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How Pharma Should Use Search Engine Marketing

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UPDATE April 6 (original post follows):

Seems like the times have changed already. In the week after I wrote this, the FDA has cracked down on paid search ads. On Friday, April 3, the FDA sent letters to 14 companies specifically about misleading search marketing ads. As you saw in this post, no one was really quite sure how to interpret FDA rules for search, but they made it pretty clear in these letters. If you have have the drug name and an indication, you’d better have fair balance. Same as every other promotional medium. The story of these letters broke on April 3 and included a few examples. One such ad was for Biogen drug Tysabri. The quote from the article:

“Biogen received a warning letter for its multiple-sclerosis drug Tysabri. The ads say ‘A Multiple Sclerosis Treatment That’s Different from the Others’ or ‘Satisfied with your MS Medication or Looking for Something Different?’ but don’t include any risk information.

“Their casual approach to Tysabri treatment is extraordinary in light of the potentially lethal risks of the drug and the stringent controls over its distribution,” the FDA said in its letter to Biogen on March 26. The letter was posted on the agency’s Web site Friday.”

The most critical part of all these letters for pharma companies is as follows: “Biogen’s ad includes a link to the Web site for the drug, which does contain the relevant risk information. The FDA said the link ‘does not mitigate the misleading omission of risk information from these promotional materials [bold added].’ “ That is, the one-click rule is dead. Just because you have the risk information on the page your ad links to doesn’t mean you don’t have include fair balance. So, for all the complaining I do about the FDA not being clear on digital promotion guidelines, this seems pretty clear to me. Check out my original post, which contains some more things for pharma marketers to consider when placing paid search ads.

Original Post

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while and haven’t gotten around to it. Someone at work today reminded me of it when they asked me a very simple question (or so it would seem) about FDA rules regarding paid search marketing. (For the sake of today’s post, I’m referring to search engine paid search such as Google AdWords.) The question was this: “Since you have to include fair balance when you show the drug’s name and what it is used for, how come there are all these paid search ads that do both with no fair balance?” Here’s an example of one of these:

Google Breast Cancer Search

There you see a paid ad (in the tan box) from Femara along with “Breast Cancer.” Femara is indicated for breast cancer, so by including the name of the drug and what it is used for without fair balance they are in violation. Right? Wrong?

The answer is I have no idea and neither does anyone else for sure. The FDA has never formally issued guidance here (a pet peeve that I’ve blogged about before). The rule that many companies seem to use is the “one click rule” (good review here from Catalyst). Many companies use this rule almost like it’s a formal FDA policy, but it isn’t. Basically, the rule is that if the fair balance information is one click away from the ad, then you’re okay. Or are you?

At the end of last year, Diovan received a warning letter for a banner they used that contained no fair balance (hat tip to John Mack’s post about this issue). They were applying the one click rule. The FDA didn’t care. Two things to consider though: this was a banner and not just a simple text ad like AdWords and Diovan has a black box warning meaning it’s got a whole set of special promotional rules to follow. So, you can’t really say this is the end of the story. Fact is that thousands of pharma ads are served up on Google each day that, by letter of the law, are in violation. The FDA has to know this and lets it go, so there has to be some informal nod of approval there…maybe.

Enough of that. In this post, I want to do two things. One, convince you of the value of paid search and two, show you some examples of what to do and what not to do. 

