Peter Houston asks, could acquisition by Yahoo make Tumblr more interesting to Pharma?

I’m sure you’ve heard already — Internet geriatric Yahoo just bought six-year old Tumblr for $1.1 billion. The deal, likely to complete in the second half of this year, is almost all cash — reportedly almost all the cash Yahoo had in hand at the close of the first quarter. Why has Yahoo fallen so heavily for Tumblr? Easy, Yahoo is seen by many in the digital world as stodgy, slow and quite possibly past it. Tumblr is cool, nimble and on the up.

The Tumblr blogging platform, founded in 2007, posts some pretty impressive numbers: 300 million unique visitors a month; 17 billion page views monthly; 120,000 signups a day; 900 posts a second; and 24 billion minutes spent on the site every month. The clincher is Tumblr’s mobile footprint – more than half its visitors use its mobile app, seven times a day on average.

The bottom line is that a Yahoo-Tumblr combination (Yumblr?) is expected to grow Yahoo’s audience by half, giving it more than a billion monthly visitors, with a projected increase in traffic of approximately 20 percent. Yahoo hopes that it can bring its expertise in personalization and search to suck users into its advertising networks.

This could be a problem as the youthful Tumblr user-base, much like its twentysomething founder David Karp, hates internet advertising. As you might expect there has already been a user backlash against the deal, prompting Yahoo CEO to comment, “Don’t worry we won’t screw it up.”

The most likely way for Yahoo not to screw it up is to focus tightly on content marketing or branded content opportunities by bringing its grown-up content management skills to Tumblr’s nascent sponsored content offering. And this is the point where pharma marketers should start paying attention.

Given the demographic distance between the average Pharma CEO and the average Tumblr user, you have probably never used Tumblr. The easy-to-use blogging platform is used mainly by a 13 to 25 age group attracted by its “social looseness”. Real names are not required on Tumblr, only email addresses, allowing users to present multiple personalities. “Tumblr is, in a way, the anti-Facebook—a social network where you do not have to be friends with your mother,” says a recent Economist Explains post.

When you explore Tumblr today, it’s not difficult to understand why you’ll find very few, if any, Pharma company Tumblrs. The content is quirky to say the least, from blogs devoted to photos of the late Kim Jong Il looking at things, to collections of dopey texts we parents send our children. Oh, and there’s a fair amount of pornography on there too.

Some major brands and corporations are already on the platform, however. Media — Newsweek, The Boston Globe, Elle Magazine, GQ — was relatively quick to pick up on it, seeing a relatively easy way to distribute a regular stream of highly visual content that would be shared by their audience. Fashion brands like J.Crew and Oscar de La Renta are also taking advantage of the “visual not verbose” ethos of the site. IBM’s Smarter Planet Tumblr is excellent. It features more of a mix of text and images, but the real value is the opportunity to distribute links to the broader network of IBM information elsewhere on the web.

What you will find when you take a closer look at Tumblr is a lot of potential patients. And as Pharma marketers get more serious about “customer-centric” and “multi-platform” approaches, maybe the acquisition by Yahoo is as good a time as any to look again at the platform.

Take a look at the diabeticproblems tag on Tumblr. You’ll see the occasional ‘humorous’ picture from people wondering how they’re going to cope with a chocolate fountain, but the vast majority of posts are from young people dealing with the day-to day-issues of living with diabetes. Questions about travelling with diabetes, snack recommendations for low blood sugar, pictures of testing kits and insulin pumps and a lot of motivational humor. Do you think a Pharma Tumblr offering funny, well-crafted advice and genuine support to this group might get some attention?

I’m not suggesting that anyone switch their social media budget to Tumblr today on the strength of Yahoo’s involvement. But it’s worth keeping an eye on what Yahoo does and how the Tumblr audience reponds. If they get the content marketing part of the play right and the user base keeps active, Tumblr might just make it into your social media marketing plan.

Peter Houston is former Group Content Director for Advanstar Pharma Science. He is now an independent media consultant and founder of Flipping Pages.

For CEOs who have spent long years and countless funds building a solid pharmaceutical brand and life-changing drugs, discovering defamatory remarks about your company online can come as quite a shock. Even worse, the negative comments about the company are often published on social media and popular review websites that rank high in search results, so everyone curious about the company sees them. And because they rank so high, these complaints often show up in search results years after the problem is resolved, diminishing your reputation both immediately and over the long-term.

A poor online reputation also impacts your revenue. Several years ago I met with a company with a severe online reputation problem — 7 out of the top 10 search results about their company were negative. After carefully reviewing their rankings and revenues, I estimated their poor online reputation was costing them over $1.5 million in sales per year. How your company is perceived online dramatically affects your bottom line.

So what can you do to protect and insulate your company from the far-reaching effects of a few complaints others are posting online about you?
Start by understanding some basics:

What is “online reputation”?
Your reputation online is based mainly on the top 10 to 20 results in a Google search on your company name. Your reputation suffers when any of these results are negative reviews or complaints about your company, customer service, or drugs, especially if they are published on multiple complaint sites. If the results are positive or at least neutral content about your company and products, prospects perceive you as a company worth doing business with or learning more about.

