What?

You haven’t noticed them? Well, they are there. Go check it out for yourself and come back.

See. I told you they were there. Don’t feel bad if you didn’t notice them. You’re in good company. Most people don’t notice them. Like many forms of banner ads, they are simply ignored and since they are relatively new to Facebook and people are very focused while on the site, this is even more true. Of course, you may have checked and found that there are no ads on Facebook for you. Congratulations. You’re in good company again along with the millions who use browser plugins to disable all of these ads (myself included).

Oh, yes, people don’t click on them much either. Check out the results from several campaigns I’ve done on Facebook as experiments. The bolded line at the bottom is the aggregate. These campaigns ranged from very broad to highly targeted, but the results are the same…pretty lousy clickthrough rates. (PS: if you’re thinking about advertising on Facebook, lean towards paying per click versus per impression…no one’s going to click on them, so you should be fine.)

0.074% clickthrough rate. Not 7%. Zero-point-zero-seven percent. Not even a measly half a percent.

I think Facebook knows that this isn’t great and they’re trying to make up for this in a couple of ways. First, price. For all of these campaigns combined, I spent around $200. That’s not going to bankrupt anyone and that got me 614,000 impressions. That’s about $3 per 1000 impressions. Not horrible. Per click, however, I spent about $0.43, which isn’t go great seeing as I probably could have done A LOT better doing paid search on Google.

The second way that Facebook is trying to help advertisers (and users), is by ensuring that only quality ads are shown. Google does this as well by adding in a “quality score” to determine which paid search ads occupy the first couple of positions. You can’t just outright buy the first paid search spot. Over time, if no one ever clicks on your ad, it’ll start to fall regardless of what you bid for the keyword. This is good for users. It’s also good for advertisers. Yes, it makes their job a bit harder because they have to make more relevant ads, but they should have been doing this in the first place. So, even if they have to be somewhat forced into making more relevant ads, it still works out.

The way Facebook helps force advertisers to make better ads is through their rating system. Take a look at a selection of ads that recently appeared on my page:

As you can see, they’re all thrilling and well-targeted to me. Just a quick look through and what do I see? First, in ad #1, I can apparently become a timber wolf  judging by the color of this “person’s” eyes. Good news in ad #2, I’m this close to being a filmmaker, which I’ll just call a good fall back job for me if this whole marketing thing doesn’t pan out. And ad #3 features one of my most annoying activities of the Internet, “Mafia Wars.” If you’ve got a Facebook account, you’ve been invited to play this “game.” This is a blocked application for me (yet, I still get the ad for it).

Bottom line: nothing terribly relevant even though Facebook’s ad creation tool let’s you target the ads to point that literally only a handful of people would see it if you so chose. Between selecting for age range, network, location, and keywords, you can target these ads to an almost frightening degree.  But all this targeting apparently doesn’t matter based on clickthrough rates I’ve seen.

Okay, so back to how Facebook “forces” advertisers to make better ads and the point of today’s post. You’ll notice at the bottom of each ad is a thumbs up and the word “Like.” In the upper-right of each ad is an “X,” which is positioned just like the “X” in Windows programs. Here’s how it works…if you click the “Like,” then presumably the ad get some additional quality score, which might make it show up higher on the page (just like Google’s paid search quality score) and you might get more ads with a similar demographic target. What’s missing is a “Hate” or “Dislike” option, but the “X” actually serves that function. If you click the “X” to close the ad, Facebook wants to know why and gives you this pop-up:

As you can see, the “X” is basically serving as a “Dislike,” but you’ve got to be “in the know” in order to know about this (and now you are). Many people have complained about this feature and would rather see a “Dislike” button (myself included). There’s even a Facebook Fan Page called “Facebook, give us a dislike button” with more than 550,000 fans. It’s basically a petition to Facebook demanding this feature. Facebook isn’t known for being very responsive to its users demands, so this might happen, but only if Facebook decides on its own that it’s necessary.

Of course, Facebook, like many other media properties, wants to protect it’s advertisers. Presumably, if you give people a “dislike” button, then when people click it there needs to be some sort of repercussion. Perhaps with enough “dislikes” the ad has to be pulled permanently or the advertiser has to pay more to have it placed. Advertisers don’t like this idea, so their collective power puts companies like Facebook in a tough spot. Make the users happy by allowing them to get rid of the worst ads or make the advertisers (who pay the bills) happy by allowing them to put up any ad they want. You can’t have both. Right now, Facebook has the latter.

I don’t mean to pick on Facebook, as they aren’t the only media property with this dilemma and very few have given any sort of real power to the users to control the ads they see. But, imagine if they did. Imagine if this were required. That’s right, everywhere that your ad appears online, there are also “Like” and “Dislike” buttons. Those ads with the most “Likes” get shown more often and the advertiser pays less and those with the most “Dislikes” get shown less often and the advertisers pay more. The question for media properties then becomes: “can I afford to only have “liked” ads on my site?” That is, if advertisers pay less if people like their ads, will the media properties make enough money? Do they need the cash from the “Disliked” ads just to keep the lights on? To answer the question: “can I afford to?” my answer is “Can you afford not to?” People are already looking for (and finding) ways to block all these ads anyway, so why not increase the chances that they don’t block them by actually making them good?

What’s that you say? It’s not possible to make a banner ad that people want to see? Try this one on for size:

Told you so. There are ads that people want to see. The ad for Pringles you see (and probably clicked a bunch of times) was even the winner of the Gold Cyber Lion at the Cannes Advertising Festival this past year. It’s the highest honor you can get for digital work…and it was a banner ad. Fair balance, my company, Bridge Worldwide, created that banner for Pringles (we are the digital agency of record for the brand). [Read my post: "What Pharma Can Learn from Pringles" to hear more about how this ad applies to pharma]

Question: how many “likes” versus “dislikes” would the Pringles ad have gotten? To give you a clue, after the award was announced, a link to a demo of the ad showed up on several social media sites including Buzzfeed, reddit, and many others. It was all over Twitter to the point that the link to view the ad (click to see it in a page) was the 4th most tweeted link on Twitter that day. More than 200,000 people came to see the ad in 2 days…on purpose. That is, they went out of their way to see an ad. Can your ads do that?

