPoint version of this, you’re in luck. You can download a copy of The 7 Golden Rules in Digital Relationship Marketing (349 downloads) right here. One request: if you do download it, how about sending out a tweet?

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