Where do negative comments come from?
If someone really wants to complain about your pharmaceutical company or products, there are plenty of review and complaint sites for them to use, such as scam.com, ripoffreport.com, and complaintsboard.com. Sites like these don’t check for accuracy, don’t usually remove a complaint if you request it, and they tend to rank very high in search results. So if someone complains about you on one of these sites, expect it to show up in search results, even years after the issue was resolved.

How a few negative comments can hurt your online reputation
A complaint or two online seems like it shouldn’t matter, but it does. Even just one negative result near the top of a Google search on your company or products can scare away potential customers by making them think twice about your products.

On top of that, if a search result promises to reveal the dirt on your company, prospects are far more likely to click that result. After all, they are researching you, and your products could drastically affect their lives.

Once you understand the basics, you can take steps to manage and protect your reputation so you are not at the mercy of your critics.

First, accept that there will be negative content about you. Everyone has the right to complain. Short of outright slander or libel, there’s not much you can do to remove negative comments about your company online.

Instead of getting frustrated or responding in the heat of the moment, just accept the fact of negative online content. Sometimes you’ll need to respond, especially on social media, to take care of customer service issues. But most of the time, it’s better to not respond at all.

The reason is that search engines give high rankings to websites with relevant, regularly updated content. Every time you comment on a website, you contribute relevant, updated content. So if you get into a back-and-forth situation with a reviewer, Google sees a lot of relevant, updated content about the company and ranks the website higher for searches on your company name, making it even more likely that everyone will see not only the negative review, but the argumentative way you responded.

On the other hand, if you simply accept the fact and move on, the review will slowly lose its high ranking and you can work on pushing it down.

Second, focus on getting positive content. The goal of pharmaceutical online reputation management is pushing negative content off the first two pages of a Google search. You do that by publishing lots of positive content and getting it to rank higher than the negative results.

That means you need to always be looking for, gathering, and creating positive content to update your websites, blogs, social media, and other places online. Publishing that positive content in multiple places online helps you gain control over more search results, so you might create several websites for different purposes and audiences. For example, you might have a website for doctors and healthcare professionals, another website where you publish news and drug trial information, and websites for individual drugs and product lines.

Third, push positive content higher in search results. The higher you can push your positive content, or at least neutral content like a Wikipedia page, the lower negative content will appear. If you can push down complains and negative reviews to the second page of a Google search or lower, they may as well not exist since most searchers don’t look past the first page.

The best way to edge out the negative content is to perform search engine optimization (SEO) on your positive content. The most important things to do for proper SEO include:

• Use your company name and other important keywords throughout your website’s content and in meta titles and descriptions, image names, image alt tags, headings, and subheadings.
• Update your website often and regularly with relevant, positive content to encourage search engines to crawl your pages more often.
• Link out to trustworthy, reputable websites to create a better user experience.
• Get trustworthy, reputable websites to link to your website so Google will think it is popular and relevant to your company name and keywords.

Of course, there’s more you can do to protect the online reputation of your company and your products, but these basic steps will get you started in the right direction.

For information on accentuating positive content for your reputation, read Don’s article in the March issue of Pharmaceutical Executive Global Digest.

About the author
Don Sorensen is founder of Big Blue Robot, a reputation management consultancy.

The localized outbreak of measles in the UK is alarming in more ways than one. There can only be sympathy for the victims of this sudden return of a disease that had almost slipped from the perception of an entire generation. In addition to the discomfort — and on occasions serious complications — of the disease itself, there is now a sense of something approaching panic in the region where the incidence is highest. Anguish over the risks is evident in the faces of the parents and young children jostling with adolescents in long queues outside special vaccination centres that have been set up.

But there is a more general reason for concern. The background to this sudden recrudescence is well known. Urban myths about the risks of the MMR vaccine were given prominence more than a decade ago in a campaign by a local newspaper in the area where the most cases have been registered. The result was wide refusal of the MMR vaccination across the region. The subsequent clear rebuttal of the myth never received equivalent publicity — such is often the nature of the media. “Titanic sinks!” is a story. “Titanic doesn’t sink” isn’t.

Consequently, the ill-founded conclusions from the pseudo-research that lay behind the perception of risk remained as the accepted wisdom among a large swathe of the population over many years. Bolstered by the apparent absence of measles, there was even a small sense of triumph: “We were right to avoid the risks of vaccination — because the vaccination is anyway unnecessary. There is no measles,” ran the logic…

…until recently.

Emergency clinics and modern treatment techniques will probably manage to bring the outbreak under control over the coming weeks and months. But it is a wake-up call, not just to parents hesitant about the merits of immunization programmes, but to everyone involved in healthcare planning and healthcare provision. Because the circumstances in which urban myths can flourish have gone through a revolution since that local paper spread ignorant pseudo-science in the valleys of South Wales.

The entire communication game is changing. It has always been changing — but most of the time slowly. More recently, it’s been changing faster. And now it’s changing very fast, out of all recognition. That’s an earthquake for everyone involved in every aspect of healthcare communication.

