Despite my outgoing personality and insane level on social media involvment, I’m not very good at the conference/cocktail party networking thing.  I attribute this to my being an INTJ and a Virgo.  The “I” of INTJ means I tend to be introverted, and not comfy making small talk with tons of strangers. The Virgo means that I like to control situations and have things neat and orderly (not my house, just my life).

Nutshell is I suck at just chatting up strangers unless I have some specific thing I wish to say to them.

Thank goodness for the “back-channel.” I’m at the ePharma Marketing Summit and if it weren’t for Twitter (and my colleague Croom), I wouldn’t have spoken to a soul.   Twitter is the introduction to a whole bunch of new people and thanks to one smart person, Shwen, we had a “tweeple” lunch yesterday where many of us met in person.  Social media and technology has opened up an entirely new avenue of conference and post-conference networking.

Here’s my approach:

1. Twitter during the conference. always using the conference “tweme” code (trust me they all have them now, and they are usually pretty simple to figure out). I do it almost as a way of taking notes on what is being said more than commenting and giving my opinions.
2. Start following interesting conference tweeple, be sure to “@” them when they say something interesting and “retweet” good posts by other people. Be sure to look for the official conference Twitter person. There’s probably one there.
3. Ask at least a couple of public questions during QA sessions, if you can come up with anything good. It gives other people a reason to come and talk to you! Do start with your name. I’m terrible about remembering that part. Today I would have been the “woman in lavender.”
4. Organize tweeple meals or at least attend them. You can just listen and nod attentively, if nothing else.
5. When you do talk to people in person don’t just take the business card and file it away.  That night, the next morning — hit LinkedIn.com! Send them a network invite( mention that you just met them at the conference, refer to your conversation to jog their memory).

My boss insists that I at least talk to a couple of people at every conference and convince at least one person that I know what I’m talking about when it comes to social media, so I’ll get invited to participate on panels at future conferences.  I guess you could call the whole approach “influencer networking.” Often conference back-channels can be thoroughly overwhelming and distracting,  thank goodness for the back-channel at ePharma or I’d never speak to anyone!

[tags]networking, social networking, conferences, back channel, twitter, linkedin[/tags]

Last week I had the privelege of speaking at a 4As (American Association of Advertising Agencies) meeting of Kansas City advertising agencies executives. They were in NYC for a day of marketing & advertising fun for the Kansas City Council Board of Governors meeting at AAAA headquarters. It was quite a full bill of speakers with topics ranging from trends in media planning to consumer insights, and of course social media.

I decided to take advantage of SlideShare.net to socialize my social media presentation to the folks at AAAA, and anyone else who might be interested.

This is the second or third time I’ve done this presentation, and I’m now inspired to do a part two. So look out for the 5 Myths of Social Media & Marketing (Part II) in the near future. Here are the Ten Myths of Social Media & Marketing, the first five are covered in this presentation:

1. Social computing is a niche activity
2. Only a few people are involved in social computing/media
3. Only millenials are into social media
4. It doesn’t matter if your audience are "inactives"
5. Social computing has hit its peak
6. If you build it they will come
7. Social media is free
8. I should build a community for my brand
9. Social media has no trackable ROI
10. Blogging is done

[tags]social media, presentation, myths, marketing, 4as, aaaa[/tags]

A lot of my clients at RTCRM are pharma companies, so I read quite a few Pharma blogs. They are constantly complaining about the lack of Web 2.0 and social Web elements in Pharma marketing. For example this article from World of DTC Marketing touches on many issues that I encounter when working with clients, but never gets to the true issues that we and our clients are dealing with.

Has this blogger and every other Pharma Marketing blogger never heard about FDA regulations? That’s why Pharma can’t move beyond Web 1.0 — they don’t have the technical & legal processes in place to deal with Adverse Event reporting. They are also extremely, and somewhat understandably, risk adverse. The major issue with Pharma marketing is that the lawyers run the show and too few organizations are educating them or working with them to craft processes to mitigate risk.

Another major issue is risk. Getting truly engaged in the social Web can help put a “human” face on a Pharma company if it’s done well, but it opens companies up to more risk and different kinds of risks than they may be used to dealing with. The other question is should they focus their social Web efforts on consumers or healthcare professionals? Direct to consumer (DTC) advertising is something that pharma companies debate the merits of and a lot of consumers think it’s a bad thing. Pharma is making some really interesting inroads to the social Web with healthcare professionals via sites like Sermo.

One last, very ignored issue, is patient privacy. There is a lot of question about how pharma companies getting involved in social media may be a conflict with HIPPA and other privacy regulations. Zack Rodman wrote two detailed posts about privacy issues on the RTCRM blog. These begin to detail how complicated an issue this can be for pharma companies and pharma marketers.

Believe me, I’d like to see more of my clients move incorporate social computing into their marketing plans, but I want them to do it the right way. Set some organizational foundations, test the waters, and determine if there’s a decent ROI before jumping in head first and having an expensive disaster to clean up.

Please, pharma bloggers, find a new drum beat. How about some constructive suggestions instead of just complaints?

[tags]pharma marketing, DTC marketing, social media marketing, social media, pharma[/tags]