Yesterday, my boss’s boss’s boss (hi, @ormshr) asked me to talk more about this idea I have about how certain sites/tools/companies have DNA that they simply can’t escape.

For example, the DNA of IBM means that it will always embrace structure, hierarchy, and rules, no matter what the rest of the world does. It may have taught elephants to dance when it moved from PC powerhouse to enterprise services, but it did so through structure, hierarchy and rules.  When it finds a new challenge, it will fall back to that view of the world and itself to meet that challenge. That’s what  mean by corporate DNA.

Microsoft

Let’s start with the DNA of Microsoft. You know what I hate? Microsoft commercials. All of them. It doesn’t matter what marketing team they hire, they will always be bad. Why? Because all of Microsoft’s marketing is based on its DNA, that all of our problems can be solved with the rigorous application of office tasks. Currently, there are two commercials which show a family hanging around the house, creating powerpoint slides (and no, Microsoft Word, I refuse to capitalize “powerpoint,” no matter how angrily you add red squiggly underlines). Now, I have to assume this is some sort of alternate dimension, because I’ve never been in a house where creating a slide deck was considered something fun a family did. Nor have I ever heard of a family deciding to buy a dog because of persuasive powerpoint deck. In the Microsoft world, the only reason you have a computer at all is to write memos, work on spreadsheets and craft slideshows. The web? Angry Birds? Facebook? These are distractions to the true purpose of computing: get a promotion. And helping you get that promotion is the nature of Microsoft’s DNA.

No matter what product Microsoft puts out, it will be in service of the office task. Whatever fun veneer they apply to it (the only reason the Xbox succeeded is because it was treated as an almost separate company from the start), the root DNA is all about the “TPS Report” or “Billable Hours” or “Corporate Memorandum.” What do you mean they can’t come up with an iPod competitor?! I’m shocked!

Apple

The mirror image of that Microsoft is Apple, who’s entire DNA is about how much you want to get out of the office. Every product they release is designed to make you forget about the office, that you should pick up your tools and work in a park or coffee shop, that the end of the workday is almost here and you can go play. If you have to be at work, at least the tools are designed around the idea of exploration, curiosity and play. I mean, what percentage of Apple commercials involve people dancing?

Even tools used in a professional setting (like current Siri commercials) don’t seem like “work.” It seems like a friendly, fun process to figure out what your next meeting is about, or what that last text said. From the smiley-face Mac that shows up on boot, to the magic mouse that is really a big touchpad, everything Apple produces is imbued with that feeling of discovery.

The reverse example: What was Apple’s biggest corporate failure in the modern Steve Jobs era? The Xserve server. No one wants to “play” with servers; it just didn’t fit with the DNA.

Google

Then there’s Google’s DNA. Google started as a search engine, and that’s significant. Google believes that there is no problem that can’t be solved or any situation that can’t be improved when you are given the right piece of information from the right place at the right time. It doesn’t matter if what you need is a photo or book, web page or blog post, it wants to give it to you. Remember that email you needed? Or that document? Or that calendar event? Or that song? Or that movie? Google wants nothing more than to be the obedient puppy butler that gleefully retrieves it for you and waits, tail wagging, for your next request.

Google+ is a great example of what happens when you try to break out of your DNA. Google doesn’t understand social, it understands finding and delivering useful information. Google could be good at retrieving something on some other social network, but building its own doesn’t make any sense. When it tries to be truly social, it’s like watching Shaq trying to be a jockey: its DNA keeps it from succeeding. (G+ should be seen as a way to collect, store and share all your personal online information, not at a place to display your “status”.)

Facebook

And then there’s Facebook. As the youngest company on this list, its DNA might be the easiest to see. Facebook’s DNA is a 17-year-old punk-ass, snot-nosed kid who wants to find a lot of people it can call friends without ever having to be too close, who respond to their whining and rants with cheers for more. Facebook’s DNA is our collective Id, responding with dopamine bursts at our righteous indignation and joyful squeals. Facebook wants to be your social secretary and best friend gossip, not talk about logic or complex issues. It’s is pure lizard brain, connected to 800 million other lizard brains.