There was a time, thousands of years ago, when most information came from the person with the loudest voice. But gradually technology took over. And in the last couple of centuries these technologies tended to concentrate the power of communication into very few hands – consolidating a system in which a few people at the top told everyone at the bottom what the people at the top wanted them to know.

Over the same period, the healthcare business moved on, leaving behind the vestiges of witchdoctors and barbers. The new healthcare establishment tended to dominate communication too — leading to a culture in which the doctor told the patient what the doctor chose to tell the patient, and prescribed the treatment he or she chose — perhaps influenced by the drug industry, and perhaps even by research … but most patients never saw much of that.

More recently, after years of patient docility, another trend started to emerge, principally among patients, who wondered if they were getting the best deal from being at the bottom of this top-down approach. The effect was a small rise over the last 50 years in activism — and even skepticism and distrust.

Then technology took another step forward — a giant leap for mankind. The internet. Communication — all types of communication — moved into a different dimension. The monopoly of authority over communication started to crumble.

Now, no single powerful voice can dictate unchallenged to everyone else. Everyone else can, if they wish, communicate among themselves, changing the balance, dethroning the former authorities.

From the perspective of democracy, this is unquestionably a good thing. From the perspective of healthcare communication, it raises as many questions as it answers. Of course researchers, regulators, drug firms and doctors can make use of the new technology in their own work — and are doing so in many cases with transformational consequences. But their voices are only some of the voices among so many others. There is much to be said for patients, consumers, customers, even the public, acquiring a new status in healthcare information and discussion. Patients, consumers, customers, the public, can no longer be taken for granted.  The paternalistic top-down approach has been more or less neutralised by the rise in technology and the rise of — for want of a better expression — people power.

It would be foolish to suggest that everyone who has traditionally been at the top until now — doctors, researchers, drug firms — is necessarily wrong. Importantly, it would be equally foolish to suggest that everyone else is always right. It is flying in the face of common sense to contend that all healthcare issues are best solved by a form of popular democracy. This can go right, or it can go wrong. In some instances, a majority can come up with an answer that looks right, but isn’t. Vox populi is not necessarily vox dei — as the UK measles outbreak demonstrates. If patients or the public have the right to question the traditional sources of information, they also have a duty to maintain a similar degree of healthy skepticism about all sources of information — including from other patients or consumers or customers or the public. The web 2.0 and the smart phone are not the weapons of a coup d’état. They are merely the tools to permit a better debate.

Like you, I get invites to attend educational webinars on an almost daily basis; I probably actually attend one every couple of weeks.

Most invites get passed over because it’s not my field, I’ve heard it all before or I don’t have the time to attend. One caught my eye recently though, mainly because a phrase in the title chimed with a lot of the work I am doing in the magazine market: “Cross-channel”.

Magazines, Pharm Exec included, are working really hard to distribute their content through the channels their audiences use most. Print is still a big one no matter what went on at Newsweek, but also so is digital in the shape of the web, email, social media and mobile apps.

Of course, the quest to fill your target audience’s information channels is every bit as relevant to pharma leaders as it is to magazine editors: Focus on one place and you’ll get passed over. With this imperative in mind, I got in touch with Fonny Schenck at digital marketing firm Across Health, the organiser of the “Cross-Channel” webinar that caught my eye, to ask him his views on cross-channel marketing in pharma.

He explained that companies are coming to realize that digital is not just about “differentiation” and “innovation” — the next stage is “fusion”, the integration of digital into the overall marketing mix.

Isn’t digital going to take over the whole world though? Not according to Schenck, who says, “It may replace certain channels, but it would be naïve to say that it will be the main channel.”

As you might have guessed, that doesn’t mean business as usual. “The meaning of some ‘old’ channels will be redefined thanks to the arrival of digital”, Schenck says. He cites Wolfgang Riepl, a German Newspaper editor who said way back in 1913, “New, further developed types of media never replace the existing modes of media and their usage patterns. Instead, a convergence takes place, leading to a different way and field of use for these older forms.”

Until now, most companies, whatever market they are in, have been experimenting with digital in isolation. Disconnected marketing and in many cases limited budgets, have resulted in mixed business outcomes. Schenck believes that by integrating digital channels in the overall mix, and executing coordinated cross-channel campaigns, significantly better business impacts will be seen.

There has never been a greater number of channels for pharma companies to communicate with patients and HCPs, but marketers are struggling to consolidate the opportunity. “The saying ‘tactics in search of strategy’ still holds true in pharma” says Schenck. He thinks the problem is that proven tactics are not sexy enough, the focus falls on “innovative” new channels and while it’s fine to run pilots, the problem comes when the tested tactic is not rolled out across the organization.

“Impact measurement is very often poorly done. Ideally, there is an upfront business-case assessment, followed by leading and lagging qualitative and quantitative metrics, but in most cases this data is missing. In addition, learnings are not shared rapidly across the organization, leading to reinvention of the wheel all the time,” Schenck says.

