Today, the IgniteBLOG reported the first ever branded pharma tweet. The tweet came from twitter.com/racewithinsulin. Of course, I found out about  in on Twitter.

This development is interesting from a couple of perspectives. The twitter feed is from a brand advocate, rather than a company. The twitter homepage includes both Levemir and Novolog important safety information and logos as part of the page background, making it almost like a brand.com website. Ignite did a very nice writeup on the effort in a previous blog post, so I won’t repeat the analysis.

The tweet itself – apparently the 12th tweet made – includes both the full product name (brand name and generic), and a link to the prescribing information. My knee jerk response was to say this was out of step with the recent FDA crackdown and the new rules for paid search. But it’s not. There’s no indication anywhere (I had thought diabetes was in the twitter username – obviously now I see that it’s not). The link is even to the PI, rather than a brand or unbranded website. If you were weird enough to view it on the Twitter homepage for the account you would get the whole story. It’s like wearing belt and suspenders – they’re covered a couple of ways. To my mind they could have linked directly to the brand.com.

So congratulations to breaking some new ground to the team at Novo Nordisk! Weaving an occasional promo tweet into the stream from this brand advocate seems palatable enough from the point of view of one of his follows. “And now for a message from our sponsors.” Of course, they’ll have to watch the ratio of promotion to hard news, but that seems a reasonable trade-off.

Social Media Landscape

Were any of you on Facebook this week? If not, your kids probably were, and you’ll be there shortly. The fastest growing segment of the Facebook population is 35 plus years of age. That means that our core demographic target as a company is moving into online social media very fast.

Social Media is an approach to online communications that shares most or all of these traits:

• Participation
• Openness
• Conversation
• Community
• Connectedness

It’s an individual searching for connection with someone just “like me.” And people take the advice of a person that they trust as seriously or more seriously than a doctor’s advice.

Sure, it makes headlines, but is this just a flash in the pan? Hardly. Sit back while we work through a few facts. Facebook has over 80 million unique users, just about the size of Germany. English Wikipedia has over 800,000 articles and is larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica and Microsoft Encarta combined. YouTube served over 3.6 billion video streams last month. There are 26MM US blog writers, and 60MM US blog readers. All of the proceeding figure are growing at a rate of 25-40% a year.

What is happening with the online population at large applies very specifically to healthcare information seeking. There are 63MM US adults who use “Health 2.0″ content and services online, meaning health blogs, forums, videos, patient support groups, etc.

Working in pharma, we know our business is different than most. We are not selling Skittles. We have safety, regulatory and legal concerns that make it difficult to engage in a two-way dialog. We are most comfortable in a one-way dialog, where we do all the talking. We are working within a box. But that’s the challenge to our creativity  -  how we can be influential within the box we’re stuck in.

Let’s take a look at some of the leading Social Media channels and how they have been used in our industry.

There are over 113 million blogs worldwide. About 45% of online consumers read blogs, about the same percentage as those that use social networking sites. With blogs anyone can publish their own online diary – the trick is getting someone to read it. Many succeed at this challenge. The online newspaper/blog the www.huffingtonpost.com had 6 million visits just last month, about one-third the traffic to www.nytimes.com. When consumers are looking for health information online, many find blogs and take value from the personal stories there. Blogs such as www.sixuntilme.com (Diabetes), www.hepcboy.com (HepC), and www.addadhdblog.com (ADD & ADHD) are hugely influential in their categories..

Online social networking sites are communities of people who share common interests and enjoy similar activities. The names Facebook and LinkedIn are part of the everyday elevator chatter you now hear on campus. Pharmaceutical products are cautiously working their way into this space. Gardasil, the cervical cancer vaccine from Merck, won raves for its TV advertising. They are equally skilled online – just search ‘cervical cancer’ on Facebook and you’ll come to an area where you can learn more, share your story on the “wall,” or become an “HPV Ambassador.”

If you looked at YouTube as if it were a search engine, it would now be the second largest behind Google! You can easily search on YouTube for any of a variety of conditions: Diabetes, ADHD, Asthma, etc. and you’ll be surprised at the number of results you’ll find.  Try “Mechanism of Action,” and you’ll see our own Gleevec leading the pack. 80% of online consumers view video each year.

Blogs, Social Networking and YouTube are only the most visible tactics. There’s also Twitter, Wikis, Social Bookmarking, Virtual Reality, and new options coming every day.