Is it surprising that the idea of a meme, while fairly old, didn’t really explode on the internet until Facebook made it easy to share these ideas with our friends? David at the Dentist (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txqiwrbYGrs and only 107 million views) and that surprised kitty (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Bmhjf0rKe8 and 60 million views) wouldn’t have existed if they didn’t cause some sort of protean emotional reaction in our reptile brain. And Facebook is the delivery mechanism.

Think about what additions and partnerships have succeeded on Facebook: Zynga games are all about distraction. Newsfeed tickles that “I need to know what’s going on RIGHT THIS SECOND” fear in the Id. And the Timeline is pure nostalgia trigger. Facebook will not be publishing a treatise on Plato or helping you navigate the complex waters of making important life decisions. There is no financial planning app in the works. Facebook’s communal Id is what makes Facebook so successful.

Einstein’s last project before he died was the search for the grand unified theory, proving how all the major forces in the universe are related: gravity to the speed of light to the attraction between electrons and everything else. It remains the “holy grail” of physics, something huge, important, and possibly unknowable.

HCP marketing has a grand unified theory that marketers are trying to understand. A unified theory would tell us that a married male gastroenterologist in Alabama with a degree from a public school who works in a small private practice needs X touches before he will change their prescription behavior, but an unmarked female Obstetrician in a large hospital in Seattle will need Y touches. 

Our unified theory shows us how tactics are related to each other. If an HCP has seen a complete eDetail, for example, maybe they need five fewer touches than one who has never seen one. What about rep visits? Or conference attendances? How do they all interrelate, and how much work do they do in encouraging behavior, by themselves or in tandem with the other tactics?

It’s far easier to think in smaller terms. Here’s a hypothetical campaign: Send a million emails and see how many someone has to get before they’ll go to a web site. How many web visits do they need before they register? How many registrations turn into an eDetail viewing or sample request? How many samples (both with and without a rep visit) will lead to more prescription writing? 

We look at these questions in isolation because looking at them in the larger picture is… messy at best, requiring very complex mathematical models. To be fair, if any of us were better at math, we’d probably be engineers instead of marketers. And the kind of math we’re talking about goes beyond the pre-calculus class we took freshman year. And if I had a nickel for every marketer with an MBA who said that they barely passed their stats class, I’d be able to retire. To an island. That I owned.

That’s why companies exist that are full of math nerds who can run modeling data and tell us what our deciles are. They tell us who should be prescribing and aren’t, and who needs a little push based on what data they have available to them.

But again, this is small ball. What if we started thinking big?

What if we took all the data we had… But, we don’t have enough data. We need a lot more data, and it’s gonna take a little work to get it.

For the next year, every banner ad you put in the field needs to get a dynamic ID number. In places where an HCP has to login, correlate that ID number to the HCP ID. You already know what emails are being sent to that target in your brand, so figure out a way to get all your brands to collect the same data so that you can put it into one big pool. Take all the data the reps send back (oh yeah, you might need to teach reps how to collect info so they can tag and input it into your CRM). Take all your eDetail data. All those business cards you collect at the conference to win a free iPad. All the mailers. All the web traffic (cookies, people). Every giveaway, every teleconference or teledetail, every meal, every pen left behind. All these things are collectible and able to be connected to a given target. Then add everything else you can find out about your target: specialty, school, practice type, practice size, gender, age, geography, marital status, family status, psychographic data about their parents and how they were raised (what, you think that’s not available?), everything. Think like Amazon or Target. Collect every coupon that’s been redeemed, every prescription filled, every visit, everything. We’re playing for the majors now, so stop thinking small.

What could all that data in the hands of serious math nerds tell us? Here’s a sample of the questions they can answer: are reps effective (broken down by specialty, brand, location, practice type)? How many emails does it take before a target prescribes (and how many before they will opt out completely)? Do nurse practitioners ever click on banner ads? Is there value in seeing your brand name again and again on an ad even if it doesn’t lead to a click? Which is better: email then a rep visit, or a rep visit and then email? Which works better at a conference: a lot of little trinkets or a chance to win a big prize? 

The days when a brand didn’t know which half of their marketing was effective is long long gone. These days, we aren’t far from knowing if a PCP in New Jersey wants your brand emails every 21 days or every 18 days, and how many they need to receive before a rep shows up to make the visit worth the trip.

But it all starts with thinking big and collecting the data. What data are you collecting? How are you planning on using it? 

