Social Media and their Relevance to the Pharmaceutical Industry

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Introduction:

Social media are shifting the way that the global economy operates. Internet journals and communities have enabled consumers to communicate their experiences with companies' products and services to other consumers. A consequence of consumer-generated marketing is that relationship management throughout the life cycle of a product is taking the place of mass marketing in consumer-driven industries.

Scope:

Introduction to social media and their relevance to the pharmaceutical industry Sizes and assesses the growth in the blogosphere in the US, Europe and Asia Looks at Blogging in other industries and highlights lessons that pharmaceutical companies can learn Discusses current examples of pharmaceutical Blogging and considers the future of Blogging in the pharmaceutical industry

Highlights:

Strategic use of Internet applications, including online communities and blogs, will allow pharmaceutical companies to increase their awareness of the needs and concerns of their patient and care giver audiences. As blogs and online forums are so frequently updated they can be a good indication of the current market. Companies from a broad range of industries have had success in authoring blogs and hosting online forums for their consumers. Some of the benefits these companies have enjoyed include direct communication with influential consumers, higher search engine rankings for key search terms and the ability to respond quickly to marketplace events. Much of the delay in pharmaceutical companies entering the public blogosphere can be attributed to concerns about the liabilities associated with Blogging. Many embattled companies, which were already dealing with high profile withdrawals and associated lawsuits, have not felt the need to expose them further to public criticism.

Reasons to Purchase:

Identify the best and worst practice lessons that can be learned from examples of business Blogging in other industries. Understand the potential liabilities of business Blogging in the pharmaceutical market. Assess opportunities to launch social media application.
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The Think Tank : Blogging

Modern technology has made it possible for customers to radically change their approach towards marketing. As a result of which, customers are shying away from conventional media to the new cyber space.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the impact and importance of Blogging. Specifically in the business realm and the effect it can have on business and personal relationships. However, I’m not limiting this to Blogging alone, I’m thinking more about having a strong online presence and the effect it can have - Blogging is just one piece of that.

The total number of blogs keeps growing. We are at 70 millions now and while there is some sign of slowdown in the adoption rate, blogs remain the most interesting and powerful opportunity for communication, education, news reporting, personal independent publishing and grassroots democracy that has ever appeared.

The state of the Blogosphere is strong, and is maturing as an influential and important part of the web.For nearly four years, we’ve been tracking and enabling the growth of this phenomenon and theirs is much in our data to indicate that the medium is “growing up.”

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Technorati is now tracking over 70 million weblogs, and we're seeing about 120,000 new weblogs being created worldwide each day. That's about 1.4 blogs created every second of every day.

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Getting Into The Blogging Mindset, Blogging is fast becoming a powerful instrument in the creative course. Blogs, be it official blogs (corporate blogs) or unofficial blogs and PR are the essential features of corporate & Personal communication. Both these aspects help shape a company’s or Personal brand name and reputation. Yet, they seem to be working against each other. Blogs are discussions between the customer and the company. They are casual conversations that are based on developing practices. If done right, Blogging can help civilize a company.

Official or corporate blogs act as a direct medium for communication and information sharing within a corporate community. They are considered to be outrageous and provocative. On the other hand, some people visualize blogs as an “open-source marketplace” for ideas. Blogs allow people to reveal issues and concepts to a worldwide audience and talk about them analytically. However, blogs are deceivingly tricky to control. If done wrong, you could not only humiliate yourself, but you could also alienate potential customers as well as end up with a lawsuit.

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There are a large number of banks that use blogs internally as a direct means to encourage communication and dispense information, including some that persuade users to share criticisms, ideas and requests of internal information technology systems. Blogs are used to share research and information. They provide a multiple perspective with ideas flowing to and fro. Technology companies were the first to get into business blogging. Microsoft and IBM have many bloggers writing for specific audiences.

With Blogging and online presence 2 things happen 1) people are able to get to know you in a very personal way without ever meeting you and 2) you are able to get to know people in the same way.

PART –I: GETTING INTO THE BLOGGING MINDSET

For decades, businesses tried to determine what their customers’ wanted using focus groups that offered feedback about how well customers liked certain products. As the business world got more complex and markets became more competitive, the kind of information that could be gleaned from focus groups became inadequate for most businesses. They didn’t provide enough information, nor was the information valuable after a product was already release.

