Roche ushers in a new era for pharma on the social web

August 17, 2010

Roche has today made the bold, progressive move of publishing its Social Media Principles (PDF).

As someone who has in their time handed out plenty of criticism to the industry, I would like to go on the record to say that it is my opinion that Roche should be applauded for its transparency in sharing this four page document.

The clear, straightforward advice it offers should not only be a boon to its own employees, but for all those who work in heavily regulated industries who wish to participate effectively within the social web.

The document is worth reviewing in its entirety via the link above, but I offer below a screengrab of the boxed summary of its key recommendations (click to see enlarged image):

I am pleased to see that Roche is giving equal weight to the way that its employees conduct themselves personally and professionally, and does not distinguish in terms of importance between speaking about and speaking on behalf of Roche.

This seemingly simple gesture contains a number of tacit assumptions that I feel are both trust enabling, and amplifiers of an authentic desire on the part of the company to participate fully and fairly within social web environments.

I for one appreciate Roche’s publicly stating that they consider their employees both conscious of the way that they deport themselves in their personal and business lives and responsible for their own actions.

This is empowering to the point that some of those on the payroll may consider it downright terrifying. However, I hope it is interpreted as the spur to ethical conduct that I perceive it to be, and a disincentive for the sort of ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ characters I am sure we have all met in our professional lives to consider applying for a position in the future.

I like the fact that employees are expressly encouraged to acknowledge rather than disguise the fact that they work for Roche, scout for sentiment, and monitor their own relevant social media channels.

This one transformative action has allowed Roche employees to justly consider themselves at liberty to act as nodes in a cross-company listening network. As a consequence, smouldering crises may be damped down before they catch fire, or maybe through dialogue, the building of trust, the establishment of an enduring presence and the evidence of a listening ear, averted altogether.

Perhaps most importantly, I would suggest that today Roche has not only raised the bar for the pharma industry within the social web in general, but that they have also heralded in a new era for healthcare communications. Those companies that have been at the vanguard of experiments within these spaces such and Johnson & Johnson (including Janssen-Cilag), Novartis, Boehringer, possibly Pfizer and perhaps even the accident-prone sanofi aventis should be able to sail over this bar too if they get their run-up approach right.

However, those pharma laggards who have exhibited the sort of pusillanimous conservatism that has characterized the industry in the past do not have a hope of reaching these heights unless they begin to participate more fully. As it is, most of them are laps behind the leaders already, and realistically we should expect them to fall further behind.

Therefore, today’s developments lead me to ask: how many business cycles away are we from seeing the first signs of a quantifiable financial benefit for those pharma companies that have chosen to participate as fully as possible within the social web, as well as a quantifiable financial impact upon those that have elected not to?

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Happy birthday Healthcare Social Media Europe

August 6, 2010

Healthcare Social Media Europe is 1 today.

To the ambient soundtrack of seagulls and an uncontrollable cat, I say: thank you.

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The new ‘sales’ ABC: always be conversational

August 6, 2010

Saying ‘everything is sales‘ was tantamount to dropping poison into the ear of the idealistic youth (OK, so I was 29) who’d spent a decade reading and teaching obscure sixteenth and seventeenth century literature, couldn’t get tenure, and thought publishing sounded like an easy gig with a solid future (how was I to know? This was 1998, after all), so I sucked it up for a decade, because I didn’t think it would be.

It turned out everything was mostly sales, as a matter of fact, regardless of the publishing function that one worked in.

Today, everything is still sales, but ‘sales’ itself now means something very different.

Sales are largely indirect and transactional-conversational rather than direct-transactional. Effective ‘salespeople’ are now engaging informers, not pressurizing influencers. The endpoint is still revenue generation, of course, but the way we get to ‘I’ll take it!’ is not a road we were able to travel with ease ten years ago.

This is what sales used to sound like (Glengarry Glen Ross is a great film of a great play, but this tense clip explodes the F Bomb all over the place so could be NSFW. However, if it is NSFW where you are watching it, are you sure you’re working in the right place? ;) ):

Sales is now less ‘always be closing‘ than it is ‘always be conversational‘.