Of course, not every ad can be “Can Hands” and certainly it wouldn’t be appropriate for healthcare, but the point remains that our ads don’t have to be mind-numbingly boring and distracting to users. The don’t have to be so bad that people just want them to disappear.

So, here are some current pharma banner ads. Unfortunately, I don’t have the animated versions (only the Premarin one has actual animation, the rest have “scrolling” fair balance only), but I can assure you that it doesn’t add much. Which would you “like” and which would you “dislike”? PS: You don’t have to “like” any of them.

The Premarin Banner (with the cloud) at least has some animation, albeit odd and “icky” animation.

I’ll just leave it at that rather than ask a lot of questions about what purple rain has to do with vaginal dryness.

So, which did you give a “like” vote to and which did you give a “dislike” vote to? I’m going to guess that none of them got a “like” vote, which would indicate you’d like to see more of a particular ad. I’d further guess that just about every ad here would have gotten a “dislike.” So, if we implemented a system where only “liked” ads are shown prominently and repeatedly and “disliked” ads were show less often and in less obvious positions, these pharma companies would be paying a lot more to advertise their products.

Sadly, there isn’t a system like this in place now…or is there? There is, of course, a de facto voting system already. If people like your ad, they’ll click on it. That’s a “like.” If people don’t like  your ad, they won’t click on it. That’s a “dislike.” So, how are your click rates?  Is the media property or your media buying agency telling you that your rates are good? Do you think they’re good? How many times did you click on the Pringles banner? Granted, I called attention to it, so more people clicked on it than might have in the “real world.” However, I didn’t make you click it twice or, say, all 97 times (you did make it to the end, right?).

People are voting on your ads. Not just your banner ads either. Your paid search ads, your TV ads, and print too. They’re also voting on the “advertising” your reps deliver to doctors and your marketing at conventions or conferences. People are always voting on your marketing. The question is: are you listening to how they’re voting? Are you making change s based on these “votes”? Maybe you’re just continuing as if you’re completely unaware that these votes exist.  Eventually, the voters will have their say and you might not like who they pick.

Possibly related posts (auto-generated):

1. What Pharma Can Learn from Pringles
2. Follow Your Customers’ Path to Success
3. Pharma Company of the Year in Social Media — Dosie Awards

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

Key Points Summary (detailed post follows)

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

Detailed Post

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Click on the image for a larger view]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Click the image to enlarge]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Possibly related posts (auto-generated):

1. 166 Reportable Adverse Events Equals One Red Herring
2. Pharma Should Forget About Social Media Monitoring
3. The Myth of Adverse Event Reporting

I’ve talked a lot about search engine marketing (both paid and organic) on this blog (check out all of my posts on this topic here , here and here) and yet, as I continue to attend conferences, I don’t hear anything about the giant opportunity search could be for every pharma and healthcare company. This giant opportunity exists because very few of the industry’s websites are actually optimized for search. What this means is that they aren’t owing, or even showing up, for critical keywords. Here’s how Lipitor, the top-selling drug in the world, does for search. If you want all the details on this table, click here. The numbers represent what position Lipitor.com shows up in search results for various keywords. A dash indicates that Lipitor.com is not in the top 500 results for the keyword (note: this was conducted in May).

Not a pretty picture. Okay, so forget about Google. Maybe there’s a reason why companies aren’t worried about Google. Of course, 80% of all online sessions begin with search and Google has a 63.7% share of all searches. That means that just over 50% of the time when someone starts an online session, they open to Google and search. In other words, if your site isn’t showing up on Google search, it may as well not exist. But, I digress.

Okay, so you’re not focused on doing anything with Google. Maybe it’s too much work, maybe you’re not sure what to do (nor are your agencies). Okay, then, let’s forget about Google and move to number two. What’s the number two search engine in the world?

Here’s how the conversation usually goes when I ask this question:

“Yahoo!, right?”

“What do you mean, ‘No’?”

“Then it’s got to be that new one…Bing…”

“What? That’s really an old one?”

“I have no idea then.”

The answer, of course, is YouTube. YouTube is the number two search engine in the world. In fact, this has been the case since October 2008. Yes, a year ago.

So, let’s talk about YouTube instead. If you can’t win with Google (or don’t want to for some reason), then let’s try to win with YouTube.

When you search for “diabetes” on Google, the first three results are the American Diabetes Association website, WebMD’s section on diabetes, and GSK-owned, Diabetes.com. All of these are credible sources with good, quality information. If you went to any of these, you’d find good information that would be a great start to your research. On YouTube, it’s quite another story.

Assignment #1: Go to YouTube and search for “diabetes.” (or just click here) What do you find?

The first three results are a general diabetes overview from AnswersTV.com (whoever they are), the Wilford Brimley Dance Remix, and third is another overview video from unknown source.

This is what we’re dealing with. This is what patients see if they search for “diabetes” on YouTube. One other thing to note, there are 31,600 results for “diabetes” in YouTube. That’s a lot of competition, right? Not really…there are 77 million results for “diabetes” on Google. So, instead of fighting your way to the top of 77 million listings, you only have to beat 31 thousand. Of course, the volume of searches for “diabetes” on Google is going to be much higher than on YouTube, but perhaps if you capture a greater share of clicks because of a higher ranking in search, then maybe you could end up with the same number as if you showed up many pages deep in the Google search results.

