by Jason Brandt (@jasondmg3)

Mad Men protagonist Don Draper works in the show’s fictional advertising agency, but the challenges he faces are real, and not much different than what many healthcare marketers face on a daily basis – meeting deadlines, incorporating new technologies, managing perceptions, and influencing behaviors all while ensuring personal growth.

The pharmaceutical industry and Mad Men’s advertising world have a lot in common: both include vibrant and competitive industries, have major players that influence standards and rely on a targeted audience to boost their business. What can pharma learn from Mad Men?

The devil is in the details. Producer Mathew Weiner pays meticulous attention to every detail from casting to the story line as well as ensuring the props and the set accurately reflects the time period. Creating an authentic and engaging experience with every dialog, interaction and visual is why fans flock to the three-time Emmy Award-winning series. Pharmaceutical companies looking to create that same level of customer loyalty should incorporate that same attention to detail, whether that’s using an authentic voice when communicating on social networks, creating intuitive, customer-friendly applications and services or delivering outstanding customer experiences.

Pick a job and then become the person that does it. Bobbie Barrett delivered this little pearl over cocktails with ex-lover Don Draper. Explaining how she became her husband’s manager – a man who wouldn’t have a career without his wife’s revealing bust line and shrewd wheeling and dealing – she tells him she invented the job.

Ten years ago there was no need for an HTML5 programmer, social media strategist or elder care services coordinator – those jobs didn’t exist. With technology and increased access to information changing everything, companies need to have their pulse on what skills will be needed in the future and recruit a workforce with the right skills to support growth. Individuals also need to develop skills that continue to add value and take control of their internal career path.

Don’t overlook the value of reinventing yourself. Don Draper is a chameleon. Born Dick Whitman, he’s no stranger to reinventing himself, whether it’s changing his name or leaving an established New York advertising agency to launch a start up.

Pharmaceutical companies may find themselves needing a reinvention with the expiration of drug patents expected to affect drug pricing, marketing and patient usage. Surviving patent expiration will require pharmaceutical companies to refocus their marketing messages to ensure they don’t lose significant market share to generic competitors. Shifting the strategy from brand loyalty to one that includes a more life-cycle branding and consumer education emphasis can deliver a competitive edge.
If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation. When a New York City developer didn’t like how he was being treated in the press, Don Draper suggested changing the conversation.

Brand management today is a two-way engagement with consumers often having louder share of voice than company-issued messaging. Putting processes in place to monitor online conversations is no longer a nice-to-have but a business necessity. Before things go south, develop strategies for how you’ll respond to negative or inaccurate information. Changing the conversation doesn’t necessarily require hijacking a thread, but paying attention to what is being said and offering truthful information can help consumers maintain a positive perception of your brand.

While we may not wear the narrow ties or hair pomade of Don Draper, we can still follow in his footsteps by keeping track of the details, owning the conversation and being unafraid to innovate when reinvention is the best option.

Like my image? You can get yourself one over at Sterling Cooper.

by Sven Larsen

We spend quite a bit of time on Pixels & Pills talking about the benefits of technology. And why not? From e-prescribing to the rise of social media as a marketing tool and digital tools for salespeople, technology has driven an unprecedented wave of productivity, economic growth and improvement in our quality of life.

So what happens when it goes off the rails?

As anyone with a home computer knows, things happen. Power goes out in the middle of an important project. Printers run out of ink. Hard drives die. And sometimes, files just disappear. And that’s just at home – what happens when a day’s productivity for the sales team is at risk, or a multi-million dollar marketing launch? Or, for the doctor moving to electronic health records, what happens when he or she can’t get to a patient’s record?

If a huge amount of our personal livelihood and business success relies on electrons flying around on copper and silicon, then there’s good news as well: Modern offices, enterprises and medical technologies are, on the whole, very reliable and robust. Still, it’s important to have a plan for dealing with unexpected downtime:

One-channel initiatives involve more risk: Got a big marketing pushed planned for Facebook? Then you’re completely beholden to Facebook’s ability to stay up and running on the date and time you need it. Facebook is pretty good at maintaining high availability, but neither they nor any other big online site is perfect. Plan campaigns in such a way that one channel’s temporary downtime won’t derail a whole campaign.

Revenue drivers in the organization need a plan for technology downtime. At the enterprise level, this means that the chief technology officer or someone similar has a strategic plan in place for business continuity. But the same principle applies at the division, department and team level. Thought exercise: How productive would your sales team be if their Blackberries were out for a day or the CRM system went down unexpectedly? The answer shouldn’t be: “They’d be dead in the water.”

