Janet Johnson | The Art of Marketing

I’ve been witness to quite a mental mindstorm brewing in my brain over the past few days, and it’s likely to consume my blog efforts for some time to come… (fair warning, or fantastic relief to my four or five regular readers.)

I attended my first non-high tech conference in years (where I wasn’t a speaker), the Drug Information Association’s (DIA) annual convention. There to represent the Academic Network, I was fortunate to research the state of the pharmaceutical industry’s online strategies; especially as consumers are flocking online to research medical conditions and the medicines they’re being prescribed.

Back to the Basics

What I found was quite surprising - for someone who recently declared 2008 to finally be the year of the business blog… the state of technology (and technical infrastructure) in pharma was pretty surprising.

Partly because of regulations, and I’m not sure what other excuses there are… but frankly I was appalled at the lack of IT infrastructure to do even the basics - like supporting remote work teams. (At least, assuming the session speakers I heard were representative.)

Some examples of issues I heard:

• Many Medical Liaisons (remote representatives of pharma companies) have no access to a shared knowledge base with internal Medical Information team members. An example of a “case study knowledge repository” was shown, but there were no search capabilities, no collaboration capabilities, nothing beyond a database of PDFs or templates. It was as if I was looking at an online portal from 2000.
• Many software representatives (Oracle, Microsoft and others were at the show) had no real notion of allowing their vertical tools to accept web-based information via XML and RSS. When I tried to describe why one might want to poll online communities for potential Adverse Events (something pharma has to monitor and report to the FDA on a strictly regulated basis); I got blank stares.
  • Meanwhile, according to JupiterResearch, the top three reasons people congregate online are:
    • To see what other consumers say about a medication or treatment (36%)
    • To research other consumers’ knowledge and experiences (31%)
    • To learn skills or get education to manage a condition (27%)

Between Rocks and Hard Places…

The panel I was most looking forward to, (and delighted to find it at the show) was titled “Drug Information, Wikipedia and Google Scholar: Implications for Medical Information.” It was both frightening and enlightening at the same time. I Twittered my thoughts as the thing was unfolding… but to net it out:

Frightening: Hearing panelists scoff at the lack of viability of Wikipedia because it’s not scientifically reviewed, yet having them be unwilling (or unable) to correct inadequacies themselves. Even when it comes down to correcting a “simple” edit like changing an inaccurate method of drug delivery - from “oral” to some other method. If they change one heinous error, does that mean the rest of the article is correct by implication?

Enlightening: Because of the advent of WikiScanner in August, 2007, even anonymous entries can be tracked to an IP address and attributed to an organization. Examples were shown where organizations (Diebold and others) altered Wikipedia entries “anonymously” and were later outed for doing so in Wired. The last thing these public companies, tightly regulated by the FDA (ugh, those poor people and their systems… more on that later), want is to be publicly derided for anonymous changes.

Meanwhile, look where most consumers go to find information about medical conditions online:

So my new crusade is to do two things: help enlightened health care organizations safely enter the Health 2.0 space (while trying to stay patient - no pun intended), and to help those of us poor schlubs who are out there looking for information to find the most accurate, up-to-date information possible.

It’s a big job, but somebody has to do it. I welcome all the help I can get…

Share This

I am more involved teaching agencies these days how to enter the blogosphere with their clients. There’s a nice checklist for PR people over on Melanie Season’s Fake Plastic Noodles (one of the best names for a blog I’ve ever read) called “Do you know whom you are pitching?” on how to pitch bloggers in 2008.

The nice thing about it is she updates the notions of:

1. Relevant content - PR people should never pitch bloggers who don’t write about the ecosystem their product may live in. I really don’t care much to spend time writing posts about things that don’t interest me, thank you. And my interests change over time. Melanie’s idea of researching not only blogger’s blogs, but their Twitter feeds and Facebook pages is spot on…
2. Relevant context - I’ve seen many bloggers (via their Twitter feeds) definitively state: “Don’t pitch me in email. If you’re going to pitch me, do it in Twitter.” I rather love the notion of paring down the pitch to 140 characters. Can you do it?
3. Current thinking - Melanie suggests you check out blogger’s activities on other’s blogs (by reading their comments) to capture a holistic view of their thoughts. An easy way to do this (thanks Melanie!) is to run a Google search: posted by: janet johnson <their screen or blog name - find it in their own blog’s comment area> to see their interactions around the web. I am fairly consistent in my rants and raves whether on my blog or on others, but you never know when you might be surprised by a potential bloggers’ current thinking on others’ blogs. As an example, Melanie points to this Flickr exchange started by Tom Coates in early 2007. Before you pitch any blogger, I think it might be required reading - just to give you a “heads up” as to attitudes and optics you might find out there.

I’m following @mseasons now, and looking forward to getting to know her, 140 characters at a time.

Share This

I’ve blogged before about tools to measure buzz / “memes” and reputations online. The first tool you should use is a smart RSS reader, like that from Attensa. But there are many other tools out there to measure buzz, and some very fun ones are beginning to be developed.