One: Why You Should Care About Paid Search

I’m going to use Google AdWords throughout this post, but know that the same rules apply to Yahoo! or MSN or any other network that wants to serve your text ads. If you have no idea what AdWords is, you can start with this primer from Google.  Very few pharma marketers I know really understand paid search and why it’s important. Typically, the buying and planning for paid search is relegated to the “e” team or is completely outsourced to a media buying agency. While this may be fine, you still need a working knowledge of what’s going on. Here are a couple of bullet points on why you should care about search as a channel for marketing:

  • Over 80% of all web sessions start at a search engine (source: comScore)
  • 85% of all website traffic comes from search engines (source: SEMPO)
  • 91% of Internet users report conducting searches daily (source: SEMPO)
  • 1.78 billion searches are conducted per day on Google alone (source: Google)

Big numbers, right? Here’s why search marketing is so important and why it works: Many people go online with a problem. Problems need solutions. This is what Google’s results, both paid and organic, are supposed to be. Solutions. If you search for “hotel in San Juan,” we can reasonably assume your “problem” is that you need to find a hotel in San Juan. The solutions might be organic results of some major hotels in the area and the paid results that might include something as simple as “Cheap hotels in San Juan.” Consumers are looking for Google to provide a solution and Google is letting you help them provide it (at a cost, of course).

Clearly this is how patients use the Internet. They have a problem (e.g., a condition they are managing) and they want solutions. These solutions can come in many forms and you need to be sure that you’re part of the list. Here’s an analogy for you: paid search similar to someone who goes to a grocery store looking for diapers. They already know their problem (out of diapers…a major problem), but they may not know their solution. This person gets to the shelf (Google’s search results page) and then picks out a solution (a specific brand of diapers). If your brand is not appearing in paid or organic search results on the first page, then you’re not “on the shelf.” It’s hard to be selected when you aren’t on the shelf.

Okay, so by now you’re convinced. Paid search is good. One more thing to consider, it’s highly cost effective. With AdWords, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. So, you’re only getting people that found some appeal with your ad. They’re interested in your solution. So, you’re not wasting money paying to display ads for people who don’t care about your solution. You pay when they click. That’s good news and bad. You pay when they click. Each time someone clicks, money comes out of your budget. The question then is “did you get your money’s worth”? Here’s how you can ensure that you do.

Two: What To Do and What Not To Do

I’m going to be as diplomatic as I can here in providing some constructive criticism. When I show an example, know that this is just one of probably hundreds that are making this same error, so if you’re site or campaign is here, know that you’re in good company. Paid search is still a new skill for many pharma marketers, so mistakes are going to be made. Let’s just figure out some ways to ensure that they don’t keep happening. I’ve broken the areas you should focus on into three sections.

“Fulfil the Promise”

This means that when you promise something in your ad, make sure you deliver it. If you don’t, the patient will simply leave immediately and you wasted your money at best. At worst, you can create someone who has a very poor perception of your brand…not something any pharma brand needs. Here are the first paid and organic search results for “breast cancer” again. You should know that each time someone clicks on a paid search ad for “breast cancer” it’s going to cost between $1 and $7. It all depends on what the competition is bidding at that time. $7 a click is quite a bit to have people leave as soon as they arrive.

Google Breast Cancer Search

So, does Femara fulfil the promise? They say they are going to allow you to “Review Treatments.” When you click on the ad, you get to this page. See it for yourself here and below.

Femara Landing Page

It’s the Femara homepage and, right away, I don’t see anything about reviewing treatments. There is a link to “Treatment Options” on the left, but why didn’t I get automatically sent to that page? Rule one: if you promise something then deliver it. Part of this is ensuring that you don’t direct every paid search ad to your homepage. Direct them to the page that matches the information you promised in your ad. 

To give Femara the benefit of the doubt, I checked this “Treatment Options” link to see if this allows us to “Review Treatments.” For one section, adjuvant therapy (one place where Femara is indicated), here’s what was included:

Femara Treatment Options

Not exactly “Treatment Options” when your treatment is the only one listed and far from letting me “Review Treatments” as the ad indicated.