Cross-training means tech is less of an issue. Whether the team is in sales, marketing, administration or elsewhere, technology tends to make specialists out of all of us – something that’s possible because it enhances productivity – meaning, a single specialist knowledge worker can handle the work that may, in the past, have taken a whole team of people to do. While there’s no arguing that this specialization drives results, it also means that the absence of enabling technology leaves workers more stranded than in the past. Cross-training can be as simple as making sure your social media specialist also knows how to assist with traditional offline marketing tasks, or your sales assistants know how to assist with social-media responses – small steps to keep productivity up when part of the tech infrastructure goes down.

We think of ourselves as living in an always-on world, but the reality is more like “always on … except when trouble strikes.” Are you prepared?

As we come to the end of 2011, we also come to the end of our year-long Defining Moments series. Once a month, all this year, we’ve looked back at the biggest events from exactly 12 months prior, and noticed how we can relate what’s been changing our world to what we can do in our work. We’d love it if you were to check back over the series and let us know what you think:

January – Haiti earthquake

February – Tiger Woods scandal

March – Iceland volcano

April – Deepwater Horizon oil spill

May – United/Continental merger

June – vuvuzelas at the World Cup

July – Afghanistan Wikileaks documents

August – end of H1N1

September – Tyler Clementi’s death and the It Gets Better project

October – Chilean miner rescue

November – antimatter discovery

And now, December – when scientists announced that they had discovered arsenic-based life. What excited us about this story was not only its ground-breaking interest at the time, but the controversy that still swirls around it. It was startlingly important because, as New Scientist explained, “Until now, all known life has been built around… six major chemical elements: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulphur… which make up proteins, lipids and DNA. In all normal life forms, phosphorus is a major part of the backbone of the genetic material.”

Saying that an element that is not one of these six, and which is extremely toxic, could be swapped in – well, it sounded a bit like saying that gravity had an alternative, or that the sun didn’t have to rise in the east. Scientists last December were essentially implying that life could be completely foreign to the way we always imagined it – not on some other planet in some other galaxy, but right here on Earth.

Commentators were reduced to unscientific reactions in their surprise: comments like “really weird” and “shocking” showed the startling nature of the news.

However, nearly as soon as the study was published, it was met with vehement criticism. Some said it shouldn’t even have been published, as the science was done messily, with contaminants that could have given false results, or alternate explanations that were not addressed. The jury is out on whether arsenic-based life is as simple, and as groundbreaking, of a discovery as it first seemed.

However, this study and the reaction to it highlighted how social media is changing science. As the journal noted sniffily five months after the study’s publication, the debate was “finally being aired in the scientific literature rather than on blogs”. The implication was that peer-reviewed scientific journalism was worth notice, and commentary hastily posted on blogs wasn’t.

But isn’t there something to be said for scientific debate happening rapidly and publicly? Certainly, there’s no shortcut for thorough and accurate methods, for proper data analysis or for uninfluenced science.

But what if this study was on an anti-angiogenic molecule, instead of on a bacteria in a desolate lakebed? Would it be appropriate to react as this study’s lead author did, saying “We cannot indiscriminately wade into a media forum for debate at this time”? I would say no.

There’s an argument to be made that the biggest leap we need to take in science and medicine is one in timeliness. The academics themselves are saying that “Online scientific interaction outside the traditional journal space is becoming more and more important to academic communication.” The story of arsenic-based life showed us both the pros and cons of speeding the process up.

We’re glad you stuck with us for a year of Defining Moments. What would you choose for this year’s notable events?

by Sven Larsen

Twenty-three years ago, World AIDS Day dedicated the first of December to focusing attention on the fight against the disease: raising awareness, fighting to lower infection rates and boost survival rates, and honor those who have been part of the fight.

On a personal level, you can more about World AIDS Day and how you can help by becoming an educator, an advocate, a champion or simply an informed person.

On a professional level, check out what Gregg Fischer told our Sarah McLellen in July about LBI Health’s multi-year “Fight HIV Your Way” photo contest for Bristol-Myers Squibb. As he said, the idea is to connect and honor people with HIV – the end goal being to help them overcome stigma, to have the courage to tell their stories and ensure that they get the best care they can.