Too many digital projects are reactionary, almost about filling perceived competitive gaps in the marketing mix rather than dealing with any real information need. According to Schenck, digital is still being resorted to if the higher-cost traditional mix cannot be maintained. This can work, but it strongly depends on the market, lifecycle stage and competitive pressure.

“Digital is not a silver bullet. Increasingly, we are seeing more sophisticated uses of digital, integrated with offline channels, and initial steps towards customization, ” Schenck explains. He offers tablet detailing as an example of a clear cross-channel opportunity that is being missed.

“In our experience, this critical feature is not being used a lot. That’s probably also why most marketers are unhappy with their tablet detailing programme — ‘making tablet detailing a success’ it is the top priority of over 300 marketers who participated in our Digital Barometer 2013.”

So what does Schenck thing pharma marketers should be doing to implement effective cross-channel campaigns?
First up define the target audience and develop your key messages and action triggers. Plan for a sustained campaign across key channels with clearly defined reach, sequencing and estimated impact. Then work up a creative execution that will maximize customer engagement. It’s also important to centralize campaign management. Oh and you’ll need a cross-channel customer database.

“Increasingly, we will direct channels to customers based on their channel acceptance rather than ‘carpet bombing’. Also the messages will be customized based on the individual/segment needs. To make that ‘right message, right channel’ happen through multichannel, you need to have actionable customer information in your database — which very often is missing.”

To make it easier to figure out if all this is working, A-Cross has developed a framework to measure the impact of new channels relative to the rep impact with the intention of developing a proxy for rep activities. Schenck says a key benefit of this approach is that companies understand the metrics very well, because it links the new (digital) to an established gold standard.

“Of course, there is more to cross-channel than just creating the same share of voice through multichannel – we need to move more towards pull, personalization and online/offline integration… but it is a great start.”

The Across Health webinar, ‘Transforming fusion strategy into cross-channel execution‘ takes place April 18th at 5pm CET. It will be available on demand after that date.

Peter Houston is former Group Content Director for Advanstar Pharma Science. He is now an independent media consultant and founder of Flipping Pages.

At the beginning of the Reboot Camp – held at New York City’s Alexandria Center on April 12 – Intouch Solutions’ CEO Faruk Capan declared the days of Don Draper effectively over. The route to patients’ hearts and minds isn’t Old Fashioned cocktails and intuition; it’s solutions based on patient, provider and payer needs, and making disparate data streams pool around brand objectives.

Katherine Patterson, global marketing communications manager, growth initiatives, GE Healthcare

Katherine Patterson, global marketing communications manager, growth initiatives, at GE Healthcare, gave the keynote address, which focused on clarity of mission in marketing execution, and the importance of marrying science and emotion for consumers. Marketers too obsessed with social media, or the newest digital platform, might impress only themselves. “It’s like peeing down your leg…hot to you, but nobody else,” said Patterson. In Japan, for example, GE Healthcare’s medical device customers “are moving back toward print” as a preferred marketing channel, although growth markets “want digital,” and they want it on their mobile devices, she said.

Citing Eric Topol, currently director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, Ben Chodor, CEO at Happtique, said we’re not too far away from a time when physicians prescribe more apps than pharmaceutical drugs. Chodor is betting on Topol’s prediction; Happtique, a mobile health application store, will “curate” mobile apps for docs through a private, customized dashboard of Happtique-certified health apps. The company’s patent-pending software would allow physicians to electronically prescribe apps to patients. Chodor says he’s lobbying the SEC to reimburse medical apps, noting that some private plans already do.

Happtique doesn’t make apps itself, but Chodor appeared before the US House of Representatives’ Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology in March to support FDA’s regulation and definition of mobile medical apps. “It’s relatively simple to take an app through FDA” [for a medical device designation], and it only costs between $10,000 and $20,000, he said, noting that 75 mobile devices/apps have already been approved. Chodor said the Affordable Care Act’s medical device excise tax – “the absolute worst tax ever” – should not be levied on smartphones or apps.

Asaf Evenhaim, co-founder and CEO of Crossix, reminded Reboot Camp attendees about the unfathomable amount of individual consumer or patient data that exists for marketers, while insisting on the importance of privacy and HIPAA regulations. His company collects this data to create “propensity scores,” which serve as the basis for highly specific predictive models. The models can then be used to predict healthcare purchase decisions.

Where does all that data come from? Some of it is volunteered, some is collected invisibly through cookies, Facebook and other online aggregators, and some of it – but not Crossix’s data – is gleaned from trolling social media channels and blogs. Passive data collection, said Intouch Solutions’ senior vice president David Windhausen, is revolutionizing pharma marketing and health itself. Windhausen said he looks at his Nike FuelBand in the evening, and if he hasn’t been active enough, it’s time to exercise.

Windhausen’s talk lovingly described the Sanofi mobile app “GoMeals,” an app for diabetics specifically, but also for anyone who wants on-the-go nutritional facts about nearby restaurants (among other things). An attendee representing Sanofi – which is an Intouch client – let slip that GoMeals, and possibly the iBGStar glucose meter, would start to integrate passive data from wearable tracker gadgets like Fitbit or the FuelBand as early as this year.