Patients Like Me, normally one of my favorites, is guilty of the same rule violation. They have two versions of basically the same ad for the search term “fibromyalgia” (Google lets you experiment which works best, which I highly recommend). Here they are:

Fibromyalgia ad 1

Fibromyalgia ad 2

Subtle difference, but one offers you a survey when you click and the other doesn’t. This is a great way to see what people are more interested in and what will get them to click your ad and come to your site. However, both of these ads send you to the same generic fibromyalgia landing page. There is no survey. At best, an honest mistake, at worst a bait-and-switch. Unfortunately, this is very common in AdWords, but people don’t like to be tricked. They clicked on your ad for a reason and expect to see what you promised. Don’t waste your money if you’re not going to fulfil the promise.

“Switch-A-Roo at Your Own Risk”

The “switch-a-roo” is pretty common on AdWords. This involves including one URL in your ad and then automatically redirecting the user to a different URL. Here’s an example:

High Cholesterol search

So, I searched for “Cholesterol” and got back these three paid search options. The first one sounds pretty good. I want to know how to do all this stuff…lowering my cholesterol and such. The Site URL sounds good too: GetCholesterolInfo.com. I want to get info and it sounds non-biased. I’ll go with that. But where does the patient go? To the Crestor brand site.

Crestor Brand Site

The person clicking this ad may be fine with this or they may scoff at being sent to a pharma brand site when they thought they were going to a third party information site based on the URL in the ad. Again, you might lose someone immediately and you’re wasting money. Let me also say that there is nothing illegal or unscrupulous about using these masked URLs and redirects. They are well within Google’s guidelines. In addition, they don’t violate the letter of the FDA law since the ad doesn’t contain a brand name. So, they are likely “less” in violation than the versions that include a disease state and a brand name. Likely, but who really knows.

Crestor does get higher marks than Femara (disclosure: I used to work for AstraZeneca, makers of Crestor, but they’re getting a little rough treatment, so you know I’m not too biased). They fulfil the promise to a much higher degree. They offer in their ad “ways to lower your LDL cholesterol” and they direct you to a page in the section of their site called “Living a Healthy Lifestyle” with information about diet, exercise, and stress management. They didn’t just dump the patient on the homepage and require him to find his way to this info.

So, I said this section is called “Switch-A-Roo at Your Own Risk” and I mean it. There isn’t anything wrong with using these masked URLs, just know that some people might not appreciate them. As I said before, Google let’s you experiment. Try different ads and track the bounce rate of those clicking the ads. Bounce rates essentially let you see if people leave your site before clicking anything else. Is the bounce rate really high with the masked URLs compared to the real URLs? If so, you might have a problem with upset people leaving right away when the figure out this is not what they expected. Test, test, test.

“For All That Is Decent and Holy, Buy Your Brand Keywords”

I didn’t include the first part of the rule initially, but added it in my second draft to emphasize the point. I’m not even going to explain this rule, I’m going to see if you can figure out the problem from this picture. This is the search result for “Lipitor:”

Lipitor Google Search Result

Figure out the problem yet? For all the fighting pharma does over Canadian imports, especially Pfizer’s based on its history, you’d think that pharma would take care of this little problem. The two top positions for paid search go to Canadian pharmacies. If someone was just prescribed Lipitor, they probably go online to check it out a bit more even before they fill the prescription. They search for “Lipitor” and find a simple way to buy your drug from Canada. That’s not in the marketing plan.

There might be a really good reason why Lipitor is not buying its brand keywords. They may have exceeded the budget for the day, one of these other companies outbid them, or Pfizer may have chosen to not bid on “Lipitor.” Whatever the reason, it’s still a rule. Always own your brand name on AdWords. Don’t let anyone else dictate the message. By letting someone else have the top spot (you can outbid if you need to), you’re giving them the opportunity to tell your story. You don’t allow that in any other marketing channel, so don’t allow it here.

 

Those are the rules. Follow them to get started in paid search if you haven’t already or follow them to improve what you’re already doing. As always, if you don’t have anyone at your company or agencies who you feel can do this properly, then contact me. Remember if your company was mentioned in my post about Pharma’s Getting the Message, I’ll help you for free. All the companies mentioned in this post are on the list (hint, hint). 