Maybe you need better answers to those questions.

Kudos to Andy Smith and his presentation on the Dragonfly Effect. Aside from having one of the best designed presentations (along with@PeteDTweets yesterday), he presented three examples that we not just inspiring, but relevant to almost everyone in the room. While only one was directly health care related, I was impressed by the amount of work he put in to relating these non-pharma examples to pharma. For example, his Coke case study seems anti-theatrical to pharma (they sell sugar water), and yet I, and others around me, could immediately see how to apply the lessons to our work. This was our anticipated return on the cost of attending — to be inspired, not by a magical future beyond the horizon, but by ideas we can put to work today.

Beyond that came an object lesson from Peter Frishauf and Jay Goldman in discussing the value that SMS message could play in a brand. Text messaging has been relegated to the junk drawer of our marketing tool kits despite the fact that it is functional, useful, and has a reach Apple, Google and Facebook can only dream about. Their presentation influenced any discussion regarding mobile for much of the rest of the day. After lunch, Scott Wearley opened up and gave everyone of us a realistic and reasonable blueprint for relationship marketing. This wasn’t broad strokes and vague ideas, this was a set of instructions better than those that come with Ikea furniture. Take it home, build it yourself.  I was very much impressed by what Robert Krensel and William Tunno had to say. The pictures were pretty, but the conversation on how best to utilize Those pretty pictures showed a depth of thought and consideration I wasn’t expecting at all. At both these sessions, I took a lot of notes. However, without being too much of a curmudgeon (it seems someone else is filling that slot quite well), I’d like to call a few things out. First, I appreciate the value of great big numbers to grab attention. But telling me that a billion iPhones were sold or a trillion Facebook accounts were created doesn’t help any of us. These numbers are as helpful as the fact that it’s usually warm in NYC. What’s worse is when these broad numbers aren’t just useless, but edge into the territory of obfuscation. For example, when you call out that 37% of all new tablet sales are Android tablets, this is an aggregate number that doesn’t reflect the facts on the ground that HCPs are now and continue to be passionate iPad users. The same is true for calling out sites like Pinterest and Tumblr as “hot new properties” without revealing that both site have very narrow audiences (good luck running that Viagra campaign on Pinterest without a radical reworking).

There was an interesting conversation I had with a few people this morning. I won’t call out who they are, but it occurred after the presentation that listed all those twitter blunders, notably from non-pharma brands (because pharma always does social right? If you say so). There was a running bet as to what percentage of the audience had not heard all of these twitter blunders before (and some were pretty famous, like the Kenneth Cole/Eygpt tweet and the Chrysler agency posting about Detroit drivers who couldn’t drive). Our group assumed that most people had heard of all of them. When we asked around, we found was that most people hadn’t, and that some hadn’t heard of any. If you are active in marketing, especially in eMarketing, these tales should be as familiar as the case study surrounding New Coke. That conversation turned shifted on twitter, where people mentioned sites like mashable.com and boingboing.org where news like this is a hot commodity. Plenty of people chimed in with other great sites for Web 2.0-type news until someone suggested that having this conversation on twitter meant that the people who needed to hear about them would be missing out; those people were not just ignoring the twitter back-channel, they were willfully ignoring the rest of the web world. They were only aware of things like Facebook and Twitter and mobile healthcare apps and iPad content delivery in so much as they needed to be for a given project and no more. I worry when I think about stories like these.

One of the amazing things about social media is its ability to create, manage and strengthen the connections between ourselves and so many others. I know so many people who turned their organizations on to twitter because they were hooked on twitter themselves. And yet, here we see a huge segment of the audience paying money to be told how incredibly important twitter (and it’s brethren, no need to be twitter-specific) is to their campaigns and to their brands, indeed to their own livelihoods, but never dipping their toes into the water. Aren’t these the risks we all said we wanted to talk and have others take within our organizations? Are we just talking, or do we really mean it? So I implore you, you delightful participants of ePharmaSummit 2012, jump in. Be part of the conversation. Agree and disagree. Pick a fight online among your peers and lose. See what those tools your company is paying so much money to leverage can really do. As for places to learn more about the eMarketing world outside of pharma, my twitterzens (twitter citizens? I admit I made that one up) and I came up with the following list: Mashable.com Techcrunch.com Engadget.com Lifehacker.com Allthingsdigital.com Cnet.comBoingboing.org (be aware, they will reference Burning Man on this site. Don’t be alarmed.) Notes about what was said on stage can be found at bit.ly/epharmasummit.