Capping off the Reboot meeting was Augustin Fou, founder and chief digital strategist, Marketing Science Consulting Group. Fou emphasized the importance of recognizing how patients’ habits, expectations, and actions – in the context of healthcare – have changed, and how they continue to change. He referenced a Capgemini Consulting report on “digital maturity” that placed pharma at the very bottom of the list.

Despite regulatory hurdles and because of an explosion in mobile technology, data capture, and the influence patient’s have on the delivery of healthcare, pharma marketers could use a reboot. But they’ll need to back-up some of the dusty old tropes of yesteryear, even those that precede Don Draper. As GE Healthcare’s Patterson noted, Aristotelian rhetoric, comprised of ethos, pathos and logos – in equal measure – works as well in a sales detail as it did in symposia. The occasional Old Fashioned might be okay, too.

Peter Houston

You don’t have a social media policy yet? Oh, you do, you just didn’t tell your staff?

By Peter Houston.

A few weeks back I wrote on this blog about the need for CEOs to get social. I’m realistic, I know that the majority of CEOs still don’t engage directly in social media. Mostly it’s “the team” that does it, the marketing team, or the social media team, or the whole team. Great. Have you told them what rules they’re playing by?

Back in October 2010, Pharmexec reported on a bold new initiative by Swiss drug maker Roche. They had taken the bull (maybe a cow in Switzerland) by the horns and published a set of internal guidelines on when, where, and how to apply social media tools when communicating with key stakeholders and the public.

The guidelines were a real novelty at the time, the first in the industry. Even now, almost two years later, transparent standards for online behaviour are not exactly de rigueur for Pharma… or anywhere else for that matter.

Numbers vary but there is a broad consensus that written social media policies are absent or poorly communicated. Research conducted by the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth for the 2012 Inc. 500 Social Media Update found that a huge majority of INC. 500 companies plan to increase their social media spend this year, but that only 24 percent had a written policy for employees using social media tools on behalf of their company.

Late in 2011 Grant Thornton reported similar findings: More than three-quarters of 140-plus companies responding did not have a clearly defined social media policy.

More recent research from the UK seems much more positive. A study by social media consultancy Immediate Future on the adoption of social media policies showed just 19 percent of companies didn’t have a formal policy. However, whilst more than 80 percent of businesses had a policy in place, for many it was out of date, still in draft or, most important, not well communicated to employees.

Poor communication of policy is noted as a particular problem by Kirsten Liston of SAI Global’s Advisory Services team. Offering tips for developing a corporate social media policy on the Corporate Compliance Insights website, Liston says that the prevalence of social media has increased the risk of compliance violations and that it’s important that employers and employees understand those risks. Regulatory restrictions specific to Pharma are much debated, but what about more prosaic infringements. It used to be you only had to worry about employees with computers on their desk. Now, with the spread of smartphones, everyone is a potential risk. Instagram photos from the lab or the manufacturing floor anyone?

But don’t think you can throw a blanket ban over the problem; simply forbidding employee discussion of their jobs is no longer an option, at least not in the US. A recent National Labor Relations Board pronouncement says employees must be allowed to discuss working conditions freely, whether at the workplace or on Facebook.
So it’s all about striking a balance. If you think this all sounds like too much effort to mitigate a hypothetical risk, here are a couple of quick examples of corporate social media screwups.

You may have heard that UK music retailer HMV recently laid off almost 200 people earlier this year. If you did it’s probably because Poppy Rose, the community manager in charge of the company’s Twitter account, broadcast a blow-by-blow account on Twitter, including tweets like, “Mass execution, of loyal employees who love the brand”. While HMV gained 10,000 followers during the “broadcast”, the company’s management was widely pilloried for mismanagement.

Then there’s the case of Dr Amy Dunbar, an ob-gyn working at St. John’s Mercy Medical Center in St. Louis. She posted on Facebook about a patient’s tardiness. Asked why she didn’t transfer the patient, she divulged that the patient had suffered a stillbirth in the past. Dr Dunbar was not found to have breached any regulations, but criticisms of unprofessionalism and hypocrisy on the part of the hospital authorities were very public.

Would a social media policy have prevented these cases? Probably not in the case of HMV, where a judicious change of passwords ahead of the layoffs would have been much more effective. Probably yes in the St. John’s case.
The trick is to achieve the standards that you need without limiting your company’s social media potential. Roger Estafanos, director of Life Sciences for Peppers & Rogers Group’s Healthcare practice recommends pharma companies take a customer-centric approach to social media activity.  Understand your audience, the channels they use, and what they are interested in. Then, you guessed it, allow employees and the public to participate within those “rules of engagement.”

In developing your rules of engagement, remember you’re part of a heavily regulated, competitive industry, not set up for “instant unfiltered communications often seen in social media channels” as described by Snell and Wilmer on Martindale.com. Their advice is to work closely with your legal and marketing teams to maintain an up-to-date social media policy.

If you need a starting point, there are 30 policy examples on Immediate Future’s blog and Edelman SVP David Fleet offers up a long list of examples and how-to resources on his blog.

