Over the last 2 weeks or so — including the time I was away at ePharma Summit — there were quite a few interesting launches and developments that I haven’t gotten around to blogging about yet, so in the spirit of catching up, I thought I’d summarize them here…

AZ and Sanofi Aventis launch YouTube channels

 

As mentioned in a previous post, YouTube seems to be the “channel of choice” (pardon the pun) when it comes to pharma adoption of new media. So I guess it should come as no surprise that two more big pharma’s launched YouTube Channels last week…

Firstly, AstraZeneca launched the My Asthma Story YouTube Channel, which complements it’s Symibcort-focused My Asthma Story Website and encourages people who have been “diagnosed with asthma, and prescribed SYMBICORT” to submit a video clip of their asthma story (see submission guidelines) — “Everyone with asthma has a story to tell. We’d like to hear yours“.

Also, Sanofi Aventis launched the Go Insulin YouTube Channel, to complement their GoInsulin.com Website, which features “insulin success stories” (video clips). Unlike AZ however, Sanofi doesn’t mention/promote any products on the page (just the company logo) and doesn’t asking for patient submissions at this time. Compared to the AZ site, Sanofi has also done a really nice job in designing the YouTube and GoInsulin.com websites – great visual appeal, IMHO.

The interesting thing about these two launches is that they both took a similar approach of using a traditional website to complement a YouTube channel and drive their audiences bi-directionally between the two; almost like the YouTube channel was just an extension of their video-filled website, but obviously with much greater mass appeal and reach. But what’s even more interesting to me is that (to my knowledge) MyAstmaStory is the first pharma YouTube channel to carry a product brand (Symbicort), which in my mind, indicates that pharma is getting more comfortable with this medium as a promotional channel, including their legal and regulatory teams.

With online video being the fastest growing medium for consumer consumption for several years in a row, and Google’s smart moves to enable YouTube channel administrators to control some of the “social features” (e.g. comments, embedding, etc.) , I’m not at all surprised to see more and more pharma companies jump on the YouTube bandwagon… In fact, I only expect to see more.

For more details on the two launches, read the EyeOnFDA Blog by Mark Senak, who stays abreast of health and pharma YouTube activities and even aggregates these health/pharma related YouTube videos on his own EyeOnFDA YouTube Channel.

Feds Also Adopting Social Media

Not to be outdone by all the pharma activity on YouTube, it looks like federal agencies — like HHS, CDC, FDA — are also starting to get on the new/social media train. Firstly, according to Nextgov.com…

The federal government is on the verge of reaching an agreement with YouTube that would allow agencies to make official use of the popular video-sharing service. A coalition of federal agencies led by the General Service Administration’s Office of Citizen Services has been negotiating… on new terms that would allow agencies to establish their own channels on the site.

For some interesting commentary on this, read this EyeOnFDA blog post — here’s a quote:

Adding YouTube to the communications menu of the federal government has a number of ramifications. First, one hopes that they do it right. CDC and FDA are examples of two agencies who are there, but their channels are irregular and the editorial framework is unclear. FDA, in particular, has a bunch of channels and it is difficult to know what will be posted where.

And if you think that’s as progressive as the Feds get, then think again… As it turns out, they’ve been involved with Web 2.0 and Social Media for a while now. For example, the HHS/CDC had a booth at the Podcast and New Media Expo in 2007, the CDC had an open discussion focusing on Social Networks, Blogs and other Web 2.0 Apps in 2008, and Miguel Goemz and Fred Smith from HHS even spoke at the 2008 New Media Expo about their use of Web 2.0 for AIDS.gov (see interview at bottom of post here).

More recently however, it seems like the Feds have become even more active in the social media space, with the launch of a Twitter account for FDA recalls (@FDArecalls) and even an active Twitter representative in the form of Andrew P. Wilson (@AndrewPWilson), who is a “Member of HHS social media team” (according to his profile). Who knew the HHS had a social media team??? Anyway, despite all that, nothing could have prepared me for this… the Social Media Tools for Consumers and Partners – a webpage that describes all their scoial media activities, including blogs, email subscriptions, Health e-cards, mobile info, and online video. Wow!