Big virtual high-fives to Sarah Gordon and Jennifer Pereira for getting Casey and I invited to all these sessions so we could bring the best to you. They bent over backwards to help us help you, and I hope their bosses read this far down the blog post. Thanks also to Casey Ferrell for letting me partner up with him in this blogging experiment. We hope we did you, the presenters, the organizers and our peers proud (so if you got something out of this, let @epharma know! Otherwise we won’t get invited back!). Beyond that, please please please feel free to engage me on twitter @digital_pharma or schedule lunch with me if you’re in Chicago. Good night!

This is the first day of the “big” conference, but my second. If you want the play-by-play for today or yesterday, just read my notes atbit.ly/epharmasummit. Feel free to share that link around.

At the end of yesterday’s sessions, I saw some trends emerging, most notably, segmentation/targeting and the twin specters of mobile and social. We saw a lot of tactics, which served a lot of people very well (judging from the twitterverse response), and a lot of data to help people like me make better decisions in the future.

Today was a very different day. Today was a macro level view as opposed to a more micro-tactical view. The discussions centered on broad strokes and ideas, hints as to what the future of pharma marketing holds.

Here’s what I will be taking away form today’s conference:

One, pharma has been in a transition period for a long time now. How long have we been calling this “the year of mobile” or “the year of social”? Three years? Can we stop the buzz-word bingo? Speaking at a macro level doesn’t mean glazing over deep truths, it means getting to the heart of the matter and distilling what’s true. Can we call a moratorium on pointing to mobile as a hot new channel? I’ve had an iPhone for four years (and I missed the first generation). Clearly, mobile isn’t a new channel, it’s just a channel. Same with social. Same with games. Next year, you’ll just sound like someone who still says “hotlinks” and “information superhighway.” You really don’t want to be that person. Do you want to know who’s succeeding? People with a genuine sense of humor and dedication to solving problems. Some people seem to be more interested at cataloging the reasons to lament the future, to pooh-pooh what we all know is coming. Do you want to work with them? All problems are solvable, they just need to be broken down into pieces and dealt with.  Telling us not to be too focused on tactics or getting more focused on tactics isn’t as useful as understanding when and where a tactic might be useful.

That’s the same telling us all to be more strategic. You might as well tell us to be smarter or not to be too smart. The same goes for saying I should target and segment and track and analyze. That I should focus on the customer, that I should focus on what worked, that I should create efficiencies. Got it. Agree. Highly agree. Cannot agree enough… But we all already agreed when we signed up. What else? Find the golden nugget of truth and deliver it with the help of examples and data.

This is the world of multi-channel marketing, but are we living in a world of multi-channel analytics, where we measure each channel independently but also in conjunction with all the other tactics. Who among is is really doing this right now? Are we too busy arguing that this channel is better than that channel? Or kvetching that MLR is complicated (in other breaking news, many people use Facebook, budgets are getting squeezed, HCPs like iPads, and puppies are cute)?  William Gibson once said “the future is now, it just isn’t widely distributed yet.”

That phrase came to me during the session on Quantitive Self, as I realized that the tools and ideas to do everything was already in all of our hands. It just isn’t widely distributed because people refuse to see the value. This isn’t a shot to those who disagree, as we are all strong with more opposing viewpoints. I was struck by how some voices dismissed the QS out of hand, as if it were threatening and scary. There’s no difference between what was said in the session and diabetic who measure their glucose every few hours, or the person who watches their caloric intake, or the person keeping track of their bench press. The bitter rejection smacks of fear and denial. And I know the people in my rooms are smarter than that.

