This blog is all about the latest technology advances that are going to improve our health and lengthen our lives. It's not the blockbuster drug advances, but digital technology that will lead the health revolution. I'm your author, Jonathan Richman.
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I’m at the ePharma Summit conference today and have heard a lot of good information about what pharma companies should be doing next in digital marketing. The usual “sexy” topics like social media, of course, are dominating the conversation. Mobile apps are too, as you might have guessed. So, I decided to take a different approach in my talk and do the least exciting presentation of the conference. That is, everything I’m presenting will be things you already know you should be doing.
A while back, I wrote a post called “Why Your Facebook Page Doesn’t Exist,” which got a good response, but made a few people a bit nervous. I’m back to make more people even more nervous today. If you thought having a Facebook page that no one really ever saw was bad, how about if I tell you that no one sees your emails either? Ugh.
Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that day may be close courtesy of your friends at Google. With little fanfare, a couple of weeks ago, Google launched Priority Inbox for Gmail. Here’s a quick overview of what it is:
Two things…first, if you use Gmail, I guarantee you just went and activated this. Second, if you use email marketing for your brand or company, that video probably made you a bit uneasy. I activated this the second I heard about it and couldn’t wait to see how it worked. It didn’t disappoint. For those who didn’t watch the video, what Priority Inbox does (as its name suggests) is prioritize your email messages by highlighting the ones it deems most important. These most important emails move to the top of the list to a section called “Important and Unread” regardless of when they were received. It looks like this:
Handy, eh? How does it work? Simple really. Google took its really great spam filter and basically told it to do the exact opposite. Instead of finding the most useless messages (spam), find the most important. Its a brilliant little tweak that works really well. For now, this only works on the Web version of Gmail, but the concept is too powerful for it to remain exclusively there for long. Nearly every email platform and corporate email provider has spam filtering, so how long before they make the same tweak as Google and offer this same prioritization? For providers looking to grab some corporate market share, this is a nice feature that any client would probably like to add.
I can say that in my two weeks of using Priority Inbox I’ve noticed two things. First, it works almost perfectly, meaning it doesn’t categorize much incorrectly. You can correct it when it does so that it gets even smarter, so by now it’s running almost flawlessly for me. Second, all I could think about when I was using this was when I could get the same thing for my corporate email account on Outlook. It might be a little while, but know that it’s coming.
As a marketer, and one who works for a digital marketing agency that manages a lot of CRM programs for a lot of clients that includes a lot of email, Priority Inbox both excites me and scares the hell out of me. To be sure, for all the noise about social media, I’m still a big fan of email (see here: “Pharma Can Use Email Marketing to Improve…Everything“). Why am I a big fan with all the buzz about social media? Simple. Email sells cases. Period. It works. For now (and this might change in the very near future), there are very few tactics that can deliver as immediate, predictable, and measurable results as email marketing. Having said that, Google might just be out to change all that.
Remember, Google’s goal is to get you to use more of Google products. So, they continuously make them better and introduce new ones. As you use it more, guess what? You see more text ads that you eventually click on. When you do, cha-ching, money for Google. It’s a system that works really well for them and, frankly, for me as a consumer. It’s a fine tradeoff to be able to use Gmail for free seeing as it’s something I would gladly pay quite a bit for. Google’s goal is not to get your brand’s email opened or clicked. Their goal is to make Gmail better. Better means that it’s quicker and easier to use. One of the best ways to make it quicker is to help people sort out all the junk and get to the important stuff.
As you can see, there are a bunch of commercial emails that filled up my email inbox for just one day. One other thing…none of them are read. I don’t care about any of them. For most, I don’t remember when I even signed up for them and, frankly, I’m too lazy to unsubscribe from them (check out the cartoon at the end of this post for some additional perspective). Google knows this. So, with Priority Inbox, I never have to even address these anymore or worry about losing an important email amongst the clutter. In the two weeks of using Priority Inbox, only one commercial email has ended up in my “Important and Unread” section of Gmail. One out of probably 150. I’m not totally sure why that one ended up there, so I told Gmail not to make the same mistake in the future, which I’m certain won’t be a problem.