Before getting into how to move up in the rankings on YouTube, I’ll deal with one other question I get. How many people are really searching for health related topics on YouTube. Unfortunately, this isn’t a simple number I can provide, as search volume is  a bit harder to find for YouTube compared to Google. It’s probably safe to say that YouTube has far fewer searches for healthcare related information than Google (as a percentage of all searches and total volume of searches). However, it appears that reference-type searches on video sites, including YouTube, might be increasing. From a recent New York Times article: Saranga Chandratillake said that “on Blinkx, some of the fastest-growing searches were in reference categories like money, travel, health and food. More traditional categories, like entertainment, sports and user-generated content, remain more popular but are growing at a slower rate, suggesting a shift.” What’s this all mean? Well, I think it’s safe to say that a YouTube search strategy isn’t going to change the fortunes of your brand dramatically, but it could have an impact.

But if it doesn’t have a huge impact today, it could tomorrow. Alex Iskold, from Adaptive Blue, wrote a great article about how video might just be the future of search in his article “Is YouTube the Next Google?‘ One of the points from his article that struck me: “Kids no longer learn about the world by reading text. Like the television generation, they are absorbing the world through their visual sense. But there is a big difference. Television was programmed and inflexible. YouTube is completely micro-chunked and on demand. Kids can search for what they need anytime. This is different, and powerful.” The takeaway for you as a marketer? If YouTube isn’t the way people find information about your brands now, it will be in the future.

So, you’re convinced by now that YouTube optimization is the way to go. How do you do it? It seems the traditional ranking factors for Google don’t necessarily apply to YouTube. Of course, no one knows for sure which factors are most important, as that would make it really easy to cheat, but experts generally agree that the following are most important (in order): “keyword focused anchor text from external links, external link popularity (quantity/quality of external links), diversity of link sources (links from many unique root domains), keyword use anywhere in the title tag, and trustworthiness of the domain based on link distance from trusted.” So, what are the top five factors for YouTube?

This is a bit harder to come by mainly because there isn’t an entire industry built around optimizing for YouTube like there is for Google. So, therefore, there isn’t a strong consensus. So, let’s go to the source: Google (owners of YouTube). Here’s what they have to say about optimizing your videos so they show up towards the top of the results for your targeted keywords. Ironically, the video is not on YouTube, so here’s the link to the video and full post with quotes.

The first tip: have good videos. Not surprising. The exact quote: “Online marketers typically are looking to get strong viewership on Youtube, the number one tip I’d give them, first, before optimizing, is to make sure that their content is something that users will engage with. … Make sure that your creative is good, that when users see it, they are prone to respond to it either through rating it writing comments, or even a better scenario, sharing it with other users. Once you have done that, you do want to figure out ways to optimize your videos for organic discovery.” So, for everyone out there who has disabled comments and ratings because you’re worried that people will think your videos stink, your problem isn’t with YouTube’s functionality…it’s your videos. I’ll assume you disabled ratings because you know you won’t do really well. So, don’t read any further until you actually have a good video to share on YouTube (and hopefully more than one).

Okay, the next factors you should work on, according to Google, are (again, from the post referenced above):

• Make sure your title, descriptions, and tags are clear and concise, describe the video
• When tagging your video, make sure to use tags that are consistent with one another. “we do have mechanisms in place to detect spamming behaviors”
• Community is very important for discovery

Well, those first two are really simple. The last one is a bit more challenging. It appears that the community aspects of YouTube also influence the search rankings. “Community aspects?,” you ask. Yes, they factor into the weighting as well.

There’s a lot to consider and here’s the list (from here):

• title
• description
• tags
• views
• ratings
• playlist additions
• flagging
• embeds
• shares
• comments
• age of video
• channel views
• subscribers
• inbound links (links from outside of YouTube pointing to your videos).

Well, that’s quite a long list. But there is some good news. It’s not all about views, which is what people always worry about. So, you control a few factors right away by having good titles, descriptions, and tags. Beyond these three and views, there are nine other factors that COULD influence the search results. Again, “could” because no one knows for sure which factors are most important. It’s safe to say that a combination of these factors, with some sort of weighting, is what determines ranking.

This is a lot to consider, so let me break it down a bit. There are basically four groups of factors here: “Within your control,” “Public opinion,” “Sharing,” and “Channel-related.” Here’s what each of these are and the tips on how you can use them:

Within your control

I’ve already mentioned, and so did Google, how the most important factors for ranking are actually within your control. Here are your tips:

1. Create great videos — If your videos are boring and people don’t engage with them, you aren’t going to EVER rank very high. As marketers, we’ve all seen good and bad videos. You know what “good” looks like, so be objective and decide if your videos meet this threshold.

2. Get your listing right — When you submit a new video, you get to write the title, description, and tags for it. Make sure they’re good. If you’re targeting certain keywords, like “diabetes,” then you probably want to ensure that “diabetes” is in the title and description (probably a couple of times), as well as the tags. If you can’t do this part right, then don’t bother with the rest. The age of your video is also a factor, so don’t wait too long to get your videos out there.

Public opinion

Ah, public opinion. It can be fickle. It’s tough. It’s unrelenting. But, it can also be your brand’s biggest advocate. What the public thinks about your video has a lot to do with where it shows up in the search rankings. The tips:

3. It all starts with views — You can get comments or “favorited,” or added to playlists or anything else if no one ever sees your video. So, what do you do? Your video probably isn’t going to be “viral” and seen by millions, as people spread it all over the world. Get used to that. So, that means that you probably have to drive traffic yourself. How? The answer isn’t directing people to YouTube (though you can do that also). The answer is embedding. Up to 44% of people what YouTube videos at least some of the time as embeds and not on YouTube.com. If you watched the Wilford Brimley video above, you watched an embed. That counts as a view even though you didn’t go to YouTube. The point? Don’t just put your videos on your YouTube channel, put them on your websites as well as embeds and drive views that way.

4. Simple engagement counts a lot –This set of factors are mostly out of your control. It includes: ratings, playlist additions, and flagging. Each of these factors all point to whether or not people liked your video. They are all actions that require a bit more engagement versus simply watching the video, but not too much. Here’s what you can do: ask for people to do these things. For some, rating videos is second nature. For others, they don’t think even think about doing it. So, get these people to do it for you. Encourage them to simply click and give you a rating or add it to their favorites. Tell them exactly what to do.

