At the risk of offending the world of analytics, I would posit that most of the world does not need to worry about "Big Data"... and thus has no cause to worry about "Big Insights" either. Most companies have no idea what data they've got, let alone if it's Big, or not. The other problem I've seen is companies who have data, and have decided to declare it Big... without knowing what other data they need or already have access to.
This does not mean that a mom & pop can't have Big Insights from Small Data. This also does not mean that a multi-national can only get Small Insights from Big Data.
What it does mean is that trying to claim you have Big or Small anything is kind of pointless.
Okay, fine... you have to put a stake in the sand at some point. That stake, though, is for your current decision. "Analysis Paralysis" does not mean "Analysis Stagnation".
Let's see... that six cliches in three paragraphs... that's enough.
Let's take a practical application.
I'm a mid-sized company, with a sales force, a moderately aggressive direct marketing campaign, purchases of radio and television time in several top markets, banner ad buys, as well as a social media advertising tactical approach.
My sales team has decided that my representatives will be making the classic 8 calls a day. I will send out 3 direct mailers every quarter. I'm running cable ad buys, talk radio hour mid-day ads, as well as intermittent satellite radio ads. I buy Facebook ads targeted at my demographic and run promoted Twitter ads.
If you take what I've seen most companies use as a typical approach, that's anywhere from 4-6 different campaigns with different KPIs, with different budget line items, with different objectives, and with different data stores.
My sales targets are now being subjected to multiple touches, and those 4-6 categories each count this as their max number of touches.
Meanwhile, my customer has grown tired of being touched so many $*&^&%@# times.
An insight here, of some non-identified size, is that it would be nice if I knew how many times my whole company was touching a customer. I can't begin to do this unless I have some kind of coordinated data infrastructure.
All that money I spend on 8 calls a day? Well, maybe it should be 6 times a day, with pull-through of mailers, ads, and social tactics instead...
All that money I spend on 3 mailers a quarter? Maybe it should be 1 because I've got sales representatives in the office and my clients are all touchable via media buys, as well social media outreach.
If I don't coordinate my data sources, and don't have a unified data infrastructure, I could be wasting budget line items that could be better used elsewhere... or I could be missing opportunities because I need to be spending more money everywhere.
Now imagine what you can do if you integrate social data with sales data... or your key opinion leaders with social activity related to nearby teaching centers... or how you could efficiently promote that new contract win through your partner's social channels and your press release contacts...
Your data needs to be as coordinated as it can be. You need to make a decision. You need to act. Then you need to look at your data sources again, so that your next decision is as coordinated as it can be.
14 April NOTE: I'm looking for a new gig, so feel free to reach out to me if this kind of thing is a problem you've got in your organisation and you'd like me to come talk to you about how we can work together to bring your coordination and integration into your next set of decisions.
Thursday, April 14, 2016
Thursday, January 21, 2016
Thinking about why I work in Pharma...
People I encountered used to get this look on their faces when I told them that I worked for Pharma. Almost as though I was some previously unseen - but often theorised - species of giant, hissing, talking cockroach. You know that look... it's also the one you get on your own face when you find fresh dog shit on the bottom of your shoe. I suppose it was because of the negative rap given to Pharma in general... much like this graph:
I once described that graph out loud in a meeting when I was employed by a Big Pharma company, and my boss warned me to "never... do... that... again...".
This graph and that warning came back to me again when I was listening to a PodCast from Freakonomics, called "Do Boycotts Work?". As part of the PodCast, a theory was posited that boycotts cast negative shadows over a company, often creating negative reputational impacts. This was challenged by one of the interviewees who is a researcher involved in plant science and plant geneticsg. His point was that while he agreed politically with almost every point of other liberals, their anti-GMO and anti-Monsanto opinions didn't resonate with him. They didn't resonate to such a degree that he took a job with Monstanto because they were doing cutting edge work in his field. He does admit that he does not lead with, "Hi, I work for Monsanto..." because of the public negativity toward his current employer, but he is happy in his work.
