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.

However, you’re not doing them.

Having said that and before getting too far into your brand Facebook page, I present you with 10 things you be doing first with your digital marketing dollars. You should be doing these first for few reasons. One, they are way simpler to get approved by your regulatory teams (for the most part). Two, you probably have someone at your company who already understands this stuff really well (opposite some emerging digital marketing areas). And finally, three, these are all likely to bring some more immediate benefits to both your product sales and patients and doctors.

So, “Facebook” (yes, as a verb) if you must, but do these things first. I hope that this gives all of you something to do on Thursday when you get back to your offices.

Here it is. Download a copy of my presentation here: 10 Things to Do First (1078 downloads). You won’t find it on the ePharma site, since I didn’t get it to them in time.

I’ll be adding a version of these slides with the audio from my talk as soon as possible so you can figure out what these slides even mean if you weren’t at the presentation.

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.

Need an example of an inbox that needs a little help? Here’s mine from last year that I showed for a post called “The 7 Biggest Mistakes in Digital Relationship Marketing:”

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.

[Click to enlarge] Courtesy of Brad Colbow.

Don’t be this company.

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.

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.

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.

Do you know all of your national capitals?

Quick.

The capital of Norway.

Got it? Stumped?

Stay tuned for the correct answer.

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.

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” (1980 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?

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?

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?”

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.

In other words, if your site isn’t showing up on Google search, it may as well not exist. Moreover, it had better appear pretty high up in the results. How’s pharma doing? Just check out this post for the answer, which you might not like: “Pharma Search Engine Rankings Need Fixing.” The title probably says it all.

In any event, I’m going to add another wrinkle to help show you the impact that search engines have on your brands and how this impact is only going to increase. The result of this poor performance in search optimization is that people are finding alternatives for content. That is, they are looking elsewhere to find information about the conditions your products treat and even the products themselves. Sites like WebMD have become the “go to” sources for health information for many Americans. Wikipedia shows up on the first page of search results for nearly every condition and treatment you can imagine. So, you’re losing people to these sites and many others (each with varying degrees of credibility).

Well, just when you thought you knew the competition, it gets worse.

Now it’s possible for people to get a lot of the information they need without ever even leaving the search engine. That creates a problem for not just pharma and healthcare companies, but also sites like WebMD and Everyday Health. How can you compete with the immediacy and credibility of the content that shows up instantly from the search engine itself?

What am I talking about?

Last August, Search Engine Land reported that Google was adding Google Health data directly into the results of health-related searches. The result is the Google One Box for health. When you search for a condition like “diabetes,” this is what you see in Google (check out the area in the red box).

Never noticed that before? What’s more interesting is what you get from clicking through the links. Click on “Google Health” and you get information directly from their vast library of highly credible content. There’s no reason to look elsewhere or blindly click on search results hoping you find what you need. It’s all right there.

Where does Google’s content come from? It comes from the National Library of Medicine, which is part of the United States National Institute of Health (aka: the NIH). Tough to beat out the NIH for credibility. When I head to the diabetes section (on Google Health), I get a bunch of information including basic disease state information, the latest news (pulled from Google News), scholarly articles (from Google Scholar), and I also get to see related searches, which is something no one but the search engines can deliver.

This is an answer to the question people often have: “Am I searching for the right thing?” Of note, Google is able to compile condition symptoms simply by the analysis of searches people perform. No medical textbooks required. Neat trick.

Not to be outdone by Google, Bing is getting in on the act and trying to back up its claim that it’s a “decision engine.” A couple of weeks ago, they introduced their version of Google’s One Box and it’s even more powerful than Google’s version. When you search for “diabetes” on Bing, this is what you get (check out the area in the red box):

You’ll notice there are a few more choices within the Bing results. Here’s where it gets interesting.

Check out the third column in the box called “Medical Centers.” This is a list of places where Bing thinks you can get excellent diabetes care. Let’s pick Massachusetts General Hospital.

You’ll notice that (in the red box), you get patient ratings for Mass General. The ratings come from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Another pretty reliable source.

Going back to the diabetes search, you also notice a handful of “related medications” are listed as well. Let’s click on Glucophage.

Right there is a list of questions that people typically ask about their drugs. The answers come from Gold Standard, which is a part of Elsevier, the company best known as a publisher of medical journals. Here’s the answer people get to the question: “What is this medication?”

Like I said, no reason to leave the search engine. All of the basic information one would need is right there. So, why would I go to WebMD for more information? More importantly, why would I go to a pharma company’s brand site for more information? With credible information sources immediately available, with a minimal number of clicks, with about the right amount of depth for most people, where do these other sites fit in?

For pharma and healthcare companies, you have reason to worry. I think we can all agree that brand websites aren’t the favorite destination for patients. Now, with the convenience of these search tools, brand sites could potentially become even more obsolete. So, what are you to do?

