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 Jason Brandt (@jasondmg3)

Can two of the hottest organizational and operational trends from the last 20 years – Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma – be adapted to pharma? That’s a trick question: They already have been, and quite successfully.

But, how about online pharma marketing? It’s a more interesting proposition.

First, some definitions for the majority of us who aren’t steeped in business-optimization methodologies: There are differences between Lean and Six Sigma methods of business, but both emphasize continuous improvement and a formal process of review and correction. Lean is sometimes seen as less time-consuming than Six Sigma; the easiest way to boil it down is that Six Sigma seeks reduced process variation, and Lean strives for improved process flow.

All of which sounds great if you’re running a manufacturing facility – who wouldn’t want fewer variations from an optimized process or an improved process flow? And they’re proven: Top-flight Six Sigma implementation is one of the factors that helped General Electric become a leader across many industries.

Applying these principles to digital pharma marketing isn’t quite the stretch you’d imagine. And while implementing a full Lean or Six Sigma strategy in your marketing efforts requires more than a lone blog entry for guidance, you can grasp some of the broad brush strokes pretty quickly:

Get good at measuring, and then measure everything. Whether you’re drawn to the Lean or Six Sigma model – and there’s a case to be made for both when it comes to pharma marketing – you’ll want to figure out how to measure things, both more comprehensively and more accurately.

Anyone exposed to social media or Web analytics knows you can measure online activity, but don’t be lulled into a false sense of security by these easy numbers. The sort of comprehensive measurement that these processes call for cover things like median and mean sales growth per sales rep in the weeks following an advertising campaign’s launch, or ROI per dollar spent on paid media in category-leading drugs (which might have much higher public awareness) versus secondary drugs.

Bottom line: You can’t track what you can’t measure and you can’t improve what you can’t track.

Round up your black belts. Six Sigma relies heavily on small groups of professionals, sometimes called black belts or green belts, empowered to review data, brainstorm improvements and then implement them. They operate with management’s approval, but they are also empowered to suggest changes outside of their department or division if that’s what it takes to improve quality.

Note a couple of key differences from many marketing processes: First, there’s an understanding that solving a problem might mean changes outside of the department or area of business operation – a big change for some marketing operations. Second and equally important is the idea of the small force of change agents, something that is necessary for breaking down organizational silos and stimulating overall movement of social initiatives.

Bottom line: Even if an organization’s social media strategy is centralized, training the entire organization can mistake-proof social execution.

Commitment to the process matters more than implementing it everywhere. Make no mistake: It’s a huge commitment to undertake either Lean or Six Sigma methodologies. That’s why it’s acceptable – advisable, even – to dip your organizational toe into the water slowly, with project-level and department level test projects. Try, fail, analyze, iterate and try again – get the process right for your team and your challenges, and then you can roll it out to more of your digital marketing efforts.

Bottom line: Every business is different. As new technologies, platforms and devices expand the digital experience, flexibility is necessary for managing a fast-moving, changing environment.

Marketing has always been a simple proposition: Deliver value in order to capture value. Within that context, business-optimization regimens like Lean and Six Sigma not only have a place in digital marketing, they’re just one more step in a long tradition of figuring out the most effective, efficient way to get the right value proposition into the right prospect’s hands so they can take action.

We’ve been writing a lot about the case for mobile in healthcare over the past couple of years. And we’re going to keep writing about it. With one quarter of US adults turning to their mobiles for healthcare information, it’s important that the industry keeps pushing forward with innovative sites, apps and tools that will keep us at the top of our game and, in the end, be useful to the community at large.

To that end, exploring how to better accomplish this is always something we’re interested in. Which is why, on Thursday, January 26^th, some of the crew from Pixels & Pills will be at the BDI Mobile Healthcare Communications 2012 Case Studies and Roundtables.

About the Event:
Consumers and professionals are increasingly using their mobile devices for healthcare information. They are also interacting with healthcare providers and colleagues on their mobile phones. This conference will demonstrate the best case studies of how major healthcare brands are connecting with consumers and professionals through mobile communications.

Speakers and Roundtable Moderators:
Meighan Berberich, Vice President, Marketing, BlogTalkRadio
Lance Hill, CEO, Within3
Scott Hopkins, Executive Vice President, Anderson Direct Marketing
Monique Levy, Vice President, Research, Manhattan Research
Dr. Katherine Malbon, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Division of Adolescent Medicine, Mount Sinai Hospital
Talya Miron-Shatz, PhD, Marketing Department, Wharton, University of Pennsylvania
Jenna Mons, Consumer Product Manager for LAP-BAND®, Allergan
Mario Nacinovich, Jr., Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Communication in Healthcare; Managing Director, AXON
Xavier Petit, Shire
John Vieira, Daiichi-Sankyo
Date: Thursday, January 26, 2012
Time: 8:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.
Place: The Graduate Center of The City University of NY; 365 5th Ave; NY, NY 10016

For additional information, including registration, please click here to visit the event website. Use promo code P&P for a discounted rate of $175.