While the task of formulating a serviceable, and sustainable social media policy is daunting, the potential benefits of enhanced social media participation outweigh the challenge. Imagine you get it right and every one of your employees becomes an advocate for your brand online.

My personal advice, talk about social media regularly and keep it simple. There is a certain irony in companies publishing a social-media policy 25-pages long to regulate a 140-character tweet. How about this? “Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t want to see quoted on CNN, be asked about by your mother or have to justify to your boss.”

I found that on Twitter; you can have it for free. You’re welcome.

Peter Houston is former Group Content Director for Advanstar Pharma Science. He is now an independent media consultant and founder of Flipping Pages.

The line between physician marketing and consumer marketing has blurred as the facets of a brand campaign – from disease and drug-mechanism education to efficacy, safety and lifestyle claims – dovetail across the traditional physician-patient separation.

“We know that DTC advertising is often the catalyst for patients initiating conversations with their physicians about their untreated or undertreated conditions,” wrote Janet Woodcock, director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, in an email on the changes. “The decision to restructure the divisions reflects our commitment to continue providing close oversight of DTC advertising.”

Before it got upgraded to a “Super Office” in 2011, OPDP was fondly (or sometimes not so fondly) called DDMAC (dee dee mac), which stood for the Division of Drug Marketing, Advertising and Communications. When DDMAC turned into OPDP, the office was split into two divisions: the Division of Consumer Drug Promotion, and the Division of Professional Drug Promotion. As OPDP, the steady stream of warning and untitled letters continued unabated, mostly chastising pharma marketers for misbranding, off-label, overstating the efficacy or minimizing the risks of a product, or the misuse of a color scheme, in one famous educational piece created for Novartis.

With today’s announcement, ODPD, pending final review, will rename its two primary divisions. They will now be called the Division of Advertising and Promotion Review I, and the Division of Advertising and Promotion Review II. Review of promotional materials will be separated and organized by therapeutic class, not by professional or consumer. “ODPP concluded that a structure that integrates the review of health care professional-directed and consumer directed promotion across the two divisions” would meet the stated goals of increasing efficiency, improving work distribution, and eliminating redundancy, wrote Woodcock.

“Our ODPD reviewers will continue to use a comprehensive surveillance, enforcement, and education program to foster superior communication of labeling and promotional information to both health care professionals and consumers,” she wrote.

Tom Abrams remains head of ODPD. For a list of the new review groups categorized by therapeutic area, click here.

If a patient or physician encounters pharma-created content that doesn’t pop with relevance or utility, it doesn’t matter how multitudinous the channels are that carry it. There is no patience online for bad content.

Pharma has the resources to create, or hire someone to create, great content. But the problem is that great content lies in the eye of the content beholder. Complicating matters further, that single set of eyes may find certain content relevant or useful in one channel on one day, but may have different needs or expectations in another channel, next week. Digital marketers hope the answer to the problem of effective mass personalization – a term that reads like an oxymoron – is big data and better analytical tools for parsing it. If enough data is compiled about a given patient, for example, it follows that sophisticated, real-time analytics will be able to predictably advise brand managers on precisely what information a patient needs at any stage of her journey, in whichever channel she prefers.

Needless to say, that level of sophistication hasn’t yet occurred in the healthcare industry. Speakers at the ePharma Summit in New York this week appear hopeful that it will happen soon, but many acknowledged the organizational changes that need to happen first.

Continuous questing for new data streams can be a quixotic endeavor, leading to “analysis paralysis,” said Nancy Phelan, VP, customer strategy and operations at Bristol-Myers Squibb. Internally, pharma needs to “think differently about the talent and skill set” needed on the commercial side, and organizations must liberate digital marketing from fixed events like budget cycles and calendar-based points of action (POAs). Companies should institute “real-time processes and decision-making” for digital marketing execution, said Phelan.

On a mobile health panel, Sharon DeBacco, senior director, customer communications and operations at Ironwood Pharmaceuticals (and formerly an AstraZeneca consumer marketing leader and brand director on Nexium and Crestor), said “mobile is a marketer’s dream,” but it’s stuck on the fringes of healthcare, in wellness and fitness apps on the one hand, and in sensors and devices for critical care on the other. Missing is the middle ground patient and his chronic condition. From a content management standpoint, mobile can be “challenging and confusing,” acknowledged Scott Wolf, EVP, sales, at Everyday Health. DeBacco said the challenge for mobile is how to combine the many transactional activities phones and tablets are typically used for, to develop first a greater understanding and then a unified program for consumers.

With regard to the future of professional promotion, “pharma needs to find its way back into doctors’ lives,” said Jordan Safirstein, an interventional cardiologist. “Taking a doctor out to eat and giving them journal articles is antiquated…it doesn’t work.” Sales reps are less effective today because “physicians have no say anymore in what drugs are on the formulary,” said Kecia Gaither, vice chairman, department of Ob/Gyn, director of maternal fetal medicine, at Brooklyn’s Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center. “That decision comes from the chief financial officer,” and to a lesser extent, the head of pharmacy, she said.