So what is Novartis doing in this area? According to a recent tally by Basel, there are 56 past, ongoing or planned projects in Social Media. There are Zometa and Femara Facebook pages. There are clinical trials for Diabetes on YouTube. Oncology recently launched a site to connect all the Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia (CML) patients all over the world.

It’s important to realize that Social Media should not live in a bubble; it’s most effective when part of an integrated marketing strategy. Social Media strategy begins with objectives and the correct tactics will follow.

Don’t have a big budget for Social Media Monitoring? There are many available free tools that are high-quality and offer interesting insights. The following list contains both Best-in-Class solutions for monitoring as well as specialty tools for specific purposes. If you know of one you feel should have made this list, use the comments section at the bottom of the post, and I’ll keep this updated.

Monitoring the Blogosphere / User Generated Content
Mainstream media lags substantially the buzz in the Blogosphere. Many people turn to blogs for news first, particularly in areas where experts offer specific insights or are ‘untainted’ by profit motives. You can track you own company, brands, and issues, using the following services. You can also easily track your competitor’s companies, brands, and issues.

Technorati One the best known and for good reasons. Comprehensive and with custom RSS feeds that let you get quick updates on any blog that mentions your company name.

Blog Pulse (Buzzmetrics) The free version of Buzzmetrics from Neilsen Online. It has very interesting trend and conversation tracking tools.

Google Blog Search If a tree falls in the blog forest, it’s likely that it will be found by Google Blog Search. Even if the blog isn’t in Google news, or doesn’t show in a Google search, Google Blog Search might still find that obscure story about that competitor’s launch. You can set up auto-alerts that will be delivered via email or RSS.

Trendpedia has a simple interface and seems to be well-regarded.

Icerocket was recently singled out to me by some Social Media pros as strong. It has tabs at the top to easily limit your search to Blogs, Twitter, MySpace, etc.

Boardtracker Forums and message boards can host some of the most important conversations about your company and brands. How can you find them? Use this.

Google Alerts makes it very simple to keep track of the latest buzz via email. Google Alerts let you track web, blogs, news and groups for any phrase you want. You can select to receive emails daily, weekly, or “as it happens.”

YouTube If you think of YouTube as a search engine it would now be #2 in search! Video is the preferred learning method of many people. Maybe your company or brand is there?

Facebook Lexicon Facebook has become so big, it’s time to pay attention to the conversations that happen there. All you need is a Facebook account to search any keyword and instantly see how often it is discussed on Facebook user’s “walls.”

Twitter
Twitter is an animal unto itself with an avid following. You can peer into the cyclone of posts by using one of the following tools. These are just a few of the many, Twitter seems to stoke creative software solutions.

Twitter Search is Twitter’s native search engine. Just type in what you’re looking for.

Tweet Scan searches Twitter, identi.ca and other Laconica-based sites with more being added all the time. You can search public messages and user profiles with results available via email, RSS, JSON, and Twhirl.

Twit Scoop shows what’s hot on Twitter right now in a ‘cloud’ format. It has interesting search and graphing capability.

Other Interesting Discovery Tools
Blogs and message boards are just part of the ‘long tail’ of the UGC web.

Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by their users. People collectively determine the value of content. You can use the search box to see if you rank.

Stubleupon helps you “stumble” around the Web and find new content. You tell the service about your professional interests or your hobbies, and it serves up sites to match them.

That’s the short list of Best-in-Class solutions. It should be enough to keep you up all night searching. If you feel I’ve missed a key solutions, use the comments section at the bottom of the post, and I’ll update the list.

Later Additions:

Here’s a huge master list – How-To: Search the Social Web – Ultimate Toolkit

A big list for Twitter specifically: 9 Twitter Search Apps : Better Than Twitter & Google

Tired of emailing your friends, then calling, then emailing again, then wondering who’s going to show up for your soccer, football, or tennis game? Try Nike Playmaker. Interesting way to enable something online that’s always a pain to do – and extend the Nike brand.

Uniqlock Widget

From a funky Japanese clothing maker comes this incredible viral marketing effort. A clock with syncopated dancers shows every 5 seconds.  It’s energizing and hypnotic (in a delightfully weird pop-Japanese way) that it earned the Grand Clio in Interactive at last week’s Clio Awards.

As with most interactive entries, you really have to experience, the “Music. Dance. Clock” action, as it’s called, with that translated-from-the-Japanese locution, for yourself. You’ll see it in the side bar on this blog at the top. It’s very absorbing in a strange way. It’s a world-wide viral marketing campaign, maybe one of the best.