The Right Mix

First off, marketers need to select the right mix. If a project has three giant general-purpose agencies all doing different pieces of a project there are bound to be turf wars as they all try to expand their scope of work into one anothers’ territory. At the other end of the spectrum would be a project populated by many small, niche players. In this case there could easily be gaps in capabilities between the different teams.

A good balance in agencies has many benefits:

• Each agency can do what they do best, and not worry about “turf wars”
• That said, a bit of overlap ensures that the agencies stay “on their toes”
• Ideas from non-core agencies can still spark great ideas

Clear Delineation of Responsibility

Even when a marketer has selected the right mix, clear areas of responsibility are critical for a smooth project. The first, most important, task is to divide up the work so that each agency knows what they are responsible for, and likewise what the others are responsible for. It should be reasonably clear for everyone on the team where any given task falls and where are the areas of collaboration.

For example, if there are cross-channel requirements between print ads and, say, a website or Facebook property there are at least two agencies collaborating to ensure the URLs are optimized and the messaging is crafted appropriately. The different options for URLs, QR codes, USB Web keys, and other technologies need to be coordinated between the responsible agencies.

USB Web keys are a perfect example of a solution that needs hands-on participation by multiple agencies. The traditional agency needs to be involved in the print materials that make up the customer’s first contact with the key, then the digital agency needs to ensure that the destination site flows as a natural extension of the print piece’s call to action. Then, analytics needs to be designed in and measures between print distribution and digital uptake need to be consolidated in all reporting. This is just one example, many more exist on campaigns of any scale.

Areas for Competition

In some cases there will be areas where multiple agencies can do a good job. In these circumstances a marketing team can open up the work for internal competition to get the very best work from each agency. If handled in a reasonable, non-abusive, way this can be a good partnership model to drive out the best thinking for the project because a good idea can often come from anywhere.

Facilitation of Agencies

Facilitation can be handled by the marketing team or a lead agency depending on internal resources, the complexity of the project, budgets, and the agency mix. The lead agency model can work but care must be exercised and the lead agency must respect the areas of responsibility with the subordinate agencies. Clear direction from the marketing team is critical here.

Decide with Data

Finally, when (not if) there are conflicts between the agencies about responsibilities decisions need to be made based on data and must be handled quickly. No project has the luxury of timelines that can extend based on internal issues, there is always time pressure to get results in market. Any decisions need to be supported with data to avoid the temptation to make them impulsively based on gut and emotion. The numbers may take a day or two to gather, and there will always be schedule pressure, but the time is well spent to ensure the decision is the best possible.

Once decisions are made the entire team needs to be held accountable to execute. This is part of the quick part of the decisions. The process is reasonably simple:

• Identify issue
• Collect required data
• Analyze data publicly
• Make decision (no appeals)
• Execute

Hopefully these tips, developed over decades of multi-agency experience, can help your projects succeed. Do you have any stories about multiple-agency work that can illustrate any successes (or failures)?

Don’t forget Mother’s Day coming up this Sunday. And it turns out that moms listen to what social media has to say. They are more engaged with Facebook, and are much more engaged with pharmaceutical companies:

• Have discussed pharma companies & products: moms: 34% vs. everyone else at 13%

LinkedIn acquires SlideShare for $119M

LinkedIn, the world’s most popular professional social network, has acquired the professionally-focused slide sharing service aptly named SlideShare. This service has long been the platform of choice for marketing professionals to share their insights and develop street cred. It is similar to YouTube for slide decks.

LinkedIn has not made many acquisitions in its history, preferring to build its own technologies such as Groups and Answers. Look for LinkedIn to integrate SlideShare tightly with its offerings in the future.

For healthcare marketers this is relevant since over 1.5 million LinkedIn users are listed in healthcare fields. Sharpen up those PowerPoint skills and get ready to present to the world.

