The Digital Maturity Curve – where is your brand? #efp reflections Part 1 March 22, 2011
Posted by Kay Wesley in CRM, Marketing, Search, Social Media, Websites.2 comments
There were three themes that emerged for me from this year’s eyeforpharma (#efp) eMarketing Europe in Munich in early March and I’ll write about them in my next 3 posts.
First, there was a sense of “where are we on the digital journey”, what can we learn from where we’ve been and how do we get to the “next level”, whatever that is.
Second, there was looking to the future; the core content of our own Complete Digital presentation, but also featuring heavily in lots of others’.
Third, the angst that surrounds changing company culture. How can we get the behaviour change across our organisation that we need to make that future happen? Not just in marketing, but throughout?
First of all then, let’s look at the digital journey. Several commentators referred to this at eyeforpharma and Peter Hinssen (@Hinssen) in his opening address, The New Normal, asked “are we nearly there yet?” Meredith Ressi (@MeredithRessi) of Manhattan had a nice curve of development over time from “physician-led medicine” to “participatory medicine”.
For the purpose of discussion here I’m going to use my own Digital Maturity Curve. You might like to consider where your brand or business is on the curve:
The first step, that we all went through in the 1990s, is “Visibility” – recognising the potential of digital and sticking up a brochure-ware (in those days) website. In those days we were still in the “push” mindset and these websites did not offer much interaction – the days when the most of the home page of BMJ.com was a picture of the front cover of the BMJ magazine.
The BMJ has moved a long way since then, but Jens Monsees of Google challenged us in the pharma industry on this point – many of those old, out-of-date and frankly poor-quality websites are still out there. We should “eat our own dogfood” he said, spend some time reading your own website and see what kind of experience you have…. Even in 2011 “information seeking” is still the most important online activity for healthcare consumers and physicans alike (@MeredithRessi) and I ask you – if your customers are looking for information, what are you doing to provide it in an easily accessible place and relevant format?
We soon figured out that in this medium we can of course “Interact” – buy, sell, recruit, play, ask questions and get answers. For pharma this means the opportunity to offer higher-quality interactive experiences such as eDetailing , eLearning, video and games, interesting content on demand when customers want it. For example, at #efp Mark Petersen showed how gaming can engage people in serious subjects such as the FAS’s Immune Attack game: http://www.fas.org/immuneattack/
The next big leap on the Maturity Curve is to “Personalise” – if we are interacting we can learn more about our customers and offer a more tailored service, Amazon-style. Gareth Thomas of Doctors.net described how they carefully segment physicians on speciality, sub-speciality, seniority, location, medical school (and year of graduation), clinical interests, and, further, on their behaviours in the community.
Supporting our point about information, the top services for Doctors.net are “Email” and “Education” with the Forums coming in close third, but each member will be offered services tailored to his or her preferences.
On to our next big leap – “Multichannel Relationships” – recognising that the person on the website is the same person using the app and having the face-to-face interaction. Tesco, the UK supermarket did a great job of this – merging their “in store points/favourites” with “online points/favourites” first, and now have an iPhone app to update your shopping with. In all cases I am the same consumer with the same profile and Tesco “knows” me. In pharma we often refer to this as “closed loop marketing” – connecting the rep interaction, with subsequent digital follow-up. At #efp Fonny Schenck showed how AZ in the US is supporting Nexium with a combination of self-service digital capabilities from eSampling to eDetailing, combined with customer service helpdesk and telephone account managers, providing a seamless multichannel service to physicians.
The next big leap, of course is social media and networking. At #efp we heard about how Citibank has developed an internal social network for employees, a great way to help people learn how to use these channels effectively (and something we’ve employed here at Complete, too). We heard the term “Chief Listening Officer” from Lucien Engelen of Radboud University (first time I’ve heard the term outside FMCG) and saw a couple of great examples of UGC, such as Janssen’s excellent Living with ADHD YouTube channel (http://www.livingwithadhd.co.uk/ ), that allows comments from anyone about this controversial condition, and is moderated but only to remove comments constrained by regulation or the law, not those critical of the condition or company.
Interestingly at eyeforpharma, a digital-savvy audience you might think, a straw poll showed only 15% of the audience were regular Tweeters and a further 15% had “no interest” in Twitter at all.
You might ask where is Mobile on the Digital Maturity Curve? At #efp repeated speakers warned against “app for apps’ sake” projects given that most smartphone users use just 7 apps frequently and the rest hardly at all. Good apps, like good websites, meet a defined user need, are interactive, engaging, informative and fun to use.
Mobile is, of course, throughout the Curve, which is not really about technology but about behaviour - how we use the different platforms that are available to us. Twitter and facebook can be used as visibility tools at one level. So can mobile – creating your website so it has a user-friendly smartphone version is probably the most important thing you can do right now, since as Manhattan told us that most of the growth in internet use is mobile based – and physicians are now spending 14 hours a week online.
