Zoomedia Blog
Over 300 pharma and life sciences industry members are here in Philadelphia for IIR's annual ePharma Summit. Anthony and I are representing Zoomedia, working to raise a little commotion in this discussion!
Day 1 was well organized. The highlight was Chris Schroeder of the HealthCentral Network and his predictions about the new environment we are facing in Pharma (as well as Marketing in general). John Mangano of comScore reported his annual update on the status of the industry and pointed out some very remarkable ROI figures for online advertising (4.75) which stirred discussion about scalability and finding the "balancing point" between on- and off-line marketing. These were great discussions based on solid data and industry expertise.
Later, I was personally both encouraged and frustrated by the discussion about legal issues and corporate policies relating to the "e" prefix and, more specifically, the concept of social media in the Life Sciences industry. This discussion absolutely needs to happen in this space (hence the encouragement), but is a discussion moving far too slowly (hence the frustration!). As members in this industry we keep patients at the center - our goal - and it is painful to see opportunities pass to help these patients through increased communication. Don't get me wrong -- just this week there have been several advances in the industry's acceptance of social media (read more about the FDA and CDC, in particular); and in previous blogs I have commented about Johnson & Johnson's leadership in the social space. However, for the most part, the discussion lags.
Now is the time that the industry needs to take steps to break down the "e" and social media discussions to make these more palatable to legal and corporate teams. We can do this by addressing specific audiences such as patients, investors, or potential employees; or we can dive in to discuss specific tactics on a case-by-case basis. Either way, we need to change a broken paradigm of trying to encourage legal/corporate teams to sign on to "e" and social media wholesale at one time.
I look forward to Day 2 and more efforts to shape this industry!
Tags: ePharma, social media, social networking, online marketing, DTC advertising
Jennifer - February 13, 2009, 10:21 am
Thanks for joining us at the conference, John.
http://epharmasummit.blogspot.com