Mobile traffic triples year-over-year

Another source showing the increase in mobile traffic around the world. Some quick stats:

• 202% increase (3x) in mobile web traffic
• 70% of web visits from iPhones vs. 24% for Android (even though there are more Android handsets sold)
• 97.2% of mobile PPC traffic comes from Google

Facebook users spend 7+ hours on mobile every month

Even the press release for this comScore tool, Mobile Metrix® 2.0, is chock full of stats and numbers. Here are the most relevant parts:

• Apps dominate the mobile experience with 81.5% of time spent. Be careful with this stat though, as usage is context sensitive and the chart only shows the high-volume sites. Smaller players need to look at their audience and offering carefully.
• There are some differences in app usage across iOS and Android devices, but these can typically be explained by looking at the default installed apps and their quality. It is interesting to note how popular Google Maps is on all platforms.
• In terms of reach, no one can touch Google at 96.9%.
• In terms of engagement, no one can touch Facebook at 441 minutes (7.4 hours). Twitter and Foursquare are next in line.

Tablets used in-home 74% of time

In a study about tablets, eMarketer shows that most locations are in-home. Those locations used out-of-home are either popular wi-fi spots, or places where connectivity isn’t currently a common option.

These findings are not surprising in light of the fact that 9 in 10 tablets sold have only wi-fi connectivity.

Tumblr nearly triples traffic year over year

Tumblr has come out of nowhere this year with 12 months of consistent growth that is pushing the blogging / curation system into the big leagues. With the traffic numbers, in unique visitors, come engagement numbers second only to Facebook. It is no wonder they have launched an advertising service to capitalize on these numbers. The chart on the left is actual data from comScore.

Experian’s omnibus report out for 2012

This report is more than just healthcare, and more than just digital, it’s a taste of Experian’s US review of trends and segments. Naturally it is meant to leave you wanting more. Some tips from the 154-page PDF:

• Households that contain adults and children from multiple generations are a mega-trend. What this means for healthcare is that the generations are “mixing it up” much more than before. Providing information for caregivers and family members is more important than ever before. Consider all generations when creating your DTC materials.
• Customers want a personalized, relevant experience, and successful interactions hinge on the ability to integrate within and across channels. It is now a four-screen world (TV, PC, Smartphone, and Tablet) and consumers are juggling experiences across and between these platforms and expecting consistency and access wherever they go. This creates the additional issue of cross-channel identity, something to consider when crafting multi-channel experiences.
• Measure the entire series of events that drove the customer to purchase, not just the last touch. The “last touch” attribution model is dead. As we discuss in Digital Rx, Google Analytics can help here.
• Two-way interactions are critical opportunities for brands to actively engage customers in conversations. In the new world broadcast just doesn’t carry the full load. In many cases we need to allow for loop back through social channels so that the engaged customers have someone to interact with (with the rest of the audience watching).
• Including the word “exclusive” in the subject line boosts unique open rates by 14% in promotional mailings. Email is still the number one direct contact mechanism and email addresses are still the most important piece of customer information.
• 91% of today’s online adults use social media regularly. So, no matter what you’re talking about, if you’re not there, you’re not relevant. On Digital Rx we discuss Google Analytics’ updated social tracking tools.
• 28% of smartphone owners, watch video on their phone in a typical month. No surprise here, the mobile revolution is well underway (see four-screen world, above) and as bandwidth increases so does the consumer’s appetite for media.
• Cyber Monday overtook Black Friday as busiest shopping day of the year. Consumer activities illustrate how digital communications have taken over from traditional everywhere. There is no “digital marketing” now, it’s just “marketing” and it must have data and digital at its heart.

iBGStar now available in the US

As previously reported in the Wire, the iBGStar is Sanofi’s groundbreaking iPhone accessory to help people living with diabetes join the “quantified self” world and more easily track their test numbers. The product is available at:

• Apple® Retail Stores and Apple.com
• Walgreens and Walgreens.com
• DiabeticCareServices.com

The iPhone app has some relevant features for users:

• Scorecard for your current reading
• E-mail share features for sending your results to your doctor, friends, and family
• Charts and trends on the phone to track your progress

Google+ hangouts on air can now broadcast

With Google+ hangouts we’ve always been able to have a few users connect via webcam. With hangouts on air we have the ability to massively increase the number of participants – these hangouts are becoming interactive television.

