Novartis Marketing Excellence Newsletter – Change

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.

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