Over on the Search Insider blog, David Berkowitz profiles “Seven Buzz Monitoring Sites to Watch.”

A short list:

• Facebook Lexicon: Lexicon is Google Trends for Facebook
• Summize: a Twitter search engine I discovered recently. But David points out that using Summize Labs you can also use a “near:” modifier to narrow results to people writing from a certain zip code - in case you want to find like-minded folks nearby. Cool.
• Flaptor is another Twitter search engine, and has a trend tool called Twist that you can use to compare search terms. You should always run your Twitter searches through a couple of engines, as they’re not yet perfect. I’m looking forward to the day that Attensa takes care of all of these searches for me, persistently.
• Using Quantcast you can track the demographics of searchers for a particular keyword. David helps you figure out how easily, and I won’t steal his thunder… go have a look on his post.

There are tons of additional tips and explanations there anyway… It’s going in my del.icio.us file. For sure.

Share This

This week I’m going to “do as I say,” “walk the talk,” and (in doing so) get back into blogosphere basics…

It seems I’ve been spending more time on Twitter than blogging lately, which I’ve heard from several people recently. I have come to feel more interest and creativity in creating 140 character blurbs and following others recently, and blogging has seemed more like serious writing as a result.

But it’s time to get serious again, for many reasons.

Last week I challenged the members of our Oregon Entrepreneurs Network (OEN) marketing committee to help enliven the OEN blog and spread the wealth of knowledge by sending me the Top 10 Marketing Tools they use - and why.

We figured that entrepreneurs (and our colleagues) would probably appreciate a glimpse into the minds and habits of a bunch of smart marketers - learning about the tools they use. The ensuing conversation and collaboration inside the room was so enlightening that I can hardly wait to share what I learn!

I’m going to start my Top 10 Marketing Tools list with some of what I believe are “blocking and tackling” basic tools. Now, I’ve got a decidedly “online” bent so you’ll want to round out your tools by reading others’ lists - for sure.

Tool #1 - A Smart RSS Reader

Any marketer interested in making their lives easier in collecting information about their own reputations, their products’ reputations, their brand reputations and their competitors’ reputations must have a smart RSS reader in their toolbox.

Why do something manually when you can have a FREE product do it for you?

I define “Smart” as a reader that will do more than deliver persistent search results into your mailbox - although if you have to start somewhere, start with Google Alerts, which will do just that.

I use Attensa’s RSS products. They’re clients, many of the employees there are colleagues, and I’ve always appreciated the work they do in terms of their consistent interface design across platforms, smart enhancements and well-programmed applications.

To me, as Smart RSS Reader will:

1. Search multiple engines in addition to the major search engines and deliver content so you can have another view of where your conversations are happening. It’s nice to have a view (beyond what your SEM tools tell you) of engagement levels on del.icio.us tags vs. Technorati tags, for example.
2. Allow you to ‘train’ the reader as to where you’re spending your attention - so it will filter high-attention results right to the top of your feeds, and the low-attention results will appear down your results lists. That way, your most reader will help prioritize your feed results for you.
3. Let you get your work done beyond simply reading feeds within the application. For example (I’ve blogged about this before), I can comment on blog posts from within Attensa - while my attention is focused on the subject at hand. I can tag articles within Attensa, and it’ll post my tags to my del.icio.us account for me as well - maximizing my work efforts.

Any time you can find a tool that will work for you, learn from you, and enhance your productivity (AND it’s free to boot…), what’s there not to love?

Share This

I had an interesting discussion yesterday with my friend Michael Sampson. He’s a blogger, content author and perpetual student of collaboration technologies and real-use cases for them.

Michael’s recently finished an ebook called The 7 Pillars Analysis of Microsoft SharePoint 2007 where he has ranked it as a collaboration platform on a seven-point scale. Without giving too much away, he said SharePoint failed his collaboration litmus test on six of the seven pillars.

Well, you can imagine the stir that’s beginning to cause…

His post about the eBook was picked up on CRN, and the comments there are pretty typical of the blogosphere fanning the flames of a discussion. One comment, from Andrew Brust, Chief of New Technology at twentysix New York, was especially passionate; and in response, Michael published an Open Letter of rebuttal.

In fact, on his “Effective Collaboration” blog, there’s quite a stream of conversations around the specific merits of his opinions, cause and effect, and even a little ethical drama playing out.

In our chat, I told him it might be interesting to further the conversation at the SharePoint conference coming up next week in Seattle. (That made him just a little nervous… I think.) I also wonder (on my own) what the Jive Software guys would think of the paper?

My bottom line? If you’re going to take a stand in the blogosphere, and (particularly when you) point out the emperor is only wearing socks, enjoy the reaction… ’cause you’re going to get it.

I believe Michael is perfectly capable of holding his own. And I’m anxious to watch the story unfold. Regardless, I hope it spurs sales. Likely it will. Any PR is good PR, after all…

Share This