Jan 23, 2012 0
Industry publication PharmaVOICE has released a special Social Media Showcase in their January 2012 edition. Marketing leaders look at how healthcare brands can participate in social networks smartly, safely, and with the greatest impact for patients and professionals. Look for my contribution, Search and Social Media for the Pharmaceutical Industry that outlines how social networks impact search results for all audiences.
Sep 25, 2011 2
In 1967, the graduate is counseled to pursue a future in plastics. Good advice for the time. To the modern business graduate, what is a sure thing?Regardless of what you believe the shelf-life of social media is, there is a fundamental shift in business communication that is occurring. At one point recently, the business world and the interactions between companies, and between companies and their clients was opaque. With the growth of social media, and the mindset of consumers that they can reach large businesses, that perception is changing.
With this change, comes an opportunity for those who understand what to look for in a changing world. The people are not the social media experts and gurus who claim that Facebook and Twitter are the end-all-be-all of new business. The people who have a future are the people who understand that the world is changing and are constantly on the look-out for what will change next and how.
I don’t want to make light of the current state of employment in this country, nor do I believe that the current guard of business is asleep at the wheel. I am proposing that the savvy graduate coming into the business world will need more than a business degree to make a difference. The opportunity for new graduates to make a mark for themselves is leveraging what they have likely been using to communicate with their friends and family, using to promote their band, and using instead of a television to entertain themselves. They will need to bridge those tools to promote businesses and brand, but do so in a way that makes sense for the channel and time.
The same successful graduate who uses these tools will also need to be know why they are using them. Is Facebook a better choice because it has a broader demographic than Google+? Will Google+ provide a platform relevant to marketers? Having a hunch which is the right choice (and being able to articulate why) is what companies need right now and will be willing to pay for.
It sounds insane, but what the modern business needs is more alchemy than science. It’s the individual who can understand how to apply what is available now and read the tea-leaves to for the next big thing to come from Disrupt.
Feb 20, 2011 0
Recently, I’ve had a few friends ask about Twitter and how to make sense of it. There are those that only see Twitter as a novella of recent meals and Glee highlights. The fact is that Twitter, with a little bit of management, can help you cull down the noise of the Internet and create a best-of list for the web.
So how does someone new to Twitter make sense of this massive onslaught of Tweets? It’s pretty easy to start. Go to Twitter.com and click create an account. Once you’re account is set-up, search for your friends and the names of sites and blogs that you go to regularly. You can also let Twitter help you with a list of people they think you should follow by using the link in the menu bar “Who To Follow”.
It’s likely that you are already regularly visiting websites and news source on the web. Equally likely is that those same sites have some presence on Twitter. So look for an icon or “follow me on Twitter” button and give follow-them (don’t be surprised if they follow you too). So these are the basics.
Live with Twitter for a few days and get a feel for the cadence of those you’re following and if they’re Tweets are of any interest. Don’t be afraid to “unfollow” those people who just aren’t producing anything of interest for you. What will make Twitter useful to you is parring down the incoming “stream” of tweets to the content that is interesting or beneficial to you.
After several days of reading people’s Tweets, you’re going to start seeing how the people you’ve followed are using Twitter. Some people use it as a life-journals, others as a way to promote their content or products, others to aggregate links and videos on the web they find beneficial. You’re also going to begin to see how people are “Re-Tweeting” (re-sending a high-quality Twitter post) and mentioning people with strong links. Start to follow those people too. You’re going to start to see that as you expand the list of people you’re following, you’re going to start seeing more and more links that are of interest and you may have not been seeing previously.
As your Twitter follow lists grows, you’re going to start seeing the “stream” or incoming links move fast and faster through the interface. This is where Twitter Lists come in. Twitter provides an explanation and tutorial on how to make a list, but essentially, it’s a subset of your Twitter group. You can put as many as 500 users in a list and catagorise it in anyway that you like. To make it useful, I have arranged my lists so I can focus on content at any given time. For example, I have a list for design, a list of people I work with, a list for of pharmaceutical industry observers and so on. The list feature can give you the ability to organize and quickly focus on a particular interest when you review your Twitter feed.