If you’re using email marketing for your brand or company, you should be a little nervous. The point you should notice by now is that I’m (and your other subscribers) likely not seeing your email. I’m not seeing it because Google doesn’t think it’s important to me. They’re right. While Google has marked some important messages with normal status, I can fix this by marking them as Important, so that the filter does a little better next time. I’ve done this for about 10 messages in the past two weeks. I can tell you that not once have I done this with a commercial email. I’ve also realized that I haven’t missed a single one. I haven’t been wondering where my email from company X is or when my regularly update from company Y is coming.
How does Google figure out which emails are important and which aren’t? Here’s how they explain it: “Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most (if you email Bob a lot, a message from Bob is probably important) and which messages you open and reply to (these are likely more important than the ones you skip over).” So, if you’re a marketer and want me to see your email, get me to do the following:
Open your email
Reply to your email
Send you an email
Easy, right?
Nope. You probably notice the problem. There aren’t really any commercial email campaigns out there that invite people to respond back to the email (in fact, most explicitly tell you not to reply) and there isn’t any reason why I’d send an email your company’s email program. Let’s assume those are out of your control. There might be some other factors, too. Google doesn’t like to give away the full algorithm for any of its products so that no one can game the system. However, you can probably assume that clicking on a link in an email is probably important, but we don’t know for sure. So, the one factor that you know is important and you can affect is open rate.
Am I opening your emails? Probably not and no one else is either. According to Epsilon, email open rates are around 22% in their most recent data. Also, this data shows that the average click rate is 5.3% (down from last year) and yet the average volume of email sent per company is up 10.6% compared to last year. Bottom line, companies are sending more email and people are finding these emails less relevant. Combine this with the birth of Priority Inbox and it’s a potential perfect storm for companies relying on email marketing.
Putting Priority Inbox aside, one goal for your email program is obviously to get people to open the email and probably to click on it. Epsilon noted that “Consumers are much more likely to open messages that contain relevant content based on their past behavior and preferences.” Are you making content that is relevant to people? If you’re sending emails about the latest sales on dresses to your male customers, you’re probably not hitting this mark. That’s pretty easy to avoid. How about ensuring that you aren’t sending me emails for engagement rings since I’ve been married for almost (17 more days) 8 years? Those are just the basics. You need to invest a little to really understand your customers, record their preferences and past behavior, and create something that’s meaningful to them. It’s not impossible.
I’m not one to pat any airline’s marketing efforts on the back, but here’s a simple example of a highly individualized email from Delta in my post “Personalization and Individualization…What’s the Difference?“. This is all you need to do. If your current CRM database isn’t capable of collecting this type of information and automatically generating an email like Delta’s, then you need a new system. If it is capable and you’re not using it, start today (if you need help, feel free to contact me and find out how my company can help you).
For all you skeptics and cynics out there who are thinking that Priority Inbox isn’t worth getting nervous about, consider this. Gmail has more than 176 million users now (according to ComScore data). Go through your email database and see what percentage are Gmail users. I guarantee that it’s higher than what you’d expect. For my part, 16% of subscribers for the Dose of Digital White Paper and Presentation email list are Gmail users (PS: sign up here). Fortunately for me, these people must find the content of the emails relevant, as around 50% have opened one of the most recent emails I sent (which is around once every 4-6 weeks). This means that Google is more likely to put a future email I send in the Important and Unread section of these subscribers’ inboxes. If the emails aren’t relevant all of a sudden, I’d expect that to change pretty quickly.
And while, 176 millions users might not be enough to sway you (I’m not sure why though), rest assured that this type of feature will be coming to other email providers and platforms in the near future. Gmail today…everyone else tomorrow.
