Social Media Wiki

Your Computer Is the Next Wonder Drug (Video)

For those who have been following the blog, you know that I recently spoke at the SXSW conference in Austin (more details here including why pharma companies should care). My talk was entitled: Your Computer Is the Next Wonder Drug.

The idea is simple and here’s how I described the talk on the SXSW site:

A few times each year, the press buzzes about the latest scientific advance that will someday cure any one of the diseases we fear the most. Nearly every one of these will turn out to be nothing more than a news story and far from a pill that can help improve our health.

We spend hundreds of millions of dollars every day on research, as we struggle to find the “magic bullet” that will rid the world of conditions such as cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. We almost never find the magic.

While the big, historic scientific advances may be what dominate the headlines, in the end, it’s the small improvements and better utilization of the technology we have already have that will ultimately lengthen ourlives and improve its quality. These technologies don’t come from labs filled with test tubes or cell cultures, but rather from labs filled with computers and the programs that run them.

In the future, it will be digital technologies that prevent, treat, and finally cure diseases and not the latest “blockbuster” drug that has yet to be discovered (and might never be). Digital technologies can already help us understand which treatments are best for us, what diseases pose the greatest risk, and how diseases spread among us. They can improve our interactions with doctors and improve access to care for everyone.

Instead of waiting for the next miracle drug to be developed, you might find the miracle was there all along right inside the computer you use every day.

You’ll be hearing and seeing more about this topic on Dose of Digital in the future. It’s going to be the focus of a book I’m working on that I hope you’ll get to see sometime in the not terribly distant future (but think in terms of years, not months).
(Click to read the rest…)

Introducing Healthy Thinkers: Doing Some Good in Healthcare

I just had a major revelation over the Thanksgiving weekend. I realized that my social network includes many people within the healthcare industry and that those people, if they worked together, could have a dramatic impact on the future of healthcare. Some of these people work for “big pharma” or medical device companies. Others run successful non-profits or have launched healthcare technology startups. Some others provide consulting to the industry and have been responsible for many of the positive changes in healthcare over the years.

At the same time, I realized that there are a lot of people out there that still need a lot of help from the healthcare community. This might be support for an important initiative, the ear of someone who can bring a new idea or product innovation to life, or even help paying for a prescription.  I realized that it would be simple to bring together many of the people that could help fulfill some of these ideas and requests with those that need help. That’s why I created Healthy Thinkers.

The concept is simple. People submit their idea or requests to the community. The community discusses and votes up the best of these. From there, the community uses all of its social connections to make sure the idea or request gets in front of someone who can actually make it happen. It’s a “degrees of separation” concept. Among all the people that will read this post (and hopefully many more who will join the community), we’re probably only a few degrees of separation away from that key person. For example, maybe someone has an innovative idea for how J&J can improve its OneTouch diabetes monitoring products. I would guarantee that someone reading this post right now knows someone on the OneTouch product team. I’ve found out over the years that our healthcare “family” is pretty small.

I was inspired to put Healthy Thinkers together by a few things. First, it was requests that I received to help people out with healthcare-related requests. The first of these was the Diabetes Hands Foundation who asked me to help them spread the word about their Big Blue Test initiative. I did via this blog post and they far exceeded their goal (not just through my efforts to be sure). Right around the same time, someone asked me if I knew anyone at a certain medical device company so that they could contact them to ask for supplies for a mission trip to Africa. I did and this person got what he needed. And within days of that, an acquaintance asked if I knew how to get a discount on her new medication, as it was way too expensive for her. I knew someone from the product team for the brand she was prescribed and that person got my acquaintance enrolled in one of the brand’s assistance programs. It was a bit fortunate that I personally could help facilitate each of these, but I realized that I don’t know everyone and maybe I just got a little lucky.

So, not one to count on luck, my idea is simple: bring together a bunch of people who have connections throughout healthcare with those that need some type of assistance or support and start solving some problems. You see, I think we do an awful lot of talking, so let’s do something instead.

Pharma companies…you want to know how to get involved in social media? Get involved in this community and offer to help where you can. Nothing but positive PR awaits you.

Consultants and ad agency people…you want to use your skills to help people directly beyond what you do for clients? Join the community and use your contacts to solve some problems.

Patients, caregivers, non-profits…you need help or advice from some key people in healthcare? Come to the community and tell us how we can help.

Will this work? Well, here’s what I know. One of my favorite sites is Reddit. No one is going to claim for a second that this is a serious community of any kind (hilarious as it may be). Think of it as a much better version of Digg. Recently, I started to notice some people asking for real help on the site and actually getting it. I did a little more research and came across a post called “Reddit’s Astonishing Altruism.” Some of the acts include users paying for a shopping spree for a dying girl, helping track down a murderer, and bringing a family music heirloom to life (read that one for sure). However, I noticed that there two things on this list that Reddit shouldn’t have had to handle, but did: buying a new wheelchair for someone who couldn’t afford one and buying a new type of hearing aid for a young woman who was deaf since she was 7.

My question is why couldn’t our community handle this? For instance, our agency has worked with one of the leading manufacturers of wheelchairs in the world and I personally know someone who works for a leading hearing aid company. Knowing these folks, I’m sure they could have persuaded their companies to donate these items.

Call me idealistic if you want, but I think we can do better. I think we have a responsibility to do this and we can do a lot of good with very little effort. So, here’s your call to action:

Join Healthy Thinkers today. Here’s the link: http://healthythinkers.ideascale.com

  • Register. Sign up and tell us who you are. You can be semi-anonymous if you’d like. If you’re a company that might be able to help, start monitoring this forum for places you can help. If you can’t do this, we’ll find you when we need you.
  • Advocate. Spread the word to as many people in healthcare as you can. We need not only the people who can deliver on these ideas and requests, but also people who are going to submit them. So, don’t just tell the people around your office, share it with friends on Facebook too. Know people in the press? Tell them too.
  • Participate. Start a post, comment on an existing one, and vote.
  • Solve. If you see an idea or request you can help with, step up. Respond or pass it along to a contact who can make it happen.