Asked about what pharma can provide to physicians, Safirstein said embedding reference texts within EMRs is one opportunity. “The most common thing I see [in the hospital] is a resident walking down the hall, staring at a screen. Pharma must take advantage of this.” What about copay cards? “I’ve never heard a patient say, ‘Thank God you gave me that coupon card,’” said Safirstein, adding that the biggest innovation to the healthcare system in recent years was the launch of generic versions of Lipitor and Plavix.

Despite ongoing challenges in digital promotion on the consumer and professional side, 72% of the healthcare companies surveyed for a recent Best Practices report said they planned to increase their digital marketing budgets by more than 10% in the next two years. Even with additional resources, will pharma be able to craft relevant and useful messages for individual patients and physicians, and deliver them successfully? The best way to find out what questions a specific customer wants answered, right now, is to ask. The best way to meet that need is to provide an answer, fast. Whether big data, new technology and analytics can help pharma provide that kind of mass personalization – at an acceptable scale and in the context of strict regulatory controls – remains to be seen.

One of 2012’s biggest buzzwords was “Gamification” and that probably means that in 2013 there are a lot of people trying to sell you on the value of gamifying your pharma business. Excellent, there’s a lot of value in there, but before you head off to commission your own “Pharmaville” app, you should know that good gamification isn’t child’s play.

What is gamification?
You’re kidding me, right? It was everywhere last year… more buzz than an industrial-scale honey farm. Where have you been?

Peter Houston

OK… Gamification  — other than one of the clunkiest marketing terms ever — is the introduction of rewards to make the performance of regular tasks more enjoyable and encourage members of a target group to engage consistently.

Think of it as the marketing world’s take on “Pavlov’s Dogs”. Have you watched the episode of the Big Bang Theory where Sheldon tries to modify Penny’s behaviour by tossing her a chocolate every time she does something he approves of? Well, that’s the thinking behind gamification — reward positive behaviors. Except with gamification in pharma the calorie intake is significantly lower; patients, doctors, nurses, sales reps get rewarded with badges, player credits or leaderboard status.

There are some great real-world examples listed in Ben Comer’s Pharm Exec “Gamification Grows Up” feature. My favourite concept is the Small Things beta that encourages kids with type-1 diabetes to stick to their daily testing regime: Children who complete tests and input results get rewarded with credits that allow them to create little tamagotchi-style creatures.

Anything that encourages patient adherence, delivers HCP or rep learning , or even broader engagement with your company has to be a good idea. But like all good ideas, the secret to success lies in the implementation not the idea itself. And that’s where gamification poses some challenges.

Achieving the outcomes you want
The driver behind gamification is the creation of an emotional response. Easy if you’re tossing chocolate around, less so if you’re working with a 3, 4 or even 5-inch smartphone screen.
As with every communications endeavor, you need to precisely target your audience. Marketing does this day in, day out, but with games you need to think a little more laterally. You no longer just have patients, you have patients with personalities. Will they respond to shoot-em-ups, building things or sharing stories? Before you hit the play button you need to be very clear what type of game your audience will engage with.

And unless you just want your target group to have a bit of fun at your expense, you need to think hard about how to achieve the outcomes you want. Those two Italian plumbers sold millions of console games, but they never changed much other than the costume lineup at your local fancy dress store.

Educational games created around complex disease simulations are a powerful way to bring active learning to HCPs. Doctors and nurses can be presented with diagnostic choices, they get an outcome, modify the choice if the outcome is negative and repeat if it’s positive. Powerful stuff, but to allow HCPs to work through a realistic set of symptoms and treatment options, you’re going to need a pretty sophisticated game algorithm. Better makes sure you choose the right vendor.

Of course, commissioning your own game is not the only way to get into gamification. More and more charities and non-profits have already made the move and sponsoring an existing game is a real alternative. This is a faster way to market and brings the additional benefit of non-profit credibility. However, it will also limit the control you have over any data collection objectives and the data collected. Better make sure you choose the right partner.

Once you’re ready to go, you need a strategy to get your game to your target audience and get them to sign up? Social networks are the biggest driver of app adoption, but they are crowded. Can you compliment a social campaign with email or SMS promotions? You could sit your game on a third-party network, as Boehringer Ingelheim (BI) did with its Facebook game Syrum. This brings the benefit of a pre-existing user-base, but also all the baggage of the network you sit on. Facebook… privacy… see what I mean?

Once you’re game is out in the wild, you need to know that it is working for you? Are you looking for increased disease awareness, improvements to specific health outcomes, market data. These are all perfectly valid objectives, but you need to know exactly what you’re looking for and how you will measure it.

We know the immense importance of data and the beauty of technology-driven patient communications techniques is the data that can be collected. This is also the challenge; the data stream that you can collect from the daily usage of a game played by thousands of patients is mind-boggling, and you need to be ready to deal with all that data.

