Let me start off by apologizing for the lack of blog posts over the last few weeks. It turned out to be busier than I expected (though I don’t know why I wouldn’t expect it to be), so I hope you at least found the “live tweets” from ePharma Summit and the Week (or 2) of Industry Launches interesting and informative.
Anyway, now that I’ve established that I’m behind on my blogging, I guess it’s no surprise that I’m also late to the gate for summarizing my thoughts/takeaways on the recent ePharma Summit. If you want the official conference blog posts (including some speaker videos recorded at the event), then check out the ePharma Summit blog — FEB 10th and 11th entries. You can also read opinions of the event by some others, like: PharmExec, Steve Woodruff (Day 1,2,3), and John Mack (Pharma Marketing News); though you may want to take John’s “10 things…” with a grain of salt 
.
Out for dinner with some of the speakers — From Left to Right:
Marc Monseau, Jack Barrette, Fabio Gratton, Shwen Gwee, James Chase, & Craig DeLarge
So, what did I personally think of it overall? Well… I feel it was possibly one of the best conferences at the confluence of eMarketing and Pharma that I have attended in the last couple of years; not just because of the quality of the speakers/presentations and the large number of high caliber attendees (plus good industry-to-agency ratio), but also because the organizers (IIR) and conference staff made every effort to really practice what was preached — using social media to really connect with their attendees and encouraging the use of it even during the event. They truely get it!
Just take a look at the ePharma Summit website… It offers the audience various options for interacting with them, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, their blog, and even simply receiving updates by email (which they really did send out regularly). They also established an #ePharma hashtag before the conference started and made participants aware of this, so that us bloggers and twitterers would use a common, identifiable label — a practice I have never seen at a pharma conference in an official capacity, but is pretty standard fare at most tech/Web 2.0 type conferences these days.
During the conference itself, the organizers not only had their own official blogger/twitterer (@ePharma) to cover the event live — and who actually posted updates within hours of sessions ending, btw — but they also strongly encouraged, supported, and even gave props to Steve Woodruff and myself (nicknamed the “Power Twitter Team“), who were live tweeting the event. In fact, when Steve and I tweeted that there was a severe lack of power outlets for plugging in our laptops, the organizers immediately responded by tweeting “…sorry to all for lack of power outlets. We learned from last year, and we have WiFi, learn from this year…need more power” (see tweet). And on the 2nd day of the conference, they even invited Steve and I to sit at a reserved table at the back of the room (a.k.a. the “Power Twitter Corner”) together with their official twitterer and a nice long power strip for all our charging needs. Now that’s getting it — all other conference organizers should definitely take note and learn… Bravo Lesly and team!!!
OK, so enough about how the conference was run… What about the content that was covered?
Seeing that this conference covered all aspects of eMarketing in Pharma, a variety of topics were covered, from reaching MDs online to online media mix to market research. Of course, there were also panels that covered Social Media — which was a recurring theme that was brought up throughout the conference — including Josh Bernoff’s great keynote on leveraging Groundswell, with some new and interesting data on health/pharma topics. By the way, this is another good example of where the organizers have thought outside the traditional box and invited a non-pharma KOL in social media.
Of all the sessions, however, I do think that the best discussion of the conference had to be the panel on “Driving Policy/Guidelines Around the Use of Social Media in Pharma“, which featured an esteemed panel consisting of: Robert Goldberg (moderator), Marc Monseau, Fabio Gratton, and Fard Johnmar. You can read more about it at the ePharma Summit blog and I also recorded the session, but will need to check with all parties involved before being able to publish it, so let’s hope.
So, if I had to narrow it down to three key takeaways from the meeting, here’s what they would be…
- We need different strategies for different stages of the patient journey…
Basically, a patient goes through very different stages during their journey from undiagnosed to diagnosed, diagnosed to treatment, etc, etc. At each stage, the patient will have different needs, so we should cater to those needs by strategizing our marketing/engagement efforts accordingly. One size does not always fit all. - Medical devices should work with online medical/health services (e.g. iPod and iTunes)…
Too often, we have proprietary systems that don’t talk to each other, so how can we expect a universal adoption of online records, like EHR’s, EMR’s, and PHR’s? We need to start thinking about inter-operability, just like Google Health and Mircorosft Healthvault have started talking about. Portability of one’s data is key to adoption. - Start with a corporate framework before launching any social media initiatives…
Pretty self explanatory, but there are always questions on where to start with social media initaitives and how to get buy-in for programs, etc. Before jumping onto a specific platform or campaign, one should first consider developing a corporate framework that has input from all key stakeholders (e.g. legal, regulatory, etc.) that will help guide any future social media programs.
OK, that’s it for Part 1. In the continuation of this post, I’ll share some of what I presented during my panel session on Social Media, Blogs, and User Generated
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