Twitter in Pharma – Interview with John Pugh (Boehringer)

At the last DigiPharm congress we spoke to John Pugh, Director Corporate and External Communications at Boehringer Ingelheim. John is well known for bringing Boehringer into the Twittersphere, and has quiet some success with that initiative. Using Twitter to communicate with journalists -his primary target in his role as External Communicator- he “can establish a dialogue with them”, according to John himself.

John started in the new/social media space about ten years ago, the time that websites were still written in Comic Sans. You could call John a real internet veteran, in that respect. During DigiPharm 2009 he shared his vision of the future of pharma, and the role new media will have.

In our interview John talks about his passion for new media and the challenges pharma is facing when deploying new media into their communication mix. John is a firm believer of new media and focusses in the opportunities rather than the threats, like we see way too often around us. We need more johns….

 

Mixed feelings about Blogworld’s first conference day

Today the Blogworld and New Media Expo 2009 took off in Las Vegas. Our first time at Blogworld but our third time at the New Media Expo and first for all of us at the combination of the two. What striked me immediately after entering the event is the size of it. More participants, more speakers, more tracks and more lectures than ever. And some very interesting and promising keynote speakers, such as Chris Brogan, Guy Kawasaki and Anthony Edwards (you know, Goose from Top Gun)

The opening keynote came from Laura Fitton (@Pistachio). Laura shared with us how she came completely hooked on Twitter and how it can change people’s lives. Absolutely convinced by its power she recently started her own consultancy on Twitter for Business, PistacioConsulting.com. In addition she wrote Twitter for Dummies. After her energetic talk I don’t think that anyone disagrees with her when it comes to the unique value of Twitter. That said, she spoke to the already converted.

It was packed, people were sitting on the floor as there were not enough chairs available. After the keynote the audience spread out to the several parallel track sessions only to come back together to the next keynote half way the morning and during the lunch break. The latter was maybe not the best chosen way of offering a keynote. When having lunch, I prefer to network and meet people, share ideas and experiences. But no, we had to silently consume our lunch, while listening to a discussion on stage which was hard to follow due to bad quality sound. Not surprizing people started chatting again.

Overall, the track sessions were disappointing. That is the sessions I attended. I had great expectations of the Medblogging track. But I did not really get any new information. Yes, individual bloggers like doctors, patients and nurses can generate their own community and yes some of these communities (especially of patients) can be of great help to the individual patient in managing his/her disease. But what’s new? Interesting question to me is: how can we truly make a difference in healthcare with Social Media? How do we get all stakeholders involved? Where is Big Pharma? Insurance companies? Governmental institutions? Hospitals? Do they blog? Or any other kind of Social Media activity? Do they care? Those parties need to get involved or at least approached and brought into the discussion in order to get a true sense of the impact of Social Media in Healthcare.

We still write. We still make notes. Electronically that is. Most participants carry their laptop around. Either to make their private notes, summarize what’s being said in their blog or share the quotes of the day through tweets. But not later than after lunch. Because all batteries ran out. And there were hardly any power plugs. How can you organize a conference for Bloggers and Social Media geeks without providing the life essence of their existence: electricity! Please give us more power tomorrow….

Was it all misery? No, I’ve titled this post ‘Mixed feelings…’. Cause the best thing of the day still had to come. Or two things to be exact (three that is…we had a great dinner with friends we met at previous editions of the New Media Expo). The last track session I attended was a panel about Social Media and crisis management. With Dallas Lawrence (Levick Strategic Communications), Maggie Fox (Social Media Group) and Shel Holtz (Holtz Communication + Technology). With the latter we had an interview last year. Social Media can truly help organizations to manage a crisis situation. transparency and authenticity are keywords here. And be prepared because a crisis always knocks on your door unannounced. Prepared meaning: have a strategy ready how to deal with a crisis and be present in the online space (and that does not mean only with a website!). Shel referred to the damage done to United Airlines by an erroneaous publication by Bloomberg that UA was close to bankrupcy. By the time UA had corrected this error, it had lost 70% of its stock value. Their response was through the traditional media channels. Had they had a blog, their response would have been much faster and less damage would have been done on UA.