You also need to think hard about the perception that industrial scale collection of market data can cause. BI’s Syrum initiative is generally thought of as a bold, innovative move, but I have seen criticism of it as a front for data collection that will benefit BI way more than any patient or HCP. That may or may not be true, but if it becomes a widely held perception then player engagement is likely to slip drastically. You need to be seen to be using your new data collection super-powers for good.

To be honest, the biggest success for gamification in pharma at the moment appears to be positive PR. Healthcare games add fun to often difficult circumstances and people feel good about them. Will they have a long-term impact on disease awareness, patient adherence or reputation management? Like anything else in pharma, only if you realise that it’s not child’s play.

Peter Houston is former Group Content Director for Advanstar Pharma Science. He is now an independent media consultant and founder of Flipping Pages.

Peter Houston

You probably have bigger calls on your time, but have you given much thought to social media? Not in the abstract corporate communications sense, in a you-the-CEO sense? There has been a flurry of reports over the last six months about the C-suite’s engagement with social media. Some hail the arrival of the social CEO, others ask “Where are they all?”

The cheerleaders for CEO participation say it makes total sense for corporate leadership to take to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the rest to spread the good news — or fight the bad news — about their businesses. While it might be tempting to leave social media to the PR and marketing folks, you could be missing a trick. BRANDFog, promoting social media for CEOs, says in its 2012 CEO, Social Media & Leadership Survey that 82 percent of employees are more likely to trust a business whose leadership communicates openly through social media.

IBM’s Global CEO survey concurs: the best performing companies are “30 percent more likely to identify openness – characterized by greater use of social media platforms – as a key influence on their organizations.”

The IBM study, based on 1,700 face-to-face interviews with CEOs and public sector leaders from around the world, explores how corporate leadership is responding to the complexity of what IBM calls the connected economy — increasingly interconnected organisations, markets, societies and governments. It highlights the importance of social media in communicating with both employees and customers. Finding that 16 percent of the CEOs surveyed use social media to communicate with customers, it trumpets expectations of a threefold increase in adoption of social media channels in the coming five years.

Writing on Forbes.com mid January , the lead for Weber Shandwick’s digital practise, Chris Perry,  accepts without question the business logic behind the growth in executive support for social media. He sees growth in the number of social CEOs “to present an authentic face, get closer to customers, engage employees” and presents the findings of his own company’s Socializing Your CEO 2013  survey to cement the case. The Weber Shandwick study says 66 percent of CEOs at the world’s top 50 companies engage online. This compares with just 36 percent in 2010 when Weber Shandwick first conducted an analysis of CEO social engagement.

Do Social CEOs tweet?

Yes, but don’t expect to see too many personal tweets or status updates from your fellow captains of industry. According to the Socializing Your CEO study, only 18 percent of the world’s largest company CEOs have their own social network pages.

Brandfog looks closer at Twitter: Although 61% of Fortune 500 brands were engaging with customers via Twitter, less than 2.5% of Fortune 500 CEOs were actively participating on the world’s favourite microblogging network. And while the numbers are a little different, this lack of personal participation is echoed in a joint study from CEO.com and business intelligence firm DOMO. Pitching the use of social media by the general population at 50 percent for Facebook and 37 percent for Twitter, it notes that among Fortune 500 CEOs Facebook usage is only 7.6 percent and just 4 percent for Twitter.

However, the CEO.com/DOMO study reports one social CEO hotspot  – senior executive participation on Linked in is ahead of everyone else – 26 percent versus 20.15 percent. And this statistic maybe hints at one reason for the reticence of high-profile corporate leaders to engage fully on public social media forums. LinkedIn’s “Professional’s Only” ethos offers a safer environment for senior executives where connections, and conversations, can be better controlled. This is in direct contrast to open networks where high-profile executives fear what Weber Shandwick’s Perry describes as “personal attacks, disclosure issues and media scrutiny”.

Perry thinks these, plus the obvious time pressures, are the reasons that executive personal pages are so noticeable by their absence. But he can resolve the apparent contradiction between this lack of personal participation and the assertion that CEO’s are embracing social. An increasing number of CEOs are choosing to perform their “spokesperson-in-chief” role through their company’s social media pages and portals.

“CEOs understand they must be a leading voice with those who follow their company pages, without necessarily amassing and engaging a network of followers on personal pages,” Perry writes on Forbes.com.

So while it’s unlikely that we’ll be seeing a Twitterstorm from Big Pharma’s leading lights anytime soon, can we expect to see more Pharma leaders on company pages and YouTube channels? Number one in Paul Tunnah’s New Year Pharmaphorum post on emerging trends in Pharma communications is to “Put a face on your senior execs”. He expects this year to introduce senior Pharma executives presenting their views on a wide range of issues, presenting “the human face of pharma.”

If you have been feeling bad about neglecting the Twitter or Facebook accounts you set up for yourself 18 months back, you can take some comfort from the fact that you’re not alone among your C-Suite peers. But maybe it’s time to reacquaint yourself with the social media basics; Corporate Communications could be knocking at your door any day to help them get followers, likes or to turn you into a YouTube sensation.

Peter Houston is former Group Content Director for Advanstar Pharma Science. He is now an independent media consultant and founder of Flipping Pages.

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