Every year the theme of the day is different, though the past several years have had the same overarching theme, with a different angle on it each year. The last few years have been dedicated to “Stop AIDS. Keep the Promise”, but this year begins a five-year cycle focused on “Getting to Zero”.

Think back: when the first World AIDS Day was taking place, fewer than eight million people around the world were HIV positive. AZT was only a year old. Children with AIDS were told they’d have to stay inside a glass enclosure in order to go to school. The government, for the first and only time, mailed a disease-education pamphlet to every citizen. Understanding was low, fear was high; perceptions and medicine were both colored by fright and ignorance.

Today, some 33 million people are HIV+, and 30 million people have died.

The numbers aren’t all negative. The quantity of new infections is finally shrinking, and a person infected with HIV who receives prompt antiretroviral treatment may have a life expectancy of another 32 years.

But of those 33 million people, only 5.2 million of them are receiving treatment anywhere like that – a statistic that explains the “Getting to Zero” theme of 2011’s World AIDS Day: the goal of achieving zero AIDS-related deaths. As the organizers point out, however, this is not merely a case of getting access to one drug or (if one existed) vaccine. Rather, it’s a myriad of goals, related not only to treatment but also to the facets of prevention that come many years before an actual infection: Improving access to clean water. Education (particularly of women). Safety. Employment.

How can we “celebrate” World AIDS Day today?

I plan to do it by asking myself – and asking you – these two questions:

• What can you do in the developing world to improve those facets of people’s life?
• What can you do in the developed world to raise awareness of these needs and help to focus resources against them?

Please leave your comments below.

by DJ Edgerton (@wiltonbound)

Thinking back just 20 years ago, there were a limited number of communication options: the phone call, the letter, the fax. A person’s digital habit – though not thought of in that way – was limited to television or radio, save for a few early adopters exploring computer technology. Today we have a staggering breadth of communication and digital tools, but are they making it easier to communicate?

Not necessarily. People’s digital habits vary across generations and locations, making it tricky if not impossible to come up with a one-size-fits-all communication strategy. You can have the right message, but if it is delivered through the wrong medium you won’t achieve your intended results.

It is critical to understand how different audiences are using various social tools and digital technology, determine what they expect to get out of it, and then tailor message delivery accordingly. By addressing the digital habits of consumers and health care practitioners, marketers and other communicators can ensure messages reach their intended audience, deliver value, and inspire action while getting a better return on their communication investment.

A good place to start is by looking at different demographics. Millennials and Baby Boomers are both social media and technology aficionados as is evident by the saturation of users, but their digital habits and expectations differ.

Millennials are less likely to use email, saying it’s too slow or cumbersome. However, Baby Boomers are likely to react positively to email communication such as a newsletter delivered to their inbox. Having not grown up in a world of brevity and online distractions, they might have more patience to read something longer than a 140-character tweet or short text messages.

While social media is ubiquitous, there are communication nuances that need to be taken into consideration. Millennials or Gen Y are comfortable with the rapid pace of social media, but they may not respond to a friend’s text messages or Facebook post immediately for fear of appearing “un-cool” or without anything better to do. Yet, they expect companies to respond immediately to their inquiries. Meeting this expectation requires regular monitoring and designated social media experts to ensure timely responses.

Same-day or next-day feedback across all digital communication platforms is a fairly common expectation. However, older adults who are still navigating new technologies and social platforms may appreciate an auto-response that acknowledges their inquiry or lets them know when to expect a response.

Also, even though both groups may be avid Facebook users, what they expect to get out of socializing in that manner can vary. For example, younger users may use the “like” function to demonstrate association with a brand, celebrity or particular thought. Cool by association is a popular currency with this demographic and what their friends say and do is likely to be influential. Older people are also influenced by peer experience, but they may expect something in return, such as receiving a coupon as a reward for their participation.

A younger audience may place greater value on interactivity, which is why games are appealing to many digital users. Even while watching TV, many people are surfing the Web or looking for places to interact as they multitask. If you’re seeking to capture the attention of younger workers or patients, consider integrating apps and other tools that encourage interactivity into the marketing mix.

As smartphone and tablet adoption continues to escalate, paying attention to mobile habits is also important. Healthcare practitioners today can access health records or electronic prescribing applications right from their handheld. Tech-savvy physicians may present patients with an iPad while they wait to be seen to help them learn more about their condition or treatment. Those practitioners catering to a geriatric community might have more success forgoing digital communication altogether and using more traditional outlets such as printed pamphlets and newsletters.

