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there are some extremely actionable steps that Big Pharma can do, and if you'll excuse my presumption, fall within FDA Draft Guidance.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.
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