An excerpt from a recent article I wrote elsewhere on the web:
Every conversation about digital and social marketing should start with these six words: What do you want to accomplish?
More often, those conversations start with: We need a website and an email blast. They’re tactics to check off a list. Digital must haves that support other campaigns rather than build new kinds of engagement and relationships online.
One reason is that, as health care marketers, we need metrics. We’ve got seven, maybe as many as 12, years to build an entire product life cycle – often introducing not only a new treatment, but an entirely new category of treatment. Every marketing dollar needs to show results.
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Have you ever read an article about people like you and thought something to the effect of – wow, they have no idea what we’re all about. I had one of those experiences last month reading a Wall Street Journal article headlined “‘Scrapers’ Dig Deep for Data on Web.”
Here’s the basic premise of the story (you can read it here): Companies like Nielsen “scrape” the posts and comments of epatients from around the web and sell them to “major drug makers” so that they can “harvest … personal details and online communications.” A number of patients in the story were quoted as saying they felt disturbed and violated.
Yeah, I hear them. With that setup, I feel that way, too.
Here’s what I personally want ePatients like Bilal Ahmed (quoted in the story) to know:
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It goes without saying that in order to build products and solutions it’s important to have a full grasp of the foundation on which your solution will live. In order to have buy-in for you solution, stakeholders, account executives and potential clients should also have a similar grasp.
In my daily professional world I am surrounded by interactive designers, programmers and digital strategists. My peers are familiar with the higher concepts when it pertains to interactive and the web. Terms like “cloud computing,” “SVG” and “HTML5″ are not foreign words to us. For many of the people in my personal life, namely my kids, my retired parents, many of my SCUBA diving buddies, this isn’t the case. With my job, it’s important to realize that not everyone I interact knows exactly what I’m talking about.
Enter Google’s most recent PSA-like contribution:
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Our last talk today – from Elona Kogan - is about risk.
Risk doesn’t mean you can’t do it. Everything has risk attached. We have to understand the risk, consider how to mitigate it and make good business decisions with the information.
It comes down to trust and credibility. A recent Harris Poll looked at overall reputation by industry. Pharma came in just ahead of tobacco (well behind other favorite villains like oil companies and airlines)
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Alan S. Klein with Sequella and Xavier Petit from Shire are talking about innovation’s effect on pharma marketing and sales.
Two conflicting trends are actually converging to create a lot of stress in the exam room: Patients are more empowered (and more demanding) than ever and payors are putting significant pressure on physicians to control costs. That’s changing the patient-doctor relationship. Not only are visits getting shorter (to cram more patients into a day), but docs are often having to say no.
We know a lot of the technology trends, but one we haven’t talked much about yet today is the fast uptake of the slate. According to Manhattan Research, as of this July, 12% of physicians had already purchased an iPad and another 30% were planning to purchase in the next 6 months. This is an entirely new tool set we’re already seeing enter that exam room conversation.
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