Personalization and Individualization…What’s the Difference?

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In programs I’ve lead in the past and in work we do here at Bridge Worldwide, we’re always striving to create a closer connection with customers (patients or doctors,  in the case of healthcare) and make our information more meaningful and relevant. There has been and always will be a lot of debate about the best ways to do this. One of the first things that marketers come up with is personalization.

Personalization, for purposes of today’s debate, means adding some personally identifying information to your communications. This usually means putting someone’s name on the top of an email or direct mail piece. It’s remarkably simple to do with digital media and has become very simple (and cost effective) in print as well. Adding someone’s name to an email, for example, is much better than sending an email with “Dear Person” or “Dear Cancer Person.” I only joke because I have seen these before. I assume they were mistakes, but I saw them.

A recent article in eMarketer pointed out that “41% of US Internet users surveyed said they paid more attention to advertising that was personalized. And nearly the same proportion of respondents (39%) said they were more willing to click on such personalized ads.” Personalization does work.

But personalization only goes so far. Consider your email about your oral contraceptive  that starts out “Dear Stacy.” So far so good. You then  give “Stacy” all sorts of useful information about why birth control is perfect for “Stacy” and how simple it is to take and that it might even clear up “Stacy’s” skin. Excellent. Good pitch. The only problem is that “Stacy” is a man. I highlight this extreme example to make a point. Don’t bother trying to make it look like your created something personal for someone when you didn’t. It’s insulting and I guarantee that it does more harm than good.

Individualization is something different. For our purposes,  individualization means creating communications that are tailored for each and every individual person. The test to see if you’re sending out individualized messages is simple: does someone read what you sent and think, “Wow. They wrote this just for me.” If not, then it’s not individualized. This too can be really simple and more and more companies are embracing it. Here’s a great example that my colleague, Bob Gilbreath, wrote about on his Marketing with Meaning blog:

First, Delta included his name. Good. That’s personalization. However, then they go on and apologize for sticking him in a middle seat on his last flight and offer him some miles to say sorry. Interesting point to note, Bob didn’t ask for this or complain to Delta. They just did it. Delta knew the situation and sent an individualized response. Question: if Bob got this email and the 500 miles or another email that simply gave him 500 miles without the individualized touch, which would have more impact? Each results in the same value for him, 500 miles. But clearly the one that talks about his specific situation makes a lasting impression. So, you can’t just give away stuff and expect that to be enough. You have to make the extra effort to make it meaningful.

But just how difficult is that to do? For Delta, all this required was for someone to into their database and write one simple rule: middle seat on last flight, send this email. Period. Probably less than a day worth of work for one person (depending on their system). If you are already collecting personal information about people, you’re on your way to being able to do this. What type of data is in your database?

Part of what makes Delta’s message so special is the fact that it’s a bit of a surprise. Bob has opted into communication from Delta, but doesn’t expect things to come regularly, yet he is open to hearing from them (even more so now). You can create relevant surprises as well. If you have a section of your site that allows people to register, then you should be doing this. Once someone registers, you can follow what they do on your site and send this information back to his or her profile in your database. The rules you set up then generate an email follow up, for example. Consider someone who comes to your site and looks through every page about financial assistance for your product. They linger a long time time on the eligibility section.  Imagine that you send this person an email noting that you know she’s concerned about finances and reiterate some of your programs that are available and then offer her a discount ( like  a rebate coupon) and offer her an 800 number she can call to talk to a live financial counselor (if you have this). 

Obviously, this email would make a huge impact and all it required was a bit better organization of your database and communication system. It is perfectly relevant to her biggest concern about your product and you are there immediately to help answer it. This level of individualization is becoming the norm in many industries. Your message is just one of thousands a given person sees each day. Your “competition” isn’t just the other drugs in the class, but also every one of these other messages. People will only interact with those that are meaningful to them. So, just because your direct competitor isn’t doing this isn’t a reason to ignore it. You need to stand out in a really cluttered inbox, mailbox,and Internet. Do your communications stand out?