The business model, the product, and the way we deport ourselves professionally have all changed. It, and we, are social.

Sales is now not so much about ‘being the brand’ as ‘believing in the brand’. Of course, if you don’t actually care about what you’re doing, you’re still a snake oil merchant, and nothing is going to change that.

The social web has afforded us the opportunity to make a living by being the best exponent of whatever service the niche we like to be in offers. Consequently, if we align ourselves with something that we genuinely care about, and that we believe can make a difference then our working life has the potential to be a liberating rather than an enslaving experience.

We are not here to sell through force of will, the allure of our irresistible charisma, or the blunt force of an argument that will brook no contradiction. Frankly, unless you’re someone of the intellectual stature and rhetorical prowess of a Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Karl Marx, or Martin Luther King, Jr., you’re unlikely to have to ability to change your interlocutors’ minds about anything anyway.

Yet sales has always been social. People sell to people.

Sales has always been conversational. People talk to people.

Sales has always been relational. It’s just now we don’t talk about ‘customer relationship management’ in the third person as an abstraction, we tweet people we follow, reach out to people we know via a professional networking group, or message someone we’ve friended.

Often we won’t be talking about a product or service at all; but if and when we do, the nature of the conversation that may lead to an invoice being generated is qualitatively different from the ‘sales pitch’ of the past, and it’s as easy as ABC:

ABC: always be conversational

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The day when Sanofi-Aventis’s ‘GoInsulin’ YouTube channel… went

July 12, 2010

What the Sanofi-aventis 'GoInsulin' channel on YouTube used to look like

Sanofi-aventis recently took down its GoInsulin web presences, including its YouTube channel of the same name.

In the web 1.0 era, taking down a website was no big deal.

People visited. People viewed. People left. People returned to find the site had gone. People shrugged. People moved on.

Not so in the web 2.0 era.

People visit. People view. People leave comments or contribute content if they’re allowed to. Hopefully, the community’s creators respond, and a dialogue is established. People leave. People return to find the site has been taken down and the community that the creators had tried to entice them to sign up to has been broken up without their permission having been asked (or their even having been told), or their having been offered an alternative home.

People get mad.

This assumes that any people had chosen to subscribe to or participate in the platform in question, of course. The last time I checked (30th November 2009), GoInsulin had received 351,830 channel views, had 641 subscribers, and had uploaded 8 videos since its launch on 29th October 2008.

At that time, if we view channel views as a measure of success for the purposes of argument, Sanofi-aventis’ GoInsulin was the biggest pharma channel on YouTube, with over 2.5 times more views than the next largest channel at the time, Johnson & Johnson’s healthchannel (138,416 views on 30th November 2009; 221,742 views on 12th July 2010).

On discovering that the GoInsulin channel had been taken down, I began to wonder how those 641 subscribers (one of whom was me) felt.

There was no need to ask how Johnson & Johnson felt about it, of course. Having just been gifted the title of ‘biggest pharma channel on YouTube’, I imagined that they felt pretty good about the whole thing.

Not so the former GoInsulin subscribers, I suspected. Would they consider themselves to have been pumped and dumped? How would they feel about Sanofi-aventis’s next attempt to engage with them in the future? What was wrong with the channel that they had signed up to? Didn’t it speak to their life as a person with diabetes in 2008? What made it fit for purpose then, but necessitated its being taken down now?

I decided to pose the question at last week’s hcsmeu. Here are a selection of the opinions aired. You can find the full archive (#046) here.

Of all the tweets published in this discussion on a hot and sticky Friday afternoon, I especially agreed with this next one ;) :

Sabine Kostevc was one of a number of participants who thought to make an observation along the following lines:

Dennis Urbaniak was listening. Here’s how he responded:


Sally Church’s subsequent comment capped the discussion off nicely:

This is another salutory lesson for pharma that every action within the social web has a consequence just as it does anywhere else, and that relinquishing control does not mean that due care and consideration for communities should also be cast aside.