5. You can’t avoid comments — This one’s a bit contentious in pharma and healthcare. Most videos from the industry have comments disabled (many have ratings disabled as well). There are good reasons for this. You don’t want people posting adverse events as comments of course, so disabling comments takes care of this. Rohit Bhargava has another good reason to not allow comments: “[because of] the low quality of YouTube comments (very few are actually substantial or add meaningful observations) as well the fact that you can still post comments anonymously, there is a high risk factor in terms of people saying meaningless things and your team having to waste valuable time to moderate. If you want to create dialogue, bring the video onto your own site and invite comments there instead.” I really can’t argue with that. But people want to leave comments and it seems to count in the rankings. If your goal is to increase your rankings, then getting lots of comments (even crappy ones) will help your rankings. I agree that having a meaningful dialogue about your video probably isn’t going to happen on YouTube, so take Rohit’s advice and embed the video in your site and have the discussion there. But, if you’re going to do that, then does it really matter what the comments are on YouTube since most people will see it as an embed?

6. Links always count — One of the biggest factors for Google search rankings is inbound links. If quality sites are linking to your site, it helps your rankings. Same rules with YouTube videos. Of course, you can embed an entire video, so simply linking to a video is more rare, but it does happen. Question: do you have links to your YouTube videos on any of your websites? No?!? Why not? It’s a simple thing to do that will dramatically impact your rankings. Most pharma and healthcare sites carry a lot of credibility with Google (and therefore YouTube), so you should use their credibility to increase the rankings of your videos as well by linking to them from your brand and corporate sites. A simple fix with a big impact.

Sharing

It’s the biggest indicator of an engaged audience because it takes the most amount of effort.

7. Make sharing simple — Embeds and “shares” are the two factors that  require people to do a little work. For an embed, they have to add it to, say, a blog post (which required work) or write something about your video to explain why they are embedding it. That takes effort, so this might be a very important factor. Therefore, you should encourage people to share your video via embeds. This will increase your ranking in and of itself and also by increasing the number of views. Sharing requires some work because you have to figure out where to share it and some pithy quote to go with it. Make it simple to share the video and ask people to do it. It’s amazing what people will do if asked (don’t forget to say “please”). Simply asking reminds people to share and might actually get them to do it.

Channel-related

No video stands alone. The highest ranked videos seem to come from people who have many other videos or are a part of a YouTube channel.

8. Create an empire – Just uploading one video and hoping people find it isn’t a winning strategy no matter how good the video is. Instead, you should make it part of a channel. Good news for pharma and healthcare: you probably already have a channel (here’s a list from the Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki). Subscribers to this channel and views of the channel both seem to count towards your ranking. Again, encourage people to subscribe whenever you can. It doesn’t take much (just a single click), so it’s a low engagement effort you’re asking of your viewers.

That’s it. Quite a lot to consider, but really simple steps. If you have existing videos, go back and see if you’re doing all of this. Touch up your descriptions and tags, embed the videos, ask people to use the ratings, link to your videos from other sites, and share them (you’re on Twitter, right?). And track your progress…try to do all of these things with one video. See where you show up in the search results related to that video now and, say, a month after your fixes. Changing the rankings takes time, so it might be a while for the full effect, but when it comes to YouTube, you should see results pretty quickly. If you like what you see, then take on the rest of your video collection.

If you can’t own Google, at least own YouTube.

Possibly related posts (auto-generated):

1. The 10 Scariest Pharma and Healthcare YouTube Videos
2. Pharma Search Engine Rankings Need Fixing
3. How Google and Bing Plan to Eliminate the Need for WebMD (and Your Website)

<Play along and use your best infomercial voice to read this first paragraph.>

Do you find yourself frustrated that you can’t take action when you see something bad said about your product on Facebook? Do you find yourself secretly logging in at home to see what bloggers are saying about you? Do you fret that bad things are being said about your brand on WebMD, but you can’t go and check? Do you have a passing interest in Twitter, but don’t want to spend hours figuring out how it works? Well, then social media monitoring is NOT for you!

<Okay, you can stop the voice now.>

That’s right, for most pharma and healthcare marketers, you should just forget about social media monitoring. I know, I know. Didn’t I tell everyone that one of the principles of pharma and healthcare social media participation was “Monitor and Get Involved.” I did. I’ve had this in  presentations for a while, but now I’m wondering why. Why is it such a big deal to monitor social media?

I’m certainly not the first to suggest that monitoring is a good first step into social media. It’s included as the first step in so many lists, that I can’t include them all here. I know you’ve all heard it before in many different places, so it’s almost a rule. The first step to getting involved in social media is monitoring. Right?

Are you sure?

Of course, there are a lot of benefits to monitoring and the rationale for doing this as a first step appears pretty sound. While you’re trying to figure out how best to leverage a certain social media channel, say, Twitter, why not start just by seeing what others are saying? You can use this information to get a sense for how your brand is perceived in the market and what people are saying. Is it all good? Are they consistent? Are they actually saying anything or do they not care? Is there one thing that you didn’t know? Does it even really pertain to your brand or is incredibly general (e.g., just took my Lipitor)? You might find some informative information and you’ll get a little sense for what people say about you when they aren’t in a focus group saying what they think you want to hear. Great. At the same time, while your monitoring, you can also learn a bit of the etiquette of the channel. Using Twitter as an example, you’ll see how the @ works and what the # is and how to use it (and how not to).

There you go…two reasons to monitor just like that. So, why would I tell you to forget about monitoring? It’s simple really.

Since we’re talking about pharma and healthcare here, I thought I’d use this healthcare analogy. Doctors and other healthcare professionals have a pretty simple rule when it comes to ordering tests: do the test only if the results are capable of telling me to change my treatment decision. That is, if I’m thinking I should do surgery and I have one more test I could do, would the results of the test, no matter what they were, convince me not to do surgery? If the answer to that question is “no,” then why do the test? You already have done tests and some sort of examination that said surgery was the right choice, so why do another test if it’s not going to change your recommendation?