The Myth of Adverse Event Reporting

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I’ve written a fair amount about the use of social media in healthcare (here and here), particularly pharma, on this blog. And, like many other people working to try to enhance healthcare marketing by including channels such as social media, I’ve heard all the same excuses. I was reading John Mack’s post today at Pharma Marketing Blog and it inspired me to write a quick little summary about what I call “The Myth of Adverse Event Reporting.”

Before getting to that, a little setup. Let’s be clear, the reality is that many healthcare companies (or many other industries for that matter) aren’t ready to incorporate social media into the mix. The specific reasons are different for each industry, but they share some commonalities. Here are the big reasons:

  1. Afraid to give up control of the brand
  2. It doesn’t work/impossible to measure
  3. No one in my target audience uses social media
  4. Worried about bad reviews

For pharma, these same reasons persist, but they have a little different spin:

  1. Same
  2. I can’t track it like physician-level prescription data
  3. Older people use my products and they don’t use social media
  4. Adverse Event reporting 

So, let’s take a look at each of these one at a time. I’ll save the one that kills me the most, Adverse Event Reporting, for last.

1. Afraid to give up control of the brand

Surprise, you already lost control of your brand. Conversations are going on without you already. Don’t believe me? Pull up any discussion board on WebMD. It’s going on without you. Search for your company’s products and see what people are saying. They’re saying it’s great, it’s horrible, it gives me gas, it makes my teeth whiter, it made Aunt Sally turn blue. They’re also giving and receiving medical advice that only a physician should give. So, if you think that allowing people to comment or post information about your product might take control from you, you’re right. However, do you want it happening on WebMD where you have no control and can’t really respond effectively or do you want it happening on your site where you can?

2. It doesn’t work/impossible to measure (for pharma: I can’t track it like physician-level prescription data)

First, social media is no harder to track or correlate with sales than any other online program done in healthcare (or offline for that matter). It is far more difficult in pharma to track the effects of a specific promotion on sales compared to other industries. In consumer packaged goods (CPG), for example, you can do panel match studies where you know who is doing what, what messages they are exposed to, and if it had a specific lift in sales. Our company does this all the time. In pharma, you don’t have this level data and you never will. HIPPA prevents it. So, get used to that. You can’t determine if someone who saw your commercial actually went and got a prescription and filled it. You can ask them, but that’s not reliable. The fact is, you may need to use other measures to determine if the program is effective. You do many programs where the efficacy is measured in clicks or visitors (rightly or wrongly) and you can do the same in social media. In addition,  in social media, you can actually track real-time brand sentiment. Instead of being a tactic to completely change opinions, you can actually use it as the proverbial “canary in a coal mine” to see if your other activities and messages are having an impact on opinion. For example, if you put out a new TV ad (please don’t by the way), you can rest assured that someone is commenting on it right now online. What does that conversation look like?

3. No one in my target audience uses social media (for pharma: Older people use my products and they don’t use social media) 

This simply isn’t the case anymore. You should know this by now. No? Well, here’s the info one more time. Consider just one social networking site for a minute. Facebook. Its share of college age users continues to decline every month. In addition, in the US, there are over 4 million users over the age of 35.

Isn’t 4 million a lot? Sure, it’s not number of people watching American Idol each week, but it’s not a small number. That’s just Facebook. Rest assured that the number of “older” people using social media will only increase in the future.