The potential is there for key patient voices to be heard while they talk about their conditions and challenges. Because of the immediate and interactive nature of video there may be substantial resistance to using this for pharmaceuticals, however condition groups and sites may pick up the technology. Stay tuned.

Facebook outperforms TV according to Nutella

Using the marketing mix model (MMM), Nutella has found that Facebook spend outperforms TV in ROI. Only substantial spend warrants this type of tracking, however.

“Once Facebook ads spend becomes material, it belongs in the [MMM],” Lee said. “If you are only dabbling, it’s going to be too difficult to understand the impact of your Facebook advertising.”

When to post links on social media

If anyone is going to know when links are clicked, it’s going to be the world’s largest link shortener service. Findings from the bit.ly study:

• Twitter: post in the afternoon earlier in the week 1-3 PM Monday through Thursday
• Facebook traffic peaks mid-week, from 1-3 PM
• The vast majority of Google+ activity takes place during the work day (from Marketing Charts)

Mobile Roundup

• Nurses get their own app with Lippincott launch
• Happtique to test its health app prescription platform
• KP’s patient-facing Android EMR app has 100K downloads, launches iOS version
• EveryMove raises $2.6 million from health plans

So how do you nurture your relationships so that they are as healthy and productive as possible? The answer is easy: communication. The execution, however, can be more difficult.

Here are three tips on how to improve your communications, your relationships, and your business results.

No Planning

This tip seems counter-intuitive and needs clarification. Obviously the work itself requires a lot of planning – intricate marketing plans don’t just appear out of nowhere. The communications around these plans, however, needs to be open and free. If you over-think the objections you may face or try to guess the motives and likely positions of other people on the team you start to restrict your own thinking. You can literally pre-think yourself into a corner and then when you’re discussing the work you can end up being defensive and rigid.

By coming to the communications without preconceived expectations you can more easily adapt to the actual “facts on the ground”, work with the feedback, explain your reasoning, and hear the actual thoughts of the other people in the room. This open stance ensures the very best outcomes from all project interactions.

Actively Listen

The hackneyed phrase is “you have two ears and one mouth” meaning listen at least twice as much as you speak. If you’re discussing the work openly, make sure to pay attention to what is being said rather than continually planning what you need to say. This relates to the stance as described above.

The active part of active listening is all about asking questions. Probe what your partners are saying so that you really understand the issues and their ranking. Then, and only then, you’ll be in a position to start finding solutions.

Give it Space

Most of the time conversations will create direction and consensus and drive the work forward. Sometimes, though, you need to give issues space before you can solve them. In these cases it is important to make sure the others on the team know that you’ve listened and understood as described above but that you need to do some work before you’ll be able to table some potential solutions.

This tactic is important because all members of the team need to absorb the information that was exchanged before they can make their best decisions. To steal some lyrics from Tom Petty, “the waiting is the hardest part.” It can be difficult to take this time when the work needs to get done and there are schedules to meet, but it really is that important.

In a world where business value really is contained in the relationships you nurture, these tips can create better, more efficient projects.

First published on May 7, 2012 in Clickz.

The first couple of months are usually pretty blissful – both parties are filled with lots of hope and positivity about the exciting adventures (programs/tactics) to come. But then you inevitably find out things that you didn’t know before, that you may not like. Things get a bit bumpy; you start to become disenfranchised with your partner. Then gradually everything starts to unravel – all of a sudden a year has gone by and you’re threatening to break up if they (your agency) don’t get their act together!

It doesn’t have to be this way! There is a way to maintain that honeymoon period indefinitely. And it starts with choosing the right partner in the first place. It’s a huge investment to onboard a new agency, so you want to make sure that the agency you choose is going to work out in the long term.

