cullmanndesign blog

Last week, Tasigna, a Novartis product, received a letter from DDMAC for including a “share” button on their website. The letter stated that the utility “fails to communicate any risk information”. For those who may not know, a “share” button is a small widget that allows you to link to the site that it has been hosted on, with one or two clicks, to your favorite social networking service (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc).

The issue with this tool (in order to make use of it) for the pharmaceutical industry, or any other highly regulated industry, is two-fold: 1.) There is a character limit placed on the title and description that is shown to other users using the framework provide by Facebook and 2.) That to be assured that this information is included in a social network post, it must be included in the metadata of the branded page (thus mitigating the natural search engine opportunity afforded by the use of metadata).

Controlling social media

The Facebook share widget, and almost all other widgets that are similar, use images found on the webpage they are linking to, any metadata (content coded into the page to help search engines) and the page title (again, content coded into the webpage for search engines) to create the presentation on the host service. Facebook is one service that provides these features. Just like search engine results that are shown to users when they make a web search, the amount of data that can be shown is limited. This is precisely the issue that the FDA has with the “Share” feature.

To add an additional complication, users can also make changes to the metadata before publishing it a part of their social network posting. Although there are many ways to do this using third-party solutions, the easy with which this can be done exacerbates the situation for brand managers and regulatory officials.

The “sharing” features of social media websites are a valuable tool for marketers and extend the reach of brand messaging. It makes use of peer-to-peer recommendations and allows easy communication of ideas and findings between professionals and patients alike. The relevance of social media for the Healthcare Professional can be debated, but regardless of your opinion, the ease of use and subtle differences between social media tools like this and search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) are indistinguishable.

Then what does this mean for SEO/SEM?

Recently, the requirements for presenting “important safety information” and warnings has become very important. Suggested parameters range from the vague “presentation above the fold”, to a persistent sidebar presentation,like Tasigna demonstrates, to a complete “opt-in” splash screen before beginning to display content. Regardless of your position, many of these parameters are moot when taking into account the growth of alternative consumption devices like mobile phones, iPads, and dedicated readers. The user experience is not nearly as controllable as regulatory groups would ideally be comfortable with.

I suspect that if regulatory boards and staff where more aware of how search engines worked and behaved that metadata too, would become equally as scrutinized. The limited amount of space allotted by search engines for description and the need to describe to doctors and consumers the offerings on a webpage may quickly come to odds. A danger exists in the sunsetting of branded pharmaceutical websites and the growth of less-accurate non-branded websites and third-party control of the search space for indication categories.

Is this preventable?

The facts around social media tools are that there is little anyone, brand managers, agencies or legal boards, can do to stop someone from linking to a pharmaceutical web property and manipulate the properties of a given post. What companies can do is pay attention to the attributes that these applications and services use. Do you know what the metadata on your brand’s websites says? Have you seen what it may look like if you link to it from Facebook or LinkedIn? That is the best place to start. You should include this in the discussion you have with your agency, peers and legal boards.

Educating yourself and those responsible for approving your web properties is more important than ever. The presentation of the DDMAC letter shows how the FDA is educating itself and taking a position. Marketers will need to be equally, if not more educated, in order to avoid the conditions which Tasigna must address.

What can be done?

If you are responsible or contribute to a brand that may require a black box warning or similar safety notification requirements, there are currently some limited actions that can be taken to make use of social media sharing tools:

• Check your metadata. Can you provide a description of your content and your required legal disclosure in 420 characters or less (you likely don’t work in pharmaceutical marketing!)? At the time of posting, that is the current maximum character count for Facebook’s status area. Anything additional will be truncated.
• Does your brand have a dedicated Healthcare Professional section? Although consumer facing communication is harshly regulated, the jury is still out on making a use-case for “sharing” tools to be a peer-to-peer vehicle with slightly more liberal policies for social marketing requirements.
• Do you have an unbranded channel? This would be an ideal opportunity for using Facebook, Twitter or any other social media channel as a driver and awareness vehicle.
• Talk to your medical legal review board. Nothing can aid your cause more than knowing your company’s policies and what your board’s opinions and policies are for the use of social media and how that may apply to a particular indication or brand.

NOTE: The opinions expressed in this and all of my posts are my own and are not those of my employer or its parent company.