Social media monitoring in pharma is just like this last test. Is monitoring, namely what you find out, going to change what you do? Is it going to change your marketing approach? Is it going to spring you into action? Are you going to actively respond? The answer is probably “no.” So why subject your patient, I mean you, to an unnecessary (and potentially invasive) test?

“But wait,” you say, “we are going to do something different. This will give us some insights into our products and  it’ll give us a great marketing idea.” Really? Here’s how this could go wrong: you could actually do this this. Change your marketing plan based on something you see via your monitoring efforts. Let’s say for a moment that you notice time and time again that people are something as clear cut as, “I know they say that Drug X works really well, but I was shocked how inexpensive it was.” (I know, a stretch, but stay with me.) You notice this a few times in a few places. At what point do you see it enough to change your marketing message? At what point do you focus on the cost a bit more in your communications? 10 tweets? 100? 1,000? Maybe 50 Facebook updates? 15 blog posts? At what point do you know it’s something real and not some sort of anomaly?

You can’t. At least, you can’t by yourself. In order to actually use monitoring to inform you about marketing decisions such as brand messaging, you need something much more robust than you doing a Twitter search and making a few notes. It’s a big commitment. Still think you can do it alone? Great. Here’s what you need to collect:

• number of brand mentions and the content of each (make sure to include links from the mentions)
• the tone and sentiment of EVERY mention (positive, negative, or neutral)
• context of the mention (you’ve got to filter out everything irrelevant like spam mentions)

Okay, that’s a good start. There are a few more, but let’s go with that. There’s still more to do. Do you like Excel? You’d better. Love statistics? You’ll learn to. Because now you’ve got to take all the information you gathered and start to look for patterns, trends over time, and where changes occurred. You then need to correlate this with market events and your brand communications. I’d use about a year’s worth of data to get started. Go ahead…I’ll wait.

If you chose to actually do this by yourself and now are coming back to read the rest of this post, it’s probably October 2010. Most of what you figured out is probably outdated. Sorry about that.

My point with all of this is to say that without a formal plan of what you’ll do with your monitoring efforts, it might just be a waste of time. There are a lot of companies out there that would be happy to help you with this. Some of these tools are free and some are very expensive. This is definitely a category where you get what you pay for. Most expensive isn’t necessarily best, but expect to pay big to do a robust analysis that is going to give you solutions and not just more mountains of data. You do have a budget for this, right?

One other reason why monitoring might not be for you…you’re not allowed. Your company may restrict the sites you can access at work and chances are these include some (if not all) social media sites. Why? I’m not sure, but two possible  reasons. First, they think that you’re going to waste your time all day playing with Facebook. They do this despite the fact that at least one study has shown an INCREASE in productivity when these sites aren’t blocked. Second, they don’t want to know. If you go out and look what other people are saying about your brand and uncover someone talking about an adverse event, you’ve got to report it to the FDA. If it’s not reported directly to you, then you’re not responsible for reporting it. That is, if someone posts an adverse event on WebMD, then you don’t have to regularly go through WebMD and report all of these. But if you see it, then that counts the same as if it were reported directly to you. I’m not implying that pharma companies are trying to sweep this information under the rug, but there’s a reason why more pharma companies aren’t using social media. Dealing with all these reports could be a major pain. For those adverse event mentions that don’t have all the criteria required for submission, you’ve got to try to find the other criteria. When you do have all the criteria, you’ve got to catalog, eliminate duplicates, prepare a submission, send it to the FDA, and prepare to answer their follow up questions (if they have any). There are processes already in place at companies to do this, but they’re not capable of handling this on a giant scale.

If your company doesn’t want you monitoring, then that’s a good indication that you shouldn’t. I’ve heard that a lot of pharma marketers simply log onto these sites at home where they have access to take a look. Of course, as an agent of the company, whether at home or not, they still have to report what they find. How much they’ll actually find is a matter of debate, but you’d should be prepared. Most adverse event mentions won’t have all four criteria (actually only 1 in 500 will), but each company has a different policy about whether they try to find the other two by attempting to contact the person who reported it or if they just gather it all and try to submit it as is. Either way, before you jump in, make sure you’re ready to handle what’s out there.

Just so you don’t feel alone, few companies actually permit social media monitoring according to a poll Len Starnes put together. The poll found that 29% of respondents said there was no internal policy. 7% said monitoring was strictly prohibited no matter what. The rest were shades of “yes” including “yes, but.” See the entire poll here.

The final reason why you shouldn’t monitor is because you might do more harm than good. You start a company Twitter account with the idea that you’re just going to see what people are saying, but you figured you may as well have an account too. Great. Now what happens when someone contacts you? They send you a DM or an @ and want an answer. Do you answer them? Are you allowed? What if you’re on WebMD looking through the forums and see a post that says something like: “If someone doesn’t tell me a way to get this drug for less, I can’t refill my prescription next month.” Now, you know from looking at the rest of the post that this person would be an ideal candidate for your assistance program and would probably get their drug for free. Do you say something? What if you do it anonymously?

If these are hard questions to answer, then you shouldn’t even be looking. When people discover that you’re online and available (and they will), they’re going to come to you looking for answers. If you ignore them, then you’ll do more harm than good, as people will only be annoyed with you.

Okay, so have I talked you out of monitoring yet? No? You’re still going forward. <Gulp> In that case, let’s set a few ground rules. You’ll have to agree to each of these in order to be allowed to monitor social media (on the honor system):

• I will develop a plan of what to do with what I find BEFORE I monitor.
• I won’t make any marketing decisions based on my own “analysis.” I’ll find an outside partner who will do this for me.
• I’ll figure out if my company has a social media participation policy. If so, I’ll follow it, so I don’t get fired and blame this blog. If not, I’ll see if we have any rules about adverse events I may uncover and I’ll help fight to get some formal rules set up.
• When I do participate, I’ll actually participate. I won’t just be a “lurker” on the sidelines, ignoring everyone that wants to talk with me.