Let’s explore the top three considerations when choosing a partner:

Consideration No. 1: Make sure the agency’s skills closely align to your needs.

• Relationship buster. While this may seem obvious, often client-agency relationships fail because there is a mismatch between client needs and agency competencies. Agencies do a good job of downplaying their weaknesses and selling their strengths, so sometimes clients receive a biased representation of an agency’s capabilities. Because of this sell job, clients can also become enamored by a specific strength that isn’t even a top priority for them.
• Relationship saver. Make sure you have a clear understanding of what you need/what you’re looking for in an agency, and consistently apply that as a filter when evaluating potential partners. It’s critical that you choose an agency based on a realistic evaluation of your needs and whether their core competencies align with these. If you’re looking for a digital agency that can offer innovative solutions to engage your audience, be careful not to let yourself get wooed by a flashy creative presentation unless you’re sure they have the chops to deliver on the technology side of things. Alternatively, if you already have a strong IT shop in-house and what you really need is a strong strategic and creative shop, you better be sure they can bring their A-game as it relates to creative.

Consideration No. 2: Make sure the agency has the proven ability to deliver.

• Relationship buster. Clients sometimes underestimate the importance of delivery in digital programs. It’s easy to get distracted by the cutting-edge solutions and fail to consider whether these programs can realistically be deployed on time, on budget, and at a high-quality level.
• Relationship saver. Make sure you verify agencies’ track records in deploying similar solutions in a timely and efficient manner. Ideally they should be able to provide case studies of similar work successfully delivered for other clients. They should be able to clearly articulate their process for taking a high-level solution/strategy to detailed tactical implementation plans. Strong project management competence is critical to ensure projects are delivered within budget and timelines. They should also be able to demonstrate that they have sufficient resources in place to deliver on multiple concurrent work streams.

Consideration No. 3: Make sure the agency can “play well with others.”

• Relationship buster. Most clients have multiple agency partners – typically at least a creative/offline agency and a media agency in addition to their digital agency. Clients sometimes take for granted that all partners will work together toward a common goal; that integration will naturally take place. However, some agencies tend toward a protective or even combative nature when working with other agencies, creating a host of problems when interdependencies are present between both agencies’ initiatives.
• Relationship saver. Prospective partners need to be able to demonstrate the ability to play well with others in the sandbox. Your agency should be able to point to specific examples of how they have worked with other agency partners in a harmonious and mutually beneficial way. Ideally they can demonstrate the ability to take a leadership role in coordinating cross-agency collaboration and integration. They should have an established process for helping to define and document roles and responsibilities between agency partners in order to come to alignment and consensus on “who does what.”

Of course, there are many other factors to take into consideration when choosing a new digital agency partner, but avoiding the pitfalls above should increase your chances of a long and successful union. Happy hunting!

Klick Health is frequently asked to help our clients forge ahead in this brave new world, charting a course that meets their medical, regulatory, and legal requirements while taking full advantage of the bounty it has to offer. Should you find yourself on the cusp of this great adventure, this document provides a guide to the questions we typically begin with. Although fifty questions may seem overwhelming, you don’t need to answer all of them, and you likely already know the answers to many. We hope that you find the guide useful and that it provokes some great discussions within your team and between agency partners.

The guide that Klick has produced gives you 50 questions to answer that will help you create a social project that will fit your company, product, market, and the FDA regulations. These questions are grouped as:

• Strategy vs. tactics
• Measuring success
• Your corporate environment
• Monitoring and listening
• Resources
• Channel selection and setup
• Content calendar
• Tracking, analytics, and reporting

Get your own copy of this conversation guide and start your journey into social today.

The truth is, regardless of the title, the document is really focused on the two sources of influence: external and internal. Each has a set of recommendations with it. To get the full report you can download it from the Awareness site.

