Posts Tagged ‘social’

Does Pharma REALLY have anything to offer in social networking?

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

Social media and social networks provide an increasingly popular way for consumer and companies to engage and interact. Consumers are not bound by regulations in the way they communicate. They are free to discuss their healthcare issues with anyone they want. Whether sharing advice on medications and their off-label uses or talking about a weird thing that happened to them medically and “oh-by-the-way” I was taking this medication when it started happening, consumers are free to share this information when and how they want.

For pharmaceutical and insurance companies, these same conversations can cause severe cases of heartburn for regulatory and compliance departments if these topics were to be brought up on a social networking site sponsored by said company. Off-label uses cannot be condoned by the pharma company and allowing a C2C conversation to happen without correcting it may be considered condoning it if brought into legal proceedings. The “oh-by-the-way” discussion could be considered an Adverse Event (AE) and would therefore need to be registered into an AE database that is regulated by the FDA.

As you can see these relatively benign instances that happen all over Facebook, Twitter and other social networks every day fall directly into a regulatory grey area for pharmaceutical and insurance companies. Without direct legislation and regulation, many companies have chosen to stay away from social media for the time being. The problem is that social media is not going away and that social engagement could pave a potentially lucrative path to new revenues and new opportunities for those companies who can figure out how to harness the power of social.

Understanding what regulations are in place and applying them to social we help shape a foundation by which to develop better guidelines for participation in social media and social networks.

Be Clear in Conversations
The range and depth of biotech, pharma and health care regulations are vast. They cover a wide range of areas spanning how you manage clinical trials to manufacturing to sales and control of patient information. While discussing the talking points in this document let’s be clear that our assumptions are that:
     * You are using your social network to manage outreach to bring interested parties into the fold to inform them of where to get information, gather their ideas, priorities and interests, and connect them with other professionals with related interests and expertise. This might include:
          o Foster greater collaboration on new products
          o Improve internal processes
          o Increase the effectiveness and efficiency managing regulatory compliance
          o Enable doctors and patients to more easily access needed information
          o Increasing the efficiency in the delivery of health care through innovation and collaboration
          o Strengthen post-marketing pharmacovigilance their products

     * You are not using your social network to manage clinical trial subject data; drug, biologic or medical device manufacturing data; or safety data

What are the Regulations that Need to Be Considered?

     The two primary bodies of regulation to watch are:
1. Title 21 CFR Part 11 - Title 21, Part 11 of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) which deals with the FDA guidelines on electronic records and electronic signatures
2. HIPAA Title II – Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) protects the ability for workers and their families to gain access to health care when the switch employers or jurisdictions (i.e., when they move). Title II of HIPPA contains something called The Privacy Rule that governs the use and disclosure of Protected Health Information (PHI).

The other area to understand is how to manage Adverse Events which falls under the term Pharmacovigilance.
1. Pharmacovigilance: Generally speaking, pharmacovigilance is the science of collecting, monitoring, researching, assessing and evaluating information from healthcare providers and patients on the adverse effects of medications, biological products, herbalism and traditional medicines

     How to Incorporate These Regulations into Social
The following talking points are meant to address how we can meet regulatory guidelines by implementing technology in very particular ways to mitigate regulatory concerns and still engage stakeholders in a meaningful way.

First, there are two over-riding recommendations when incorporating social media. They are:
1. Separate social networking infrastructure from regulated legacy systems. You do not want to unduly subject your social networking infrastructure to all of the regulations that fall under regulated systems therefore it is absolutely critical to ensure you separate the social networking components of your Health 2.0 infrastructure from your other enterprise systems.
2. House all UGC in a true enterprise data warehouse. By pulling social networking UGC into a enterprise data warehouse and providing your safety monitoring team access to this, you are providing them a new channel to mine and monitor safety information.

With regard to specific regulations, here is how they can be incorporated into social media:

Title 21, Part 11 of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) that deals with FDA guidelines on electronic records and signatures. With social engagement, we recommend three key elements:
1. Never Delete: data needs to be Archived or turned “Inactive” not deleted.
2. Use secure, electronic signatures: which relates to only letting authenticated users contribute content (no anonymous contributions).
3. Documentation of Compliance: be able to demonstrate that you have designed, built and tested a system that does the above. This includes documenting requirements, design, test cases and successful completion of those test cases. It also includes demonstration that your configuration management processes ensure that the code you have in production has completed full documentation of the above before going to production.

