A few weeks ago, I shared with you my slides from a presentation I was giving at the ePharma Summit. My topic was “10 Things to Do First in Digital Marketing.” That is, 10 things you should try first before spending a bunch of money and time on social media. Let’s face it, social media isn’t easy to pull off if you work for a pharma company or any other company in a highly regulated industry. So, it makes sense to me that you should look at doing things that are both simpler to execute (i.e., less roadblocks to internal approval) and likely will bring a larger and more measurable return on your digital marketing dollars. I could put together a list of 50 things, but lets start with 10.
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10 Things to Do First in Digital Marketing
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.
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“We Hate Your .com” Comes to Life
For those of you who attended the recent e-Patient Connections conference, you got a chance to hear me present my manifesto: “We Hate Your .com” (which seemed to get pretty good reviews from what I understand). As a further challenge, I was told I had to do the presentation in Pecha Kucha format. For those not familiar, Pecha Kucha means you get 20 slides that each stay on the screen for 20 seconds. They advance automatically and the presenter doesn’t get to control them. 6 minutes and 40 seconds total. It’s the USA Today of speeches. I personally like it.
So, what is “We Hate Your .com” all about?
The premise is simple:
As digital spreads to every facet of our lives, marketers are trying to figure out how to use it to get their message out to the masses. The average marketer is still struggling with how to effectively do marketing online. Rather than finding enthusiastic supporters of their latest digital effort, they watch their programs go unnoticed and ignored by customers. Even the “lucky” ones who manage to be noticed are often quickly abandoned. But for a select few, there is an entirely different outcome. These programs are not only noticed, but become fixtures in consumers’ lives.
Question is…are you creating digital marketing people love or love to hate?
So, what’s your answer?
The folks at Kru Research, who put on this conference, put together a great video of my presentation (with sponsorship help from Klick Pharma). I decided I didn’t just want to let the video float out there all on its own on YouTube and many of you asked me for a copy of my slides, so I’m trying something different.
Head on over to WeHateYour.com and get the full treatment: an overview of the concept, including a bunch of images, the video of my presentation, and a link to download my slides. You also have the chance to “Like” We Hate Your .com on Facebook. If you do, you’re pledging that you won’t commit any of the digital marketing sins that I talk about. If you can’t commit to that, then you probably shouldn’t join up. We’ll kick you out…seriously.
Enjoy it. While you’re there, please visit the contact form and let me know if you want to nomination a digital marketing program for the good or bad list. I’ll be keeping a running commentary on the blog there.
Social Sharing Tools in Pharma and Healthcare — A New Solution
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post to address the Warning Letter that Novartis received from the FDA for its social sharing widgets. Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time talking with a lot of different people and I’ve changed my view on the situation. I want to share that new opinion with you today.
One of the things that was the biggest change for me was the availability of a new solution to the problem. Before this solution (more on that in a moment), you had to choose between having quality META tags (including the description tag) that could be used by search engines in their results pages or social sharing tools. Typically, META descriptions include information about what the product does, but doesn’t include any fair balance (because of space limitations). These META descriptions are what many sharing tools use by default and this is what happened in Novartis’ case. The content that was shared lacked fair balance because the balance was not present in the META tags.
Today, I’m pleased to announce that companies no longer have to choose. You can now keep your META data unchanged along with every other visible element of your site and still have social sharing buttons. You can control exactly what content is shared when any of these buttons are used. How is this possible? Immediately after this Warning Letter was made public, I started talking to the folks at ShareThis to see if we could figure out a way to better control the shared content while not impacting anything else. Remarkably, in just a couple of weeks, the team at ShareThis was able to change their tools to make all of this possible. Here’s a press release from my company, Bridge Worldwide, and ShareThis explaining what we did in more detail: ShareThis and Bridge Worldwide Social Sharing Tools Press Release .
The short explanation the changes is this: ShareThis now supports the Open Graph protocol (the same one used for the Facebook Like buttons). By adding open graph tags to content pages, ShareThis buttons will now recognize this data to be used in sharing. This allows site owners to specify what content is shared.
For me, ShareThis was an obvious choice to deliver this new functionality for a few reasons: it only takes a couple of lines of code to add ShareThis buttons to any site (plus the open graph tags), you can select buttons representing 50+ different sharing sites (and customize the look of the buttons), their robust reporting and analytics tools, and the fact that ShareThis is the most recognized sharing service online (400+ million people a month, 850,000+ sites use it), so I know it’s reliable and recognized all over the Internet. And, of course, it’s free to anyone who wants to add it to their site.
Based on all of this, and a new view of the real issues raised in the FDA Warning Letter, here are our updated recommendations to pharma and healthcare companies (and any other company in any regulated industry) regarding social sharing: Digital Alert-Bridge Worldwide-Social Sharing in Regulated Industries (832 downloads)
We welcome your views and opinions on these new recommendations and also any comments you have on the enhancements to ShareThis. Adding ShareThis and the tags is a very simple process that any developer should be able to handle. However, if you would like to hear how our company, Bridge Worldwide, can help with the process (working with ShareThis), please feel free to contact me.