External Influence

1. Identify key influencers: the paper provides some good tools for this including PeekYou, Kred, mBlast, and PeerIndex
2. Follow the influencers: this means that you need to be on the social networks where these influencers operate
3. Study their content: this one gets overlooked all the time because it is time consuming (read: expensive) but missing this step will miss the context that the influencers have created
4. Plan to add value: this is essentially the analysis of what you’ve found
5. Engage: once you have your plan, act on it
6. Ask for feedback: it has been shown that the most effective way to get social media feedback is to ask for it
7. Respond and act on feedback: if you ask for feedback and do nothing you’re seen as a black hole, you need to interact to build credibility
8. Stay in touch: social engagement is not a one-shot project, it must be an ongoing activity if you are to reap the benefits

Internal Influence

1. Gauge your current state: using Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Referral Value (CRV) because you need to know where you are before you can measure progress
2. Define your brand advocate segments: find the important brand advocates for your product / service, for pharma this will often be patients on therapy or their caregivers
3. Segment your brand advocates: get into the details and really understand these folks
4. Craft a reward strategy: determine what the segments value and craft a strategy to help them help you

The full report from Awareness has more detail, it is definitely recommended as a tool to help get your team thinking about how to tackle the amorphous opportunity known as social media.

If a picture is worth a thousand words then Pinterest is valuable indeed. This social site uses images as its currency and people are eating it up. For a site that is still in beta and is by invitation only, it has posted an impressive 2,700% growth rate since May 2011 and has crossed over 10 million monthly visits according to comScore data[1]:

ComScore also tells us that the audience is 2/3 female, 20-35 years old, and at the higher end of the household income scale. The site is also captivating for its users, they spend 15.8 minutes per visit, for comparison Facebook users spend 12.1. Pinterest isn’t a habit yet, though. Facebook users visit 37.4 times per month, Pinterest users only 6.2. And Pinterest users don’t just stay on-site, they go and visit the source sites of the images – in February Pinterest generated more referral traffic than Twitter.

This site is a retailers dream, but does it hold any promise for healthcare marketing?

The top categories on Pinterest are fashion, arts and crafts, recipes, seasonal events and holidays, and interior design. Even so, because of the volume of traffic, a search on any health topic returns results. Search on Cancer and you will see images of breast cancer survivors and pink ribbons. Search on IBS and you will see gastrointestinal diagrams mixed in with many advice columns and naturopathic products. Sleep, baby care, nutrition, all topics that align with the audience are well represented and infographics are making an appearance on the site.

If a healthcare category includes the younger female demographic that is currently flocking to Pinterest, there is almost certainly a place for it on the site.

How can a site take advantage of Pinterest? There are two things needed:

1. Large, compelling images: make sure there are sharable images on the site that will speak to the demographic on Pinterest. Infographics can be particularly compelling. Link the site to a dedicated board on Pinterest that has the same images to make them easier to share.
2. Acceptable terms and conditions: don’t make the audience violate the site terms to use Pinterest. Artists worry about Pinterest because it strips out metadata, including copyright references. For websites that want to generate traffic with Pinterest the terms and conditions should allow for sharing of the imagery. Ensure that the rights agreement with the originating artist allow for this global sharing.

Happy pinning!

Here are just a few ideas to illustrate why we think voice recognition can improve the patient experience in healthcare. Imagine:

• The ability for a smartphone to record the tone and speech patters of patients suffering from depression over time
• A patient with full or partial paralysis being able to control lights, temperature, self-medication, and security within their homes via voice commands
• Stroke patients with speech impediments may be able to train devices to translate impaired speech into clear prose

Perhaps even more compelling is the case for health care providers to adopt voice recognition in their daily practices:

• Doctors can record and archive patient notes without the need for transcription to text, enabling them to see more patients in a day
• HCPs could search patient records and research with voice commands
• Using tablets to combine visuals such as charts and graphs with voice-control to provide faster access to robust patient data

While voice-recognition has existed in various forms for years, we believe the technology is now more reliable and robust than ever. We at Klick Health are excited to be on the cutting edge of improving the patient and healthcare professional experience, and we believe voice recognition will be a big part of the near future.