Besides creating better emails, what else can you do? I’ll give you one big tip that only those dedicated few who have made it all the way through this post are going to get. Thanks for sticking around. Okay, here it is. Right now, it seems like the thing to do now with email is to ask subscribers to Like you on Facebook or follow you Twitter. That’s fine. However, if you are like other marketers, you probably do more marketing via email than social media, so it’s critical to get the email stuff right before worrying about social media (this from me, who is “Director of Social Media”, so you know I think it’s important). So, how about asking your subscribers to do something different? Instead of asking them to Like you, how about asking them to increase the priority of your email?
What?
Assuming that your email didn’t land in the Important and Unread section of their Gmail, then you need to help ensure it does next time. You can do this by having them flag the message with a higher priority. If they do it, then the next time you send an email to this person it’ll likely appear in the Important and Unread section. I know what you’re thinking…that’s just one person…we’ve got thousands (or millions) in our database. Showing up in the priority section of one person’s inbox isn’t helping us. Well, you see Gmail is smarter than that. When enough people mark the same email as spam in Gmail or the same company’s emails are keep getting marked as spam by a bunch of people, guess what? Gmail eventually categorizes it as spam for everyone and sends it directly to your Gmail spam folder. Since Priority Inbox uses the same algorithms as Gmail’s spam filter, you can be fairly sure that it uses the same general idea. That is, if enough people increase the priority of a company’s emails, then eventually Gmail will classify them as important for everyone. So, maybe your next email should have a little diagram like this as a call to action.
If you read this and said to yourself, “that great, but it would annoy all the people who aren’t Gmail subscribers if we included this in an email to all of subscribers,” then you need a new email database or a new way of looking at the one you have. Even the most basic systems (including nearly-free Mailchimp, which I use for Dose of Digital) allow you to filter out people based on email address. So, create one version of your monthly email that goes to people with Gmail addresses that includes whatever content you want plus this new call to action. For those who don’t have a Gmail address, send them the usual. [PS: the next step is to stop sending requests for people to Like you on Facebook who don't have Facebook accounts or who already Like you (or do you?), but that's a post for another day.]
So, there are a few ideas of what to do to get ready for Priority Inbox from Gmail and at the same time make your email campaigns more effective. As some parting inspiration, here’s a great cartoon I found that gives you an idea of how not to conduct your email program. If this reminds you of your program, Priority Inbox is the least of your problems.
If you’re looking for more about digital marketing in pharma, register for the 2010 E-patient Connections Conference. This year’s conference features three different tracks: mobile, gaming, and, yes, social. I’m co-chairing the Social Pharmer track, so expect a different approach compared to the regular conferences you’re used to.
I’m also teaching a tutorial the day before the conference called “Social Media Accelerator.” This will be an interactive workshop that will provide a quick way to catch up on social media in healthcare, including a review of the most and least effective social media marketing programs across industries. You’ll learn about the social media platforms used by patients and physicians and discuss opportunities and challenges of social media marketing, including within the context of DDMAC regulations. You’ll leave with a “best practice” process for creating and approving social media programs within your organization. Bring your questions, as there will be some good discussion time.
Register for the conference and use code “rx2010” (no quotes) and you’ll get $300 off. As a further incentive (as if you need one), everyone who registers gets a free Zeo Personal Sleep Coach system and some other great gifts too.
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:
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.
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.
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.
For those of you who learned and remembered this type of information from your grade school days, congratulations. Geography is a tough subject for most of us. There was a time (not too long ago) when it would have been pretty challenging to find the answer to this question if you didn’t learn it at some point in the past and remember it. For those who didn’t know the answer and “Googled” it, accidentally stumbled upon the point of today’s post.
Recall a time not too long ago when you didn’t have Internet access. If you wanted to find out a capital of a country, you didn’t have much choice but to look it up in a book. If you had some encyclopedia’s on hand, you could find it there. You might even find it in one of those giant unabridged dictionaries or an almanac. If you didn’t have any of those, you were out of luck. You could call a friend to get the answer, but you certainly couldn’t send them a tweet or even an email.