With an expanding set of ways to reach your target audience, it’s essential to consider digital habits and demographics to determine the best mode of communication. Television advertising, comprehensive websites, online newsletters, video, email, mobile or social networks are all viable platforms. However, ensuring success requires addressing the digital habits of your audience.

by Briana Campbell (@MsMatchGirl)

Ever since social networking became a popular way to communicate, people have been sharing with gusto, whether that’s the minutia of their daily lives (I had the best corned beef sandwich!) or crowing about significant milestones (I completed my first marathon!). Not only has social media provided an outlet for expression, it’s also given consumers a new way to expose their experiences with products and companies that touch their lives.

Sharing is rewarding for many reasons – it helps people fulfill the role of influencer or connector or taps into their inner social butterfly. But not all feedback is positive, and companies need to prepare for that.

Negative feedback may initially seem scary, particularly for pharmaceutical companies who have shied away from social participation or are just starting to move away from one-way communication strategies to engage with patients. While negative feedback may sting, when social media hands you lemons, there’s opportunity to make lemonade and use the feedback constructively.

Show you’re authentic. Include feedback guidelines on your blog or website, but don’t be in a rush to delete comments that point out flaws. Some less-than-positive feedback is expected as part of authentic communication. Acknowledging the blemishes is also a way to demonstrate the company’s ability to listen and respond.

Feedback lets you tap into customer needs. Sure, the truth hurts, but business is no place for emotions to rule. Listen to what customers are saying because chances are, they’re telling you what they want. Is your advertising misleading? Are your products too expensive, hard to open or foul-tasting? You can file one negative comment under the “you-can’t-please-everyone” school of thought, but if you read a bunch of posts with sympathies or similar complaints, there’s opportunity for improvement.

Paying attention to what employees are saying can help you improve the workplace. Even if your company isn’t participating in social media, chances are your employees are, and they’re talking about your brand, their managers and other factoids from their workday. An employee posting that they’re bored on Twitter might need more challenging work. While a Facebook rant about a manager may not be professional, it can shed light on something that may require further examination. Paying attention to what is being said on the social networks can help managers correct a problem before it escalates, protect the business reputation and cultivate a workplace that meets employee and business needs.

Sorry should not be the hardest word. For some people it’s almost cathartic to send a tweet or post a status update when a business or product has let us down. If you’re monitoring what customers are saying, you can turn a negative customer experience into a positive one by responding in a more personalized manner. Companies that acknowledge what their customers are saying and work to resolve problems can demonstrate empathy and build customers for life.  The next time a customer is making a purchase decision they may not remember the exact issue they had, but they’ll remember how you made them feel.

It would be great if everything was sunshine and lollipops, but social communication is reflective of the real world, and people are going to be dissatisfied. Take advantage of these negative moments and look for opportunities to improve communication, customer service and product development. You may not always like what you hear, but how you respond can be a competitive edge.

by Jason Brandt (@jasondmg3)

1. I don’t understand any of this stuff.
2. Who has the time to really use this stuff anyway?
3. No real business can afford to have employees wasting their time on this stuff when they should be busy working.
4. It’s just a geek thing. Nobody with a life really uses this stuff.
5. It’s just a kid thing. Nobody over 20 really uses this stuff.
6. Even if this new stuff has some applications for some industries, but in healthcare, it’s just too difficult. It will never work here.
7. Even if we wanted to see if this new stuff could work here, we can’t try it yet. We have to wait for the FDA to explain exactly what we can and can’t do.
8. Even if we did try this new stuff, who would own the project? IT? Marketing? Communications? We can’t all try to share it, it’ll be a disaster.

Raise your hand if you’ve heard someone say that about social networks, smartphone apps, blogging or any other type of social digital technology over the last few years.

Now, if you’ve been in this industry over 15 years, look at that list again… and raise your hand if you heard someone say that about websites in the mid-1990s.

The more things change, eh?

As funny as it sounds, people were scared to death of websites – once they stopped scoffing at them. They’d waste employees’ time, they’d never be accessible to most consumers, they’d invite a crippling deluge of adverse event reports from the fanatics who would find them, and the FDA would shut the whole company down if you tried to say anything anyway.

The double-edged sword that breakthroughs carry (in communication technology or anything else) is that they are entirely unformed. They do not come with guidelines. They do not come with user manuals. You can’t always tell which will catch on. You can’t always tell how people will use them. You can’t always tell what next-generations they will spawn.