Agree? Okay, good. Now go forth and monitor. Try the two below to get started…and be careful. There’s a lot you’ll find out there that will surprise, bewilder, delight, confuse, frustrate, and annoy you. That’s normal. No need for me to order another test. You’re just monitoring social media.

Possibly related posts (auto-generated):

1. Monitor This, Forget That — “The Monitoring Continuum”
2. Monitoring Adverse Events in Social Media for Pharma’s Biggest Brands: Hopeless Task or Simple Project?
3. 9 Simple Steps to Getting Started in Social Media

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

• First and foremost, without your contributions, the wiki wouldn’t be what it is today and it would quickly become outdated. You can submit your recommendations for inclusion (including your own site) using this form.
• Share with your network. Here are some shortcuts:  Send a tweet, update your LinkedIn or Facebook status, and/or whatever your preferred means of sharing is. You can just copy and paste this: “Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki. http://su.pr/20M8CB. (via @jonmrich)”
• Write about it. Feel free to blog about the wiki and use some of the examples in case studies or presentations you’re developing.
• Get a badge. That’s right, if you’re listed on the wiki, you can now add a badge to your site to show that you’ve made it to the list. We’ve created a couple of options to choose from.

<strong>Note:</strong> some of you who have tried to use the code told me that it wasn’t working for you. I’ve fixed the problem, so these should work fine now.

Option 1

Copy and paste the code below onto your site:

<form><a href="http://www.doseofdigital.com/healthcare-pharma-social-media-wiki/" target="_blank"><img src="http://d2pa1q4iz3ea7o.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/doseofdigitalwikibadge1.jpg"/></a></form>

Option 2

Copy and paste the code below onto your site:

<form><a href="http://www.doseofdigital.com/healthcare-pharma-social-media-wiki/" target="_blank"><img src="http://d2pa1q4iz3ea7o.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/doseofdigitalwikibadge2.jpg"/></a></form>

Again, thank you all for your contributions. If you have any suggestions on how to improve the wiki, please let me know. We’ll be undertaking a big design and organization project some time soon, so feel free to weigh in now.

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1. October Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki Updates (and Badges!)
2. Latest Updates to the Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki
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Ready for this revelation? The healthcare industry, particularly pharma, is heavily regulated. I know, a shock to all of you. You also probably have heard that every company in this industry has a team of lawyers and regulatory folks whose sole responsibility is to ensure that the company isn’t getting into trouble with regulators. Many of these internal folks are charged specifically with making sure marketing teams aren’t putting the company at risk with a program that violates regulations. As a former pharma marketer, I know these folks have prevented me from getting into what likely would have been some pretty hot water over the years. That’s what they do. However, in some cases, marketers view these internal groups as another obstacle to getting their program into the market. I’m sure that at some companies this is truly the case. I don’t have a lot of advice for you if this is your situation.

For those with more enlightened teams who are willing to work closely together, I’ve got some advice that I think can make it even simpler. I mentioned in my talk at the Business Development Institute that, to borrow a term,  “it takes a village” to get a program approved, particularly if that program is social media based. Never before has a single healthcare marketer conceived, developed, and launched a program on his or her own. There are teams of people that help along the way and some of these people are charged with making sure  that the program isn’t going to get the company in trouble. So, if it does “take a village,” how can you get your village on your side?

Here are what I think are the most important things you can do as a marketer give your program the best chance of approval:

• Know the “why”
• Become your own toughest critic
• Check in along the way
• Be an educator first
• Force “Yes, if…” instead of “No, because…”
• Try something

Know the “why”

The regulatory folks at your company aren’t standing in the way of your program because they don’t like you (probably not anyway). They aren’t saying “no” because it’s much simpler to do so. They have good reasons. Likely, they understand both the internal and external rules much better than you do. As you’re developing your program, invest some time in understanding the regulatory rules that are likely to have an impact on your program. If you do this well, then the approval process should be much simpler and it’s going to allow you to be a better partner, as you’ll be able to really understand where your regulatory colleagues’ concerns.

Become your own toughest critic

Be honest. You know the flaws in the program you’re creating. You know why it will never get approved as is. Why bash your head against the wall then? Be tough on your program just as you know your regulatory team will be. Doing this during the development process is going to force you to rethink things and to look for ways to do them differently. This might be where the big breakthrough comes from. A word of caution: don’t completely stifle an idea because you think it’ll never get approved. That’s an innovation killer. Figure out a different approach that might work or…

Check in along the way

You probably have a very formal process for reviewing a new program. That’s good. But sometimes, you need to go outside this process a bit. As you’re developing your program and run into something that you think is going to give your regulatory team (and therefore federal regulators) heartburn, ask. Ask someone on your regulatory team for advice. You can do this rather informally and it may save you a ton of heartbreak and money later on. It makes no sense to completely develop a program (including all the resources you’ll use) only to find out that the key component is a complete non-starter. Check in before you commit too much to see where the problems might lie. You can not only do this internally, but also externally as well. You can request a meeting with DDMAC (the pharma marketing arm of FDA), for example, to review an idea before it’s complete. They will give you their take on why or why not your program is all right. This is a formal process that your regulatory team can help you set up. If you’re thinking about a really big, really innovative program, don’t get a million dollars into it before you figure out that DDMAC will never allow it. Take advantage of these meetings. Your fees and tax dollars are paying for them anyway.

Be an educator first

You may be a social media expert. Great. Chances are that the people who have to approve your program aren’t. That’s a problem. While you’ve invested a lot of time figuring out how to, say, do a brand page on Facebook that will be compliant, your regulatory teams might not understand the finer points of Facebook. Because of this, they only can go on what they’ve heard or read. We all know that’s not enough. You never really understand the finer points of a channel until you dig in yourself. That’s part of your job. While you can argue that it’s also part of your regulatory team’s job too, it might not be happening that way. That’s where you come in. Educate your team. Teach them about emerging channels and the benefits and risks of each ahead of time. Don’t try to teach them about Twitter in the meeting where you’re asking for approval to do a branded Twitter page. It’s a little late then. (My company, Bridge Worldwide, via WPP, offers a “Digital Immersion” program that can do this sort of training as a one-day seminar. Contact me if you’re interested in hearing more.)