HIPAA Title II: specifically the Privacy Rule that governs the use and disclosure of Protected Health Information (PHI). We recommend three key elements:
1. Closed Groups – create specific areas that can be closed from general populations (ie.HIV, Diabetes, etc groups). To create even tighter requirements you can apply white list/black list rules to enforce group requirements (even blacklisting insurance domains).
2. Strict Adherence to Profile Information – Do not capture any PHI data fields. Strongly encourage Display Names to not include names or other identifiers (this includes either prohibiting Avatars or only allowing members to pick from a list generic Avatar icons). Finally, encrypt all profile information (and – to assure Part 11 compliance – never delete past profile information.)
3. Moderate all UGC – this is limiting in participation and taxing on resources however there is a mix of moderation and publication that can limit a user’s exposure (through the use of coordinate inputs for instance).
Pharmacovigilance: pertains to patients reporting adverse drug effects. There are a couple of items here including moderation and having a true data warehouse to store your social content and easily mine and manage information and content.

Source: Much of this content was pulled or modified from http://www.exsecutus.com/haughwout/2009/07/health20-ugc-mgmt which is the work of Jim Haughwout.

So now we’ve covered the regulatory side of the issues that pharma faces in social.  So what can they do?  That is what our moderator this week is going to help us figure out.  Moderating this week is Steve Woodruff.  Steve is one of the leading minds in helping to figure out social in regulated industries.  The topic this week and the questions are:

Topic:  Does Pharma REALLY have anything to offer in social networking?

Q1:  I think pharma companies are generally evil and I don’t want to hear from them. Am I right?

Q2:  I have health questions and would really like to hear from these companies. Can they talk?

Q3:  What are pharma companies actually doing in the social space, and is it worth anything?

Join us on Tuesday 9/21 at noon ET for the #socialmedia chat by following #sm78 from your favorite Twitter client or simply follow our LIVE site at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live.

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Posted in Privacy, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

The Lifespan of a Social Community

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

Are social communities getting old all ready?  Companies who jumped into the social fray a couple of years ago and built out their social communities are beginning to re-evaluate their benefits.  Other companies are looking to these early adopters for signs of value and best practices as they consider building out their own.

So by now, we have all figured out the magic beans for developing and sustaining brand or service based social communities.  Right?  Product research communities?  Unfortunately, those magic beans have yet to sprout.  Even within the same industries, companies struggle to replicate the success of their competitors.  Yet we know some of the ingredients that are needed.

  • solid platform
  • community manager
  • brand fans to join
  • some cute marketing to drive traffic
  • then, like fishing, we sit back and wait while listening all the while.

We rely on the community manager to create new, clever ideas every day for content and conversations to keep the candle lit and if that fails, we can always bribe them to stay (chatchkies!).   Seems a bit rudamentary even after 2-3 years of experience, yet we have a hard time trying to come up with that one killer idea that will revive our community and keep it engaged for another few months.  That may be one of the problems.  There’s not one idea but rather the execution of many smaller ideas together that keep the community going.  But it’s certainly hard to create the ideas when you are so vested in the middle of the community. 

Another issue may be the old hammer and nail analogy.  Most community managers and social media directors come out of the public relations or communications fields so it makes sense that content would be at the top of the list when it comes to brainstorming.  I have a bit of a problem with that though.  Almost by definition, it’s not sustainable and certainly it’s expensive.  So knowing that, let’s come up with new ways to increase the relevance of your community (for both participant and company), make it sustainable and most importantly add value.  We have to look beyond content as the strategy and consider what else is out there.  Here are some ideas:

  • Collect names in CRM not just the community.  Track users inside and out of your community (yes they have other interests).  See where else they go and incorporate those topics into your community.
  • Research how your users live, not just demographic and geo info, but the cultures they represent.
  • Incorporate Open Graph (facebook, Google, LinkedIn) tie-ins and recruit new participants from your existing user’s social graph
  • Use analytics to identify gaps in your community experience.

