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Personal branding has taken kind of a bad rap over the past few years. As the overglorified “social media rockstar” label has been brought to life by people skilled in hype and little else, the idea of building a personal brand can seem inherently egotistical. Yet what if someone were to suggest that only egotistical companies need to worry about building a brand? Of course that would be silly, yet there is a double standard when it comes to individuals.

In many cases, there is good reason for this. Most companies are afraid to get employees who are not dedicated to doing their job, but rather focused on self promotion to their own ends. Yet the companies that manage to create an atmosphere where employees can build their personal brand and explore their interests are the ones who will win in the long term because they will have the employees that everyone wants to work with - and be better able to hold on to their best people and not drive them away to look for jobs elsewhere.

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Today’s Wall Street Journal featured an article on a study that is rekindling some fierce debates about the central role that social media is taking in all aspects of healthcare.  Based on data contributed by 596 patients who all self reported outcomes through a community they belonged to on PatientsLikeMe in a Nature Biotechnology journal article - it is one of the most visible in a trend towards patients using the empowerment that social media tools have offered them, and using that power to add their voices into the previously untouchable realm of clinical research.

“Trialsourcing” is where patients conduct their own self reported research (often on new indications for existing medications) and share their results over social networks such as PatientsLikeMe. It is a controversial idea. After all, no one expects that patients would apply the same scientific rigor to the clinical trial process as professional scientists and researchers - so the results they find could be meaningless at best and actually harmful at worst.  Still, the approach is winning some high profile advocates for its potential. The WSJ article also quotes Dr. Lee Hartwell (a Nobel Prize-winning scientist at Arizona State University) opining that “the approach has tremendous potential.”

So will this be the wave of the future? There are at least a four key reasons why trialsourcing may be here to stay:

1. Patients are desperate for control. The thing about most serious medical conditions is that they tend to render patients powerless over their own outcomes. It is a frustrating position to be in. If you could self organize, create your own data and offer that up to research professionals and scientists in order to help them, however … that is empowering and liberating for patients.
2. Empowerment leads to better data. There is no doubt that a patient who is more invested in a particular trial or type of treatment will be far more likely to be more compliant with required dosages and taking necessary measurements at set intervals. In this sense, the data that patients self collect and self report may rival that of an “official” clinical trial if they are coached on all the right steps to take and data to measure.
3. Public data breaks down academic barriers. In the world of academics, sometimes the structure of funding and pressure to publish can lead to inefficiencies. In many cases there is a disincentive to share research and data before it is analyzed and findings can be published. Patients have none of these barriers … all they care about is getting better treatment options sooner rather than later. As a result, trailsourcing has the potential to enable collaboration on a level that can be hard within the confines of traditional academic research.
4. Data can be globalized. One major challenge with clinical trials is to get enough diversity in the participating population to ensure that the treatments developed will be equally effective on patients from ethnic minority groups. In many cases, this diverse type of data simply doesn’t exist. If patients can share their data across geographic boundaries, all of a sudden data can be collected in a truly global way and new pools of data from diverse ethnic populations can be gathered and used by scientific researchers to validate data and conclusions they are already working on.

If there is one sign of hope for the marketing industry as a whole, it is that no one really wants boring, one-way, shout-oriented interruptive marketing to survive. Social media is a natural ally in this fight, given its focus on fostering conversations and creating content, but what about the role of marketing as entertainment? It isn’t necessarily the first word anyone might choose to describe effective marketing, but this week at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show in Las Vegas it was the featured topic in a panel I moderated at an event focused on the intersection of broadcast, marketing, social media and entertainment.

What Is Branded Entertainment?

The focus on the panel was on branded entertainment through online video - though on several occasions it was raised that this content can increasingly find its way onto other platforms as well such as broadcast TV or mobile. There were three core models of branded entertainment being used by brands today that panelists shared:

1. Product Placement - The most simplistic form, some would argue that this barely qualifies to be called branded entertainment … yet it is increasingly popular for brands to use as a way of inserting their brand or products into existing content.
2. Brand Sponsorship/Integration - This category had the most varying descriptions, incorporating everything from a brand simply adding a “sponsored by” slate to a video to inserting a pre-roll or post-roll ad.
3. Branded Content Creation - The “purest” form of branded entertainment, this area was clearly the focus of the panel. Included in this category were examples like Royal Carribean’s recent Ocean Views campaign, as well as Lexus’ popular LStudio online video channel that spawned the popular series Web Therapy with Lisa Kudrow which was recently picked up by Showtime as a pilot.