Force “Yes, if…” instead of “No, because…”

This one isn’t mine, but I had to use it because it says it all so perfectly. It comes from Marc Monseau, Director, Media Relations at Johnson & Johnson. You may have heard his name from the J&J blog he helps edit or the J&J Twitter account that he manages. Both, in my opinion, are the standard in healthcare. Marc sent this tweet a couple weeks ago in connection with the Business Development Institute (#BDI) conference I mentioned earlier:

Think about that for a minute. Which do you hear when you propose something to your regulatory group? The first one, “Yes, if…”, indicates someone who’s willing to help you find a way to make your idea possible. You might not like the concession, but it’s a step forward. The latter, “No, because…”, tells me that this regulatory person isn’t interested in a solution, but rather just in following the company’s and federal regulatory rules. It doesn’t have to be that way though. Force your regulatory teams to think about the issue with “Yes, if…” instead of “No, because…” It’s a powerful difference. You can enable this by talking this way yourself during the discussions with your regulatory team. Come prepared with alternatives and be willing to compromise (assuming it doesn’t kill the intent of your program), but also encourage your colleagues to do the same. PS: you might want to add that this idea comes from J&J, who probably has the most robust social media program of any healthcare company.

Try something

This isn’t “Do something just for the sake of doing it.” Here, I want you to try something because I want you to test all of the above. If your company hasn’t delved into any major social media initiatives and you suddenly spring one on them, expect it to be denied pretty quickly. Instead, do something small now. Maybe an unbranded Facebook page. It doesn’t have to be incredibly robust and the point isn’t to get thousands of people to join. Your goal is to test your process. The process for approving a social media program might be completely different than any other program. Do you know the process? Is there a process? Maybe you need approval from a higher level or the PR/corporate communications team needs a say. The process may be totally different from everything else. Figure it out now, so that when your big program comes up for review, people will be familiar with the process and you won’t have to waste time figuring it out. Also, if you need to respond very quickly to something in the social media space, you can’t waste time creating a process, as things happen in hours, not weeks when it comes to social media.

These six steps are designed to help you and your company advance its social media program. In the end, you’ll need a lot of people to buy into it, so make it as simple as possible. Like many things in life, getting a major program (that also relies on a newer channel) approved involves some selling. These tips hopefully make your sales call just a bit easier.

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Speaking of Twitter, there was quite a bit of participation during the conference and you can run through the entire stream. You can search for #bdi or review it all in real time here.

My talk was called Healthcare & Social Media: Know the Rules. You can listen to my talk using the player below, but first, you can download a PDF version of the presentation so you can follow along (though you’ll have to guess a bit when to flip to the next slide): Healthcare and Social Media...Know the Rules. My talk starts around the 68:08 minute mark if you want to jump to it. For the record, I did not provide this introduction to Steve, the host of the conference. Seriously. [If you're viewing this in an RSS reader or email client, you'll most likely have to click through to the post for the player to work.]

The version you can download above is exactly what I presented in New York. However, you probably noticed that there aren’t many words on the slides (a pet peeve of mine). What this means is that without my “script” these probably don’t make that much sense. So, here’s a PDF of a fully annotated version with more details on the slides, a few slides that I had to cut because of time, and my full speaking notes. Here’s the link: Annotated Version of Healthcare and Social Media...Know the Rules

You also might be interested in the Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki, which I mentioned in my talk. It’s where you can find a bunch of examples of other pharma and healthcare companies have ongoing programs in some social media channel.

A few more things while I’ve got you here…

Don’t forget to subscribe, so you don’t miss anything in the future.

I can also send you an email anytime I publish a new white paper. Interested? Fill in the form below. Rest assured that your email will never be sold, rented, or shared with anyone. I hate spam more than you do. If you’re viewing this in an RSS reader or email client, you’ll have to click through to the post for the form to work.

Lastly, be sure to check out the Mini White Paper Series. These are posts on a general issue that can be re-applied to many other situations. For example, my post on The Myth of Adverse Event Reporting covers how pharma can deal with adverse event reports and how often they really occur online. The information in that post can be used in a number of different situations. So, that’s what it takes to be a “Mini White Paper.” And, yes, they’re long. So, here are all the articles that currently feature the Mini White Paper icon:

• Why Your Facebook Page Doesn't Exist
• 10 Things I'd Like to Start Hearing About Pharma Social Media
• 10 Things I'm Tired of Hearing About Pharma Social Media
• Can Your Electric Bill Show Us How to Improve Medication Adherence?
• Why Cataloging and Calculations Should Be King
• 9 Simple Steps to Getting Started in Social Media
• 10 Healthcare Dinosaurs Digital Technology Will Make Extinct
• Are You Reminding Me or Annoying Me?
• The Seven Uses of Social Media in Business -- The 7 "C"s
• 14 Things That Will Inspire Your Digital Marketing in 2010
• Monitoring Adverse Events in Social Media for Pharma's Biggest Brands: Hopeless Task or Simple Project?
• The 7 Golden Rules in Digital Relationship Marketing
• The 7 Biggest Mistakes in Digital Relationship Marketing
• 166 Reportable Adverse Events Equals One Red Herring
• 8 Tips to Help You Own YouTube's Search Results
• Pharma Should Forget About Social Media Monitoring
• Crushing Pharma's Digital Marketing Dreams--Part 2
• Crushing Pharma's Digital Marketing Dreams--Part 1
• 6 Steps to Getting Your Healthcare Social Media Idea Approved
• What Pharma Can Learn from the Pizza Guy
• Why Pharma Needs Product Reviews
• Is Pharma Ready for the New iPhone (or any iPhone)?
• Become the Best of the Best in Digital Healthcare Marketing
• Follow Your Customers' Path to Success
• Ten Digital Marketing Ideas Pharma Companies Will Never Try (But Should)
• Pharma Search Engine Rankings Need Fixing
• How to Make the Social Media Risk Worthwhile
• Forget Communities, Create Channels Instead
• A Simple Treatment for Your Ailing Healthcare Website
• Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Principles Presentation
• Pharma Friends: If You Like DTC TV, You'll Love Social Media
• Healthcare and Pharma Social Media: It's All About E.V.E.
• Increase Enrollment with a Sneak Preview
• How Pharma Should Use Search Engine Marketing
• Pharma Needs an iPhone
• Providing Meaningful Customer Service in Healthcare
• DFC: The New DTC
• How to Avoid FDA Regulations Using Mobile Marketing
• Gaming To Save Healthcare Marketing
• Personalization and Individualization...What's the Difference?
• The Myth of Adverse Event Reporting
• The Digital Rules...First Things First