Realizing the limitations of focus groups and similar marketing practices, companies decided that they needed to know more about who were their customers, how they interacted with the company, and how the company could reach out to customers in a meaningful way. This idea of getting a “360-degree view” of customers was a nice concept, but it was never really achievable within the limited spectrum of marketing and communication tools that were available.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software was designed to try to pull together information from various systems to provide an idea of not only whether a customer had interacted with your business, but what kind of interaction occurred, who was involved in the interaction, and what it meant to the company. Unfortunately, most companies could get only limited answers to these questions: whether a customer had bought a company product or ever called in with a question or comment, and whether his or her current contact information was valid.

CRM software didn’t contextualize any of the information it collected. It simply created a repository of information. It didn’t create any data on what the customer actually thought, nor did it allow a way for customers to provide direct feedback. To supplement this CRM data, businesses began to hire customer relationship specialists and product evangelists—individuals whose sole job was to make customers aware of the company products on a one-to-one basis—to interact with customers directly.

For most businesses, this created some sense of value, but the practice simply couldn’t be applied to a large number of customers. Because each individual customer relationship staffer had only so much time, the staffer typically spent most of his or her time nurturing the relationships that had the greatest return—the big spenders—and the majority of other customers were left out in the cold.

KNOW HOW TO TREAT YOUR CUSTOMERS
Every successful company uses some type of measuring stick when comparing itself to other similar companies. But businesses looking to succeed in the current interactive, customer- and conversation-driven marketplace must consider factors other than the financials. Companies need to value the knowledge made available to them through employee and customer input. One way to do this is by never confusing customers with the popular marketing term: consumer.

A customer should never be called a consumer. A consumer is someone you use for profit; a customer is an asset. Customers are your best product managers, your best evangelists, and perhaps the only people in the world who will tell you the truth about your company. Listen to them. The easiest way to help customers become more involved in a positive, passionate, way about your business is to talk to them and treat them as equal partners.

CUSTOMERS ARE ASSETS
Too often, businesses look at their customers as they would rows in a spreadsheet. Businesses spend time figuring out how to get more money out of them, analyzing how often they come back and how much they spend on each trip, and figuring out how much a customer will spend on a particular item. But customers can and should be much more than just an income stream.
Customers’ experiences can range from completely unhappy to glowingly positive. Both types of customer can greatly influence your company’s reputation.

Generally speaking, customers fall into one of five categories:
Saboteurs These customers have had so many negative experiences (or perhaps only a handful of incredibly negative experiences) that they will go to whatever ends necessary to do whatever harm they can to your business.

Occasional sufferers These customers don’t enjoy your product or service, but they buy from you when they have to, and only because they have to. Some people who eat at fast food restaurants fall under this banner—although they will never evangelize or even talk positively about what they’re buying, they’ll buy it when absolutely necessary.

Reluctant consumers These customers have had negative experiences with your company—often many negative experiences—to the point at which they simply expect a negative experience or a poor product every time. Occasionally, they’ll be pleasantly surprised and will leave contented, but generally they simply accept that they have to buy from you and they move on. In many ways, these customers are living a balance of positive, negative, and blasé experiences.

Regular customers These customers enjoy your product or service. They may admit it’s not the best in the world, but they buy it because it has value, it is the cheapest, or they haven’t found anything better. They’ve had enough positive experiences that the negative ones seem paltry in comparison.

Evangelists These types of folks have had so many positive experiences with your company and/or product that whenever a subject even mildly related to your company, products, or services comes up in conversation, they just have to tell everyone about it. Many different companies enjoy this type of customer—for example, Apple Computer evangelists can be so passionate that they’ll say Apple is a religion. These customer evangelists are the types of passionate people that will transform your business, and the currency they deal in is positive experiences. (Ref: New Age Marketing Mantra – By: Jeremy Wright)

Each of these personalities is created over time through a pattern of individual experiences with your company. Successful companies strive to create positive experiences for customers through positive environments, well-trained staff, great value, and quality products; whatever your customers are looking for, that you are able to provide, is a potential positive experience.

Do you provide a storefront? Investing in a positive shopping space is vital. Do you provide food or hospitality services? Smiling, courteous, and energetic staff are a must. Do you provide analysis or consulting services? Knowledgeable consultants, value-added services, excellent communication, and constant follow-up will create positive experiences for your customers.

