How a Pharma (Or Any Highly Regulated Business) Can Evolve Into a Social Media Leader In 5 Easy Steps

With marketing budgets tighter than ever, pharmaceutical companies are hungry for new ways to reach and engage highly qualified prospects at a fraction of the cost traditional media. Social media is just one new weapon in the pharmaceutical marketer’s arsenal. Used with the proper strategic rigor, it can help to amplify exponentially the good will generated from a company’s other marketing and public relations -based initiatives, providing much more bang for the buck.

By simply dipping the toes of its digital footprint into the online communities where both doctors and patients congregate (and data shows they are congregating more and more), a business can be a fly on the wall and gain invaluable information about what patients, healthcare providers and caregivers are discussing in terms of the disease state, treatments – even their experiences with customer service.

A lot of what’s being said on blogs and forums is positive and a lot of it is neutral. But what usually stands out most is a very vocal minority that knows how to use social media to vent its displeasure. (Think... um...Tea Party.) This is what makes the news.

It’s also what makes pharma companies nervous about using social media.

Case in point: just a few weeks ago, Sanofi Aventis had (an unofficial) Facebook page overrun by an organization of former breast cancer patients (the “Taxotears”) who suffered permanent hair loss (alopecia) due to their use of Sanofi’s chemo drug, Taxotere. The patients posted photos of their bald heads and accused Sanofi  of not properly warning them of the possibility of alopecia as a side effect of treatment with Taxotere. The warning is indeed printed on the brand's materials, but it seems doctors may not be making enough of a point about it when discussing possible side effects with prospective patients. It will be interesting to see how Sanofi responds to the situation. In this situation, considering that the page is counterfeit and infringing on Sanofi's logo, I might suggest dispensing with the usual social media rules of engagement and have Facebook pull the plug on the page.

It’s adverse events like this that make pharma companies nervous about the use of social media. But if a company is properly prepared to anticipate such events and has a procedure in place, social media is the best way to turn a negative discussion into a positive one.

We always talk about pharma’s squeamishness about social media – the regulatory issues, and so on.  But when you think about it, what industry is better prepared to deal with these things than pharma, itself?  After all, pharmaceutical marketers have a couple of decades under their belts of working within rigid FDA guidelines. 

In social media, transparency and authenticity is key. Companies can’t make false or inaccurate claims or hide their mistakes or products’ shortcomings. Unlike those in other industries that can play around with semantics, pharma companies have long been held accountable for their actions and know what it takes to abide by a firm set of rules. So what industry is better prepared for social media than pharma? It just takes some smart planning, good strategic thinking and a little courage. Here are a few suggestions for venturing more deeply into the unchartered waters of social media (with water wings):

1. Who does what? Decide who on the team will be responsible for what: monitoring conversations, engaging in the dialogue, handling MLR, etc. Without clear assignments, mistakes can happen. (Even with them, mistakes will happen.) The important thing is to expect the unexpected and have the right people in place to handle it. This means everyone will have to take on a little extra responsibility beyond their original job descriptions.

2. Socialize social media. To get everyone in the company more comfortable with the inevitable, have them create their own Facebook pages and Twitter feeds.  Just make sure that they don't use them as vehicles for delivering the company's point of view. These are purely for personal use only.  After everyone gets a little more comfortable, create a corporate Facebook page for employees to use. Get the hang of moderating the discussion. Open a corporate Twitter feed and practice using it as a tool to engage the community – not as just another PR outlet. Create a company blog and have members of every department contribute to it. But before doing any of these things, develop an editorial calendar that strategically fits your marketing plan. Then adhere to it.

3. Create a fast lane to legal. Like any one-to-one conversation, social media happens in real time. When someone says something worthy of a response – or even more importantly – a correction, you don’t have the luxury of time.  So a process designed for reviewing bigger and more complicated materials over a much greater length of time simply won’t cut it.  By the time the material is deemed kosher, it could be too late to engage in the conversation. Create an HOV lane to your legal department. 

