Monthly Archive for February, 2010

Mobile: Puma phone a glimpse into pharma future?

At the Mobile Congress in Barcelona last week, shoemaker Puma launched a new Puma Phone to appeal to the on-the-go, healthy lifestyle of their target consumers.

Hmmm.  A branded “lifestyle” phone?

Think the Viagra phone is far away?

While it’s easy to say it will “never happen in pharma,” the rapid changes in mobile adoption around the world suggest that, perhaps, anything could happen. As the technology gets less expensive, global mobile adoption has exploded, blurring the roles of function, entertainment, brand and marketing.

If  5 years ago someone had predicted that the bookseller Amazon would one day have its own line of computers it would have seemed far fetched, right?  But now there’s Kindle: a branded product (software) on an emerging technology (tablet).

The good news for pharma: sometimes being later to market is better.

Technology companies know they learn as much from going through the launch of a new technology (tablet, mobile, etc.) as they did developing the product in the first place.  That knowledge becomes “the bigger part” of theie intellectual property (IP).  The experience of doing it first, or early, becomes the competitive advantage, not just the software, or device. Early adopters have experienced more earlier, so they figure out how to avoid the mistakes for version 2.0 (in software).

For pharma it will be the second version of their tablet application, or mobile device app that translates to success, because the IP gathered from the first version will have taught those brand managers what works, what doesn’t and (drum roll) why it worked.

mwallinger
Mark Wallinger | February 26th, 2010 | 0 Comments

How will a Microsoft (Bing) powered Yahoo search affect pharma?

Last July, Microsoft (Bing) and Yahoo agreed to a search engine deal to improve both of their chances and market share against Google. The deal will see Yahoo and their family of sites use Microsoft’s search technology for both organic and paid search. How will this affect pharmas use of search marketing?

Currently, Google is the first stop for any search marketing spend for a brand. Few extend their budgets onto Yahoo and Bing. For December 2009, comScore reports that Google sites currently has 65.6% market share followed by Yahoo sites with 17.5% and Microsoft sites with 10.3%. Now Microsoft search will have 27.8% market share instead of 10.3%. Can you afford to ignore over a quarter of the search population?

All paid search will work through MSN’s adCenter once the transition is complete. Both Yahoo and MSN have awful paid search admin portals. Tie that into small market share and poor paid search results, and many brands choose to focus on Google. Now that you will have one location to reach almost 28% of searchers, it will be hard to ignore.

On the organic search side, the Bing algorithm will get much more attention from search marketers. Yahoo is currently the only search engine that does not have a unique health solution, like Google Health and Bing’s version (see left, red box), at the top of the search results. But with Bing now delivering Yahoo results, all the major search engines will own the top spot of organic for health keywords.

The end result of the Microsoft/Yahoo deal and pharma is the new partners have created a pull of market share that makes them hard to over look. Microsoft will now deliver organic and paid search results to over a quarter of searchers and that is hard to ignore.

Tyler Ransburgh
Tyler Ransburgh | February 25th, 2010 | 0 Comments

Five tough questions to ask your web project team

We can all make digital brand investments more valuable. It all starts with asking the right questions:

  1. What does it look like on the computer in my pocket?
    Accessing the web via mobile is the new game-changing trend. Smart phone sales are up 30% year over year; they’re expected to beat out global PC sales within the next three years. Think of all the places people are seeing your brand where going online to find out more would be infinitely easier on a handheld than with a laptop? Conventions halls, waiting rooms, conversations over coffee. You don’t want them to end up just seeing this:

  2. What do we want people to pass on?
    You’ve probably got a call-to-action written into your strategy, but what about a call to share? Half of all online health searches are done on behalf of someone else.  And two-thirds of us talk with someone else about what we find online. What do you want your visitors to say?
  3. What is our site telling Google about us?
    Ok, maybe your search engine of choice is Bing. Still, you should know what your site is saying to the spiders as well as the masses. Talk about what steps to take to optimize the site. Cover all the bases: what’s in the words, what’s tucked in the code and where do you pass your content on?
  4. How will people engage with us?
    Everyone is chasing after that metric – what does it mean for a consumer to engage with us? For our purposes, let’s say it means more than reading a carefully-curated digital museum. Put aside the Tetris-like sitemap and think people for a minute. What’s the experience should they have? Where can they interact with your brand or each other? (And, no, a contact form doesn’t count)
  5. What do we have the opportunity to own in search?
    What’s the competitive field look like? Who’s winning on what search terms? This is where the digital strategists come in. Those curious people who are utterly fascinated by microsegments and use paths and comparative data. They can tell you where the open spaces are and what content strategy to take to make them your own.
lhouseholder
Leigh Householder, VP/Managing Director of Innovation Strategy | February 23rd, 2010 | 0 Comments

Google: it’s mobile, everyone

Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s keynote at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona seemed to help everyone focus on what’s vital in the next phase of developing apps: it’s mobile, everyone.

Citing smart phone sales up 30% year-over-year (soon to pass PC sales) and the argument that web adoption is 8x faster than web adoption in the early 2000s, he reinforced what we sometimes forget: in emerging countries more Google searches are done on mobile devices than on desktops.

Think about it…

That’s a rough patch for some network operators. (Read about the tough Q&A period that followed in ComputerWorld.)

But it’s clear… it’s not iPhone vs. Droid. It’s all of it.

mwallinger
Mark Wallinger | February 22nd, 2010 | 0 Comments

Social: Gartner Group announces the future

If you ware wondering about the future of social (especially social software) look no further than Gartner Group, which bills itself as the “world’s leading information technology research and advisory company.”

Through 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail.

By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users?

Riveting.  Read more in this overview.

mwallinger
Mark Wallinger | February 19th, 2010 | 0 Comments

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