So there it is, the Digital Maturity Curve. You can see my #efp description of it here:
What happens next – at the top of the Digital Maturity Curve – what is the next big leap? The picture shows a fairly woolly “Web 3.0” but does not define it clearly. To answer this question, we leapt off the top of the curve and into the year 2016 to see what “Healthcare 3.0” might look like….that is the subject of my next post.
Why not Wikipedia? October 19, 2010
Posted by Kay Wesley in Search, Social Media, Uncategorized, Websites.add a comment
At the recent Digipharm meeting (29-30 September) in London, I led a discussion about Wikipedia using live Twitter-voting (thanks to the adrenaline-pumped efforts of my colleague Dave Clarke, who made it work on the day!) to see what the audience of pharma marketers and communicators thought about this phenomenon, the largest collection of knowledge the world has ever seen.
Why is Wikipedia important?
It is highly visible in Google for almost all subjects from blast furnaces to the Rolling Stones. This is because (among other things)
- It is content-rich – lots of text about each subject, descriptive headings, images with labels.
- Its link popularity. It has lots of links to it and from it and what’s more the links are to and from related content.
- It is updated regularly. Google likes websites that get updated frequently.
The reason we all love Google is that it has a pretty good algorithm for putting the most relevant and up-to-date content as the top search results, so we trust Wikipedia because Google does.
What about the pharmaceutical industry?
But for our industry, Wikipedia is “The Elephant in the Room”. It is big, obvious, can’t be ignored, and yet we continue to behave as though it isn’t there. Why?
Perhaps our customers don’t use Wikipedia – can doctors and patients really trust it? Studies suggest they do – according to Manhattan’s latest research (Taking the Pulse and Cybercitizen 2010), 75% of physicians use it regularly and it is the top patient information resource in all countries surveyed.
Are they getting a good service from Wikipedia? Generally, no. A peer-reviewed study (2008) compared Wikipedia to Medscape Drug Reference (MDR), by looking for answers to 80 different questions covering eight categories of drug information, including adverse drug events, dosages, and mechanism of action. The results are shown in the graph – more than 80% success with MDR but only 40% for Wikipedia.
None of the answers from Wikipedia were determined factually inaccurate, while they found four inaccurate answers in MDR. But the researchers found 48 errors of omission in the Wikipedia entries, compared to 14 for MDR.
Why are drug pages on Wikipedia so incomplete?
The answer to this was provided by the Digipharm audience. We found that only 18% of them had updated a Wikipedia drug page, and almost 90% of the pharmaceutical companies present had no policy or strategy to keep Wikipedia up to date:
Why doesn’t the industry do something?
To get to the bottom of this question we asked a few more, and the answers we got were quite encouraging.
First, the perception that Wikipedia is a free-for-all without any control is gradually being countered:
Second, we know (it seems) that neither industry regulation nor Wikipedia’s own rules preclude us from updating Wikipedia pages:
For example, the APBI Code says “reference material for prescription only medicines may be included on the Internet and be accessible by members of the public provided that they are not presented in such a way as to be promotional in nature”. What about Wikipedia itself? Here’s what the audience thought:
Wikipedia’s guidelines simply say you should “Avoid, or exercise great caution when editing articles related to your organisation, or its competitors, as well as projects and products they are involved with” and ensure you adhere to the guiding principles:
So, the industry code and Wikipedia guidance are consistent – content should be referenced, unbiased and non-promotional.
So why don’t we update pages about our drug products?
Maybe because there is still some uncertainty about accountability:
In fact Wikipedia has robust version controls and it can be clearly identified who has updated what. Provided you edit pages whilst logged-in, your edits can be attributed to you, but others are not. Furthermore, if a page is vandalized or inadvertently made inaccurate by another user, it is easy to revert to the accurate version in a couple of clicks, as a full page history is stored.
For an industry that is both information- and expertise-rich and comfortable with manuscripts written from an unbiased point of view with good citation, it seems an anomaly that we have not embraced this platform, a generally-considered-successful experiment in information democratization.
Perhaps, as one physician colleague said, it is because it is not “peer-reviewed”. But that depends who you consider your “peers” to be, doesn’t it?
This is a resource for everyone, so in this case everyone – doctors, patients, caregivers, the general public – are the peers. Wikipedia works as an encyclopaedia because generally people only update topics they are interested in and have some knowledge of. A patient’s contribution about a health condition, provided it is factual, is as valid as a physician’s.
Surely as an industry that values transparency, medical accuracy and high quality information standards we should be dealing with this dominant presence in the information landscape of all our customers?
In other words… can we at least acknowledge “The Elephant in the Room” and start talking about how to address it, in the interests of better patient care?