Chris Brogan closed the day with a remarkable keynote. Why we are in Social Media, what do we want with it and where do we go from here. It’s nice, being at a conference like this, with all like minded friends. While we should get out there and convince others. And all this in sentences of not more than 140 characters. The tweet fountain in the back could not keep up with all the tweets that were produced. A few of his oneliners (of less than 140 characters):

- If you’re a bad person, get good or get offline – quickly

- Your community will fall on a sword for you, your audience will watch you fall on it.

- Listen to Master Yoda: do or do not, there is no try

- Social Media is the new nervous system of your organization.

And that closed the day. With inspiration. Now I’m curious what tomorrow will bring. Because overall it has to do better than today. Otherwise Blogworld and New Media Expo 2010 has to do without me.

Cruisin’ in SanFran

Stuck in San Francisco Airport due to long delays of departures it’s time to reflect on what has been an amazing 4 days in the ‘Bay Area’. Without turning this blog intro a Traveller’s Guide to the West Coast I can honestly say that this part of the US struck me because of it’s laid-back culture, European-style architecture and nice climate. Although the latter can not be confirmed by myself because during our stay the biggest tropical storm of the last 50 years hit SanFran. Yes, it was raining, yes there was storm. But nothing like we sometimes experience in the Netherlands. Finally we found something bigger and better in our country.

The Bay Area obviously is known for the cradle of technological advancement in modern human history. It was here where the first computers were ‘born’, where small garage-startup companies became the heggemoths of nowadays modern computer technology. The first wave in the 80s. Think Apple, think HP. The second wave in the 90s. Think eBay, think Google. And now the third wave with the thousands of Web 2.0 companies, making the internet really revolutionize the way we work and live. And we were here, in the breeding ground of collective binairy intelligence, making this digital era happen: Silicon Valley (now, if that doesn’t sound apocalyptic, I don’t know what does…)

So off we went to our Final Destination, the Mother of all Motherships: Cupertino, headquarters of Apple Inc. In our newly rented convertable Mitshubishi Eclipse (BMW Z4’s were all rented out…) we drove 35 miles south passing by places of which the names have earned a permanent place in the modern fairy tale about the Rise of the Machines. Palo Alto (HP, Facebook), Berkeley University, San Jose (‘Capital of Silicon Valley’)

Cupertino, for that matter, is a place you don’t want to end up living. Sure, working in Cupertino is from yet another dimension (only in case your employer’s HQ is on Infinite Loop One) but the town itself is next to nothing. Apple has found a nice and quite place to settle down, and with an inmense complex of various buildings it determines the landscape of this little town. No other computer companies I know of have a Company Store where you can buy Apple goodies, mocks, T-shirts, pens, all with the world famous Apple logo embossed. Just to keep the brand experience alive. And they succeeded in that because from far, far away Apple fanboys (and girls!) travel to this sacred place to buy an exclusive and tangible artifact of the brand. Their brand. I even heard some guys from Holland visited the Company Store.

In reality of course, driving around Silicon Valley sounds more romantic than it really is. Sure, large buildings with huge signs of well known computer-related brands remember us where we are: Symantec, Yahoo, McAfee, Intel… It’s exiting if you realize the background of this area, but apart from that, these are just buildings. No rainbows of forever promising wealth, no cool dudes in convertables shouting out that they just invented the Next Big Thing in Cloud Computing, or frenzy VC’s (Venture Capitalists) scouting for the Next Big Thing in Cloud Computing. But that was all going to change the next day.

Jack Porter is a serial entrepreneur, as they call that in the Valley. Seven times CEO, Angel investor in tens of startups, multimillionaire and a well-known person in the Valley with a network our friend Shwen looks like an amateur. Jack has a friend, Randy, who has created the world largest community of Angels (Angel = person who invests in startups using their own money). And these Angels have collectively invested more than $200 million in about 200 companies. Many Web 2.0 companies would not exist without the financial injections these people provide. We had a meeting with Jack, and with Randy, to discuss one of our projects. Not to get funding, but to get advice how this business is run.

