You can see the original post here at ‘information is beautiful‘.

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It’s more quaint than business opportunity at the moment as it’s a real world extension of the basic Wikipedia concept; contributing to more freely accessible information for everyone who is interested, and for, well, in this case potentially pretty much everything. But it has a more social aspect to it. At the very least I can certainly see a social games emerging from these concepts- think treasure hunt with Foursquare (location based) and Twitter (real time) maybe?

Perhaps tags should include 3-D barcodes, NFC (like Oyster) tags and in the future DNA style tagging? Part of me wants to run away at the big brother potential of all this social technology and part of my revels in it. The Itzen concept is certainly very interesting but early days, so I’m looking forward to seeing if people adopt it.

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I’ll run through the percentages with a little commentary. If you’re not interested in being teased with a ‘slow reveal’ though just click down to the bottom of the posting for a table of the results.

100% did you enjoy Eyeforpharma (#efp) 2010!

That’s excellent news so well done to Jon Gwillim for organising such as resoundingly successful event, and to everyone else for contributing to discussion. No debate on that one then.

53% did learn about new marketing channels previously not considered

This was not an area for prevarication as the remaining 47% felt that there was nothing new on show. I’m not sure whether the lack of European case studies on show was to blame but I felt that there was a change, but maybe not in the content.

86% would consider new ways to engage with healthcare professionals and patients

That is a whopping 86% of you from where I am sitting! Okay, you’ve only committed to ‘considering’ new ways but that’s considerably better than dismissing innovative digital media (smart move ). The question did lump healthcare professionals with patients, but both have their complications. Where respective country code impedes outright patient communications (rightly so), perceptions of doctors entrenched in traditional communication channels is equally challenging to the mind of the marketer.

33% had fears of using social media channels as a means for engagement eased

27% are undecided and 40% felt that it did not help instil confidence. This is where we get to the nub of the problem. Without great European case studies there will be less confidence in executing campaigns which are not typical one way communication strategies. If there isn’t a medical legal precedent in Europe let alone the operating country relevant to the marketer it makes the process of setting up a project a much harder one.

Great case studies are coming though, though small at the moment, confidence is growing in how to use social platforms within regulations and effectively. There is a mass of research and data coming through that demonstrate relevance and the value to the pharma industry.

73% of you will be attending further digital marketing events as a result of this one!!

I don’t know whether that is truly 73% who will be attending as a result of this one, or whether that most were intending to go anyway. Still, if we take the result literally I suggest to me that Eyeforpharma sparked a surge of interest in digital marketing for pharmaceutical marketing professionals which is great news. It certainly corroborates the research that suggests that increasing amounts of spending will be committed to it over the coming year to 18 months.

So, how will the industry embrace the social web? How will patients and HCPs perceive their involvement? As an intrusion or as a welcome participant? Like any social media project implemented by a business it will depend on the people in question, the objectives of the marketing campaign, the strategy and the how the tactics are executed. It will require understanding and commitment from marketing and comm’s departments who will see much of the new activity –such as moderation- as extra work that they don’t have resource for. It’s an interesting area for discussion and I’ll be returning to it in my next post.

Graph displaying responses to 5 Questions posed to marketers at Eyeforpharma

The table of results including full ‘questions’; follow up to Eyeforpharma

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I was impressed with the standard of the speeches, but overall I don’t think that the content was a massive departure from the previous year. The tone and enthusiasm from the speakers and those in the audience however, was different. What was interesting for me was that although this was about digital marketing everything seemed to come back to social media, or web2.0 (they’re catch-all phrases really). However, some of the more easily achieved digital marketing tactics are still not really embraced by pharma. It almost feels like a case of trying to run before you being able to walk.

To market around the ‘code’ restrictions using search engine marketing is much, much easier than using social media. Jonathan Richman recently made the case for email marketing in his excellent ‘Dose of Digital’, but I think ‘search’, both natural and paid, in the UK is even better. Build it and they will not come, but sign-post it to them in search engines and they will. The result? Bucket loads of relevant traffic. The hard part is in then providing quality content and engagement, but that’s a whole other issue (and a bit social).

I’m not knocking enthusiasm for social media. Not a bit of it, I love its potential for changing the landscape for communications, but specifically for HCP comm’s and ultimately patient care. It’s a shift for one to one communications, so it’s really important that people understand it and embrace it.