To build on the idea of sustaining you social community, we wanted to tap a professional resource and there is no one better than Connie Bensen.  Connie is a community strategist with Alterian (better know by their social monitoring solution Techrigy) and known throughout the industry as a go-to resource.  Connie will lead us in discovering advanced ways to create value from your communities and make them more sustainable.  Join us this Tuesday 8/10 at noon EDT for this topic and questions:

Topic: The Lifespan of a Social Community

1.  How do you plan resources for the lifespan of a social media engagement?

2.  Do the communities you create need a community manager or can they be self-sustaining?

3.  What do you do with a community when the budget is exhausted or resources are no longer available?

4.  Can a community continue indefinitely and how?

Follow along on Twitter or your favorite Twitter client by following #sm72 or simply visit our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live.

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Culture Shift: Is Your Company Ready To Go Social?

Monday, April 19th, 2010

"not everyone should karaoke either"

Social media is on the minds of every marketer in corporate america today.  Whether good or bad, they are certainly at least thinking about it.  In fact, according to a new study just released by Social Media Examiner, 91% of marketers are using social media in some capacity.  After social media makes it’s way through the marketing department, then what?  What happens to the rest of the company?

From that same research marketers are reporting exposure, leads, better customer service, reduced costs and more as benefits of being engaged.  The only problem is that exposure is the only benefit that stays in marketing.  The other listed benefits affect many departments across the organization.  So what’s happening with that adoption?  While marketers were forced by their consumers into social engagement, other departments may not be feeling the pressure…yet.

How do you socially infuse your company?  It’s the same discussion that has been around for a couple of years at least, however it feels a bit more real right now.  There has to be more to it than getting your company’s name on twitter or setting up the “Facebook page” as a catch all.  There has to be more than an executive decree to become “social” and there has to be something more substantive than 3 front-line employees in a dark corner somewhere taking some social initiative.  Maybe it’s all three or a smaller combination of them.  John Bell from Ogilvy PR spoke to Lucas Watson from P&G recently and had some solid insight.  Lucas, Global Team Leader for Digital Business Strategy at P&G, had three key points when he was asked how he gets his teams to embrace social for the first time:

1. Get them out of the office. Take them somewhere provocative like to a startup’s office or to the Googleplex or somewhere where they can feel and see the excitement of doing things differently. Don’t try and convince them in a conference room at P&G behind a Powerpoint slide

2. Get a digital champion on the brand. Every team needs an enthusiast who will push and keep challenging the usual way. We constantly shift between making digital everyone’s job and embedding it via true experts. Truth is both are necessary and the balance will change over time as more people make digital a part fo their jobs.

3. Show them the ROI to inform marketing modeling. P&G is know for their marketing modeling. This simply confirms what each of us not inside the company would guess and that is that you have to have a ‘pretty good’ story of both the performance and ROI to convince hard core marketers like those at an FMCG (fast moving consumer goods).

I personally agree with these points with a minor exception on point two.  Instead of making it “everyone’s job” or leaning on the expert (which exonerates everyone else) make it a department requirement and let each department come up with their own way to handle it.  Depending on the department, they will self-organize, take turns, hire someone, etc.  Social cannot be forced on people just like not everyone should have to Karaoke at the bar just because it’s there.  Some people enjoy it and some are genuinely good at it.  It should be up to the department lead to figure out how best to manage it within their own environments.

These three points are a good start, but what else can companies to encourage social innovation within their companies?  Ask any salesperson and they will tell you that compensation dictates behavior, I just don’t think that applies to social though (and I’m a sales dude).  Socially infusing your company will take initiative from four equal directions IMHO:

  1. bottom up
  2. top down
  3. outside in
  4. inside out

To help us put some more meat on that bone, we have asked social magnate Trey Pennington to moderate this week’s chat. Trey comes with an impressive background of teaching, implementing and consulting for some great brands and focuses much of his time on using technology to make meaningful relationships with real people. For companies, it requires a new mindset—a huge cultural shift. It’s filled with huge opportunities.  These opportunities are available to everyone but not everyone is ready.  Spend some time with us on Tuesday 4/20 at noon EST to make sure you build your checklist of things you can do to get your company ready to go social.  The questions will be asked every 20 minutes starting at 12 noon then hold on to your seats as this topic will certainly be fast paced:

Title:  Culture Shift: Is your company ready to go Social?
Q1:  Employees or Management: Who drives the social culture of a company?
Q2:  What comes first, executive investment or employee initiative?
Q3: Create a checklist that companies can use to become more social.

To participate, follow along on Twitter or you favorite Twitter client (www.tweetchat.com is mine) using #sm56 or simply goto our live page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live.