What I found most interesting in his interview was when he stated, "... I don't think the company is doing anything evil. It's a large company that makes the same decisions any other large company would... The company's values are the values of a successful, large company, and they are not, uh, what the public perception might have you believe that they're out to rip off and destroy agriculture and farmers."
I am pretty sure that what follows, my statement of what Big Pharma can do, may be viewed as some to be the repetitions of some kind of cult member, or some kind of apologist... but honestly, chances are if you've read my work, or met me before, you're not putting me in that bucket... unless you're my brother-in-law... a Vegan...
That last statement of the interviewee, really resonated with me. When I work in, or with, Big Pharma employees, I find that almost all of them are good people... almost all of us are good people. We go to work for the specific purpose of earning a living by helping others. We're about four steps away from the actual patient, but we try to keep the fact that we're helping people in the forefront of our minds. I'm not speaking about CEOs, or others in the C-Suite. Even in that group, I've found more than half are dedicated to helping patients. Heck, some CEOs are even former drug researchers... former science nerds. This eye toward helping people is what still gets me up and running.
I scan social media data so that I can help my Big Pharma clients understand:
A key objective of all of this work is to help my Big Pharma clients act like a contributor, and not like a loud huckster. And being a contributor includes being a trusted, reliable, less-biased, and "good actor" in their social media efforts.
Ultimately, Big Pharma will do whatever Big Pharma needs to do to generate the profits demanded by the financial markets. I'm not imagining a future when a company spends millions or billions to just give things away. Remember, "The company's values are the values of a successful, large company...". The hope that I have, yes I still am somewhat idealistic, is that as Big Pharma gets closer to patients, a little bit of understanding can be passed back and forth.
And maybe... just maybe... one day, Big Pharma will move above The Mafia.
This graph and that warning came back to me again when I was listening to a PodCast from Freakonomics, called "Do Boycotts Work?". As part of the PodCast, a theory was posited that boycotts cast negative shadows over a company, often creating negative reputational impacts. This was challenged by one of the interviewees who is a researcher involved in plant science and plant geneticsg. His point was that while he agreed politically with almost every point of other liberals, their anti-GMO and anti-Monsanto opinions didn't resonate with him. They didn't resonate to such a degree that he took a job with Monstanto because they were doing cutting edge work in his field. He does admit that he does not lead with, "Hi, I work for Monsanto..." because of the public negativity toward his current employer, but he is happy in his work.
What I found most interesting in his interview was when he stated, "... I don't think the company is doing anything evil. It's a large company that makes the same decisions any other large company would... The company's values are the values of a successful, large company, and they are not, uh, what the public perception might have you believe that they're out to rip off and destroy agriculture and farmers."
I am pretty sure that what follows, my statement of what Big Pharma can do, may be viewed as some to be the repetitions of some kind of cult member, or some kind of apologist... but honestly, chances are if you've read my work, or met me before, you're not putting me in that bucket... unless you're my brother-in-law... a Vegan...
That last statement of the interviewee, really resonated with me. When I work in, or with, Big Pharma employees, I find that almost all of them are good people... almost all of us are good people. We go to work for the specific purpose of earning a living by helping others. We're about four steps away from the actual patient, but we try to keep the fact that we're helping people in the forefront of our minds. I'm not speaking about CEOs, or others in the C-Suite. Even in that group, I've found more than half are dedicated to helping patients. Heck, some CEOs are even former drug researchers... former science nerds. This eye toward helping people is what still gets me up and running.
I scan social media data so that I can help my Big Pharma clients understand:
- what patients have to say about their lives
- what patients say about their treatment options
- when and how patients seek information about their disease and treatment
- how physicians behave in sharing information in social media channels
- what a physician's network looks like so we understand more about who that physician is
- what content can resonate in a patient or physician conversation
- where caregivers go to seek solace or a break from working with their loved ones
- what represents hope for patients, physicians, advocacy groups, or caregivers
A key objective of all of this work is to help my Big Pharma clients act like a contributor, and not like a loud huckster. And being a contributor includes being a trusted, reliable, less-biased, and "good actor" in their social media efforts.