Here’s what I didn’t hear much of that I wish I had: Lifetime value of a customer. Two different people outside the events brought this concept up independently to me, and only one person even hinted at the concept’s existence. We are getting too focused on the efficacy of this tactic today versus that tactic yesterday that we miss that everything we do should be in service of the goal of understanding our customer in both the short and long term. Without that understanding, we are in danger of becoming the Crazy Eddie of marketing, shouting whatever it takes to get someone to prescribe. Is that the game you really want to play? Relationship Marketing. In attempting to understand our customer, we build a relationship with that customer. Even when we fail to understand them, the relationship exists, however dysfunctional and flawed. Why do we continue to pretend that this isn’t true? It won’t do pharma any good to stick its head in the sand and pretend that relationships can be solved by mobile or social (a medium it still isn’t comfortable in). We must face the issue head on, plan and execute marketing that fosters relationships we want to be in. And while I appreciate a fresh point of view, a point of view uncluttered with even a basic understanding of the day-to-day realities didn’t do me (or many others, based on the twitter response) any good.

Especially if the resulting advice is to “change faster” and “fail harder.” I don’t disagree, but I’m not blind to the facts on the ground.  Far Better was the panel which discussed (among many other things) MRL on a level that I hadn’t considered before. MRL isn’t the enemy; they are partners we haven’t brought into the fold yet, just as we haven’t taken the time to learn what they can teach us. I will admit that my brain is pudding. I will be taking notes tomorrow, but since I’m traveling home, I’m not sure when I’ll be posting my blog. Maybe Thursday. So enjoy the notes, and keep the twitter back channel going!

Day one at ePharmaSummit is done, and I figured you’d like to know what you missed if you didn’t get on the flight to NYC. You can catch the blow-by-blow on my live notes site atbit.ly/epharmasummit. (I plan on updating again tomorrow, so keep an eye out.)

But for those looking for something closer to an executive summary, there were definitely some significant trends that kept popping up. The word of the day was Segmenting (and/or Targeting, which is just the other side of the same coin). Treat different people differently and they will respond in great numbers and with deeper engagement. Data was presented that shows that it’s easy to say that an email has a 6% response rate, but if the rate is really 11% in one group and 2.3% in another, how useful is that 6% number? It doesn’t just apply to email.

Even videos appeal to very different audiences in very different ways. For example, Die Hard is a great movie to a very specific audience segment, very different from those who think Dirty Dancing is the greatest movie ever. Rather than just throw something out there you like, know your audience, know your targets, know what they respond to and become a hero. Segmenting was a fundamental concept in at least four different discussions. My concern is that there was a lot of talk about segmenting, but not a lot about how to segment, or where the data is that helps you segment or how to manage your segments. One talk mentioned that you could just buy demographic (and maybe psychographic) data to help you segment, but how will that tell you if an audience prefers email to mailings to video to conferences? How will you learn if your audience is the kind that sees their condition as a burden, or as something you barely acknowledge?  Maybe that’s to be discussed in future sessions.

The other watch word(s) were the dual terrors of Mobile and Social Media. Either separately or in conjunction, these twin villains were going to make every pharma marketer’s life rough. Why? Because these are symbols of change. The fact that they are technological advances means little: they are the things we point to that are forcing the industry to change for the first real time in decades.  The most interesting viewpoints in the room never said, but certainly indicated, that all would be well if we would simply take the time and care to evaluate and choose. A great example was a process that helps one firm get an unscripted video shoot through MLR. It was simple: they took the time to understand what the objections would be, planned for them, found alternates, or faced them head on. Ignoring what you see ahead is tantamount to failure. Surely this same idea can be applied to social media and mobile? 

Finally, I will say that sessions that presented data seemed to be the most interesting, not just to me, but to everyone in the Twitterverse. We’ve reached the point where we don’t need to be told what the difference is between Twitter and Facebook, but we do need data to help us make decisions for ourselves. Not data we can all get from a quick Google search (though some of that was excellent, I’ll admit), but from research we’ve done ourselves. Too many people throw out that 102 million people watch health care videos. But that number isn’t useful because We don’t know how many were about diabetes and hypertension, and how many were about the proper way to exfoliate and the best way to execute a dead lift? Healthcare isn’t our industry, pharma is. And it will make things very messy very quickly if we start confusing the two. But there was data in spades. Two email research sessions were based on data collected as recently as last week. Another firm opened their kimono a little to show us their internal numbers. These things can do a lot to help people in my world understand far more than broad generalizations and semi-applicable case studies.

I look forward to tomorrow, though, as I don’t have my schedule in front of me, I have no idea what ePharma has in store. Good night, kids. See you bright and early in the morning.