4. Make monthly “digital house calls.”  Have your company's medical experts openly drop in on the most respected and heavily frequented disease state-related forums to answer questions and correct any misinformation they find. They should be clear that they are there on behalf of their company, and they should clearly substantiate all of their information. While they’re at it, they should also look at any Wikipedia entries about your brand and the disease state it covers, and politely correct any inaccurate Wiki information or discussion posts. But the corrections should be made only in the "Discussion Bar" notes, NOT in the Wiki, itself. Leave good source material and the active Wiki community will make the change for you.

5. Create a spokes-patient. Have him or her write a weekly blog about their personal patient journey experience and regularly post entries for a video diary on YouTube. They can also (with full disclosure) correct misinformation like the (and with the help of) the experts in the previous suggestion. Your spokesperson could also write emails for a retention program, leading the patients by example. This concept could carry into above the line media, as well.

It’s all about tiny steps. But even a tiny step is one in the right direction.

By the time the FDA gets around to establishing social media guidelines for the entire industry, your pharma company will have smartly and carefully established itself as a leader in social media.

-Mark

The Transformation to Transformational Marketing

At the recent ePharma Summit in Philadelphia, Pfizer’s Joe Shields threw out a provocative question:

“Would the shift to specialty pharmaceutical products lead to less disciplined marketing?”

Joe wondered whether the higher margins of many specialty products would cause pharmaceutical marketers to slip back into the bad habits of yesteryear and spend without a lot of forethought to efficiency and ROI. 

Pharmaceutical marketing, by necessity, has gotten more disciplined as the margins have shrunk on many of the blockbuster brands. Expenditures that were once considered the price of entry – massive booths at medical conventions, national network advertising campaigns and fully outfitted field forces of 5,000 or more – are now routinely and rigorously questioned.

In the past, management wasn’t asking, so why bother measuring? (About 10 years ago, I remember being told by my boss when proudly describing a large cost savings I had helped engineer, “that’s nice but not important here.”) 

Things have certainly changed.

To answer Joe’s question, I don’t believe that the shift to specialty pharmaceutical products will lead to the unexamined spending of yesteryear but I do think it could result in increased spending as it has the potential to completely retool marketing in a way that advances patient care.

Specialty pharmaceutical products, by their nature, apply to smaller, more engaged patient populations often fighting for their lives against devastating disease. These are patients willing to be seen, to be heard, to be known. And knowing and interacting with these patients is taking on different forms than it does with marketing primary care medications. 

In marketing specialty products, more intimate, unvarnished ways of understanding patients including watching lives unfold on personal blogs often offer more relevant insights than the traditional tools of understanding such as large scale A&U’s. Tactically, marketers find themselves in deep conversations with patient ambassadors rather than crowded around a tiny TV monitor on a commercial shoot.

And with this more intimate view, has come greater empathy. It is devastating to be told stories of how pulmonary arterial hypertension saps people of their energy so much so that a short walk to the kitchen for a glass of water is an overwhelming obstacle. On the other hand, it is heart-warming however to hear that same person’s son drove 30 minutes to get his mother a glass of water.

This greater empathy combined with the marketers' natural problem-solving nature, is leading some to shift focus: 

From selling products to transforming patient lives. 

No matter how many well-researched mailings we send, some people simply don’t have the life skills, the mindset, self-esteem or financial wherewithal to successfully address their health challenges. The question for pharmaceutical marketers then becomes “What changes can the marketer help the patient make so that they have the skills that not only help them take their medication but make sustainable changes that impact their overall lives and health going forward? 

Marketer as social worker? Think again.

Customer transformation is marketing. According to “The Experience Economy” by Pine and Gilmore, customer “transformations are a distinct economic offering.” Transformation marketing views its business as changing customers in a sustained way. Published in 1999, the book outlines various levels of economic value from extracting commodities to delivering services to finally guiding transformations.

The idea is not exactly new to pharmaceutical marketing either. People at the ePharma Summit spoke about needing to focus on “value beyond the pill.” However this statement still makes the pill rather than the customer the central point of reference. A more customer centric version asks, “what sustainable changes can we help the patient make to improve their health?”

The answer will probably lead to spending increases on more comprehensive patient services. 24-hour nurse lines cost more than IVRs. Behavior modification programs are more complex than the usual set of patient mailings. True social media marketing and on-line community management is more labor intensive. And designing transformative patient experiences will have a higher CPM than your average television spot.