This is uncertainty. This is change. This is movement.  This is scary as hell.

But the thing is, it’s not. It is not uncertain, it is not movement or change. It is not new. It is the exact same argument about the exact same ideas – just with a new specific target.

Healthy skepticism is healthy. It can keep you from wasting time, money and resources. It can keep you asking questions. It can keep you thinking critically and strategically.

But unhealthy skepticism is paralyzing, debilitating, deadly. Today, you’d laugh at any company who thought having an online presence was a waste, or who wouldn’t give their desk-based staff internet access. It would be ludicrous.

So, how do you keep the balance between healthy skepticism – and asking the same fear-based questions from decades past?

Here, we get our hands dirty with new technology. We take it apart, play with it, figure out what we’d like to have it for ourselves, and start to piece it into our plans. But we don’t throw out what we’ve got that’s already working. Movies didn’t disappear after TV, and TV hasn’t disappeared because of the internet. The new pieces – the ones that last – learn how to play with the old ones, and vice versa.

How do you stop asking the same old questions?

by Briana Campbell (@MsMatchGirl)

Amit Gupta is dying.

And the tech world is rallying to help.

This makes sense, right, he’s a tech guy, protégé of Seth Godin, and founder of PhotoJoJo, and his community wants to help him. They want to heal him. By any means necessary.

Several months ago, as part of Fast Company’s Innovation Uncensored in New York, Jennifer Aaker, of Stanford Univeristy, gave an inspiring presentation called “The Dragonfly Effect : How Ideas Take Flight.” The presentation was about how one can inspire infectious action. I thought of that talk, as I listened to Seth and Amit being interviewed on The Takeaway.

In her presentation, Professor Aaker shares the story of two other Indian men who, like Amit Gupta, found themselves struck with leukemia. Who, like Amit, needed bone marrow transplants to survive. Between 2006 and 2007, Robert Chatwani found that two of his friends, Sameer Bhatia and Vinay Chakravarthy, had been diagnosed with leukemia. And that without bone marrow transplants, they were going to die.

For a marrow transplant to even have a chance of being effective, the match needs to be near perfect – 10/10. Out of all the people who have submitted samples of their DNA to the National Marrow Donor Program in the US, only 20% of those people are minorities. And only 1% of them are of South Asian descent. So the chance for a match for a person of South Asian descent, the chances of a match are 1 in 20,000.

Read it again. 1 in 20,000.

Robert used his tech savvy and used his social networks to register over 20,000 South Asians, across the US, to add their names to the registry. He found matches for his friends. The full story of how he used social networks in conjunction with traditional media and education to drive registration is embedded below. The ending, is not one of fairy tales.

While Robert registered 24,611 people, and while 266 people were matched, aside from his two friends, there are still few South Asians registered.

And there’s no match for Amit.

So Amit’s mentor, his friend, took it one step further.

Seth Godin is offering $10,000 to the person who’s a match for Amit. Not to the person who donates to Amit, but to the person who swabs and is a match. The hope would be, of course, that the match would choose to donate. The hope is that the possibility of being a match, and receiving $10,000 from Seth, would be enough of an incentive to drive loads of people to register their DNA with the National Marrow Donor Program.

But it raises some ethical questions.

There is a 1984 statute against, basically, buying and selling donations. The idea being that if the rich can buy donations, the poor will never stand a chance.

So, what do you think? Is Seth’s offer of $10,000 to the first to match ethical? In a world as connected as the one we live in, is it wrong to use any resource at your fingertips to help a friend? Would you do it?

If you’d like to register with the National Marrow Donor Program, you can do so here. No matter your ethnicity, it is possible you could save a life.

by Briana Campbell (@MsMatchGirl)

It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, so for companies to succeed, they need to either dream big or go home. However, in a competitive world, turning a dream into reality requires action.

With social media becoming a formidable communication tool, pharma and health care companies are devising new strategies to communicate with patients, consumers, partners, and internal constituents. Whether it’s creating branded messages for Facebook, using Twitter to direct people to the corporate website or other relevant content, launching a mobile app to bring interactive information to people’s fingertips, or setting up a Yammer community for employees, everyone has their eye on social media and how it can be used to support marketing efforts, build sales and deliver a point of differentiation.