Pharma likes to put itself in a very specific frame: They are makers of our “Brussels sprouts.” No one wants to take their meds, or go to the doctor, or track their progress. These are chores we all simply have to do. And while Pharma is fully engaged in finding and designing new Brussels sprouts to make us healthy, they throw a sidelong glance at the idea of adherence. You can almost hear pharma say, “It’s good for you, so just take your meds while we get back to making new ones.” They leave it to the prescribers and pharmacists to scare patients into adherence. But adherence is key to pharma’s success in the long run. Low adherence reduces the likelihood or curing or treating the disease, which lowers patient’s interest in taking more meds. If we instantly hit 100% adherence, pharma sales would be way up and we’d hear less doom and gloom at industry conferences.

So let’s look at someone who’s gotten the idea of adherence right and see what we can learn. Fitocracyis a site designed to get people to take a different kind of medicine: Exercise. Excluding those handful of crazy people who consider exercise fun, most Americans look at time at the gym or on the treadmill as a chore even more dreadful than swallowing some pills. Yet somehow, Fitocracy has levered a number of different psychological and sociological tricks to get people to commit to getting more fit, and then doing the work required to get there. How successful is Fitocracy? In a world where startups are desperate for people’s attention, Fitocracy’s site is invite-only, and it took a little effort for me to get in. In a nutshell, Fitocracy gives you points for being physical. You get points when you work out, but you also get points when you shovel snow, or take the stairs instead of the elevator (granted, you get a lot more points for deadlifting half your body weight than you do taking the stairs, but it all adds up). There are pre-assigned quests and achievements you can complete (like when you log 10 items in a week, or try a barbell squat). And as you add workout data, you can level-up, like in a video game. And like a video game, each level gets a little harder to achieve, but by the time you’re working towards level 10, you’ve got weeks of workouts under your belt and you have the confidence you can complete the level without it being too easy. Aside from the game tricks, Fitocracy leverages the power of each person’s personal network. Just as you will gain weight when you hang out with over-eaters, and get funnier when you hang out with clever people, hanging out with people who work out encourages you to work out. Hanging out with people trying to lose weight helps you look at your choices in a new light. On the site, your social network gives you props for good workouts or when you’ve had a couple of good workouts in a row. Or when you lose a few pounds. Or when you set a record on the treadmill or barbell. You get positive reinforcement, right there on your screen every time you work out, along with points for giving your friends props, encouraging you to give as well as you get. No friends? Join one of the existing groups, like the Chicago group or the weight loss group to achieve your goals. You are collaborating together, and that induces even more adherence. This is social proofing: you don’t want to let your friends down, and they don’t want to let you down.

 How can pharma steal some tricks? Well, if pharma wants to start using the ideas of persuasion, gamification and social proofing to increase adherence levels, it needs to start by getting out of its own way. Especially in terms of privacy. Yes, pharma succeeds because of federally mandated privacy laws, but as you can see from the thousands of patient forums, people are willing and interested in talking about their disease state so long as they get the choice to do it on their own. Pharma can play a part, and even encourage people to talk amongst each other without coming anywhere near violating privacy rules. They can build a site like Fitocracy devoted to diabetes or gastric distress or gout or depression, where patients get points for doing things that make them healthier (like taking their meds), or talking to other people with the same disease, or helping other people with their problems. Beyond the obvious health benefits to the patient and adherence benefits to Pharma, this community could serve as an active focus group, one that can help you understand patients and even leverage should you need to communicate with patients or the public at large. Pharma needs to become partners with their patients to solve a lot of each other’s nagging problems, and it seems Fitocracy has developed a pretty interesting template on which to model that solution. If you’re looking for Fitocracy invites to check it out, ask me on Twitter: @digital_pharma!

Let’s say someone commissioned a very special book from you. They already knew the subject, format and title, but you had to supply the content. And, for the sake of this silly hypothetical situation, you’re going to be paid enough money to retire like a prince. So clearly, we need your best thinking here.

The book is called “The One Thing Every Marketer Must Do Well.” Yes, the one thing. Not the one system, not the one methodology or tactic. Just one thing. And the worst part is that the book must fit onto the back of a matchbook cover.