If anything, the industry must look to redouble its resolve in this area if it is to be taken seriously by the constituencies it wishes to petition if it wants to be regarded in a kindly manner by them when it reaches out again in the future.


How to create a PDF archive of hashtagged tweets

July 2, 2010

It was great to reconnect with the Francisco Grajales this week. Cisco, who you probably know as CiscoGiii is currently taking a sabbatical from Twitter to move forward a fantastic project he is working with Peter Murray on.

Make sure you’re following him to hear all about it on his return.

Cisco was asking about hashtagging tweet archives, and further to our conversation sensibly suggested that I share the following how-to with you via this blog.

Why bother to archive conference tweets?

Well, for a start many of the learnings shared and the backchannel discussions stimulated by conferences are some of the best you’ll find on the web. People turn up at conferences fully caffeinated and rarin’ for sharin’, especially on the first day, and are often generous enough to punctuate the speaker’s presentation with twitpics of slides, supporting links, and illustrative examples. You may not have the opportunity to follow the event in real time, but reviewing tweet archives is an efficient way of getting up to speed with what the vanguard of your discipline is thinking and doing.

Personally, I like to bundle up a tweet archive as a gift to the kind souls who take the time to live tweet or stream sessions at conferences allowing all those outside the room an insight into what is happening within it. Feel free to bookmark this link to a folder containing all the health 2.0 events I have created tweet archives for in 2010, and look out for future updates.

Here’s what I do. It may not be the most succinct workflow, but it is robust, and having undertaken the preliminary steps if necessary (1-3 below) takes about 3 minutes to complete:

1) Ascertain (or if you are creating the event, establish) the hashtag that will be used at the event.
2) Enter the hashtag at whatthehashtag?! N.B. you will have had to have tweeted with the tag at least once for this to work: there needs to be something to find :)
3) whatthehashtag?! will prompt you to create a page; populate the page with details about your event. In so doing, it will also create a URL for your event (eg hcsmeu‘s is http://wthashtag.com/hcsmeu)

4) Let the data build. Note the ability to tweet from this page, view a transcript (we’ll be coming back to this), and acquire an RSS feed.
5) When you’re ready to grab the event hashtags, return to your whatthehashtag?! page and click the ‘view transcript’ tab. Enter a start and end date, then hit ‘generate’.
6) Either (Mac) File>Print>PDF>Save as PDF or (PC) print to PDF.
7) Upload to your Google Docs account or Scribd, Slideshare, or however you want to propagate it. The rest of these steps assume Google Docs used as medium of redistribution.
8) Within Google Docs, choose ‘allow user to edit without signing in’ . The PDF will be locked anyway, but it’s always best to choose the maximum sharing option.
9) Within Google Docs, select ‘get the link to share’, and copy the URL on to your clipboard (‘save and close’).
10) Drop the link into bit.ly or whatever trackable link truncator service you use. Be sure to use the same truncated URL everywhere you publish in order to get accurate metrics regarding usage via your truncator account homepage.
11) The most important bit: tweet the fact that you’ve created the archive using the conference hashtag, include the truncated URL link you are using, and consider sharing with the other conversations in your field of interest on Twitter. I tend to cc. #hcsmeu, #hcsm, #socpharm, and #rnchat as appropriate, among others.

You’re done.

If you use a different method, I’d be interested to hear about it

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I belong to the health conversation

June 25, 2010

On 1st July, STweM would have been trading as a commercial concern for a full calendar year. During this time, it has been my pleasure and good fortune to have had the opportunity to work with a wonderful group of pharma, agency and publishing clients. I would like to take this opportunity to thank them all for their interest in my work, as well as for their commissions.

Today I am putting the consultancy element of STweM on hold indefinitely. The consultancy services tab on this site has been taken down, all current projects have been concluded, and the current clients and partners with whom I have been working have been apprised of my change in circumstances. My commitment to and involvement with extra-curricular interests such as Healthcare Social Media Europe (#hcmseu) remains unchanged.