If you want to spread the word about Healthy Thinkers, here’s some shortcuts. Click Like to share on Facebook. Include a comment so your friends actually notice it in their News Feed.

Or send a tweet about the community:

We’ll be posting success stories as they happen and also updates on big needs that still aren’t fulfilled on the blog for Healthy Thinkers (still a work in progress, so bear with me). Also, the top ideas and requests will automatically be tweeted by the @HealthyThinkers Twitter account, so follow that to see what’s new and hot on the site.

Over the next few days, I’ll be introducing you to some volunteer “Connectors” who are going to help moderate the site, but also have agreed to use some of their extensive connections to make sure these ideas and requests get done. If you’re interested in becoming one, then send me a message.

One final point, Healthy Thinkers is a completely non-profit, non-promotional effort. There is no money to be made, so don’t join up if you’re looking to promote yourself or your company. I’ve already told you what the site is for, so I hope that motivates every one of you to take a look.

Once more, join Healthy Thinkers today. Here’s the link: http://healthythinkers.com

Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki September Update

It’s been a while and many of you have asked what happened to the update you’ve submitted, so here they are. Welcome to the latest update to the Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki. The last update came in late June,  so it’s been a while. Thanks to everyone for your patience.

This month’s update includes 37 new additions to the wiki bringing the total to almost 650 entries. Some highlights from this month:

  • Six new HCP communities
  • Seven new Facebook pages
  • Two new corporate blogs (including one from Lilly)
  • Seven new industry Twitter accounts

Instructions for recommending an addition to the Wiki are included on the page. A couple things to consider before you submit. Currently, we’re not adding hospitals or healthcare groups (such as large physician group practices). The main reason for this is because there’s a great source for this already in Ed Bennett’s Hospital Social Networking List. In addition, I’m happy to include your blog (especially for you “industry observers”) on the list, but I ask that it be somewhat established before you ask for it to be included. There’s no set rule, but 10 posts as a minimum is probably a good rule of thumb. Also for “industry observers,” there’s currently not a place for your Facebook, YouTube, etc. page. For now, it’s just your blogs and Twitter accounts. If you have questions, just contact me.

If I sent you a note saying that you’d be included in the next update and you don’t see your listing, please contact me and I can explain why it was not included.

Here’s the link to the wiki:

Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki

Announcement

If you’re someone who’s really interested in the wiki, then you probably will enjoy the upcoming 2010 e-Patient Connections Conference. I’ll be chairing the “Social Pharmer” track along with Shwen Gwee from Vertex Pharmaceuticals. It’s next week, so you’ve only got a few more days left to register.

For those who didn’t attend this conference last year (its debut), expect another top notch event with a slate of great speakers on numerous topics (plus some nice gifts).

You can also register for my pre-conference workshop: “The Social Media Accelerator.” This highly interactive workshop provides a quick way to catch up on social media in healthcare, including a review of the most and least effective social media marketing programs across industries. You’ll learn about the social media platforms used by patients and physicians and discuss opportunities and challenges of social media marketing, including within the context of DDMAC regulations. You’ll leave with a “best practice” process for creating and approving social media programs within your organization. Bring your questions, as there will be some good discussion time.

You can register now  2010 e-Patient Connections Conference. Readers of this blog get $300 off  registration if you use code “rx2010″ when you register.  [Disclosure: I am co-chair for this conference and I receive a referral fee for registrations from this blog.]

Supporting the Wiki

Many of you have asked what you can do to support the wiki, as you’ve found it so useful. Well, there are a few things you can do since you asked:

  • First and foremost, without your contributions, the wiki wouldn’t be what it is today and it would quickly become outdated. You can submit your recommendations for inclusion (including your own site) using this form.
  • Click the “Recommend” button at the top of the page to share this page on Facebook.
  • Share with your network. Here are some shortcuts: Send a tweet, update your LinkedIn or Facebook status, and/or whatever your preferred means of sharing is. You can just copy and paste this: “Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki. http://t11.me/HCT-ER. (via @jonmrich)”
  • Write about it. Feel free to blog about the wiki and use some of the examples in case studies or presentations you’re developing.
  • Get a badge. That’s right, if you’re listed on the wiki, you can now add a badge to your site to show that you’ve made it to the list. We’ve created a couple of options to choose from. (If you’re not listed and think you should be, see the first bullet above on how to do that.)

Option 1

Dose of Digital Pharma and Social Media Wiki Badge v1

Copy and paste the code below onto your site:

<form><a href="http://www.doseofdigital.com/healthcare-pharma-social-media-wiki/" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.doseofdigital.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/doseofdigitalwikibadge1.jpg"/></a></form>

Option 2

Dose of Digital Pharma and Social Media Wiki Badge v2

Copy and paste the code below onto your site:

<form><a href="http://www.doseofdigital.com/healthcare-pharma-social-media-wiki/" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.doseofdigital.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/doseofdigitalwikibadge2.jpg"/></a></form>

Again, thank you all for your contributions. If you have any suggestions on how to improve the wiki, please let me know.

16 Social Media Precedent Setters

Dose of Digital Mini White Paper

prec·e·dent

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

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

(via Dictionary.com)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blogs

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

JNJ BTW – Johnson & Johnson’s corporate blog

AZ Health Connections – AstraZeneca’s corporate blog

More than Medicine – GSK’s corporate blog

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

YouTube

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

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

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

Facebook

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

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

Twitter

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

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

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

@azhelps on Twitter

Communities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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