Hotel Sponsor: Hotel 373 is the official hotel of BDI’s events. Click here to receive a discounted rate

Sponsors:
PR Newswire; Within3; Anderson Direct Marketing; BioCrowd ; Cinchcast; Journal of Communication in Healthcare; Manhattan Research; New York University; Pixels and Pills; Public Relations Society of America – New York Chapter; Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development

Last week Pixels & Pills’ editor Briana Campbell had the pleasure of sitting down for a Skype chat (so the quality is a little lower than our normal, professional videos) with Dr. Darshan Kulkarni (@FDALawyers) of the Kulkarni Law Firm in Philadelphia. And while the questions answered in the conversation don’t constitute legal advice and should not be constructed as such, we were very happy to get the thoughts of a lawyer on the recent FDA draft guidance. And to have him address some questions that you all had put forth on Twitter.

Further information on some of the things Darshan touches on can be found in the following sources:

The Park Doctrine

Par Pharmaceutical versus the FDA

FDA’s Cease and Desist to Triple Flu Defense

One more time, Jonathan Richman’s handy flow chart

He also mentioned to us, after we’d turend the camera off, that the FDA uses draft guidance as a way to express their thoughts on certain issues without the rigor of regulations. There is much draft guidance out there that never becomes finalized. To us, this means that we should take the guidance for what it is – all we are getting on emerging electronic/social media platforms at this time. And maybe ever.

Do you have questions for Dr. Kulkarni? Thoughts on this conversation? Leave them in the comments and we’ll continue the discourse.

You’ve told us that you want to see more about what goes on at Zemoga, the sponsor of this media property, so we thought we’d give you a quick look in at a recent project that the team is especially proud of. Maria Rueda gave us the lowdown on one of Zemoga’s new babies, the HeartBeats app (which was created for the Adobe AIR App Challenge), and the thinking behind it, as well as her thoughts on the competition.

Here’s what she had to say:

Originally, the goal was to have HeartBeats be a digital tool for surgeon training, simulating heart surgery with all of its inherent risks and complications. Since that’s obviously complex, creating it will require a lot of knowledge, investigations, permissions and reviews. To begin the process, and to be able to submit an app to the contest, we decided to turn the idea into a game.

This app is designed for everyone, of any age, who has ever dreamed about becoming a surgeon, or who has an interest in medicine. The goal is to demonstrate what a real surgery looks like and what all the tools are that heart surgeons use.

We hope to add difficulty levels to the app, different procedures and other types of surgery. In the long term, it would be great to turn the app into a real training tool; that’s a big challenge we’d love to take on.

While we’re disappointed we didn’t place in the contest, of course, it’s great to see how strong the winning applications are. They all share a high level of polish, creativity and innovation. Conqu, in particular, is a very clever take on the often-visited subject of task management, and Tweet Hunt – the overall winner – presents a fresh and fun way of reading tweets while playing a video game. Something that stands out is that the concepts themselves are not very complex or elaborate, but rather elegantly simple. It goes to show that in today’s mobile market, innovation, creativity and solid execution are the most important qualities.

Out of all of the winners, we’ve been particularly surprised by Level, which we believe succeeded in something that none of the other apps did: it managed to take advantage of the two screens on the Sony Tablet P by integrating it to its core mechanics. This shows the ability of the developer to harness the particularities of the device and use them to their advantage.

As more and more medical schools are handing their students a tablet computer on their first day, we expect to see a lot more applications like Zemoga’s HeartBeats. While it will never take the place of real life experience, it will be interesting to see how this technology will play a part in the future of medical education.

If you’re an Android user, download the free HeartBeats app yourself, and let us know what you think!

We’ve entered conference season and there are a lot of great ones on the horizon in the next few weeks. Our friend John Mack has a fairly comprehensive list over on his website, but he’s missing one that we’re particularly excited about.

The Life Sciences Innovation Forum, from Microsoft and our friends at ExL Pharma, promises to addresses how to excel in this shifting global climate, with the rise of the emerging technologies in the healthcare and pharma world, along with globalization and shifts in demographics, we’re seeing a change from the traditional model – and doors being opened to previously unthought of opportunities.