To stay organized, encourage productivity and support goals, many organized people create to-do lists. When it comes to social media, with all this focus on what needs to get done, it’s easy to lose sight of what you should not do:

Don’t rely on the spaghetti strategy. In a rush to have a social media presence, individuals and organizations established a presence on many social networks, but without forethought to what they’re trying to achieve and the best platform to reach their goals. Is it enough to have a large base of followers? Are you just moving your website content without leveraging different audience dynamics? Is the basis of your strategy “me too”? Are patients looking for active communities, promotional materials or health-related information? Don’t just “throw things out there” and hope it sticks.

Don’t put social media on a checklist. Creating a social media presence might have been on your 2008 checklist. Today it’s about nurturing your networks, and being creative and nimble in response to change. For example, commenting changes to Facebook, have spurred many pharmaceutical companies to pull down their Facebook pages or replace disease-specific information with corporate communication. Don’t assume you can put up a presence and walk away from it.

Don’t suck all the air out of the room. Pharma communication has traditionally been a one-way street with companies providing information and patients, doctors and others consuming it. We’re in a different world where everyone is part of the conversation. While there are restrictions in the types of interactions pharma can participate in, there are no limitations on listening in to what consumers and patients are saying. Don’t forget to “take the temperature” to understand how messages are being perceived so you can alter your strategy accordingly.

Don’t post the same updates on all of your social networks. Of course there are some messages, such as product recalls, that may be appropriate for your entire customer base, but don’t assume people use all their social networks the same way. Delve into the demographics on the platforms you participate in and then tailor messages to the specific audience. Every post, reply or retweet is a chance to deliver additional messaging to support your overall communication efforts.

Don’t lollygag. We may all be gray-haired in rocking chairs by the time the FDA gets around to issuing formal social media guidelines. Rather than wait for that day to occur, begin setting your own internal policies and best practices that are in accordance with industry guidelines so you can move forward.

It’s easy to forget what you don’t want to do. Figure out the things that are keeping you from achieving your social media goals, and don’t do them.

What’s on your to don’t list that’s keeping you from reaching your social media goals?

by Jason Brandt (@jasondmg3)

Are patients the mega opinion leaders of the future?

Thanks to increasing accessibility and availability of information, patients are becoming experts on their diseases. When they talk to doctors, they are educated and often know what they need or the options available to them. More patients head online to learn about their condition and ask for specific prescriptions. Not only are they conducting research – but they’re sometimes more current on the latest technologies or treatments than their doctors. And, they’re sharing that knowledge with other patients through their social networks and online communities.

Opinion leaders – physicians and researchers hired by pharmaceutical companies to motivate other physicians to prescribe a particular drug – have long played a key role in medicine. As medicine becomes more patient-centric, the empowered patient is increasingly influential, giving way to the pharmaceutical industry’s newest KOL.

Sociologists Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz coined the phrase “opinion leader” in Personal Influence to describe how media messages were shared through personal contact with influential people. While Lazarsfeld and Katz studied face-to-face interactions, it’s social media and other technologies that are driving the two-step flow of communication and putting the power in patient’s hands.

KOLs are a critical component of any marketing plan. Using iPads, tablets and mobile devices, patients are learning about treatment options prior to a physician visit, using health-related apps to manage their care and are especially effective at delivering messages to their peers. There has been a profound transformation in how patients gather and share information and it’s time to take advantage of these relationships.

Physicians are also turning to these same sources – blogs, message boards, social networks, etc. – to expand their knowledge or help direct patients to where they can find credible information about their condition. Digital media has redefined not just how we obtain information, but how patients make decisions regarding their care.

This paradigm shift in the doctor-patient relationship creates new opportunities for pharmaceutical companies to strengthen brand messages and position itself as a leading source for health-related information. Pharma should place emphasis on engaging with patients – within existing regulatory parameters – to increase advocacy activity and gather valuable marketing feedback. Just because formal social media guidelines have not been issued doesn’t mean pharma should rest on its digital laurels.

Today’s patients are the key opinion leaders of the future and can help pharma perpetuate its messages and values to a larger community. It’s time to engage with patients to ensure they access credible information and help them make informed decisions and have more proactive discussions with other patients and the medical community.

Recognizing patients as the new KOL is a win-win for both parties as social media continues to play an increasingly important role in the doctor-patient relationship. For pharma companies that have yet to get active on social networks, it’s time to step up their game. After all, it’s where the patients are whether they’re looking to improve their own state of wellness or that of a family member. And, the better educated they are, the more likely they are to share content.

How are you tapping into the power of the industry’s newest KOL?