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Posted in corporate | 1 Comment »

This Town's Not Big Enough For The Two of Us: Social Media Marketing (SMM) vs. Traditional Marketing

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

Marketers seem to be more judicious before hopping on or off the social media bandwagon these days, yet they are still not quite sure where “social media marketing” fits within their organization.  Is social the “new” marketing or is it complementary to exisitng initiatives?  Beth Harte has a strong opinion on this matter and if you know Beth, I don’t think I’ll argue too much with her experience.

For our post, we have used much of Beth’s post from a couple of weeks ago to prep for our conversation this week.  Her original post follows:

“All of the panelists agree that social media are exciting new ways to listen and communicate, but they are basically new tools. So how do we get across to the marketing community that boring old marketing disciplines still apply and how do we get rid of this silly dichotomy between social media marketing and classic marketing.”  

My basic response was that social media tools are not new and some have been around for ten years or more. And second, there isn’t a dichotomy because social media needs to be integrated. 

I think this is a serious discussion that needs to take place because there marketers and marketing executives who have been given the wrong impression or direction when it comes to social media. 

Integrating Social Media 

First, I am not a fan of the term ‘social media marketing’ because a) it silos social media from other marketing communications tactics and other marketing disciplines and b) because a lot of folks out there are implementing social media tools without understanding the nature (or theory) of marketing as a whole. Second, as an integrated marketing practitioner, I totally disagree that ‘social media marketing’ is replacing classic marketing (or the theory that comes with it). 

What’s new and important is how these tools are being used in business; how we have a window into what our customers are really thinking, where they interact, how to engage with them, etc.; and how we now have data to serve our customers BETTER. 

But this notion of knowing our customers isn’t anything new…that’s basic marketing (and I mean ALL of marketing here, not just the promotional aspect of marketing), public relations and communications.

While CRM systems have been the tool of choice for keeping track of customers and extracting data  they never really allowed marketers to put faces to names (unless there’s some stealth way to take a photo and add it to your CRM), to listen to conversations or to actively engage in a two-way manner. The only tool that allows that is social media. 

The key to integration today is simple. Marketers need to be flexible, able to adjust, and most importantly able to provide pertinent AND timely information when, where and how customers/potential customers need/want it. Social media allows for that across all areas of marketing (product, pricing, promotion and distribution). 

Who/What Is Creating the Dichotomy?  

I think the most important issue here, however, is who/what is creating the dichotomy? Who or what is causing marketers to think that it’s an either/or situation? 

Is it that we’ve been siloed for so long and that there hasn’t been a good job with integration to begin with? We only need to look at E-Mail Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, and Direct Marketing to get a sense of the answer. 

As social media evangelists and practitioners we need to truly understand what is going on in our industry. Otherwise, we are doing a disservice to our customers and future as marketers. 

Beth’s post was perfect for this week’s chat which is set to take place Tuesday 4/6/10 at noon EST. 

Topic:  This Town’s Not Big Enough For The Two of Us: Social Media Marketing (SMM) vs. Traditional Marketing

Q1: Is SMM on its way to replacing traditional marketing?

Q2: Can marketers be as accountable with SMM as traditional marketing?

Q3: What are best practices for cooperating traditional marketing with SMM?

To follow along, use #sm54 or simply go to our LIVE site, now with new features.

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Posted in corporate, social media | 1 Comment »

Social and the New Model For Market Segmentation

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

So you know by now that we attempt to shake things up a bit and challenge people to think differently about topics and their impact on business.  Our topic this week is no exception and with the skills of our moderator, we are going to test those limits.  This week’s discussion is around market segmentation and how social can change how we approach it.

Market segmentation is more than what markers do with homogeneous products before deciding which actress to use in the commercial to best reach a desired consumer group.  Market segmentation is defined by Wikipedia as:

“A market segment is a sub-set of a market made up of people or organizations sharing one or more characteristics that cause them to demand similar product and/or services based on qualities of those products such as price or function.”

This is a good start as a definition, however this does not even begin to scratch the surface.  How do we take this to the next level?  To explore ways by which to re-imagine consumer grouping, we must get past the traditional segmenting like demographics, geographics, income, even behavioral.  For many marketers, they look at data models that break out behavioral with layers of demo and geographics mashed in.  This modeling then determines a budgeted ad spend for a period in time like 3 or 6 months where the messaging is developed, pricing assigned and commercial created.  The problem is that by the time the ads hit, the data models have shifted and the intended groups have moved on.  Now with peer reviews and endless product content the real-time web is heavily influencing consumer preferences  that continue to change with increased velocity.