So, whatever you think the most important thing is, you’d better get to the point.
What have you got? What’s the one thing that’s gonna let you buy a plot of beachside property and learn how to paint? Will you fall back on the Four P’s? Do you think that’ll get you a 7:30 tee time at Pebble Beach every morning? What about “think strategically?” Is that ball of meaningless text going to pay for that cottage in the Hamptons?

No. But here’s what my version of the book would say: Understand what the customer wants and give it to them. (And, for the record, I will be retiring to a hotel suite in a new city every year. We can meet for drinks in Barcelona.)

Can you beat that “one thing?” The best part of it is that is leads to a zillion tough questions, all of which are vital to the process.

So how do you understand the customer? The problem with marketing in any industry (pharma is no exception here) is that the marketers all get together and talk and think and write blog posts (guilty!) and articles and read books and end up building a marketing bubble, one where little new thought gets in or out. 

How can pharma understand its customer (in my case, the HCP), when it just talks to other marketers? Getting outside the marketing bubble is hard work, and it’s far easier to let the focus groups tell us what customers want. 

What do HCPs really want? My feeling (and I’m willing to hear opposing views here) is that what HCPs really want is a 25-hour day. Or the need for less sleep. Or more efficient records management. 

They want more time.

HCPs know that paperwork is part of the job, but they feel like it takes too much time away from their patients. 

HCPs know that medicine changes every day and that part of their job is learning new ideas to keep up. I don’t see the surveys that show that they hate to learn new things.

But I see the surveys that show that many see reps as time-sucks, black holes from which there is no escape from marketing hackery. They see tsunamis of email pitches and requests for attention, and they think to themselves, “somewhere in that mountain of spam are two good things I need to know, but how can I know what they are when they all look the same?”

HCP’s have the desire to learn. But more than anything, they hate having their time wasted. This is your customer.

So how do you give them what they want? Start by getting out of your marketing bubble, stop thinking about what you like and think about what your customer needs. What they need is for you to stop showing off all your well-considered strategic thinking, your expensive creative and your cool new technology and cut to the chase and tell them what they need to know.

Right now, I bet each and every one of us could cut the size of our marketing materials in half without losing the inherent meaning within. It may not look as cool or be as flashy, but it will save the HCP time. And if that’s what they want…

Here’s another thought: If we spent as much time on our login form (or better yet, started thinking about ways to make an HCP login once and see more content) as we do on our graphics, would we have more engaged HCPs? 

Build a reputation for getting to the message faster and I bet you’ll be surprised to see more HCPs better engaged than they are today.

So think about what you can do in every marketing piece to save the HCP time. That’s what they want, and they’ll reward you for giving it to them.

You’ve read the FDA’s new partial guidelines for pharma in social media titled “Responding to Unsolicited Requests for Off-Label Information About Prescription Drugs and Medical Devices,” right? (If you haven’t, go now. We’re all waiting. Try Dose of Digital or Fierce Pharma.) 

Okay, so in a nutshell, if I’m reading this right, it says that pharma companies are allowed to respond to people who post in private and public internet spaces about off-label uses of their drug. But have to respond privately. Specifically, these are unsolicited requests, so you can’t coordinate with your marketing company to seed the idea that Brand XYZ cured baldness. There are some other considerations, but that’s the gist. (Those of you waiting for complete guidelines from the FDA should get comfortable, because if this is what we got in a year or two of discussion, you’re in for a long wait.)

So, here’s what is interesting:

1) The words “liability,” “expectation,” or “anticipate” are nowhere in this document. The FDA is not yet ready to place the burden of having to listen to every online channel on pharma. Yet. So pharma can hang back and choose not to get involved in social if they don’t want to because the FDA is not forcing them to.

2) The rules for what pharma is allowed to say seem to differ depending on whether or not the request came in public or private, despite the fact that the answer must be private. (Private requests will answer scientific questions with scientific information, public requests will pretty must stick to the label and ask the requestor talk to a healthcare professional.) Thus, the same questions asked in two different medium might get two different responses.

3) The FDA is saying while pharma can respond to all unsolicited requests about their own brands, they have to respond privately. But we all know in social media nothing stays private for very long. 

Let’s walk through a scenario to see how these new rules are applied.