This is the first time this forum is being held and we’re happy that we’ll be there, interviewing attendees and speakers alike, bringing in as much information and content that we can, for you, our readers.

The forum will address questions like:

• What is the role of eHealth in clinical research?

• FDA is encouraging technology solutions to capture source data electronically – what does eSource really mean?

• How can we enhance collaboration by having the ability to access, share and analyze data more efficiently?

There will be presentations from Johnson & Johnson, Sanofi, Microsoft Health and Life Sciences, Eli Lilly, Pfizer and more.

Will we see you there?

Date: January 26 & 27, 2012
Location: Marriott Forrestal Village Conference Center, Princeton, NJ
Website: http://www.lsinnovation.com/
Discount Code: C210PPS

By Sven Larsen

These days everyone is familiar with e-commerce. And our more social media savvy readers are probably all clued up on f-commerce (that’s Facebook commerce folks). I’ve even heard Google’s Adwords and Adsense business referred to as g-commerce. But what about the next letter in the alphabet. How come no one is talking about h-commerce?

Make no mistake; healthcare commerce online is big business (A Forrester research report projects 2012 Healthcare spending online will reach $8.7 billion). And the traffic for online health retailers is pretty impressive, too. Drugstore.com, a pioneer in the space nets 4.66 million unique users a month (and a not too shabby $416 mm a year in annual sales). But their traffic pales next to more traditional drug retailers like CVS (6.37 mm uniques per month) and Walgreen’s (10.6 mm uniques per month). And then, of course, there is the 800-pound gorilla of health info online, Web MD with a whopping 16 million unique visitors per month (to put that number in comparison, the New York Times website average 17 mm uniques per month). It’s clear that Americans are more than comfortable obtaining health information online and they’re also comfortable with online purchasing of the drugs and other healthcare products they need. So why aren’t we doing a better job of selling those products to them?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating digital snake oil sales or anything similarly distasteful (or anything that might get anyone in trouble with the FDA). In fact, quite the opposite. As an industry, it’s a real black eye for us that most people associate online drug information with spam e-mails offering cheap Viagra and that most of the discussion of drug sales online revolve around things like obtaining cheap Canadian pharmaceuticals. No wonder the Pharma industry has such a bad reputation with many consumers. While drug manufacturers have sat in their ivory towers doing their best to ignore conversations with consumers, the digital space has been ceded to shady characters who have no interest in preserving brand integrity or serving patient’s needs.

Yes, we’re bound by strict regulatory requirements that preclude us using some of the traditional methods that other consumer marketers use to tout the features and benefits of their products. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t find new and better ways to educate consumers about their health and help them maintain positive lifestyles. Or even just make their lives a little easier.

Consider the plight of a young mother who has just relocated with her family to a city where she doesn’t know anyone. She needs to find a GP she can trust for her family. She needs to find a pharmacist she can trust as well. Maybe one of her children has special needs and she needs to find a local support group. Maybe she just needs to know where that 24-hour drugstore is located. Perhaps she has a prescription that has run out and no one to authorize a refill. What does she do now?

She probably looks at Yelp or one of the many sites that publish HCP reviews. She may type the name of a national drugstore chain into a search engine and find a store at random. And she will spend a lot of time online looking for resources to help her and her family. Not a problem, right? We all know young moms have nothing but time on their hands.

How much better would it be if she were able to go to a one stop portal that contained tons of information about the healthcare resources available in her community? A site that listed HCPs, local specialists, pharmacists and patient support groups. A site that also provided links to educational resources online and e-commerce partners who could help with issues of supply and cost. A site sponsored by one (or several) Pharma companies that provided a real service to the community and a positive representation of our industry online. And, not for nothing, a site that increased compliance and by extension benefitted both the patient and the Pharma company.

The above, is just one example, of ways we can interact with and benefit the end consumer, without violating FDA guidelines. I’m sure our readers could come up with numerous other ideas. The key here is to once again step outside the narrow confines of our traditional industry thinking and to learn from other players in the market. A good start would be for Pharma companies to become more active in the general conversations about online marketing and retailing that take place at sites like INTERNET RETAILER and SHOP.ORG. Ultimately, the end consumer for Pharma is a consumer and we need to realize that despite all the rules that bind us, the purchase funnel for our products is no different than any other.

What do you think? Is this the year we finally start talking about h-commerce?