So, what I’d like to know from anyone at the #efp conference is, did the talks or any of the resulting discussion change anyone’s perception of social media in healthcare?

1. Did you enjoy eye for pharma (#efp) this year?

	Yes
	No
	Undecided

2. Did you learn about any marketing channels or tactics for engagement that you had not previously considered?

	Yes
	No
	Undecided

3. Has the conference eased any fears that you have about social media in this industry?

	Yes
	No
	Undecided

4. Would you now consider new ways to ‘engage’ with patients and healthcare professionals?

	Yes
	No
	Undecided

5. Will you be attending more digital pharma marketing events as a result of this one?

	Yes
	No
	Undecided

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I’m fascinated by the sheer vastness of the universe with its interconnection of galaxies, planets, suns and moons, and after watching Horizon’s programme ‘Infinity’ last week I couldn’t help being drawn back into this ultimately mind aching thought process. If space is expanding, into what is it expanding and just how big is it exactly?

Just as the universe is expanding, so too is the web. It’s an enormous and continually growing mass of interconnected static and dynamic websites with communities and links that bind it all together. Here’s a visualisation of the web universe. Attempts to figure out how big exactly are probably as difficult as calculating the size of the universe, well almost. Google had found 1 trillion URLs by the end of 2009, and the ‘WayBackMachine’ that archives most of the net has 2 ‘quadrillion’ bytes of information consisting of just regular pages that exclude, for instance, video content.

In the beginning Yahoo! was able to index most of what was important on the web in its directory of links, but it was never going to be able to cope with the tide of people and information that surged to it over the late 1990’s and since. Not only are organisations moving their content and records online for people to access, but users are increasingly contributing their own content. We’re all authors now, which is incredible. Our day to day lives recorded for posterity.

Technology has developed at such an incredible rate over the last 300 years, and the pace of development is only getting more rapid. We’re now hurtling towards quantum computing which will harness atoms and molecules to perform calculations more rapidly than we can imagine, certainly via the current silicon versions. The web landscape itself has also changed shape even during its short life, evolving over last two or three years in particular into a place where it’s not just about computing power but people who are interacting more and more online. This trend, or shift in culture, has not come about due technology developing specifically, so much as the way that we’re harnessing it. We’re all doing what comes naturally.

Look at the estimated 275,000 people working on open source projects. People are writing code, building parts of an application that ultimately contribute to previously unseen whole. For free. Linux, the operating system, is the probably the best example of this. These people, I imagine, do it mostly for the kudos and to a lesser extent the experience, but it’s Marxian in its concept isn’t it? People working for the good of ‘the people’.

Social networking websites have developed at an astonishing rate over the last couple of years. The ‘sun’ of the community world, ‘Facebook’ has now reached over 400,000,000 users worldwide and has overtaken Yahoo! as the second most popular website in the U.S.1 Facebook could quite possibly have reached its zenith and burn out in two years, but the reason it became so hot in the first place will not. Facebook would simply be replaced by other websites that allowed people to interact more easily and more intuitively.

One of the reasons Facebook -and multiple other websites that enable interaction- are as popular as they are because they allow us to communicate one to one but also in a way that would have previously been very difficult indeed. They allow us to keep on top of what’s happening, and whose doing what on an unprecedented scale that ignores time, geography and physical relationships. Consequently we’re all becoming more connected, and it’s a trend that will not diminish. The momentum for TV, internet and mobile to converge into one lovely anarchical mesh of interconnected people and platforms that all create, consume and cultivate content and information is growing all of the time.

All of the time Google’s machines are recording the content that we are creating in a manner unprecedented in human history. Recording, analysing, understanding, indexing and subsequently returning that content to other users in their search results. The web ‘machine’ is continually learning from us, so we’re all contributing to each other’s development. Times really have changed. We don’t just consume information and advertising anymore, we want to be part of the conversation. It’s in our nature, and woes betides companies that think that these cultural shifts don’t affect them. Companies that persist in a communicating one way as the web universe grows will find themselves increasingly disconnected from the websites where people discuss them. They won’t be invited to the conversation anymore, and they will wield increasingly less influence within everyone’s personal galaxies…

1. (Compete.com.)

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