Things have changed very dramatically in the past 15 years or so, such that it isn’t necessary for you to have a set of encyclopedias in your house should someone challenge you on the capital of Norway (which is, of course, Oslo). To find the answer today, you just search for it online. We even have a new word to describe it: “I Googled it.” For you youngsters out there, there wasn’t always a company called Google, much less a verb based on it. Today, of course, you can find out the answer to any factual question almost instantly no matter where you are. With mobile technology advancing very quickly, you can do much of what a desktop PC can do with only an iPhone. If you compared the guidance computers used for the Apollo moon missions to an iPhone, the two wouldn’t even appear to have been developed by the same species, much less separated by less than 40 years. One stat: the Apollo computer’s speed was 1.024 MHz. My iPhone’s is 600 MHz (my laptop is 2.53 GHz, which is about 2000 times faster than Apollo’s). Enough geek talk, what’s the point?
The point is that there’s no reason to waste your time learning capitals of countries. With this type of information at your fingertips in an instant, wouldn’t your time be better spent elsewhere versus the hours required to memorize information you might never need? Yes, there’s value in learning, but not memorizing information like this. The value come from learning how to remember things and how to process information.
Let me put it more plainly. Basic information has no value. It has no monetary value and very little time value. Since you can get it anywhere for free, almost instantly, it’s a waste of resources to learn it and have it cataloged in your own head.
Instead, what you do with this information is far more useful. That’s what people pay money for. That’s why we hire consultants. For example, we don’t pay them to tell us the capitals of countries, but rather which ones are likely to have the biggest influence in global economics in the next 10 years.
The question for content producers (and if you’re reading this and have a website, you’re one of them) is what this means for your content creation strategy and what value you provide to people. If you’re giving them information they can get elsewhere, then you aren’t adding value. I’ve already shown you “How Google and Bing Plan to Eliminate the Need for WebMD” by providing basic disease state and medication information, such that you never have to even leave the search engine to get it, much less dig through your website.
This change is happening now and will only exacerbate in the future. Less and less content will be stored in people’s heads and we’ll focus more on interpretation. Less and less value will be placed on basic information, as it will be everywhere, easy to access, and completely free. As a marketer, do you know how you can prepare for this future and to lead the change as it’s happening now?
That’s what I’m here for.
Before we go any further, you have to accept the fact that “content is king” isn’t really true anymore. While Bill Gates coined the term (good trivia question BTW), it’s been adopted by entertainment companies most recently. Ironically, you don’t need to look much further than these companies to see that this phrase no longer holds true. They have been the first to have their business models turned upside-down simply because the content itself isn’t as valuable as it used to be.
There are two different areas that you need to look for a future “king.” Cataloging and Calculation. Try these on for size: “Cataloging is king” or “Calculation is king.”
Cataloging is King
For as much as I might talk about how wonderful it is that content is available everywhere, in massive amounts, and for free, there’s a problem. Content is available everywhere, in massive amounts, and for free. That’s right…it’s good and bad. You already know the benefits, but here’s the downside. With all the content out there, it becomes very difficult for people to find exactly what they need. It’s simple to find the capital of Norway, but what about finding how many people lived in Norway in 1980 compared to 2000. That information exists, but not all in one, nice, neat place and not in this format. At best, you’d have to look up the populations in both years and break out your calculator to do the rest. Or do you? The evolution is already in up and running: WolframAlpha. While it’s still a little hard to use if you’re not familiar with it, it’s a powerful computational tool that does more than just math and was able to instantly give me the answer to my question. The power lies not in the data, as it comes from free, open-source databases, but rather in how you access the data. Here, WolframAlpha saved you two steps, as you don’t have to look up the population information for each country or do the math on your own.
Companies that make it easy for people to sift through the data that’s available will lead in the future. For healthcare companies, this means being able to take information about a certain disease and personalize it. Picture this: I want to find only information that’s relevant to my condition and treatment stage and history. Let’s say a patient has stage IV non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). I’ve already taken carboplatin and Gemzar (together) and then Taxotere after progression. His question is simple: “what treatments are now indicated and what’s the average time to progression for these treatments?” If you think about it, that’s really a simple question, but it would be almost impossible to find out the answer online quickly and easily despite all the information needed to answer the question being freely available.