Savvy marketers have been using insights for more than just marketing also.  Saavy marketers use segmentation for product development, pricing, marketing channel, and even customer retention.  Using the last example, customer retention, the segmenting considers factors like profitability, strategic fit, product version and longevity.  Can you service your customers differently with better targeting for profitability or would you be more proactive with customers who were ripe for renewal or upgrades?  Now consider going beyond your internal gates and imagine the results if you combined internal factors along with external or social listening capabilities.  Maybe that customer who is really loud socially is a drain on your profitability.

So what this means is that the social web is having a profound affect on preferences, therefore insights that are not derived in near-real time are simply missing the mark.  If we open our research and insights departments to the social web, how can they can they use these tools that have never been considered before?  Every company will find different value in different social instances, however there are some great new possibilities that are emerging:

  • What if you titled the buckets of your listening tools with Underserved, Disenfranchised and Contemplators.  Could you use that insight to build better products or price more according to near real-time inputs?
  • What if you targeted people who played Mafia Wars on Facebook or joined relevant fan pages.  Could you use those applications for consumers to self segment themselves and find commonalities?
  • What if you targeted people who used certain hashtags (#) on Twitter or similar platforms.  Could you infer commonalities from everyone who tweeted #farm, #beer or #sweets?

Understanding and using social segmentation is challenging.  The pace at which social moves and the pace by which people flutter around digitally are simply exhausting.  Marketers like General Mills and Coke are early adopters of social segmentation and blazing a trail for others to follow.    This week’s moderator Ken Burbary is going to help us sort out this topic.  Ken manages the social media duties for Ernst & Young where he develops these types of solutions for their respective clients.  The topic this week is:

TOPIC: Social and the New Model For Market Segmentation

Q1) Is traditional market segmentation still relevant?

Q2) What should be more important for Brands: social segmentation or engagement?

Q3) How are you segmenting your customers with Social Media?

Please join us Tuesday 2/23 at noon EST by using #sm48 on Twitter or follow our LIVE page

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Follow up to UnPanel #6: How to Win When Your Competitors are Losing, an advanced social media approach

Sunday, May 10th, 2009

A great turnout for this event led by Jason Falls from full service brand agency, Doe-Anderson.  Can’t decide whether to attribute the passionate dialogue to the topic or Jason for challenging the standard response posts.  As a result, this UnPanel created a solid dialogue around the topic of how some companies can grow their businesses even when competitors and their industry is even or declining.  A summary is below:

Customer’s perception: is that companies care more about profits than customers.

How can you overcome this perception?  Assign someone or some people to interact with customers throughout the day/night.  Be free to answer questions whether related directly to selling more stuff initially or not.  Create a personal “face” that customers can relate to.  A theme that came up was that of ” living amongst them” or showing customers that the people of the brand face the same challenges and experiences as the customers.  Create familiarity and relate to your customers at an individual level.

You can’t outsource relationships whether online or in real-life.

One point to this is that you have to humanize that which is inanimate.  Brands are things, people want to interact with humans, not things.   There was some talk about trusting agencies but at the end of the day, the consensus agreed that agencies have a place with developing strategy, guidance, focus, etc but the dialogue needs to come from people inside the company.  Agencies are best when they try to avoid dependency relationships with clients.  Managing their work by not getting noticed.

How do you know as a brand that you have been “accepted” or become in-network?

First, this is not a destination, becoming accepted social as a brand by your customers is a continuous journey.  Certainly when your customers are recommending you to their friends is a good indicator (Apple may win this battle).  That is a much deeper commitment that simply purchasing something and being done.  Make it easy for customers to become advocates.  A great post said when customers start wearing your tattoo, then you know you are operating in-network.  That is a great concept both literally and figuratively.

Once you have arrived, how do you keep your Cred with you customers?

In list format in order of how they came in:

  • Invite interactions offline, meet-ups, invites to parties, events, etc.
  • Consider Mobile interactions as a more intimate way to connect with customers
  • Invite them to help develop new products, innovations for the company
  • Keep evaluating feedback, adapting, changing to the needs of customers. No stagnation.
  • Social CRM as a method to stay engaged and relevant.
  • Buy your own products as your customers would. Discuss your experience with them and improve it with input.

Want to thank Jason Falls again for moderating this topic!

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