Jack and Randy know the game well, and enthusiastically they explain how the valley works. How you should set up your legal entity of your company, what you should do with your options, how many options you should submit and much, much more. It slowly became clear that we were very, very inexperienced in this Valley-talk, and we had to put our minds in the highest gear just to keep up with all the jargon throwed at us. “Do you know how Angels and VC’s determine the value of your company?”, Jack asked retorically. “They take the number of software developers inside your company, multiply that by $500,000. Then they take the number of sales people, multiply that by $250,000 and substract that.” OK, we got the message: nerds are important. The more nerds, the higher value your company has. “Make sure you have your CTO inside your company, that’s important. Without a CTO Angels would not even take you seriously…”. Thanks Jack, for the advice. Now let’s first figure out who will be the CEO, before getting into details.

Honestly said, Jack knew what he was talking about. And I don’t say that because he finds our idea “very valuable”, and that “this is the way the industry is moving towards”. Of course that will help in our confidence to go ahead, in whatever construction we’ll come up with. Jack has been in the investing-bizniz for more than 20 years and has a tremendous attention to detail. It was inspiring and exciting at the same time to be able to discuss you plans with Silicon Valley incrowd. Now being Dutch as we are, we need to stay realistic as well. Conceptually our idea has got a green light from the experts, now we still need to implement it.

But first we’re heading to Vegas. Tomorrow the BlogWorld and New Media Expo will kick-off and we’re excited to attend for the third time. Let’s see if the landscape of New Media is changing. We’ll keep you posted.

DigiPharm 2009 – Interview with Jamie Heywood (PatientsLikeMe)

As promised hereby our first video interview we made on DigiPharm 2009. In this episode we talk to Jamie Heywood, Co-Founder and Chairman of the impressive community PatientsLikeMe. About his motivations, the community, the relationship with Big Pharma and much more.

Pharma on the Move – DigiPharm 2009

Rules, Compliance, Regulatory Affairs… There are many reasons why Big Pharma should not engage in Social Media. But apparently the Web 2.0 fever has hit hard in Pharma Marketing as well, since most, if not all congresses deal with this subject. And rightly so, since the change in behavioral patterns of patients and Health Care Professionals (HCP) are profound and can not be neglected anymore.

DigiPharm 2009 was such a congress, organized by Health Network Communications in London, from September 22 till 25. We were invited to present as well, so off we went to the capital of Great Britain. The event started on Tuesday with an interactive preconference workshop (“European Regulatory Strategies for Digital Marketing”), followed by the two day congress and finished off with a postconference workshop (“Strategies for Successful Marketing to the Digital Healthcare Community”). The workshops were attended by about 20 people, the conference approx. 85 people (excluding 15 speakers). A pretty high number I must say, given the time we’re in now (and also related to the various -rather aggressive- phone calls I got to participate in congresses). In this blogpost I will focus on the conference itself.

Digital Media, Social Media and Regulations
With more than 20 sessions it was a full program. It’s important thought to realize that one should make a clear distinction between Digital Media Marketing and Social Media Marketing. The latter, in our view, is about a dialogue, being transparent and authentic, and let the customer (be it a patient or HCP) in the driver’s seat. Digital Media could be an eDetailing without any ’social stuff’ around it. It’s more a one way communication, rather than a dialogue. Although the importance of Social Media is now fully recognized, still Digital Media plays an important role in the communication strategy of many companies. Four years ago on a similar congress we concluded that Pharma is by far not ready yet because all presentations were about Digital Media (eDetailing, nice Flash sites). This time, at least half of the presentations were dealing with Social Media aspects within the communication mix.