4. Worried about bad reviews (for pharma: Adverse Event reporting)

So, this is the main reason for today’s post, but since you came all this way, I figured I’d give you a few other things first. No charge. Let’s address bad reviews first. Product reviews are the norm now in ecommerce, but they weren’t always. One of the big reasons is that companies were afraid of negative reviews. It turns out, of course, that simply having reviews can increase traffic, conversion rate, and average order value (see more detail here). In addition, negative reviews aren’t an issue so long as there aren’t only negative reviews.  Consider yourself for a minute. You’re checking out a product online and all the reviews are glowing. What do you think about that? You’d probably feel like the results might not be all that authentic. Instead, when there are negative reviews, it actually can lend credibility to the product (and site) because people know the reviews are actually genuine. Negative reviews don’t turn people off. They read them and consider whether the negative would actually bother them. For example, someone ranks a product 1-star and says “this didn’t work on my Mac.” Well, if you have a PC, you aren’t worried. Simple example, but you see how it works.

Adverse Events are nothing more than negative reviews. If you want people to genuinely talk about your brand, they are going to say negative things. But how often do posts include adverse events? Nielsen decided to take a look at this rather than simply assume it was ” a lot,” which of course is a difficult number to manage. Nielsen looked at Yahoo Health boards and took 500 postings. Of these, only 1 contained enough information to qualify as an adverse event that needed to be reported. That’s 0.2%. Why so low? Turns out that someone simply saying that your drug caused them to have a headache isn’t enough to qualify as an adverse event. Nielsen summed up the pieces of information required to report an adverse event and there are four pieces: “(i) an identifiable patient; (ii) an identifiable reporter; (iii) a specific drug or biologic involved in the event; and (iv) an adverse event or fatal outcome.” (Hat tip to Pharma 2.0 for the summary). The study showed that one or two of these pieces were often available, but not all four. In addition, they found that it would be impossible to get all four even with some effort. In fact, the FDA says, “[Without these pieces] a report on the incident should not be submitted to the FDA because reports without such information make interpretation of their significance difficult, at best, and impossible, in most instances.”

This is because people often don’t register or leave their personal information in a post, so there is no way for a company to follow up and fill in the blanks. Naturally, if there is something significant, every effort should be made, but on the often anonymous Internet, this is usually difficult. Suppose for a moment there were several adverse events that need to be reported. How often do they need to be reported? The FDA is pretty clear on this. For new drugs, reports need to be filed quarterly for three years. After that, it’s annually. For “serious and unexpected” events, these have to be reported within 15 days. However, there’s a pretty high threshold for an adverse event to be considered “serious and unexpected.” Every company already has these reporting channels in place, so it is simply a matter of including adverse events received from social media into the workstream. 

 

Yes, it’s a balance. The fact is adverse events should not be the reason why healthcare shies away from social media. These risks can easily be mitigated and, if done right, can actually be used in a positive way. So, don’t use adverse events as an excuse anymore. You’ve got the data. 1 in 500 posts include a reportable event. You report quarterly at most (which you’re doing anyway). How much ongoing effort do your other marketing programs require? Probably quite a bit more than this. Next time you hear this excuse, you’ve got the data to dispel the myth of adverse event reporting.

The Digital Rules…First Things First

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Before we go too far, I thought I should share with you the Digital Rules that are important to any healthcare brand. Without these, pretty much anything else I’ve got to say isn’t going to mean much to your brand. Call this the required list and everything else I’m about to tell you the optional list. If you don’t do the required things, then the optional things won’t matter much.

These rules I developed were actually published in Pharmaceutical Executive magazine this summer under a title I never liked but they created, Exercising Your Brand. (You can download it here.) Yes, that is my picture…nice lighting, right?

Here are the rules for those who didn’t click through. Print this out and refer to it from time to time.

The 10 Digital Rules to Keep Your Brand Healthy:

Interactive Marketing in Pharma

1. Show; Don’t Tell: A demonstration, picture, or video always beats never-ending pages with thousands of words. Make your content scannable (easy to read quickly), and make it memorable. KnowMenopause.com uses videos of both patients and healthcare professionals (HCPs) to deliver content, instead of using countless pages of text.