Occasional visitors to STweM who miss this post and casual observers of the rest of my presences across the web may not even notice the transition, but there is going to be one.  I am very excited about it, and would like to take this opportunity to tell you why.

Over the past year, I have become increasingly interested in exploring the shifting dynamics of the health conversation. In chronicling the transition from dictated to participatory medicine I continue to find endless fascination in exploring the novel ways the 3 key stake holders in the healthcare conversation (patients, healthcare professionals and the industry) are engaging with one another.

I am a vocal patient and carer advocate, but I have no especial desire to be associated with a single representative organization at present.

I am not a healthcare professional.

I have worked with the pharma industry for over a decade and am somewhat obsessed by it, but I do not want to be a part of it at this time.

Nevertheless, on assessing what I do in my working life it would appear that I ‘belong’ to the health conversation in some profound way.

That’s why when an organization approached me that is committed to ‘improv[ing] medical care by serving those who need it, those who provide it and those who seek to improve it,’ it was a conversation I was going to have to take forward. On discovering the boundless dynamism, restless inquiry, and driving sense of purpose that the company manifests, it was a conversation that I was eager to bring to a positive conclusion.

It is for that reason that I will be assuming the position of Editorial Director at FirstWord, part of the P\S\L network of companies, on 28th June. I will be helping to develop a totally new venture which I will share more about with you in the near future.

I look forward to continuing to work and learn with you all as we drive the health conversation forward.

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Be seeing you: ITPvillage.com fails to capture attention

June 16, 2010

ITPvillage was launched on 10 June as a ‘healthcare education resource developed by Amgen for the support of healthcare professionals, patients and those seeking education and information about ITP’.

Having spend half an hour navigating around the site reviewing both the patient and healthcare professional views, I have to say I’m underwhelmed.

For all its floaty, new-age appearance ITPvillage takes no prisoners in its hunt for the contact details of ITP healthcare professionals. Whilst it does not appear to be possible to register as a patient, every healthcare professional page features a tab at the bottom of the page inviting you to submit your contact details. To what end from the point of view of the healthcare professional I couldn’t quite ascertain, but if being hustled is your thing, then perhaps you’ll enjoy it.

The Post Office promises the opportunity to ‘post questions or comments’, but if you can find out how, be sure to let me know. All I could find was a PDF. Hidden away in the Tour section of the site I did find a sorry little pop up message apologizing for the fact that all the functionality does not currently work.

Perhaps this refers to the missing question and comments function, but perhaps it is just a smoke-screen for the non-availability of functionality that may never be rolled out because it’s too risky (which it isn’t, of course).

Alternatively, how about waiting until everything does work before launching as a courtesy to your users? I note again with some cynicism that Amgen made sure the healthcare professional contact-scraping interface was up and running for the go-live date.

The Market Square turns out to be a press release channel. You can see from the attached how much thought has been given to crafting some punchy, engaging messages for the site launch. I’m really glad they gave us those posting times down to the second, too.

Move on.

There’s nothing here to interest you, folks.

The Cinema currently offers three films. Further mistakes here, as Amgen has chosen to host these on-site rather than on YouTube, which would have opened their videos up to a far wider potential audience.

Pick of the current bunch is the ‘making of’-style ITPvillage.com video that discloses more than it probably intended to in revealing that there appears at one time to have been plans to offer an ‘ITP patient stories’ short which is currently nowhere to be seen. Maybe this will appear at a later date, maybe Amgen got cold feet. Only time will tell.

The Station is offers to tell you more about upcoming events and offers ‘useful links’. There are yet more errors to have to overlook here, unfortunately. The avatar presenter’s introduction is the same whether you’re a patient or a healthcare professional, yet only the healthcare professional version of the page offers a link to a conference calendar where, I’ve little doubt, Amgen representatives will be happy to take down your contact details.

Interestingly, the links are different for the patient and the healthcare professional, although the latter are frankly embarrassing. A paltry four suggestions, one of which is to Wikipedia (thanks! we’d never have considered looking there) hardly instills confidence in the visitor with regards to the authority of the site as an ITP reference hub.