The new features are located under Traffic Sources on the Standard Reports screen of GA and are really worth a look. The first thing you’ll notice is that there are education screens at the top of each report. These are clear and to the point, definitely worth keeping active until you get familiar with the new functionality.

The Social traffic sources are split into the following sections that we’ll look at individually:

• Sources: from which social sites did the visitors arrive?
• Pages: to which pages on your site did they go?
• Conversions: which tracked activities on your site did they perform?
• Social Plugins: which share buttons were used on individual pages?
• Social Visitors Flow: where did social visitors go?

Sources

This report is helpful because now you can see all traffic from social platforms, not just traffic from your own posts. For example, you’ve always been able to track social traffic using UTM codes as described in Social metrics for Pharma. Now, however, you can see the organic traffic generated by visitors spontaneously sharing links on their own.

This ranking by platform quickly and visually illustrates where you should be investing your time. This analysis is made even more rich with the Social Visitors Flow view.

Social Visitors Flow

This view is very powerful and I recommend everyone look at it as soon as possible. The visual display of social visitors “pathing” through your site will quickly show you what is working, what isn’t, and those “hidden gems” on which you can shift focus.

For example here is a screen shot from the Klick website:

This screen shows us some valuable insights very quickly:

• The users that came from DZone, while welcome, didn’t look elsewhere on the blog for insights because they are not our target of healthcare marketers
• LinkedIn is driving our most engaged social users, and they are most interested in our job postings (did we mention we’re on track to grow by 100 employees this year?)
• LinkedIn is also a great source of traffic for the blog, surpassing our Facebook page
• Facebook loves the fact that we were voted one of the top places for women to work, plus our other blog posts
• The hidden gem is Reddit, we are getting some traffic from that site and we may want to see if we can expand that

Pages

If you want to look at social metrics from the other side, you can look at what pages were most popular as links. This report shows the pages that generated the most interest. Because it’s a page-focused report, you can restrict it to certain portions of your site to get deeper insight.

Conversions

Assuming you have GA goals set up on your site you can see how many were hit by users from social media channels. This report ties into the detailed attribution model that GA introduced late last year.

Knowing which goals on your site are most popular with social visitors can help you craft the most engaging content and share it in the right places.

Social Plugins

Finally, the social plugins tool integrates with individual share buttons to allow you to track which pieces of content are being shared outward using these tools.

The 3rd party tools such as AddThis and ShareThis integrate directly with GA, typically with only a small code change required.

Now that Google’s Social Tracking is part of the free Analytics toolset, we can all benefit from the insights!

This review of a Forrester report on B2B marketing shows how the Pharma industry is increasing community management while other industries are reducing it.

Pharma, medical device and biotech firms are making significant investment increases in customer community management and product marketing while decreasing those in field enablement, as they use social media to engage end users with their drugs and devices.

Pharma marketing and social media

A post from UK’s Eye for Pharma discusses how Pharma is, and can be, participating in social media. The main topics are:

Healthcare social vs. global spend and rankings

This email is primarily about the Latin America market, but there is an interesting chart that ranks healthcare marketers by:

• Facebook pages
• Facebook likes
• Global promotional spend

60% of North American consumers research via mobile devices

While not strictly pharma-related, this study shows that most US consumers are using their mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) with their regular PCs and laptops to research products and services. Many other studies show that some of those products and services are healthcare-related.

In related news:

• Tablets are predicted to hit 153 million units in 2013
• The Kindle Fire from Amazon has quickly grown to dominate the Android tablet market (comScore)

Literature survey on games used for health

Gamification has become an area of study only recently and this paper looks at how recently and quickly this topic has received academic scrutiny. The citations on this paper provide a rich resource for further research.

ICANN system offline since April 12 – new domain name applications stalled

As previously reported in Digital Rx – The Klick Health Blog, ICANN has been moving forward with plans to allow brands to buy their names as “top level domains” such as dot-Coke. The system tasked with allowing applications has been down since April 12 and has no estimated uptime. This means that ICANN won’t be able to announce the current registrants on April 30 as planned.

