Accelerating Medical Sales

A recent Manhattan Research Whitepaper, Pharma & Social Media: Practical Social Media Strategies for the Pharmaceutical Industry lays out the footwork for a successful social media strategy. Here’s a brief summary of the paper’s 10 key elements:

Know your audience—younger, female, and primary care physicians are most likely to engage in physician-only online communities. Physicians using social media are also more likely to own a smartphone, or PDA, and go online during or between patient visits.

Review others’ social media initiatives—check out existing social media applications for inspiration, such as Johnson & Johnson’s childrenwithdiabetes.com or Bayer’s WomenHeart Strong @Heart online community on Facebook.

Develop a company wide social media policy—having a formal plan for how to monitor, seek out, and respond to the conversations of online consumers is an important tool in risk management.

Boost customer service—monitoring social media outlets is a useful means of identifying customer concerns, as well as optimizing products and services.

Make it a group effort—get an early start ensuring roles and processes are commonly understood by related teams such as communications, marketing, legal and regulatory review, agency partners and IT.

Make it measurable—define performance indicators based on what you want to get out of a social media strategy. Don’t forget to define measurement and optimization cycles as well.

Every interaction counts—useful, regularly updated content that is closely tied to your overall goal is essential to a social media strategy.

Coordinate your efforts—social media is closely connected to search and public relations strategies and should be factored into an overall marketing plan.

Be transparent—honesty is the best policy when it comes to your identity and your intentions with social media.

Have fun—don’t forget to enjoy yourself in the process.

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A recent survey conducted by Medimix International finds internet usage is up among physicians in Latin America. The survey is a follow-up to its 2007 study, which included physicians in ten Latin-American countries. The 2009 study was conducted through telephone interviews with physicians in Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, and Puerto Rico.

Though they usually connect to the Web for professional reasons, most physicians in Latin America log on from their home, not from their office. The primary reasons for logging on cited by participants were to search for information about diseases, current therapies and drugs, and for sites to recommend to their patients.

A surprising 80% of the 1,973 physicians participating in the survey reported that they access the internet at least once a day, compared to 33% in 2007. Brazil (85%) and Venezuela (80%) ranked the highest in daily usage, while the lowest ranking country  was Colombia at 74%. The number of physicians reporting that they use the internet “all the time” was lower with a high of 27% in Colombia and a low in Venezuela of 17%.

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Paul Levy, President and CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, defends the use of social media by hospital employees in a recent post on his blog, Running a Hospital. The blog post was written in response to an email prohibiting the use of social networking sites in an unnamed Boston hospital. The email cites violation of the Hospital’s Electronic Communications policy and a potential HIPAA violation as the underlying factors for the decision. 

For Levy, the benefits of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter outweigh the potential violation of privacy rules—a risk that, according to Levy, accompanies any form of communication within a hospital. The following is an excerpt of Levy’s post titled Shutting Down Social Media? Not Here.

“… limiting people’s access to social media in the workplace will mainly inhibit the growth of community and discourage useful information sharing. It also creates a generational gap, in that Facebook, in particular, is often the medium of choice for people of a certain age. I often get many useful suggestions from staff in their 20’s and 30’s who tend not to use email.”

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The final installment of the 2009 Health 2.0 Conference was held in early October in San Francisco. The fall conference featured over a hundred speakers, nearly 80 live demos and technologies on display, along with an additional 30 displays in the exhibit hall.

The conference, which has received recent media attention from giants such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, featured Health 2.0 Tools for doctors, ePatients sharing their needs, and an address from CTO of the US, Aneesh Chopra. The conference was co-founded by Matthew Holt, author of the Health Care Blog, and Indu Subaiya, a recent Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Physic Ventures and film-maker.

Each year the larger fall conference is held in San Francisco.  An additional spring conference is held at varying locations. Look for the Spring 2010 Health 2.0 Conference in Paris next April.

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With so many social networking options for medical professionals cropping up across the Web, it can be hard to know where to begin.  Here are a few options:

DocCheck—DocCheck.com is an international online network of over 600,000 physicians, pharmacists, students and others.

DoctorNetworking—Doctornetworking.com is a network of thousands of online professionals.

Medscape Physician Connect—Medscape.com is a shoot-off of the popular patient education site WebMD.  The site features free continuing education materials, medical journal articles, and iPhone apps for physicians.  The social network exceeds 100,000 members.

Ozmosis—Ozmosis.com is a network of U.S. licensed physicians promoting the exchange of knowledge with colleagues.

Sermo—Sermo.com claims to be“the fastest-growing community created by physicians, for physicians” and boasts a membership in excess of 100,000.  The site utilizes a patent-pending to authenticate doctors credentials in real-time.

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