For a great take on the whole Feds and social media thing, read Jonathan Richman‘s Dose of Digital blog post (and follow the links to previous stuff he’s written). He’s got great insight and commentary on the entire situation.

Medpedia Launches

Earlier this week, Medpedia — a new medical wiki — was launched with the support of its founding partners: Havard Medical School, Stanford Medical School, University of California Berkely School of Public Health, and University of Michigan Medical School. According to the website…

The Medpedia Project is a long-term, worldwide project to evolve a new model for sharing and advancing knowledge about health, medicine and the body among medical professionals and the general public. This model is founded on providing a free online technology platform that is collaborative, interdisciplinary and transparent. Read more about the model.

Users of the platform include physicians, consumers, medical and scientific journals, medical schools, research institutes, medical associations, hospitals, for-profit and non-profit organizations, expert patients, policy makers, students, non-professionals taking care of loved ones, individual medical professionals, scientists, etc.

If Wikipedia is any inidcation of how powerful and successful a well designed and maintained wiki can be, then I have to agree with Mark Senak’s post about the importance of Medpedia in the future, where it may become tops in organic Google search for medical and health related terms, just as we seem to see now with many Wikipedia definitions

The question is: Will the right people be engaged and willing enough to spend time “maintaining the Medpedia garden” in order for it to become the dominant medical/health reference of the future? Perhaps… I think it definitely stands a chance just looking at the number of Health Professional articles on Google’s Knol and videos on YouTube. Read EyeOnFDA’s report on this which also has a great audio interview with the founder and head of Medpedia, James Currier.

Pharma’s Tweeting…

Twitter has been growing like Jack’s beanstalk lately. In fact, it grew by 752% in 2008. So it’s probably no surprise that a lot of companies are also jumping on board, including pharma and biotech. Up till recently, the only two pharma’s I knew of that use Twitter as official communications channel are @novartis and @Boehringer. I also recently discovered that AstraZeneca (US) has a Twitter account (@AstraZenecaUS), though their udpates seem to be pretty sparse at the time of writing. In addition to all that, J&J also recently launched an official account, @JNJcomm, just last week. Previously, Marc Monseau (Editor of JNJBTW.com) had a personal twitter account, so it was not an official channel.

While there’s not as much control on Twitter account settings as YouTube has for it’s channels, I can only imagine that more pharma companies are going to be jumping on board the Twitter-train sooner rather than later. How they use it to engage, on the other hand, is going to vary greatly from company to company. At the very least, I see companies setting up accounts as “listening posts”, but others may choose to engage, like @boehringer does in an informal manner. Whatever the case, Twitter is fast becoming the new dominant space for listening and/or engaging with the community.

If you’d like to follow the live tweets/blogs that will be going on during the 2009 ePharma Summit (FEB 9-11, Philadelphia, PA), then just watch the space below… I’m trying out a new application called Cover It Live, which aggregates a “live” stream of tweets, blogs, comments, etc. in one screen, here on my blog.

The panel that I’m speaking on is called “Social Media, Blogs and User Generated Content: What’s Working Today, What Will Work Tomorrow?” at 9am on FEB 11th. You can read details about the panel on my previous blog post or see the ePharma website full program details. By the way, they did a great job with the website — lots of useful info (including a blog) and downloads.

Now, watch this space as I Cover It Live!

As a follow up to my recent blog post on “CNTO11 – Heading to the Dead Phlog Pool?“, you might want to listen to an interview on BlogTalkRadio that John Mack (Pharma Makreting Blog) did with Michael Parks, the creator of CNTO411 and former VP of Corporate Communications at Centocor.