Merck wants to start something small

Merck has teamed up with a national infertility association, RESOLVE, on an unbranded campaign.

The campaign, which corresponds with National Infertility Awareness Week, is themed “It’s Just a Conversation.” It includes an interactive website, www.FertilityGuide.com, which provides information in the form of a fertility knowledge quiz, a doctor discussion guide and a fertility specialist locator.

Syfy channel launches ambitious TV / Game integration – talking to advertisers

This story isn’t strictly about digital pharma, but was just too exciting to pass up. Syfy network is integrating an episodic TV show with an interactive, first-person shooter (FPS) game. As the show progresses through its plot arc, elements will be enabled in the game. Advertisers are being sought for product placement in both the show and game.

“The game could have a highway with rest-stop signs, and one of the signs could have a Burger King symbol,” said Nicholas Beliaeff, senior VP-development for Trion Worlds. “When they get off the highway, they find a Burger King that survived the universal war.”

It remains to be seen if any brands want to be associated with “post-apocalyptic life”. Because of it’s FPS gameplay, only pharma brands that target younger males may want to join in on the fun.

For a more “pharma-friendly” version of the two screen solution, see Online Media Daily’s coverage of Discovery Network’s online and video offerings.Game preview at Trion Worlds.Ad Age

Moms are using mobile for shopping

Moms are making decisions based on information found via their mobile devices. It is reasonable to expect that if shopping activities are conducted on these devices then health searches are as well. Also the study found:

• Mothers spend twice as much time online monthly as the general population (66 hours vs. 33 hours), and spend 63% more time streaming online video.
• Three-quarters of mothers say they skip all of the ads they can while watching TV, 20% higher than the general population.
• Mothers are 45% more likely than the general population to use social media. According to April 2012 survey results from Performics, mothers make keen brand ambassadors on social networks, too.

Also, looking at the behaviors of almost 3,000 women who accessed at least one social network on a regular basis:

• Mothers were 34% more likely than other women to recommend companies and brands via social networking sites (59% vs. 44%)
• 25% more likely to talk about companies and brands they follow on Facebook (61% vs. 49%)
• 50% more likely to discuss them on social networking sites after seeing an ad elsewhere (49% vs. 33%)

A dying patient uses YouTube to plea for Genentech experimental drug

A case of a patient using YouTube to attempt to get access to an experimental oncology drug. In this case it worked and the patient got access.

“Every case is a huge maelstrom of hope, begging, corporate self-interest, slow bureaucratic due process, media spotlighting and public frustration,” he continues. “It is simply very hard to solve access issues with a single policy given the many interests besides the patients that are in play in these cases. Each winds up being unique.”

Physicians want more digital, but can’t find the time

This article and study, by ON24 and MedData Group, are chock-full of stats, only a few of which are highlighted here. This is definitely worth the time to read:

• 80% of the respondents said that ability to view on-demand content at their convenience was one of the benefits of attending conferences and meetings virtually
• 63% of respondents said that early evening is the most convenient time of the day to attend a live virtual event or webcast
• 45% of respondents currently own an iPad, 52.4% are iPhone users, 10.1% use a non-iPad tablet, and 25% use a non-iPhone smartphone. When asked which devices they planned to purchase in the next six months, 29.2% of respondents cited an iPad, 17% an iPhone, 4% a non-iPad tablet, and 5.9% a non-iPhone smartphone

FDA Roundup

• An FDA Warning Letter to The Medicines Company for Omission of Risk Information and Unsubstantiated Superiority Claims on a printed piece.
• An FDA Warning Letter to Octapharma for Octagam for Omission of Risk Information and Failure to Submit Post-Marketing Reports at the Time of Dissemination.
• The FDA says it’s doing a great job in a press release.The FDA defends its monitoring of drugs after marketing clearance. Reuters.
• FDA Fact Sheet on nanotechnology.