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1. Three Things I Learned at the FDA Social Media Hearings and Three I Wish I Had
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This one is called: “Emerging Media in Healthcare and Pharma.”

Here’s a brief summary:

“There are a significant number of emerging media areas that will affect healthcare and pharmaceutical marketing campaigns in the future. Some will have an enormous positive impact on current marketing practices, while others will have devastating negative consequences on these same practices. The good news is that there are alternatives to the way many current campaigns are conducted that leverage the best in consumer understanding, interactive technologies, and solid marketing strategy (all while staying within DDMAC rules).”

I identified eight emerging media trends that about which I think every healthcare and pharma marketer should be aware:

• Medical Social Networking: Beyond Facebook and MySpace, patients are now connecting with one another online and taking each other’s advice, sometimes over their physician’s advice.
• Live and (Almost) in Person: YouTube is fine for delivering content, but it is instantly outdated. Consumers want to use video to interact with a real person to get the freshest information all from the comfort of their homes. This includes their doctors.
• Secure Communications: People will begin to trust more of their confidential information online, but will expect that it be protected through constantly secure channels.
• Micro-targeting: Targeting consumers has evolved dramatically in the past 10 years to the point where it is possible to find and communicate with a small group of brand supporters in a highly cost effective manner.
• Instant, Dynamic Content: Online content must now immediately change based on user inputs. Providing the same content for everyone regardless of what they do on your site is a losing proposition.
• Mobile Grows Up: Typically seen as a marketing platform that could only reach teenagers, older users are beginning to adopt some of the same habits as younger consumers, opening up a range of new promotional options.
• Managing and Leading Word of Mouth: Tracking down everything that someone says about your brand was impossible without Internet-based technologies. Now brands are expected to track, and where appropriate, join in the conversations that people are having about them.
• Print Goes Interactive: Print isn’t dead, but it needs to leverage interactive technologies to stay relevant and match consumer behaviors.

If you want more information on each of these trends, then you can download my full white paper on this topic: Emerging Media in Healthcare and Pharma  (1084 downloads)

As an added bonus, I want to share a copy of an article I had published in Pharmaceutical Executive last year called “Exercising Your Brand.” This paper outlines these rules healthcare marketers must follow to help ensure a successful digital program. I’ll share the link with you via DM on Twitter if you send this tweet about today’s post (PS: make sure you’re following me, so I can DM you). Deal?

If you want to be informed of any new white papers I publish, just fill out the form below. Your information will only be used for this purpose and will never be shared under any circumstance.

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Note: Stay tuned for an updated version of this paper in the coming months. Emerging media changes quickly, so it’s difficult to stay current no matter how often you’re updating.

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1. Live From CBI Emerging Media Pharma Conference
2. No, Pharma’s Digital Future Isn’t All Social Media
3. Pharma Should Forget About Social Media Monitoring

Relationship marketing is exactly what is sounds like. It’s marketing that involves an ongoing relationship between customer and company. “Relationship” is of course the key word, but often times, it’s really just a one-way communication:company to consumer. That’s going to have to change.  A few trends in pharma and healthcare are going to make this happen whether we like it or not. Understanding these trends is going to be critical if your relationship marketing program is going to bring value to customers or be piled in with the rest of the spam out there.

Here are six emerging trends that every pharma and healthcare company needs to consider not just in regards to their relationship marketing programs, but in all their marketing efforts.

• Healthcare Information 24/7 —  The information that consumers will have access to and will use to make decisions will continue to increase in volume and availability.
• Consumers As “Physicians” — With the staggering increase in bloggers, user-generated media (such as YouTube), and social networking, end users are creating and controlling more and more of the content available online.
• Internet = Trusted Source — All other forms of media already fall behind the Internet as a source for healthcare information for most Americans.
• It’s Their Data, Not Yours — In the future, consumers will have more control of their healthcare records and history.
• Healthy Social Networking — Because of the sheer number of people utilizing the Internet, it is possible to find people who share the same experiences as you.
• Constant Contact, Constant Care — Some technologies to monitor patients’ health, now in early development, which still are largely cumbersome and not embraced by the public, will become more widespread.

If you want more information on each of these trends, then you can download my full white paper on this topic: The Future of Healthcare Relationship Marketing  (1583 downloads)

You can download more publications and presentations on the “Pubs and Presos” page.

If you want to be informed of any new white papers I publish, just fill out the form below. Your information will only be used for this purpose and will never be shared under any circumstance. (Note: this form will not work in email clients or within Feedburner. Please click through to the post to fill it out.)

Possibly related posts (auto-generated):

1. Emerging Media in Healthcare and Pharma White Paper
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You can follow all the goings-on at right here. Through the magic of Twitter, you’ll get live updates from me and many industry leaders who are also here.

If you have questions, send them in. Chances are someone here can answer it.

Also, you can view and download my presentation by following this link: “If You Build It, They Will Come…Or Will They?”

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1. Emerging Media in Healthcare and Pharma White Paper
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