The congress kicked-off by a presentation of Isabel Silva, Director Global eMarketing from Merck, who took us through the landscape of digital media and the new reality pharma is facing. She was focussing on the opportunities rather than the threats and stated that a “Digital environment could be the way that Pharma business can reinvent itself….to create an open dialogue with customers”. Easier said than done, was the common denominator in the audience. And what about regulations? Don’t they stop us at every digital initiative we deploy? “Not true”, said Heather Simmonds, Director of the Prescription Medicines Code of Practice Authority (PMCPA, making ‘the Code’). “Of course there are rules to follow, like there have always been, and will be. But within those rules there is a lot possible. Clause 24 deals with the internet and in our Code of Practice Review Number 53 we even have an article about blogging for example”. “Let us know what you want and we’ll come back with a position”, she advised the audience. She went through a whole list of social/new/digital media tools and elaborated on the fly. She even discussed Wikipedia, which she had personally visited only once….

Hey! WE are being interviewed - for a change...

Multi-Channel
So if their are possibilities, we might consider using a multi-channel approach towards pharma marketing. Paul Dixey from BlueLight Partners states very clearly in one of his slides: “The Push Model doesn’t work anymore”, according to Paul. Too many changes which result in a more informed person on the other end of the deal. He identifies 5 main areas to deal with when implementing new channel approaches: Speed (pharma is not known for its speed), Knowledge (which company will have the best, up-to-date knowledge), Processes (can you handle to change your processes?), Resources (will you have sufficient resources to implement new and innovative channel approaches?) and finally Culture (is your culture open to change?). Paul suggests Multi-Channel Directors as a new function within pharma, preferably “empowered” according to Steve Jadhav from Astellas, who gave a presentation on team efforts in relation to successful campaign management.

Communities in pharma

Communities are no doubt one of the hottest things since Kotler came up with his 4 P’s, but most companies have trouble either

Yep, that's me, speednetworking

understanding, building or monetizing them (or all three). The same goes for Big Pharma, where legislation offers yet another potential deal breaker. So are there any success stories? May be there are. Hospira, a global specialty pharma and medication delivery company developed ‘Haemanet.com‘, a platform for hematologists to share knowledge on their profession and thus improving treatment in all hematological-related diseases. “For hematologists, the current communication methods are not ideal”, says Joseph Talanges Jr, Marketing Director at Hospira EMEA. “Journals reach a wide audience but yet the response to comments is slow, sometimes a few months. E-mail is quick, but it’s limited to what you know and is mostly a one to one communication. Congresses happen only ever so often and their only a few websites available”. I would say this is not only the case for hematologists, by the way. Haemanet jumps into this gap by offering a global, 24/7 expert platform. So far so good, because since June they have about 233 registered users from 55 different nationalities. Mind you, this is an expert community, so the absolute numbers are low.

A community from a different type and size is PatientsLikeMe. This patient-driven community collects and shares experiences of patients with certain life-changing diseases (ALS, fybromyalgia, HIV/AIDS, MS, Parkinson, etc). “The first real patient-centered management system”, in the words of co-founder Jamie Heywood who gave a vivid presentation at DigiPharm. “The ability to connect with others, the ability to understand the impact of treatments of the disease is an insight which was surprisingly absent

Jamie Heywood - from PatienstLikeMe

in online healthcare”, he continued in our interview we had with him. He started together with his brother and an old friend from MIT in 2004, after his other brother was diagnosed with ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis). “We had so much advantage in managing his disease because all the people we knew, we wanted to hand that over to other people”, Jamie said. And it certainly is an advantage, given the 50,000 members and 10% monthly growth of the platform. Growth which didn’t go unnoticed by pharma companies, such as UCB Pharma which recently partnered with PatientsLikeMe. So what’s in it for them? Jamie: “For them it’s a way to truly understanding the disease (epilepsy – EZ) and giving patients a tool that reflects their commitment”. Interestingly Jamie was clear in his message to the audience: “Patients who’s life is at stake want to hear from the pharma industry. They feel better knowing that Big Pharma is listening to them, working on their disease”.