Most customers don’t look for reasons to be unhappy; in fact, most are looking for positive experiences, and often it takes only one of those in a given industry to transform the way customers look at every single service provider in that industry. The influence wielded by businesses who create positive experiences is disproportionate to their size: Apple Computers isn’t the largest or most popular computer manufacturer (not by a long shot), yet it is one of the most-watched tech companies on the planet.

BMW and Mercedes don’t sell the most cars in America, but the consumer desire to own one is palatable. Starbucks may make great coffee, but people aren’t necessarily buying just the coffee—they’re buying an overall positive experience.

But creating positive experiences isn’t really about being a luxury supplier like Apple, BMW, and Starbucks are in their industries. You can create positive experiences no matter what business you’re in by having friendly and knowledgeable staff members, offering exclusive discounts, and generally building your business by contributing to their experiences.

Positive experiences create emotional responses, and nothing is worse than a customer who feels no emotion toward your business: no emotion means no loyalty, so customers really have no reason to stay.

Tips for Marketing Your Blog

With so many blogs being created every day, it’s a mystery to many bloggers how to make their blog stand out. There are many types of blogs or purposes for blogs and a certain number of tactics are applicable to just about all of them. Some companies choose to hire a blog consultant, but others like to try things internally. For those companies and individuals interested in practical tips for marketing and optimizing a business blog, try out the following list of blog marketing and optimization tips:




Decide on a stand-alone domain name www.myblog.com or directory of existing site www.mysite.com/blog. Sub domain is also an option blog.mysite.com. Avoid hosted services that do not allow you to use your own domain name!
Obtain and install customizable blog software - WordPress and Moveable Type are my favorites.
Customize blog look and feel templates - aka design.
Research keywords and develop a glossary - Keyword Discovery, WordTracker, SitePoint, SEOBook Keyword Research.
Optimize the blog:
Template optimization - RSS subscription options, social bookmark links, HTML code, Unique title tags, URLs, Sitemap
Add helper plugins specific to WordPress or MT
Create keyword rich categories (reference your keyword glossary)
Enable automatic trackback and ping functionality.
Create Feedburner Pro account and enable feed tracking.
Setup a Google account for Sitemap, validate and prep for future submission.
Identify authoritative blogs, web sites and hubs for outbound resource links and blogroll.
Format archived posts, related posts.
Enable statistics for tracking - Google Analytics, ClickTracks.
Submit RSS feed and Blog URL to prominent RSS and Blog directories / search engines.
Engage in an ongoing link building campaign.
If podcast or video content is available, submit to Podcast and Vlog directories.
Submit blog url to paid directories with categories for blogs - Yahoo, BOTW, bCentral, WOW, JoeAnt.
Optimize and distribute a press release announcing blog.
Request feedback or reviews of your blog in relevant forums, discussion threads. If you have a resourceful post that will help others, point to it.
Research and comment on relevant industry related blogs and blogs with significant centers of influence.
Post regularly. If it’s news oriented blog, 3-5 times per day. If it’s an authoritative blog, 3-5 times per week, but each post must be unique and high value.
Monitor inbound links, traffic, comments and mentions of your blog - Google Alerts, Technorati, Blogpulse, Yahoo News, Ask Blogs and Feeds.
Always respond to comments on your blog and when you detect a mention of your blog on another blog, thank that blogger in the comments of the post.
Make contact with related bloggers on AND offline if possible.
When making blog posts always cite the source with a link and don’t be afraid to mention popular bloggers by name. Use keywords in the blog post title, in the body of the post and use anchor text when you link to previous posts you’ve made.
Use social networking services, forums and discussion threads to connect with other bloggers. If they like your stuff, they will link to you.
Remember when web sites were a new concept and the sage advice to print your web address everywhere you print your phone number? The same advice applies for your blog.
If your blog’s goal is to promote you as an authority, interview other prominent bloggers in your industry. Your own credibility will improve by association.
Build out your online networks through services such as MyBlogLog, Twitter and Facebook and leverage them to promote particularly useful content on your blog.
Once your blog has 1000 or more subscribers, show your Feedburner badge
Host images with Flickr making sure to include an anchor text link in the image description back to the post where the image is used.
Use your blog to gain press/media credentials at relevant industry conferences and use the event to create content, connections and increase your knowledge.