By this point, you’ll be wishing the Station actually could take you somewhere, preferably far, far away from this site. After half an hour here, I was beginning to feel like a prisoner myself, unnerved by the design’s resemblance to Portmerion, and fully expecting Number 2 to step out from behind a colonnade.

Whilst the Cafe avatar stands abashed in front of a rather less than welcoming sign that reads ‘sorry, we’re closed’ it does at least resolve – finally – the mystery as to why you can’t ask questions in the Post Office. If you can be bothered to find out, go and take a look for yourself.

Whether ITP patients and professionals will find anything to appreciate within the site remains to be seen. I found each area of the site equally bland, hosted by avatars of uniformly patronizing, irritatingly earnest, posh-sounding Brits who succeeded in doing little more than annoying me beyond measure.

With probably the most daring thing about ITPvillage being the Librarian avatar’s plunging neckline, visitors are left asking: how is this site advancing the conversation between patients, professionals, and industry representatives interested in the ITP community?

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Influence, reach, impact, connectivity, visibility: why convo is king for pharma on Twitter

June 4, 2010

As a Friday gift to you, I am turning my first commercial report, ‘The Top 20 Pharma Accounts on Twitter: Rated, Ranked and Reconsidered‘ (PDF, 110 pp.) open access as I would like to share the findings and data before they get too old to be relevant.

Here’s some context from the introduction:

“The Top 20 Pharma Accounts on Twitter: Rated, Ranked and Reconsidered’ offers an analysis of the 20 pharma corporate, brand and campaign accounts with the highest follower numbers using 20 different statistical and visual measures derived from 15 different tools. The report concludes with appendices offering rankings by influence, reach, impact, connectivity, visibility, awareness/engagement, and a rank of ranks that averages out the six preceding measures and presents a final order to compare against the by-follower ranking, noting the consequential differential between the two sequences[...]

If the rank of ranks (p. 102) for the 20 Twitter accounts considered in this report assessed against their relative rank by followers demonstrates anything, it is that conversation is king on Twitter. The rank of ranks features 9 out of the 10 accounts that appear in the rank by followers, but only
one of them is in the same place. The two accounts that leap to the top of the rankings, JNJComm and Roche_com, are those which may reasonably be said to have ‘the most human face’[...]

The strong performance from both of these accounts in the rank of ranks in consideration of the benefits a personality can bring to a corporate pharma account’s influence, reach, impact, connectivity, visibility, and awareness-to-engagement ratio reinforces the opinion that users from all communities of interest approach Twitter with the attitude ‘I want to see your face, not your logo’”.

Here’s a screen grab of the ‘rank of ranks vs. rank by follower and differential’ (p. 107), which will form the next report’s starting point:

Click on the image below to grab a PDF of the full report, and do please leave a comment as to what you think of the results:

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Biggest and best? The optimal size of professional health networks

May 25, 2010

Doctors.net.uk‘s recent announcement that it has acquired a share in Swedish healthcare practitioner network MedUniverse.se has prompted me to ask: do professional health networks have an optimal size?

The primary criteria to consider when framing such a question should logically be predicated upon a consideration of the stated aims of the community’s organizers, and the external perception of its brand.

Who constitutes Doctors.net.uk’s community?

It is not unreasonable to assume that a site which features ‘UK’ in its suffix is targeting the United Kingdom as its core constituency. This is borne out in part by such definitions as we may encounter on the site itself, with the ‘About‘ page referring to ‘the largest and most active community of medical professionals in the UK’, ‘available to UK-registered doctors in primary and secondary care’. However, Doctors.net.uk’s core values page, where it speaks of the primacy of trust, collaboration, transparency and independence to its enterprise, makes no such regional associations.

It will be interesting to hear more about how Swedish doctors are responding to their site being badged with a UK medical community’s logo, and to better understand whether they interpret the language of the press release which speaks of Doctors.net.uk’s ‘strategy to expand internationally’ as being consistent with their own aims and aspirations as Swedish healthcare professionals.