Ultimately, Big Pharma will do whatever Big Pharma needs to do to generate the profits demanded by the financial markets. I'm not imagining a future when a company spends millions or billions to just give things away. Remember, "The company's values are the values of a successful, large company...". The hope that I have, yes I still am somewhat idealistic, is that as Big Pharma gets closer to patients, a little bit of understanding can be passed back and forth.
And maybe... just maybe... one day, Big Pharma will move above The Mafia.
Wednesday, January 6, 2016
Add these to your 2016 To Do List... No, Really...
Thanks to my amazing colleague, Eric Shenfield, for pointing out this article from DRG, "New Year's Resolutions for Pharma Marketers". It's worth a read... go... check it out... I'll wait.
Pretty good, huh?
Where have I seen those recommendations before? I know I've seen them somewhere...
Oh, right. It's what we've been telling Big Pharma to do for about three years now. When I say, WE, I mean all of the people I know who are involved in digital and mobile recommendations for Big Pharma... yes, it's missing people... no, it's not just the agency I work for... and not just me...
Let's review the DRG/ everybody involved in digital pharma recommendations. Because, there are some extremely actionable steps that Big Pharma can do, and if you'll excuse my presumption, fall within FDA Draft Guidance.
Help Patients Help Themselves:
e-Patient Dave de Bronkhart, Kerri Sparling, Natasha Tracy, WeGo Health... to name a few, are the kinds of people and groups focused on specifically supporting patients in their respective disease states. How do I know these people? I've been around. How can Big Pharma get to know these people? By listening, and investing in comprehensive influencer identification... not just Klout score, or twitter followers... but really investigating the content these influencers share, determine their primary connections, understanding how Big Pharma can provide unbiased content that can be sources of education and support for their followers needs. By the way, that list includes, like, three things W2O does with Analytics, and a couple we do with virtual boots on the ground, thanks to Eileen O'Brien and Greg Matthews.
Support Telemedicine, Electronic Health Records, and appropriate use of ICD10:
Wait a second, didn't we already cover supporting patients? Yes... yes, we did...
But this section can also be covered by helping physicians provide actionable data to patients. This means working with influencers to identify content that will support patients in a specific disease state community... let's say Crohn's... providing the influencers with content to share via any of the social networks (staying fully regulatorily compliant) and then ALSO providing that to specialists in diagnosing/ treating/ caring for patients in that community so they can share it via electronic health records that provide patients with understandable information. Not, Crohn's for Dummies language, but Crohn's language for people who will then take the language and google it and then find the influencers discussing the topic, and have access to other patient support materials, and influencers who provide relevant and appropriate types of recommendations to memebers of their community.
This does not mean that you take a shiny marketing piece and format it for a different environment... because chances are that the language in that marketing piece amounts to "New, Improved, Better for You..." when patients are discussing quality of life topics, or everyday hiccups in their world because of their conditions, or wondering how to tell their friends and family what's going on with them, or finding other people to talk to because their family thinks they're annoying...
This does not mean that you write a biased puff piece that talks about how awesome your drug is... because chances are that the language in that puff piece will be transparent as self-serving marketing. Again, understanding what issues are facing parents and how Big Pharma's research and in-depth understanding of the disease space (which any pharma should have before entering into research, anyway) can then help patients is key.
You don't want to be the guy who shows up to the potluck with no hot dish and then stands in the corner shouting about how awesome he is. Social media is like a party where you get to be an active, engaged participant in a conversation. Be a narcissist and the people you're working so hard to impress will walk away.
Redefine your sales staff:
All this digital stuff is pretty darned cool. I live it. I really enjoy it.
