Relax! It’s okay for pharma to go slow on social media
Is Pharma getting too excited about social media?
This is the closing question in a thoughtful interview with
Anish Shindore of Novartis in Spain.
He argues, essentially, that social media is a means, not an end, and that the
real focus should be in developing good drugs, because that is where the real
competition is.
Well, yes and no. Of course, if you have the wrong products,
no amount of marketing is going to compensate. But if you are going to invest
anything at all in marketing, social media has changed the rules of the game.
The ability to target and interact with individuals has meant that what you
say, how you say it, where you say it – it’s just not the way it was even five
years ago.
One of LinkedIn’s most hated policies is SWAM – site-wide auto moderation. This means that if you post on a group, and the moderator decides to ban you for any reason, all your posts to all groups you belong to must be reviewed by a moderator before they appear.
We all know that LinkedIn is a virtual ocean of potential leads for your business, and that if you find the right contacts, you can transform your company.
How easy do you find it to use LinkedIn? Is it as intuitive to use as Facebook and Twitter, for example, or do you struggle with some of its features?
“We really need to make a start on social media, but have no real direction.”
YouTube attracts a mammoth amount of traffic – in fact, more searches are made on YouTube than an all of Yahoo. And yet, companies do not think about it enough as a marketing platform.
It’s hard to write a great corporate blog if you’re in the pharmaceutical industry. There is so much you can’t say… So much of what’s going on in the industry is, well, not very interesting to outsiders…. And – let’s be honest – the inside gossip in your company isn’t going to gain much traction either.