Some of the great points that Michael brings up in conversation include:

• The need for Marketing and PR to move away from working in silos — instead, they should be sitting down together and working together to complement their campaigns.
• Why it’s important to engage with blogs and other social media, instead of missing out on a multitude of conversations that are going on about your therapeutic area.
• The need to work closely together with your regulatory colleagues and identify key questions about engaging in social media.
• The importance of a long term strategy before rushing into a social media initiative — making sure you have a strategy for when people leave the company (as Parks did), backup writers, appropriate breadth of writers to keep blog fresh and with new content, etc.

Parks also goes on to elaborate a bit on the launch of his new PR company, Pitch360, which focuses on giving top level PR communications support to companies that are not quite sure how to get there or what type of investments to make in that area; in other words, startups and smaller companies with less formal communications department.

Overall, the 30 min interview is a great listen and full of insights — I highly recommend it. And I’ll leave you with probably my favorite quote by Parks from the interview:

“A lot of people look at the launch of the blog as the hard part, but it’s the maintenance of the blog — Keeping the blog going, keeping people engaged, and finding content that will keep people coming back for more — obviously that has a completely new set of challenges.

If you missed the JAN 29th webinar “Achieving Openness: Communicating With People Using Social Networks For Health & Wellness” (hosted by Fard Johnmar) that I blogged about recently, you can now access the audio recording (MP3) and slides (PDF) from the event here: http://www.envisionsolutionsnow.com/healthsocnetworks.html.

In addition to the audio/slides, you can also download a copy of a 60+ page report (PDF file), which they refer to in the webinar that covers:

• Information about four major communications strategies health organizations are currently using to engage with social networkers.
• New data that will help health industry executives predict the impact of two-way dialogue with social network users.

NOTE: Be sure to also check out the full list of research and strategy publications (including social media in health/pharma) that Envision offers.

There’s a lot of great advice and suggestions that one can learn from in this webinar, particularly from the Q&A session in the second half of the program. And much of what is discussed can not only be applied to social networks and online communities, but it can also be applied to any health/pharma social media initiative that an organization is thinking about implementing.

Here are some quotes from the webinar:

Fabio Gratton, Ignite Health
To us, being ready means having a plan. So, for companies, we like to say that having a plan starts with having an overarching policy about the rules of conduct and engagement with the social space. In our experience, this really starts from the top and it doesn’t just happen at the level of the brand, or department, or specific campaign initiative; that it should really be a core part of a governing code of conduct for an organization… If your organization is ready, I like to say that it’s like being a parent. We have to understand that having a child doesn’t end when they go to kindergarten, so it’s interesting for us — working with pharmaceutical and biotech companies — many of their discussions center around off-label discussion, adverse event reporting, negative feedback, and so on and so forth, as opposed to what I believe the bigger questions is, which is: What are the requirements — the long term resource requirements for launching a large scale initiative? You don’t build a house for your customers, invite them in to live in it, and then shut of the electricity. And similarly, social media for any organization is really an extension of customer service and we believe that leading folks in the dark can really send a bad message.

Erin Edgerton, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Some of the core pieces, in terms of wanting to have a conversation (we heard a lot about the tonality), you have to really be in a place where your group and your organization feels comfortable with engaging in a conversation. You can’t participate in a social network and only uses the aspects that you think are going to work for the image you want to portray, you really have to be invested in the reasons for why people use that space and use all of those characteristics to the fullest… Start small, build it over time, and it doesn’t have to be perfect. You can learn as you go and definitely think about maintenance and how you’re going to keep the content fresh once you’ve launched it.

Jim Nail, TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony
The whole purpose of social media is the “social” aspect of it; that conversational aspect of it. And that’s really hard for a lot of organizations in all industries to get used to… This is just a very, very different world. And so, part of the preparation for the organization is to set the expectation and educate them that this is a different world. The idea that “the consumer is in control” is sort of a cliche, but it is true. So, your executives and those who will be looking at these initiatives need to be comfortable with the fact that you can’t exactly predict what’s going to happen, but the fact of the matter is… That’s OK. And even if something “bad” happens, if you handle it well, you can actually come out of it much better.