2. Build an Integrated Approach: Do your website, e-newsletter, banners, AdWords, widgets, blog, emails (and so on…) all work together? Do they work in concert to drive action? And you’ve got to do all this before even considering your TV, radio, and print. While an over-the-counter (OTC) product, pharma could learn a lot from the marketing of alli, from GSK. The OTC version of the weight loss pill Xenical was launched with a large media campaign, but included several other unique consumer programs. Among these was a comprehensive starter kit with each bottle, which included a well-designed pill case, and a highly customizable website at myalli.com. What made the program stand out for me was the alli cookbook with special recipes that help you stick with a healthy diet and avoid foods likely to cause undesirable side effects. In-store efforts pulled all this together with excellent product placement strategies.

3. Deploy Rapid Segmentation: With digital technologies you have no excuse for sending the same thing to everyone or for providing the same information to everyone. Find out what each visitor needs and provide it. Repeat. PurplePill.com, the Nexium branded site, does this well with its navigation. You can select whether you are just curious about symptoms, are suffering from symptoms, are ready to talk to a doctor, or are a current Nexium patient. Depending on what you select, you have immediate access to content tailored to your needs.

4. Create Value for Everyone, Not Just Your Brand: If it just benefits the brand, people will reject it. No one trusts big pharma anymore, right? Instead, create something that helps the patient, and they’ll help you. This is done successfully for a number of brands that use an unbranded site to truly educate patients and help them find the information they need. Roche has done this well with fluFACTS.com, including the first movie tie-in for a pharma product. This site offers some good, basic information about the flu and useful tools like a flu tracker all without pushing their flu product, Tamiflu. This approach has undoubtedly has driven traffic and awareness of Tamiflu.

5. Structured, but Flexible: While you don’t need to include every feature ever conceived, you do need to give people the ability to make your stuff their own—whether it be customized home pages, content they can borrow, or a section of your site that they alone own and manage. Once they make your site their own, they’ll be more likely to return to it because they’ve already invested time and energy. This rule hasn’t been fully embraced by any pharma companies, but brands throughout healthcare have effectively leveraged this rule for years.

6. Clinical Doesn’t Mean Colorless: Research shows that consumers find visually appealing sites more credible than their plain counterparts. Did you make your site look like an exam room? (Incidentally, in the same study, HCPs had the exact opposite reaction, preferring more plain-looking sites.)

7. Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed: Because imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, flatter. Learn from what’s worked, and what hasn’t. Don’t stop at looking within your company or even within pharma. Apply lessons from other companies and industries. From this, create what’s never been done before, but don’t shy away from something because it’s been tried before. If it’s effective, then go with it.

8. Simple, Cost Effective, and Scalable: Just because you need to impact a lot of people to meet your goals it doesn’t mean that spending more money is the answer. Find out what your patients want and deliver it. Create programs you can build over time in planned phases. As you get positive results and more funding, build on your successes and cut your losses. Resist the temptation to create more one-off campaigns that don’t have a long life span.

9.Don’t Let Legal Run Your Program: Yes, pharma and healthcare have their own unique set of regulatory hurdles, but this doesn’t mean you have to ignore all of the new channels available to you. So, if the latest tools (e.g., Facebook, MySpace, widgets, etc.) aren’t allowed, find smart people who can figure out how to take what patients love about those tools and distill it into something you and your legal team can agree on. Reckitt Benckiser is one of the few companies willing to reject the idea that MySpace and sites like it aren’t a place for pharma. You can visit their MySpace page and become friends with “addiction411.” This page links to their TurnToHelp.com site. The effective use of MySpace to help educate adolescents (a key demographic of MySpace) about the risks of and treatments for prescription painkiller addiction shows that just about any digital channel can be brought into regulatory compliance.

10. The Patient Is the Boss: With infinite choices online, you have seconds to show why you are genuinely different before your audience moves on to the next search result. If you obey all of the above principles but ignore this one, you might as well give up now.

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