But the result could be far-reaching changes in patients lives that go beyond the pill and their disease to transform the whole way they approach their health and their life. And it is these fundamental changes that will also enable them to successfully adhere to their medication regimens.

Certainly, mine is an optimistic answer to Joe’s question. I’ll admit, I have a natural affinity towards half-full and rose-colored glasses.

How would you answer Joe’s question?


-Dorothy

 

 

Study Pushes Envelope, Thinks Outside Box And Drills It Down To A More Granular Level

I just came across a Reuters story about a study published by Opinium, a research company in the U.K. It reveals what workers today consider the most annoying things they have to deal with on the job.

Along with such expected grievances as "people not cleaning up after themselves in the kitchen" and "talking too loudly on the phone" is my own personal neck hair-raiser: obnoxious business jargon, which the study kindly "drills down to a more granular level." Here are the results, ranked from the most grating, to the just plain annoying:

1. Thinking outside the box (21 percent)

2. Let's touch base (20)

3. Blue sky thinking (19)

4. Blamestorming (16) (sitting down and working out whose fault something is)

5. Drill down to a more granular level (15) (Look into something in more detail)

6. Let's not throw pies in the dark (15) (we need a plan rather than a haphazard approach)

7. I've got that on my radar (13)

8. Push the envelope (12)

9. Bring your A-game (11) (Be ready to do something to best of ability)

10. Get all your ducks in a row (11)

Having spent most of my career in the creative departments of advertising agencies, I had mostly been sheltered from hearing such hooey. But on occasion, I do get to hear such beauties as, "how do we make it an actionable item?" and other "game-changing" phrases which hopefully won't be "gaining traction" around the Extrovertic office.

I'd love to hear your least favorite office jargon. We'll "run it up the flagpole and see who salutes."

-Mark

 

Has Twitter's Bird Flown?

It appears more and more companies are flipping Twitter the bird. 

In a story by Todd Wasserman in Brandweek, a new study from RJ Metrics shows that the Twitter craze has hit the ceiling. In the middle of last year, Twitter's growth slowed from 7.8 million new users per month to 6.2 million. What's more, only 17 percent of users updated their accounts in December. (An all-time low.) Earlier, a Nielson study found that 60 percent of Twitter users don't return from month to month.

This data, however, may be misleading because so many users access their accounts in ways other than through their Twitter home pages.

Regardless, sentiment about the platform is changing.

Says Converse CMO Geoff Cotrill, "Twitter has become the butt of a joke. You start seeing in popular culture people making fun of Twitter. There will be a new media toy that will replace it in a year or two." Joel Ewanick, group vp of marketing for Hyundai, feels Facebook, which has replicated many of of Twitter's best features, to be a much better product. And according to Venture Blog, some P&G executives told venture capitalists that they didn't consider Twitter "particularly relevant to they're doing on the brand-building and advertising side."

Verizon, which spent more than $1 billion on advertising in 2009 has accumulated about 0.3 percent the amount that Perez Hilton has. Delta's account went without a single update last year from June 17 to December 22.  And Apple doesn't even bother with having presence on Twitter. 

But there are also those who claim great success using Twitter. Dell, for example, boasted an ROI of $6.5 million in Twitter-based revenues in 2009. Best Buy is trying to follow suit, but so far, with more modest success.

Companies that do the best with it tend to be smaller and less known. 

Twitter does provide value as a platform for PR, CRM and promotions. 

But for this bird, it looks like the sky is no longer the limit.

-Mark

"Hi, Billy Mays here. From beyond the grave."

One day last week, after a meeting in Boston, I went back to my hotel room to relax before joining my colleagues for dinner. I turned on the TV and started unpacking my laptop, when suddenly the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

The voice screaming at me was instantly recognizable.

"HI, BILLY MAYS HERE FOR THE JUPITER JACK. THE MOST CONVENIENT HANDS-FREE DEVICE FOR ANY CELLPHONE, GUARANTEED!"

I felt like the kid in "The Sixth Sense." 
"I see dead people," I thought to myself, "and they're yelling at me."

There he was, the dead pitchman, pitching at me with all the vigor of an extremely live pitchman. And unlike in his other spots, he was driving a car while doing it!