This post is part of a series of point/counterpoint arguments proposed by different members of the Pixels & Pills staff. We’re strong believers that healthy arguments can yield the best solutions, and we hope that you enjoy our series. Feel free to add your own arguments in the comments section below!

by Krissy Goelz (@krisgoelz)

In The Godfather Part II, Michael Corleone lambasts a Mafia crime family member following an attempted hit on his life.

“In my home!” he rages. “In my bedroom, where my wife sleeps! Where my children come and play with their toys.”

Even in the mob, business doesn’t belong in personal quarters. The same is true for how professional communicators should handle their social media presence. If your business role requires you to participate in social media, you need to lock down your personal profile, tailor privacy settings and keep what you do on the off hours separate from your job.

In my father’s day it was easier to compartmentalize work. You left the office at 5 p.m. and your personal life was your own. In the digital age, segregating personal details from professional ones is harder, and it takes a great deal of diligence. But, it’s worth it if you want to build an image as a thought leader, trusted advisor or esteemed professional.

When participating in social media you have to enact the grandma rule. In the fields of Behavior and Psychology, this is known as the “Premack Principle.” What it means is conduct yourself properly and never post anything that you aren’t willing to shout from a rooftop or say in front of your grandmother. This is true of all social media users, but especially those who post on behalf of their organizations.

To borrow again from The Godfather, when participating in social media you also have to keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. There’s always danger of putting information into the wrong person’s hands – whether that’s competitive details, revealing personal health information or posting personal messages on Facebook during business hours. Even messages that are meant to be private sometimes find their way into the public arena. If you share too much of yourself, you may be surprised when it comes back to haunt you.

Blurring the lines between work and personal life can cost you reputation or financial damage. Just because you qualify something you post with the caveat “the views reflected are my own and not that of my employer” doesn’t mean that a reader is able to maintain that separation. In fact, the more the lines between work and leisure blur, the harder it is to separate our identities.

One way to manage a clean division is to use different platforms for different purposes. For example, keep business relationships and professional content on LinkedIn or Twitter. Use Facebook to connect with college roommates, neighborhood or childhood friends or other personal connections. If you want to use platforms like Facebook or Google+ for both purposes then make sure you create two profiles and work the privacy settings.

While you could argue that we’re all multidimensional human beings and everyone knows people have a work personality and an after-hours persona, there’s still no reason to mix them together.

We’re at work to work and do great things on behalf of our employers. How and when we socialize needs to be kept separate. Also, judiciously parsing information is never a bad thing. It’s good to keep a little mystery about yourself.

There’s no way to know how even the most inane things will be perceived by an outsider, whether it’s having a bad day or not being able to relate to your training for the New York City Marathon or sharing feelings about the NRA. Connecting with others online is critical, but as with anything, perception is reality. Shaping and controlling how you’re received requires a disciplined approach to managing your digital profile.

How are you handing your online presence?

This post is part of a series of point/counterpoint arguments proposed by different members of the Pixels & Pills staff. We’re strong believers that healthy arguments can yield the best solutions, and we hope that you enjoy our series. Feel free to add your own arguments in the comments section below!

by Jason Brandt (@jasondmg3)

As Egon Spengler told us in “Ghostbusters”, “crossing the streams” was a horrific tactical error, one which would create a terrifying explosion of undreamed-of power and destruction. “Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light,” he explained.

That’s how a lot of people feel about mixing business and personal personas. Nothing comes of “crossing the streams” except chaos and disaster. Social-media professionals – those of us in the communications and marketing fields who work largely in social digital venues -cross the streams” between personal and business social networking at our peril, and that of our brand. As a result, some people, in representing their brand to the world, put on a brand hat so big that they hide underneath it completely.
In my opinion, all that gives you is a boring hat. I want a hat that’s walking around with a living, breathing, interesting person underneath it. This is what makes the company real: a warm fuzzy personal face. That’s the whole point of social media. It’s social. It has personality and feeling and humanity. If all I wanted to see was the brand hat, I’d go to Wikipedia or to your website.

There is, of course, inherent risk with the personal nature of social-media marketing. If you tie the online brand to one person, you risk losing your whole brand if that person leaves. Or, perhaps worse, if they disgrace themselves somehow, they take the brand down with them.

That simply reinforces why it must be done astutely. Social media is a delicate mix of informal conversation and careful consideration. Deliberation and silliness are never a more necessary couple than when trying to conduct yourself in social channels. Your brand is represented by a person, but your brand isn’t just one person.

One great example of this? Tony Hsieh. He is the Zappos dude, but Zappos’ culture and customer service is bigger than him.