In addition to lists, you can also search twitter using keywords or phrases. Like a search engine, Twitter will return posts from the entire Twitter community that contain your particular search string. If you are searching from Twitter’s website, you can then search through the results by last date posted, geographically (tweets near you) and person who is tweeting. All very powerful tools. Google and Bing both provide search features that can focus searches on Twitter and show results in real-time.
You can also search Twitter using hashtags. These tags are a created by putting a “#” sign infront of any word or phrase. Doing so allows that phrase to be easily searched and parsed. Users can then follow a particular hash-tag in a fashion similar to the way that you might follow a user. Some examples are #mobile, #design, or #fdasm. Hashtags are an organic product of the Twitter community and not part of Twitter’s supported API. To use hashtags properly, apply the “#” symbol infront of any word or term without any spaces. Upper and lowercase characters can be used to discern words in a phrase. Managing these hashtags becomes easier if you use Twitter in a desktop or mobile client.
Once you’ve conquered some of the ins-and-outs of Twitter, you may want to start mastering Twitter. Although Twitter’s web interface has come a long way, many power-users make use of desktop clients like TweetDeck (Mac and PC), Tweetie (Mac) or Twirl (PC). Twitter, having recently purchased several third-party companies creating Twitter clients has released their own platform clients. Twitter for the iPhone and Twitter for Mac are two examples. Personally, TweetDeck is a fantastic client developed using Adobe AIR. It works on all major platforms and is very powerful supporting multiple accounts and several other services.
Twitter is as powerful a tool as you make of it. With a little management, careful curating and a little bit of use, you can turn Twitter into a powerful way to pull in information from all over the Internet ranging from topics you are familiar to information that you may never have known existed. It’s important that you spend a few minutes to review some of the etiquette of Twitter as well. It’s a very fickle community and being aware of when to cite a source, what a retweet does and how to direct-message are all important to being a good citizen in the Twitterverse. Chris Brogan has a wonderful Twitter Etiquette post that summarizes everything for the nube and veteran Twitter user. Mashable has created an equally useful Twitter Guide as well.
Follow me on Twitter and happy Tweeting.
Nov 20, 2010 1
Are you addicted to your social media channel? Fanatical about Facebook? Totally tuned into Twitter? Then the team at RockMelt have created a browser you can’t live without. Like Flock before it, this new browser marries a ton of social media utility with the browser you’re using to roam the web.
Built on the Google Chrome open source project, RockMelt is a browser that is created around social interaction. It has much of the functionality found in the latest release of Chrome, but adds in-browser integration for Facebook and Twitter. The inclusion of Facebook comes from several very intuitive features: A sidebar showing your friends and the Facebook chat interface, your news stream, and the ability to share the website you’re currently visiting via a single-click button in the address bar.
If your tendency is more towards Twitter, the share button can toggle between Facebook and Twitter both using RockMelt’s own shortening service “http://me.lt”. A running Twitter feed is included in the sidebar without having to visit Twitter.com or use a third-party client.
As a Chrome user, RockMelt is easy and feels right at home, although on a smaller screen, the sidebar makes websites feel cramped and closed in. The browser is snappy and if you spend a lot of time sharing links and posts, than the embedded utility is a very nice cool addition. I think RockMelt feels a little strange, but I toss that up to my being a browser purist. I have been a long-time FireFox user and Chrome user. I tend to use only a very few add-ons for web development and debugging. RockMelt has been a fun diversion, but I’ve found myself returning to my old-favorites with no regrets.
Take a look at RockMelt’s promotional clip or listen to the interview with RockMelt CEO, Eric Vishria.
Aug 15, 2010 0
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).
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Chris Cullmann is a Creative Director and Online Strategist. He works for Ogilvy CommonHealth Interactive Marketing, a digital agency dedicated to healthcare marketing. His professional and personal portfolio includes interactive websites, viral and social media, and online education applications. His portfolio and observations about the design and marketing industry can be found at www.cullmanndesign.com
The opinions expressed on this site are my own and do not reflect those of my employer or those who I am professionally connected.
Follow Cullmann on Twitter