This does not mean, however, that a field force is now just an electronic detail aid away from making your drug the next blockbuster.
It does, IMHO, mean that your sales staff should now include anybody in your organisation that interacts with your customer. If your Customer Relationship Management software is still only counting field force touches on a physician/ payor/ advocacy group/ formulary group/ accountability care organization/ pharmaceutical benefit manager/ group practice (I think you get the idea) as a touch... then I think you may be underestimating your impact on a customer's time.
Expand your thinking for what a touch is, and quite frankly how you incentivize your expanded sales staff... here at W2O, specifically in Greg Matthew's and my brains, we've got some pilots we've engineered that may make your head spin just a LOT... but that's not for the blogosphere.
Track, Track, Track:
Okay, your privacy officers may now want to reach through the computer screen and smack the heck out of me, but I can take it. There is a wide swath of unactivated, non-personalised data that I think you're all missing. AND, I think it's data that your privacy officers have already approved for use. Let me not assume to understand the brain of the privacy officer, though.
Let's use an example, though... Are you creating unique short, trackable URLs for your various social media campaigns which lead to co-pay cards or physician locators or regional advocacy chapters, tying them back to internal marketing codes, then matching them to geographic data based on rolled-up IP addresses matched to your DMA and field force data because you want to know if your coordinated campaign had impact on your final scrip volume? Every step of that track might have required some privacy officer to review the tracked and transferred data... so you've probably even got most of the approvals you need.
Okay... that one may need more than an elevator pitch of two sentences, so you should probably call us so we can walk you through what's going on in our brains about that one.
Oh, and yes, in several states, it's illegal for your sales staff to even have access to that data... Fine. Don't give it to them. Creating an active physician score based on multiple measures, including social impact is something they are probably allowed to have... aaaaaaaaaaand that's something else we can help you build.
Good grief, this is sounding more and more like a pitch email, and less like me dumping my brain on the page.
How do we sum this up.
Okay, how's this.
The thoughts expressed here are intended to stir conversation, let you know what's going on in my head, what I think is possible.
There are multiple agencies who can do this... and multiple ways to do them.
I just happen to think I work for somebody who encourages me to let my brain run free on topics like this, and is best positioned to actually execute on these types of ideas.So, maybe it's a pitch, but it's a pitch based on the least biased information I can provide.
Call us, eh.
And if you're not gonna call us... Call somebody, because if you don't do these things, one of your competitors will, and you'll not only miss out, you're gonna fall behind.
Pretty good, huh?
Where have I seen those recommendations before? I know I've seen them somewhere...
Oh, right. It's what we've been telling Big Pharma to do for about three years now. When I say, WE, I mean all of the people I know who are involved in digital and mobile recommendations for Big Pharma... yes, it's missing people... no, it's not just the agency I work for... and not just me...
Let's review the DRG/ everybody involved in digital pharma recommendations. Because, there are some extremely actionable steps that Big Pharma can do, and if you'll excuse my presumption, fall within FDA Draft Guidance.
Help Patients Help Themselves:
e-Patient Dave de Bronkhart, Kerri Sparling, Natasha Tracy, WeGo Health... to name a few, are the kinds of people and groups focused on specifically supporting patients in their respective disease states. How do I know these people? I've been around. How can Big Pharma get to know these people? By listening, and investing in comprehensive influencer identification... not just Klout score, or twitter followers... but really investigating the content these influencers share, determine their primary connections, understanding how Big Pharma can provide unbiased content that can be sources of education and support for their followers needs. By the way, that list includes, like, three things W2O does with Analytics, and a couple we do with virtual boots on the ground, thanks to Eileen O'Brien and Greg Matthews.
Support Telemedicine, Electronic Health Records, and appropriate use of ICD10:
Wait a second, didn't we already cover supporting patients? Yes... yes, we did...