In the past 2 years, there has been a tremendous push to move messaging and advertising to social media. Whether FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, every market has it’s niche and ad agencies have gotten proficient at targeting groups within these networks. While social media marketing was maturing, there was (and still is) a trend in dismissing e-mail marketing. With relatively low click-through rates, competition with SPAM, difficulty in delivering branding elements in many e-mail clients, it had become easy to cast off for the more attractive and exciting new arrival: social media.

Verification

Despite a dip in popularity, e-Mail is still a force to be reckoned with for communicating with customers. Regardless of audience, e-Mail is still one of the few ways outside of a closed-wall eco-system like Apple or FaceBook, that a marketer has to “verify” identity or ownership of credentials. One field of any online transaction of information is ALWAYS e-mail. A savvy marketer will verify the e-mail address with a call-to-action confirmation as quickly as possible to confirm that the email can reliably be associated with a particular identity. Next to credit card information, this is a very easy and convenient way to apply a small amount of accountability to an online user. The process of having users “opt-in” and define the terms that they would like to be communicated with is important and based on metrics, e-Mail is still the most popular method for online CRM and brand-building communications.

Call To Action & Response

E-Mail offers users an expected behavior that is comfortable for them. A well-designed e-mail program will have a clear “From” identifier, visible before even opening the e-Mail, a subject line declaring the main intent of the message and the message (usually with several call-to-actions). User are familiar and typically follow a pattern of behavior if you structure your e-Mails with consistent design and language. This is where e-Mail excels: While social media channels are still working towards how to handle unique customer response and moving users from the gated sanctuary of a particular social network, e-Mail delivers a personalized medium with the ability for a unique call-to-action. All of this can be done addressing the users as an individual, tailoring content and offering an end-to-end dialogue. E-Mail’s ubiquitous nature allows this to be done across any platform or device (including mobile).

Reach & Audience

One of first and still the most common method of communication on the internet, e-Mail offers the widest audience. A majority of web users claim more than one active e-Mail address1, many having several. There is also a wave of adoption for new audiences. AARP has recently released data showing that seniors are the fasting growing group of adopters2 of e-Mail. Those in emerging markets overseas also represent a growing population of e-Mail users. There is a simplicity and approachability that makes it attractive to new web users and bullet-proof to web veterans. There are several complications when dealing with e-Mail as well. e-Mail is a communication channel protected in the US by federal law. The manner in which you engage your customers (or recipients) must adhere to the US CAN-SPAM Act. Although it’s a simple criteria to adhere to, not observing the standards set by this policy will likely land you in your reader’s junk-mail file.

Privacy (sort of)

Although E-Mail is far from a secure medium, it does offer several advantages over social media, SMS and several other hot advertising mediums. A marketer and e-Mail recipient can both expect that the contents of an e-Mail message will not be seen by dozens of their friends, other customers or competitors. Additionally, this same channel can be acted upon with an expectation that the action will be equally as private. This may seem like a small nuance, but if you are someone buying a present for a loved one, accessing banking information or even making a mundane request from the post-office, you can expect that the exchange is limited to the addressed parties.

Equally important, a user can respond via e-mail without a character limitation, or concern that there will be additional charges on their bill for the communication. These are both issues facing SMS marketing and communication. Although immediate, it is a concern to those not familiar with texting and it’s protocols.

Cheering The Underdog

I am a believer in e-Mail marketing. I don’t think it is a silver bullet or the only solution for marketers, but rather, a tortoise in the proverbial race with the hair. Currently, the role of the hair is played by social media and SMS marketing. I think both of these have a place. I also believe there are many cases where social media marketing is a run-away winner. The power of e-Mail marketing is in it’s familiarity and direct nature. It offers strong ROI and is easy to measure both success and failure. For the average person, e-Mail is approaching 15 years old. Even if you’re not measuring your time in “internet years”, it has come into it’s maturity.

Before you pass-off your next opportunity to pitch an e-Mail marketing plan to a client, ask your self about the message and audience. The solution may be easier and more traditional than you may have thought.

You want more?
Check out MailChimp and CampaignMonitor for great tools to launch your campaign. If you want to learn more about who is opening and how frequently messages are read, check out MailerMailer’s metrics report from 2009.