What Will The Future Of Branded Entertainment Look Like?

Ultimately, the premise behind branded entertainment is that great content will provide an entertainment value and there is a role of marketing to play in trying to create or support more of that type of content. The ongoing challenge will be one of setting the boundaries between what is reasonable underwriting or brand sponsorship of a message, and what is over the top. This is the real question at the heart of the growth of branded entertainment - and one that several filmmakers have recently tackled - including The Joneses (a film about a fictional family planted in the surburbs to create demand for new products by flaunting them to neighbors) and Morgan Spurlock’s new documentary - “The Greatest Movie Ever Sold” or as it is “officially” meant to be called “POM Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.“

Despite these cautionary notes, however, the powerful premise of branded entertainment is that brands need to get better at telling a story instead of merely hawking product benefits or service descriptions. People engage with entertainment, and they tend to share it if they like it. In a world where consumers have more ways to ignore and filter out brand messages than ever before, engagement is the new and necessary metric because it means more than empty measures of reach or frequency.

Branded entertainment today is still a strategy for marketers and organizations who are ahead of the curve. It won’t be long, however, before the followers and later adopters in the mainstream start to join the party.  After all, no one wants to miss out on a good show.

NOTE: This post is cross posted on the Influential Marketing Blog.

According to a PRWeek article, the FDA has officially delayed releasing guidelines for social media, once again. As our team has shared before, social media guidelines are simply not a priority (at least until 2013) for the FDA. Waiting for these guidelines to come is akin to sitting in a busy hospital ER after a major accident waiting to get treated for a skinned knee … you’ll be waiting a while.

Now is the time to face a reality that most Pharma brands have never really admitted to themselves … that guidelines are unlikely to come anytime soon simply because it is not urgent for the FDA to focus on. In the meantime, the FDA will continue to prioritize the more important activities they are responsible for - and any significant guidance is unlikely to come in the near future until something forces the FDA to treat this as a more urgent request.

This lack of guidance has meant that pharma brands are forced to operate in the dark when it comes to social media. The lack of guidance has led to many misunderstandings and angst over warning letters sent for digital marketing efforts, and as a result many valuable patient education efforts have been stalled in the hopes that guidelines would be coming soon.

Most thought leaders working in social media for pharma brands will share that there is already a way to use social networks and tools to offer value to patient communities, support HCP communications and otherwise make a positive impact in communications. The lesson any pharma brand should take from this latest delay is that waiting for some guidelines is no longer a viable alternative to moving ahead with the strategic use of social media.

It’s time to move on.

App fever is everywhere and healthcare certainly hasn’t been immune to its effect (um, puns intended). Early apps in the healthcare space tended to focus on dumping huge amounts of data into searchable dictionaries for everything from drug names to conditions and symptoms. Those were useful a small number of times, but for the average person they offered fairly little. Fast forward to 2011, and there are plenty of examples of a bright future for using apps in every aspect of healthcare, from taking a small role in treatment, to mobile screenings, to joining a network of people skilled in providing healthcare so you can be “on call” at any moment to save another life.

Here are just a few of the most interesting apps that are now getting popular and are worth paying attention to for anyone in healthcare marketing considering developing an app strategy of their own:

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Most trend predictions that forecast beyond a year into the future are doomed to inaccuracy simply because of the pace of change and unpredictability of innovation. The rightfully skeptic among us are therefore likely to condemn a report that promises to predict how the world might look in 2020 as a work of optimistic fiction at best, and an exercise overstretched vanity at worst. That was the lens I brought to a report that some colleagues of mine at Ogilvy CommonHealth recently shared with me called 202020 VISION, a digital-health report outlining 20 scenarios of what digitally driven healthcare might look like in 2020. The report is surprisingly brilliant.

Reading through the scenarios, it was easy to imagine a distant future where technology and healthcare finally begin to work together to create a better world of care for us all. Though we cannot share the full report here (see the bottom of this post for details on how to get the full report), this post highlights seven of the most powerful ideas from the report along with some potential implications for anyone in marketing and communications. continue reading

If you could have put all the people working in marketing at pharmaceutical companies together in a room today, you might have heard a collective sigh of disappointment. As many suspected for weeks or even months now, the FDA quietly confirmed that the long awaited guidelines for how to use social media for which they held a hearing in late 2009 won’t be coming this year and to expect them (perhaps) in Q1 of 2011. Earlier this month, however, the FDA did release a sweeping document that received much less fanfare from marketers - even though the implications of it may change the world of pharmaceutical marketing for the next half decade at least.