Let’s tweet!
A clear message from Jamie, and pharma companies are looking for tools to open up these communication possibilities with patients. Take Twitter, for example. The ‘Social Media Darling’ of 2009. With a stunning growth of 1,382% earlier this year Twitter seems to be unstoppable as the new tool for some forms of communication. I say ’some forms’, because 140 characters

Tweeting away!

seems to be a bit short for your company’s brochure or CEO’s shareholders preso (though in many cases the latter one would be better if it would fit 140 characters). Although used in many conference (such as this one, see the Twitter feed here) more and more pharma companies starting to explore the possibilities of this platform. “Novartis, Boehringer and J&J belong to the top 3″, according to John Pugh, PR responsible for social media at Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH and together with Shwen Gwee crowned ‘Twitter kings of pharma’. So what do they tweet? “Headlines linking to approved press releases, links to digital resources and relevant media articles, dialogues, questions and answers”. And there it becomes tricky. What can you say in your answer, and what can you certainly not say?

Since it was time to get some answers from the audience, we decided to do just that during our 30 Minutes of Fame. No presentation, just debating on 4 statements. See our previous blogpost for more information. In the near future we will be diving much deeper into the outcome of our little survey.

In conclusion
Overall we went home with a positive feeling. Of course, still many things to do in order to go home with an absolute Wow-feeling (for example, don’t let the conference just fade-out but end with a big bang, a presenter which people won’t forget) but I think DigiPharm 2009 was worthwhile attending. Good venue, good program, professionally organized and great line-up of speakers (duh! ). We see a clear shift in the audience towards a more open and transparent way of communicating with their customers. Also authorities seem to understand the changing landscape, although I have the feeling that a lot of education still needs to take place. Not only at the level of the authorities, but also within the pharma companies. “We are preaching to the converted” was said many times during the congres. And in a way true, I guess. Despite some great initiatives shown to us by the various speakers, how many of us went back to the office, switched on their computers (IE6, no doubt), made their traveling report and dove into the hundreds of e-mails awaiting? Before you know it DigiPharm has become a nice memory, with hopefully some LinkedIn and/or Facebook connections. Who is going to make a difference? How are we going to organize ourselves to take pharma marketing into the 21st century?

We have interviewed Paul Dixey, Jamie Heywood and John Pugh. Stay tuned for these video interviews. Also, once the organization of DigiPharm has released the video of our presentation we will of course share this.

Let’s vote – Power to the People at DigiPharm

We thought, let’s do things different. And so we did. During our presentation at DigiPharm 2009 we used our slot to interact with the audience. After 1,5 day of talking about the (im)possibilities of Social Media for Pharma, sharing Best practices, visions of the future and panel discussions we thought that it was time to measure the opinion of the participants. Because, as James Heywood (patientslikeme) said on day one: “The pharma industry is the only health care stakeholder that really cares, because they measure”. OK, we thought, if that’s the case, let’s measure. Or, in our own words, let’s opinionate.

Before our exercise started, every participant was given a green and a red voting card (an analogue voting system symbolizing pharma’s current position in the evolutionary ladder of Social Media). We presented 4 statements. For each statement we gave a pro and contra argument after which the audience entered the discussion, giving their support to either of the two positions. Finally, the discussion on each statement was closed by a vote. Those who agreed raised the green card, those who disagreed the red.

And here are the results:

Statement 1: In 3 years Twitter will have become a valuable communication tool for pharma

Statement 2: In the near future pharma regulations will become more flexible, which will help Web 2.0 initiatives

Statement 3: Implementation of Web 2.0 tools in pharma will have a positive effect on the reputation of pharma in society

Statement 4: Using Web 2.0 tools internally will spur innovation within pharma companies

Interesting results. In our following blog-posts we will elaborate more on each of these statements. We will share some of the responses from the audience and will give our own opinion.

We would like to thank all the delegates of DigiPharm for their co-operation in this ‘ad-hoc research’. Stay tuned, there’s more to come.

First day Digipharm took off like a rocket

Being in London is always fun, but this time it’s pretty educational as well. The first day of the Digipharm congress can be classified as ’successful’ in our opinion. Pretty good speakers, good venue, live Twitter feed on stage, video recording and speed networking possibilities (it’s amazing what a red and green envelope can do to open up the conversation).

