By DJ Edgerton (@wiltonbound)
Have you ever thought of the government as a business partner?
Over the holidays I managed to catch up on a lot of reading. The always insightful Chris Brogan had an interesting post on how a music company had created a custom version of Tweetdeck (a Twitter aggregator) that was preprogrammed with interesting artists to follow on Twitter. Chris was pointing out that this kind of “extra work” could be done by a lot of companies and that it would really provide value to consumers.
Of course, I started thinking about how Pharma could apply this strategy. Like everyone else, I thought about the barriers first. How adverse event reporting requirements would stop companies from being able to recommend specific tweeters. But then I thought about how companies might be able to create other tools that used trusted third party information to achieve the same goals. Why can’t companies us e the wealth of information provided by the FDA, the CDC and other government agencies to build digital tools that inform and empower their consumers. Lysol’s Germ Information Center is a terrific example of this kind of project. And there are many more out there.
Yes, we live and work is in a very strictly regulated field. But hose same regulatory organizations also provide us with a wealth of resources that we can use to help the people who keep us in business. Barack Obama and his administration have been incredibly forward thinking in their use of technology to share information with the public. We can learn from those efforts and use the tools they’ve created to make our customers lives better.
We’ve been doing a lot of brainstorming about this stuff at P & P lately and very soon we’ll have some news about a project that taps directly in to this type of thinking. In the meantime, ask yourself – why can’t my organization do something like this too?
PS: If you come up with a great idea but don’t feel that it’s something your company can do (due to regulatory restraints, budget restrictions or whatever) share it here. Somebody reading this may be able to take the your idea and run with it (and that benefits everyone)!