That document focused on the FDA’s “Strategic Priorities: 2011 - 2015″ and offers nearly 50 pages of insights into the future direction of the FDA and offers many hidden insights that everyone who is considering doing any marketing or communications for a drug, medical device, healthcare organization or biomedical research organization should pay attention to. Here are a few of the most noteworthy passages in that document along with thoughts from our Ogilvy Digital Healthcare team on their significance.

“FDA’s primary responsibility is to protect the American people from unsafe or mislabeled food, drugs, and other medical products and to make sure consumers have access to accurate, science-based information about the products they need and rely on every day.”

1. What It Means: Despite Lots Of Hope From The Industry, Social Media Guidance Isn’t A Priority For The FDA
There is only one point in the entire 48 page document of strategic priorities where social media is even mentioned, and much of the document focuses on the much bigger challenges and scope of the FDA. When you work in Pharma, you tend to underestimate the scope of the FDA’s mission. As this document spells out, issuing social media guidance is nowhere near a priority for the FDA - and despite what anyone working in this area may want to see happen, it is unlikely that this will change in the near future. continue reading

Yesterday I spent the day at the eyeforpharma eCommunications Summit where brands including Novartis, Bayer, Pfizer, J&J and many others shared thoughts and perspectives on using digital communications to reach patients and healthcare professionals. As someone who has spent a significant part of my career working in pharma marketing - but also has worked outside that industry, my topic was one that I have often wished that more pharma-oriented events would include: lessons from other industries.

Generally when I consider sharing a case study from another industry outside of pharma, it leads to a debate within our internal teams and also with clients about whether those examples could ever be relevant enough to offer value to a marketer working in the pharma industry. As I shared at the event yesterday, this usually comes down to what I call the “pharma case study excuse matrix” - a collection of four points that most marketers in pharma use as rationale for why their situation is unique.

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Every week on Monday our team of digital specialists focused on the healthcare and pharma space share insights about a new topic relating to the industry. It is a focus that we are passionate about within the Digital Influence team and one that we have seen huge growth in over the past several years as more and more pharma brands start to focus or refocus on this area. As much as we love the virtual environment for sharing thoughts and ideas though, it is still no substitute for the power of a face to face discussion.

In the second week of November, we will have one of those chances as a few of our team members (including myself) will be heading to Boston to participate in an event we are VERY excited about. Put on by the folks at eyeforpharma, the eCommunication & Online Marketing Summit will feature presenters from lots of big Pharma brands including Bayer, Novartis, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Abbott, Genzyme, AstraZeneca and many others. Just as importantly, the event features many people who are thought leaders in the area of applying digital marketing techniques to the world of pharma including my friends Marc Monseau from J&J and Shwen Gwee from Vertex Pharmaceuticals.

My topic will be one that I have been wanting to present for some time but that I have not yet had the opportunity to share at a healthcare-centric audience about “6 Surprising Lessons Pharma Can Learn From Other Industries.” It will be highly applicable, case study focused and hopefully useful for all the attendees of the event. If you work in any healthcare oriented industry - this event is going to be a huge hit and I highly encourage you to try and join us.

To help try and motivate that, I’m pleased to share that the organizing team has provided us with a special registration discount code for friends of Ogilvy and readers of this blog which is good for $500 off of the standard registration price (CODE - “IM”). In addition, they are running a limited time promotion right now where you could also win 10 FREE PASSES to the event for you and your colleagues. Just visit their promotion page for more information on that.  Hope to see you there!

Almost all the major pharmaceutical companies are using Twitter now (or about to start) and there are Facebook pages and sponsorship deals with social networking sites tailored to doctors or surgeons. Most of these efforts are commonly described as social media because they are all forms of social communication.

Sometimes the most anti-social efforts online, however, are actually the ones that use the principles of social media best. Reading a book or a magazine is typically an anti-social activity, for example. Not because it makes you less personable, but because it is an activity you do by yourself generally with little interaction with others. Activities that are not inherently social are easy to underestimate in this time of an overly socialized Internet.

When you consider the target audience of physicians and medical professionals, you could make the argument that they have even less time to indulge this socialization need. Why can’t technology and social media be used to support this type of online interaction as well? This seems to be the premise behind a site from Sanofi-Aventis called iPractice that is getting quite a bit of attention from those who talk about social media efforts in the healthcare space. continue reading