None of the above need necessarily concern us if we assume that the members of MedUniverse self-identify as healthcare practitioners first, and Swedish healthcare practitioners second. Perhaps focus groups were convened prior to this transaction taking place in order ascertain the community’s response to such developments. However, it is something of leap of faith to assume that this is the case without evidence of the same.

No community’s aims and aspirations must remain immutable through time as a precondition of their existence, and networks can have several potential boundaries of scale. For example, we can acknowledge the utility (which need not also necessarily infer the validity) of all of the following orders of magnitude:

Global – Doctors.com

Continental – Doctors.eu

National – Doctors.uk

Regional – SussexDoctors.[suffix]

Practice – [PracticeName.suffix]

Personal – Blog and/or suite of social web presences

However: if members have been recruited on the basis that the community in question serves a particular need they wish to fulfill (for example joining a national community in order to connect with other primary care practitioners within their own country), upon what basis can the community organizers assume that they will be able to retain their membership or convince them that they are serving their best interests if they subsequently choose to reorient the community’s direction by endeavouring to broaden (or, less likely, to narrow) its remit by transforming its enterprise into a continental or global one?

I posed a question to the #hcsmeu community as to whether it is felt that the ‘.net.uk’ suffix of Doctors.net.uk would impede its expansionist campaign, but it is just as important to ask: how will existing Doctors.net.uk members feel about seeing the Doctor.net.uk badge on the MedUniverse.se site?

If they are interested in creating connections with other international healthcare professional communities, they will doubtless be delighted. However, if they perceive significant differences between primary and secondary healthcare provision in the UK and Sweden and joined Doctors.net.uk primarily as a spur to their desire to continually interrogate, assess and refine their own practices as a UK health practitioner, their response may be confusion, consternation, or downright irritation.

Do professional networks in health have an optimal size? A site aiming to serve UK or Swedish healthcare professionals is never going to exceed the size of the healthcare professional community. What sort of constraints does this place upon the growth expectations of the business behind it?

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Hypno-promo’s a no-go on the social web

May 7, 2010

On the 21st April, the FDA issued a warning letter to Novartis regarding www.gistalliance.com and www.cmlalliance.com (currently down) conveying their opinion that the sites represented branded promotional material for Gleevec (imatinib mesylate).

During today’s #hcsmeu event, Dominic Tyer made an astute observation regarding one of the points in the paragraph entitled ‘misleading product claim websites’ wherein the FDA states that:

The websites are perceptually similar to the Novartis Gleevec product website, incorporating similar color schemes (including a distinct orange), design layouts and other presentation elements

If a disinterested observer considers the conclusion that the FDA reached regarding the claimed perceptual similarity between the sponsored websites and branded promotional material to be valid, it does beg the question: what kind of stunt is being pulled here?

Is a desire on pharma’s part to camouflage rather than abandon its promotional activities hereby disclosed?

If so, a fundamental misunderstanding within the industry of the nature of the dynamics of such environments is revealed.

It is a category error to perceive the social web to be a haven for the promotion of product rather than the promotion of conversation.

The social web belongs to info, to convo, but never to promo. Those pharma campaigns that endeavour to hypnotize their audiences through their utilization of supra-subtle echoes of or allusions to their existing brand semiotics truly deserve to be called out as what John Mack has immortalized in another context as sleazy spam. Conversely, those that renounce such dubious methods will be commensurately rewarded with positive brand-trust reinforcement.

It is to be hoped that the industry will regard such salutory warnings as a spur to hastening on the migration of their activities within the social web from the offering of tricksy hybrid promotions that benefit nobody towards finding ways to filter clean, clear information to clinicians and patients.

In so doing, the industry will bolster trust with key stakeholders, broaden, deepen and strengthen its engagement with them, manifest a real commitment to decoupling itself from the promotional economy and securing itself to the relational, conversational economy, and credential itself as a concern that embodies a commitment to supporting the communities it claims to want to sustain.

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