Director Ridley Scott, of BladeRunner Fame, will be producing the most recent re-envisioning of “A Day In The Life” series. Most popular in it’s form as a coffee tablet book, this series is one of the original “crowd sourcing” projects inviting people from all walks of life and stations to provide a visual record of their experiences on a particular day.

The current incarnation will begin life as a user-submitted video via a dedicated YouTube channel and will evolve into a feature-length film with Scott at the helm of creative. Budding film-makers can submit their own videos and have their work featured in the final cut.

Although the day-in-a-life concept has been around for quite some time, this most recent work seems to be a natural application of the web, and in particular, YouTube. The idea of a truly open submission that captures the creative and mundane alike-presenting it as a perspective on our condition. A draw-back–and one that is substantial–is that the digital divide may leave more in the cold than previous day-in-the-life projects. YouTube’s popularity is worldwide though and the focus perspective should be something more broad than the typical “western” view.

The “Day” will be July 24, 2010, so submit your entry between July 24 and 31, 2010.

A recent study from Nielsen shows that more than half of television viewers are engaged in another media consumption activity while taking in their favorite programming. Nielsen’s study, The Three Screens Report, was created specifically to capture data about usage behavior in our living rooms. The report is a painting of how media is changing and how the adoption of our phones, computers and hybrid devices is changing the way that we interact with one another and media. Nielsen’s Three Screens Report goes back to 2009 and even this small period of time, it’s easy to see a shift in behavior.

Surprising is that the multi-channel consumption is not limited, or even led, by a particular demographic. Mobile video consumption for instance, is led by 25-34 year-olds. and that consumption drops 10-15% for users not-yet 20 years old. Also surprising is that although younger audiences consume more media (in time spent), a more mature demographic (24-35 year-olds) spend their time using many channels simulatiously. The Nielsen study does not go into specific details regarding the content of what is consumed, but should still be taken seriously by those who create content for prime-time viewing as well as content on-demand and web media.

From a media-professional perspective, understanding that your messaging and imagery is competing with several different stimuli at a given time. The tactics that you must employ are becoming more and more fragmented as well. Web content should be scannable, clean and broken out into digestible portions. Apps should be designed to keep your place within content and preserve the last “state” if the device goes dormant or is exited. Television content, especially commercials, should be fast and attention getting. Also, branding should not be visual alone as users may be looking away from the screen (especially during commercial breaks).

The Nielsen report is a fantastic benchmark for media producers. Not only does it provide support for what we all know-all-to-well to be typical behavior, but it also shows demographic information that is surprising. The report covers the first quarter of 2010 and the data, when compared with the previous year’s reflects the emergence of new devices and mobile network capabilities. The survey period ends before the release of the Apple’s iPad, which may further tilt the statistic towards multi-channel and mobile media consumption. The iPad, Google Android and several other consumer oriented mobile media devices are creating a new category of info-tainment that makes every minute, every commercial break and every morsel of downtime an opportunity to see a short-format video or catch a quick-laugh on YouTube. The trick is to become THAT content that captures user’s attention.

Google Wave, the strange, neither here nor there Google app is turning over it’s first year. Recently at the Google I/O Conference, some new life has been breathed into the application and there seems to be a renewed buzz in the online community. The pre-release version lacked some functionality and a clear purpose. It actually had, and now still has, a tremendous amount of potential. In the last year, improvements in the stability and development of extensions have allowed the benefit of such a “real-time” oriented application to become evident. If you are not familiar with Wave, it’s a hybrid employing the length and editing tools you would find in an email client, with the “real-time” content delivery instant messaging offers. Additionally, you can now “publish” waves to any webpage and also review the collective work as via a playback feature and see how a given “wave” has formed.

The most recent release is a maturing application that can be used immediately for sharing, distributing, editing and publishing a collaborative workflow to a group of any size. I can see now what had driven Google to create such a unique tool. Like many other great idea that have launched, user adoption is going to be key in the success of Google Wave. It’s ideal for groups that work remote from one another or instances where seeing a linear progression in a conversation is required. If you haven’t had a chance to try it, wave.google.com is open to anyone with a Google ID. If you want to get a strong grasp as to what Wave is capable of, I recommend Gina Trapani’s book The Complete Guide To Google Wave. Google also has a dedicated Wave Blog and there is technical documentation for the Wave protocol as well. A Wave to accompany this post is also available.