As far as speakers is concerned, we were pretty impressed by the presentation of James Heywood, co-founer and chairman of Patientslikeme, a community for people with specific diseases, a huge help for these patients and a tremendous repository of data to compare. Yet another intruiging preso came from Joseph Talanges from Hospira, who has built a community for health care professionals with an interest in haematological malignancies, Heamanet.com. We will be interviewing both speakers, so stay tuned for more info.

Tomorrow we’ll be presenting our case: Pharma and social media: the Garden of Eden or the beginning of the end? Check this blog tomorrow to know the opinion of the audience about social media in pharma. Let the voting begin!

Off we go to London – DigiPharm 2009

It has been a while since my last blogpost. Shame on myself, letting the community down. All perfectly explainable, yet unforgivable. I hope to make it up to you in the next few weeks, which seems to become very exciting for us. As written earlier, still three weeks off from our Grande Tour de US. But first London…

DigiPharm 2009 is a pharma marketing congress organized by Health Network Communication and “is one of the largest gatherings of pharmaceutical marketing and communications professionals in Europe. It will discuss the challenges and strategies used to enhance online communication, customer relationship, strengthen brand awareness and improve profitability in digital marketing”.

With two days of conference and a pre- and post conference day the stage is set for four days being Sponge-Bob-on-the-first-row-sucking-all-info-into-our-brains. But hey, we got our moment too! On Thursday we will present the audience our preso entitled: Pharma and social media: the Garden of Eden or the beginning of the end?.

• Is social media really the holy grail of marketing in pharma, or just a new term marketers like to talk about at birthday parties?
• Is our audience getting smarter with all these new
• technologies or losing their mind while multi-tasking?
• Is blogging the answer to obtaining transparency, or just an expression of complacency

We won’t do the ’standard’ preso but have been cooking on something new. Of course we will be covering the event by video interviews as well, so keep an eye on this blog for more info soon!

National Marketing Day – The Impression

Some people say that summer time is more laid-back, easy going or just less of a hassle. People go on holiday, enjoy life, gain weight and do not worry about it – yet.

Not for us. Like last year it seems that our summer time is one of the most hectic times of the year. Or I should say at least as hectic as normal. Reason for a bit of a delay in the postproduction of our impression of the National Marketing Day which we attended a few weeks ago (see my earlier blogpost here)

I can honestly say that it was a wild ride, but most certainly a worthwile ride. Not only was our presentation scored as one of the best (8 points out of 10), we got a healthy traffic to our stand which kept our crew (thanks Kurt, Jolanda, Rob and Eduard) busy from 10 o’clock in the morning till the absolute end of the conference.

People are genuinly interested in using social media for internal purposes and on a conference where the majority of the topics are about external communication our vision was a welcome addition. We got some interesting leads from a variety of companies, which means visiting many of them afterwards for a more in-depth discussion.

I have included the video impression in the post, but mind you it’s in Dutch. No time yet for subtitling. Summer is here…

René talking about podcasting on his preso

Kurt trying out Qik (didn’t work, by the way)

From left to right: René, Jolanda and Kurt.

Eduard, operating the camera

Rob -Now He’s Working For DigiRedo As Well- Kieboom in conversation

50% of the Veterinary Core Innovation Team

Our article in Pharma Marketing News

 

 

 

 

 

John Mack is (aka pharmaguy on Twitter) is a ‘Pharma Pundit & Publisher of Pharma Marketing News’, according to his Twitter Bio. He runs a successful blog named ‘Pharma Marketing Blog‘ and a podcast with the same name on BlogTalk Radio. In addition to that he’s publisher and executive editor of the monthly newsletter ‘Pharma Marketing News’, distributed to the pharma world.

Pharma Marketing News is an independent, free monthly electronic newsletter focused on issues of importance to pharmaceutical marketing executives. It is a service of the Pharma Marketing Network, which brings together pharmaceutical marketing professionals from manufacturers, communications companies, and marketing service providers for wide ranging discussions and education on a multitude of current topics.

After reading our blogpost on the EXL Digital Pharma congress John contacted me to ask whether he could publish this post in his monthy newsletter.

Of course you can John, of course…

Click here to download the article from the April issue of Pharma Marketing News.