Here are a few immediate actions:

• Make sure the information about your products is accurate and up to date. While these are quality sources, they aren’t infallible, so double-check. When there is an error, work directly with the sources (or enlist the help of Google or Bing if you can) to get the information fixed. Repeat for your competitors.
• Do some research to figure out where the content and data comes from that might impact your brand. If you know this, then you can make sure that future updates are more reflective of the full body of information about your product.
• Make your website better. This is a tough one, but if your site has the same depth of content as these search engine resources, seriously ask yourself, “what am I really adding to the situation?” If you offer nothing above what’s available here, then the answer is nothing. This also means that there’s no reason for people to come to your site for more information. Make your content deeper than what’s available from the search engines.  Don’t be afraid to license that content either…they did.
• Continue to optimize your websites. While many people will use the search engine provided information, many others will continue to look through the organic search results. You’ve got to be there.
• Don’t forget about paid search. If you want to appear on the same “shelf” (think: grocery store shopping) as these search engine boxes, then the only way you can do it is with paid search. Direct people to quality content via paid ads and be sure to exceed what they can get from the search engine information.

The importance of search engines will only continue to increase. Because of this, you have to pay very close attention to everything that they do and be prepared to react quickly when they make changes. In many ways, search engines will determine whether or not people see your websites. If they determine that your sites aren’t valuable enough (via search rankings), then you may as well throw in the towel. Sure, keep your current site for anyone who types  “yourbrand.com” into their browser, but know that they’ve probably already gotten everything they need somewhere else. That is, unless you do something more.

[Thanks to my colleague @nicocoetzee for the heads up on the Bing changes.]

Before we begin, I wonder how you did with last year’s resolutions? Here’s part 5 of last year’s set of resolutions, with links to the other four parts so you can score your progress.

Onto 2010…

2010 Resolution #1: Stop Talking About Social Media

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I bet I know what you think my next line is going to be. You’re thinking I’m going to say: “Stop talking about social media and just do it!”

Wrong. I’m not saying that.

I’m really saying, “stop talking about social media.”

It’s enough already.

To recap, in 2009 we demanded the FDA call a hearing to discuss social media…and they did (and created a website to track it all). We wrote and read hundreds, if not thousands, of articles on social media. We transformed (read: hijacked) every digital marketing conference into a social media conference. We launched a ton of social media programs even if they represent a conservative start. And Dose of Digital almost became Dose of Social (almost).

Meanwhile, we might have left all that proverbial “low-hanging fruit” to rot on the vine.

Which fruit am I talking about? Here are a few…

Search Engine Optimization

I was recently asked by Ellen Hoenig Carlson to contribute to a mini-book that was all about defining the best opportunities for pharma marketing in 2010. In this book, I got to answer the simple question: “Where should I spend my first marketing dollar in 2010?’

My answer was simple: If you can spend your money on only one thing, it should be organic search optimization. Not paid search; organic search.

I’ve talked about this a million times before, so I won’t into it here (but do check out this post “Pharma Search Engine Rankings Need Fixing“). If you’re not doing this well, you’re missing out on far more than any social media activity will ever get you.

Yes, read that last bit again: “more than any social media activity will ever get you.” There are three reasons for this. First, pharma companies as a whole do so poorly in search rankings that there’s really no way to go but up and the upside is huge; the benefits of appearing in the top search results are obvious. Second, pharma is so restricted in what they are allowed to do in social media that it’s going to be a long time before anyone creates a program that generates dollars for a pharma company. Yes, that’s not the point of all social media, but it should have some direct impact on the company’s performance, however tenuous the link. Other industries, with less restrictions, might be able to make a case to go with social media before search, but I don’t think pharma is one of them. Third, did I mention regulatory issues?

Website Enhancement and Fixes

Search marketing not glamorous enough? Well, you’re not going to like this next one either. Fix your website. Yes, I’ve said that companies might even consider getting rid of their website in my post “Ten Digital Marketing Ideas Pharma Companies Will Never Try (But Should),” but for those who remain unconvinced, let’s fix what you’ve got. Not sure where to begin? Check out my post “A Simple Treatment for Your Ailing Healthcare Website” to see how you can use tools like Google Website Optimizer to make your site work better for your visitors and to increase the chances that they actually ask for and/or continue your treatment.

Upgrading Your Content

Whether you distribute all your content on your brand website or, yes, via social media, it doesn’t matter the channel that it comes from if the content is bad. You can come up with the slickest website or distribution model or send it to a massive CRM list that you’ve compiled over the past 10 years, but if your content doesn’t stack up to the rest of what’s available online, then your efforts won’t matter much.

How can you tell if your content is good enough? Simple. I can figure out that answer with one question: “If You Charged for Your Content, Would Anyone Pay?”

Here’s a little bit from a past post on this topic:

Many of the free things we use online, we would pay for if they suddenly required us to pay. A few examples: if Google suddenly decided to charge for Gmail, would you pay for it? I would. If Nike decided to charge for Nike+, would you pay for that? I would and I bet that I most people that use it would do the same.

“But,” you say, “we’re not Nike. We’re not Google. We’re talking healthcare. I don’t have to worry about these types of companies. I’m worried about my competitors.” Well, they are your competitors. Everything online is you competitor. Everything is competing for your customers’ time, so they’re you competitors. Here’s the thing to remember, people ARE paying for your content. They pay for it with their time, which is both very valuable and finite. When they waste their time, they waste their money.

So, resolution #1 is in the books: “Stop Talking About Social Media.” Who’s with me? I’m not saying you should never do social media, but I’m am saying that before you commit a large part of your time and attention (even if it’s only a small amount of actual dollars), make sure you’re doing “the basics” right. Without these it’s likely even the slickest social media program will fall flat or never meet its true potential.