One example to watch? Apple. Is their drive and idealism and vision the company’s, or did that die with Steve Jobs? The next few years will tell us.

To return to the “Ghostbusters” metaphor, do you remember what happened at the end of the movie? (If for some awful reason you haven’t seen this cinema classic, I’ll wait here while you go and do that now.)

The state of affairs had gotten desperate. The old ways weren’t working. People had made mistakes. Nothing they were trying was stopping things from getting worse. As a last resort, they crossed the streams. This new way of doing things, taking their individual energy and combining it in this new and scary way, was finally enough to save the day.

Should you take all your life lessons and business acumen from Ray, Winston, Egon and Dr. Peter Venkman? Well, maybe not. (Although, if someone asks if you’re a god? Say yes.) But in this case – go ahead. Cross the streams. Dare to be yourself as well as your brand.

by Briana Campbell (@MsMatchGirl)

By now, you’ve all had time to review the FDA’s draft guidance on Responding to Unsolicited Requests for Off-Label Information About Prescription Drugs and Medical Devices. And you’ve had time to read the multitude of responses that came after (if you didn’t, Fabio Gratton has compiled many of them for you). And, as this is something we’ve been talking about for over two years now, you’ve probably been waiting for our response.

We were disappointed in Advertising Age’s write up calling this Social Media “Guidelines.” While this draft guidance should clear some things up for pharmaceutical companies surrounding responding to unsolicited off-label inquiries via electronic media, without being the definitive guidelines that we’ve been waiting for since 2009 (head’s up, those are not coming anytime soon, if at all), it should be used as just that – a guide. We’re not lawyers (we’ll be getting you insight from one ASAP!), but we’d guess that keeping social media responses in line with these guidelines should keep pharma companies out of hot water for at least the near future.

As recently as December 2011, we posted a piece, “Shoot First, Apologize Later: Why Pharma Needs to Proceed Without Social Media Guidelines,” that offered up the idea that, with a bit of thoughtfulness behind it, pharma could easily embrace social media platforms, not only for the benefit of their own brands, but the patients that are searching the social web for answers.

Companies that want to change, lead or influence need to take calculated risks and proceed even without formal guidelines. Often, a permissible approach results in delays, obstacles and stagnation. For companies waiting for permission, by the time they get it, it’ll be too late. Someone else will lead the pack and they’ll again be reduced to playing catch up.

That doesn’t mean to proceed without caution and strategic foresight, but it does mean the time to act is now – not at some undetermined point in the future. Consider how the U.S. Navy has embraced social media for recruiting. Realizing that conversations are happening online, with or without guidelines, they chose to not fight it and instead promote social media usage throughout the ranks.

There are loads of heavily regulated industries joining in online. Why shouldn’t pharma be amongst them?

In lines 338 through 351 (on page 10) of the draft guidance, the FDA lays out some of the thought behind the draft guidance release, writing that “the Internet has revolutionized communication” and that it has “spawned a variety of social media tools that host online content primarily created and published by users other than the intellectual property owner or product manufacturer.” Given the nature of online communities and the public’s growing reliance on the social web to gather information about their personal healthcare via internet communities, web pages, social platforms and discussion groups, it makes sense that the FDA should offer some thoughts on how their already stated policies for responding to off-label inquiries (first laid out in 1982, and restated many times after) can be applied to trends in emerging electronic media. From lines 207 through 209: “This draft guidance sets forth FDA’s current thinking on this topic consistent with Agency’s past policy statements about responding to unsolicited requests.”

Many have mentioned, and we agree, that the language, as laid out in this draft guidance, seems a bit confusing. Our friend Jonathan Richman at Dose of Digital has you covered, with a handy flow chart explaining what pharma can and cannot do in responding to these requests. We’d recommend printing it out and hanging it eye-level, for easy reference.

The internet, web sites and the social web as we know them are constantly changing, evolving and growing. This draft guidance, while maybe not the set-in-stone policy so many marketers and the pharma companies they work with – so many of whom are terrified to dip a toe in the water of social media, for fear of drowning in misunderstood or mis-handled regulations and red-tape – were hoping for, are a nice step forward in clarifying how pharma can respond to inquiries, public and private, via the web.

So. Next steps?

Let’s keep moving. Let’s keep innovating, building, growing and pushing forward as the social web continues to do the same. With an eye to this guidance, and some strategic thinking before jumping on the bandwagon, there is no reason that pharma companies can’t join finance and insurance in finding out the all the good that can happen from participating in social media.

We say, listen to the conversation, develop a plan around it and go forth. Stop running scared. Be smart and you’ll be okay.