If this person visited the average website, he’d have to sort through all the different stage information to find stage IV, then look through each of the treatments and data to see what’s applicable to him. The WolframAlpha-style solution would allow him to type (or use drop-down selections) in his stage and past treatments, what parameters he needs to know and then spit out an answer. The companies who present the data, the content, in this format will lead in the future. How hard would it be to create this tool? Answer: not very.
The second part of aggregation is alerting people when information has changed. To take our example above of the NSCLC patient, if a new treatment is approved or studied that matches his current status, he needs to know about it immediately. He shouldn’t have to go online and dig around everyday for new news. It needs to come to him. That’s the idea behind RSS, but this needs to go even further to make feeds automatically from any source, not just pages that happen to have feeds already. This exists in many areas, but for customized data like we need here, it’s not that simple. Making new, relevant information available to people that finds them instead of the other way around is the future.
When you wrap all of this together, whoever is able to simply and effectively catalog and deliver all the content that’s out there will win the day.
Calculation is King
I take this theory very much to heart and have tried to practice it here on this blog. Rarely will you ever see me simply stating a bunch of facts or statistics (that you can get anywhere else) without an interpretation of that information. The statistics and facts have no value. I hope the interpretation does. That’s the reason why some posts (like this one) run a little long. I try to present the data, what it means, and what it means for you. That’s calculating.
The main point here is that you’re trying to help people make choices. This is what Bing’s entire “Decision Engine” positioning is based on. They don’t want to just give lists of information (i.e., links) leaving you to pick which is the right one, they want to guide you to the answer. Here’s how they’re promoting this concept via a series of clever commercials:
If you want to see the actual features that Bing is touting to deliver this new type of searching, then you can check out the video here (big points off for Microsoft since I can’t embed the video here). While I’m not totally sure that Bing delivers on this big promise (helping you make decisions) just yet, it’s a step in the right direction. What Bing understands is that the content (in this case, links) isn’t as important as helping you find the information. When you search for something on Google (or Bing), you aren’t doing it to see what links come up, you’re doing it to find the answer to your question. Think about that for a minute.Today, both of these search engines are trying to do this for basic searches. That’s why, for example, if you type “define” followed by any word in Google, you get the definition as the first listing, so you don’t have to go to another page on another site to find the answer. You don’t want links, you want answers.
It’s the same thing for any other type of question. Going back to our NSCLC patient, he doesn’t want bunch of links. He wants to know the answer to this question: “what treatments are now indicated and what’s the average time to progression for these treatments?” The answer(s) should be easy to find and immediately available (that is, he shouldn’t have to dig through tons of pages to find the answer). That’s a good first step and is why “Cataloging is king.” To deliver “Calculation is king,” you need to be able to not only answer this question, but to then tell our patient which treatment of the possible choices is best and why.
Of course, this already exists. We call them doctors. But a doctor isn’t always available to answer these questions. When you’re researching, you’re probably doing it to educate yourself so that when the doctor does recommend something, you understand why. I’m not recommending that we cut doctors out of the equation or that they won’t be important in the future. Rather, I’m saying that the “calculations” they do based on their knowledge and experience is what is valuable and what people need. But it’s not the sole domain of doctors or any other expert either. The companies that can effectively find the information and analyze it for people are the ones who will win in the future. They will win because they will be the go-to source for answers. If people come to you for answers and you can supply them, then you’ve provided something of almost limitless value and will have created a very powerful bond with your consumers.
Contrast this to the information and content you supply today for people visiting your sites or through brochures or any other medium. How far are you away from being able to provide calculations and not just content? I know that there are limitations to what pharma companies can recommend, but that’s narrow thinking. It’s not the way the world works now and certainly not the way it will work in the future. Far from being a starry-eyed optimist, I’m even more of realist. If you can’t figure out a future where you can provide this service to patients in some form, then you will be left behind. The good news is that you have some time to figure it out. The bad news is that it isn’t that much time.
Remember: content isn’t king anymore. Cataloging and Calculations are king.