So I write Brand XYZ and ask them a question. The brand is now allowed to respond privately, but they, as good corporate pharma citizens, must be “truthful, non-misleading, accurate and balanced,” and include standard response information. Then, I go on Twitter and ask the same question and get a different response via DM or email. This isn’t much on the surface, except that the FDA has done everything to keep pharma from ever saying anything anywhere that hasn’t been reviewed seven ways to Sunday. The review process is the FDA’s way of getting everyone to stick to the script (because it’s far cheaper to stick to the script than to try something new, and gamble on whether it survives medical, regulatory and legal reviews). To allow two different responses from pharma on the same question is new. 

But since the FDA is quite clear on keeping those responses private, maybe it thinks it can control the message in the world’s most porous communication environment. Which would be silly.

So either A) the FDA is asking pharma to do nothing new (i.e. “stick to the script, kids”) or the FDA is anticipating (or worse, not realizing) that every private response will quickly be copied and pasted into public forums all over the internet, thus negating the FDA’s own intent of keeping off-label information private.

On one hand, the new guidelines seem to focus on solving a very narrow problem in social media. On the other, the FDA may be trying to learn how quickly these “private” messages will become public, indicating that the FDA is serious about understanding the social media environment–not just in theory, but in practice.

If you haven’t read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, you probably already know the thesis: In order for an idea to be adopted by a large group of people, you need an influencer, someone who wields sway over large groups of people. That one person who may not dominate the conversation, but the one people listen to when they speak.

It’s a great theory, and you can see why marketers adopted it: reach and influence a large number of people by leveraging a relatively small number of key people. The hard part is to figure out who those key people are.

This is a theory born in modern communication models. The greatest example may be that of Walter Cronkite and how his feelings on the Vietnam War swayed millions of opinions against it. Or MLK influencing millions of Americans of every color to stand up and demand equality. It’s also the basis of every celebrity endorsement. 
And it might not really be true.

What if we were looking at the idea of influencers backwards? In a system where we feel like the one can hold sway over many, who’s in charge? The one or the many? 

Influence is two separate processes held together: one person wielding an opinion and many people interested in listening. If the group isn’t interested in listening, what good is the influencer? If I’m not in the mood to buy a car, how important is Eminem’s feelings about a Chrysler?

Perhaps what we see when we see the key influencer effect is the natural aggregation of like-minded and interested people congregating and getting themselves ready to listen. At which point, someone (or anyone) with some basic credibility can take the mic and make their case. Is that person truly an influencer or are they leveraging a very ripe environment? Was MLK influencing people who previously had no opinion on civil rights? Or was he tapping into the existing desire for equality?

Once a congregation occurs, social pressures work to encourage people to act in the same direction (for example, you are more likely to laugh and laugh louder when those around you are laughing), thus reinforcing the idea that the influencer is influencing.

In Albert-László Barabási’s study about connection (he was the first to suggest that we’re all just six degrees separated from Kevin Bacon each other), he finds that there are no key influencers, no selection of people influence more people than others. What he saw were groups, connected to each other by a series of strong and weak bonds. You talk about something and someone on the edges of your social network hears it. They talk about it and someone on the farthest edges of their network pass it along. 

In my own work, I looked at people I considered very influential people: social media gurus. These are people who have tens and thousands of subscribers and followers, people who have ideas about social media that get disseminated very quickly (e.g., Chris Brogan and Jeremiah Owyang).

When they post an article, I read it. Their ideas are now part of my thought process. Thus, they are seen as influencers. But who’s in charge, the person trying to influence or the people who have come to listen? 

This is problematic because pharma relies heavily on KOLs to be its brand-supported influencers. And if influencers really don’t wield an inordinate amount of influence, where should pharma be focusing?

Again, let’s return to the model: it’s the congregation of interested people that leads to influence. It’s more important to find (or build) those groups than to find someone to influence them. Once you find the group, standing in front of them (depending on the medium) with some basic credibility will make you look like an influencer.

For example, should you try and find an all-star pharmacist to talk about your brand? Is there really a pharmacist that all other pharmacists listen to? If there is, could you point that person out to me? Or is it more true that each pharmacist is probably professionally friendly with a handful of other pharmacists? If we could reach a few of them, the ones interested in our brand, they could influence the handful of people in their own networks. Isn’t that how you commonly learn about new ideas?

Perhaps pharma should spend more time and resources cultivating these congregations of people interested in learning about new treatments and brands than trying to find people with special influencing powers.