It was a bit unnerving. Billy seemed so alive, so eager to sell this amazing little miracle product!

Never before had I been held so entranced by a hardcore direct response commercial. I practically had to fight myself from picking up the phone and ordering a few of the damn things.

Why was I so much more captivated by this infomercial than any other I had seen?

Then it hit me. For an infomercial, this was the perfect storm: A famous dead guy driving his car – possibly with cocaine in his system – while pitching a product that he promises could save your life.

What could have more stopping power than that?

(Okay, the only thing that might have made this spot even more unsettling is if he had crashed into something as he spoke to the camera.)

Later, I read that this spot was Billy's last. I suppose the next time I see it, I won't be so caught off guard.

Unless he starts to decompose more with each subsequent airing...

-Mark

A Title Wave

This week, Advertising Age ran an article about how Alex Bogusky, of Crispin Porter Bogusky, would be expanding his role beyond his own agency and working with parent company MDC to improve the creative output of all its agencies.

The title Bogusky gave himself at MDC is "Chief Creative Insurgent."

While some in the trades have been having fun with this title, I quite like it. It clearly states his mission – to shake things up creatively – in a way that is inherently more creative than "MDC Executive Creative Director" or the like.

Way back in the last decade (13 months ago, to be exact), my partner Dorothy Wetzel and I named our new agency "Extrovertic" because we felt it accurately reflected who we are and what our business is all about.

Since our mission is to help companies become more extroverted in their customer engagement, "Extrovertic" just seemed like the perfect monicker for our firm. And when it came to giving titles to ourselves and our staff, it made sense to carry the theme down to a personal level.

Dorothy is our "Chief Marketing Extrovert." I am the "Chief Creative Extrovert." We have a "Chief RM Extrovert," a "Marketing Strategy Extrovert," a "Strategic Planning Extrovert," a "Client Services Extrovert," and so on. We even have an "Associate Extrovert" – our intern from York College.

I've had a couple of colleagues in the business tell me they're not sure about these titles. But most prospective clients, upon receiving our business cards, seem to find them refreshing and reflective of who they're meeting with for the first time. It really sets the tone for a more relaxed, unstuffy meeting.

Non-traditional titles seem to be gaining popularity all across the corporate landscape.

When I was at Ogilvy, we had a "Minister of Culture." The head of Aol's matchmaking service holds the title, "CEO of Love." Yahoo! has a "Yahoo! Evangelist."

Some companies refer to their receptionists or call center operators as "Directors of First Impressions."

Even a company as conservative as Berkshire Hathaway has a "Director of Chaos" (the person responsible for putting together its annual event-filled annual shareholder get-together).

And while Steve Jobs' official title at Apple is CEO, he prefers the title, Chief Know it All.

In today's business world, 9:00 to 5:00 has become 24/7 and the office has become anywhere you can pick up a WiFi signal. So why not rethink people's titles, too?

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

– Mark

An Old Force of Nature Meets a New Force of Kindness

This is the second time since we started this blog that I've posted about the use of social media after an earthquake.

Of course, the quake in Haiti was a world apart from the one last year in Italy, and not just in terms of geography. It appears that the devastation caused by the Haitian quake may be unlike anything we've ever seen before.

And this, in a country that was already considered by many to be a disaster zone on even a normal day.

While Twitter was once again the first media source on the scene, social media is now earning accolades for its power to raise a whole lot of money in a very short time. Almost instantly, musician Wyclef Jean was on the news shows appealing to people to text the word "yele" at 501501 to make an automatic $5 donation.

The Yele Haiti fund reached $1 million today.

Soon, it seemed every humanitarian aid group was collecting money this way. The Red Cross has raised $4 million through its $10 text number. The White House has a number, as does UNICEF, Catholic Relief Services, Oxfam and countless others.

Usually, donations take weeks to get where they need to go, but with these texts, it's instantaneous. And without having to write a check or pull out a credit card, people seem to be much quicker to donate.

"It's shattered any record that we've seen with mobile giving before," the Red Cross's social media manager told CNN.

It appears that in the aftermath of a tragedy of such immense magnitude, texting technology is now helping to untap generosity of perhaps an even great magnitude.

– Mark