But this section can also be covered by helping physicians provide actionable data to patients. This means working with influencers to identify content that will support patients in a specific disease state community... let's say Crohn's... providing the influencers with content to share via any of the social networks (staying fully regulatorily compliant) and then ALSO providing that to specialists in diagnosing/ treating/ caring for patients in that community so they can share it via electronic health records that provide patients with understandable information. Not, Crohn's for Dummies language, but Crohn's language for people who will then take the language and google it and then find the influencers discussing the topic, and have access to other patient support materials, and influencers who provide relevant and appropriate types of recommendations to memebers of their community.
This does not mean that you take a shiny marketing piece and format it for a different environment... because chances are that the language in that marketing piece amounts to "New, Improved, Better for You..." when patients are discussing quality of life topics, or everyday hiccups in their world because of their conditions, or wondering how to tell their friends and family what's going on with them, or finding other people to talk to because their family thinks they're annoying...
This does not mean that you write a biased puff piece that talks about how awesome your drug is... because chances are that the language in that puff piece will be transparent as self-serving marketing. Again, understanding what issues are facing parents and how Big Pharma's research and in-depth understanding of the disease space (which any pharma should have before entering into research, anyway) can then help patients is key.
You don't want to be the guy who shows up to the potluck with no hot dish and then stands in the corner shouting about how awesome he is. Social media is like a party where you get to be an active, engaged participant in a conversation. Be a narcissist and the people you're working so hard to impress will walk away.
Redefine your sales staff:
All this digital stuff is pretty darned cool. I live it. I really enjoy it.
This does not mean, however, that a field force is now just an electronic detail aid away from making your drug the next blockbuster.
It does, IMHO, mean that your sales staff should now include anybody in your organisation that interacts with your customer. If your Customer Relationship Management software is still only counting field force touches on a physician/ payor/ advocacy group/ formulary group/ accountability care organization/ pharmaceutical benefit manager/ group practice (I think you get the idea) as a touch... then I think you may be underestimating your impact on a customer's time.
Expand your thinking for what a touch is, and quite frankly how you incentivize your expanded sales staff... here at W2O, specifically in Greg Matthew's and my brains, we've got some pilots we've engineered that may make your head spin just a LOT... but that's not for the blogosphere.
Track, Track, Track:
Okay, your privacy officers may now want to reach through the computer screen and smack the heck out of me, but I can take it. There is a wide swath of unactivated, non-personalised data that I think you're all missing. AND, I think it's data that your privacy officers have already approved for use. Let me not assume to understand the brain of the privacy officer, though.
Let's use an example, though... Are you creating unique short, trackable URLs for your various social media campaigns which lead to co-pay cards or physician locators or regional advocacy chapters, tying them back to internal marketing codes, then matching them to geographic data based on rolled-up IP addresses matched to your DMA and field force data because you want to know if your coordinated campaign had impact on your final scrip volume? Every step of that track might have required some privacy officer to review the tracked and transferred data... so you've probably even got most of the approvals you need.
Okay... that one may need more than an elevator pitch of two sentences, so you should probably call us so we can walk you through what's going on in our brains about that one.
Oh, and yes, in several states, it's illegal for your sales staff to even have access to that data... Fine. Don't give it to them. Creating an active physician score based on multiple measures, including social impact is something they are probably allowed to have... aaaaaaaaaaand that's something else we can help you build.
Good grief, this is sounding more and more like a pitch email, and less like me dumping my brain on the page.
How do we sum this up.
Okay, how's this.
The thoughts expressed here are intended to stir conversation, let you know what's going on in my head, what I think is possible.
There are multiple agencies who can do this... and multiple ways to do them.
I just happen to think I work for somebody who encourages me to let my brain run free on topics like this, and is best positioned to actually execute on these types of ideas.So, maybe it's a pitch, but it's a pitch based on the least biased information I can provide.
Call us, eh.
And if you're not gonna call us... Call somebody, because if you don't do these things, one of your competitors will, and you'll not only miss out, you're gonna fall behind.
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