?>?> 2009 May

Lance Armstrong Reports on Lance Armstrong; What does it mean for your Brand?

May 28, 2009 By

lance and levi after stage 15 — powered by http://www.livestrong.com
Two weeks ago Lance Armstrong stopped talking to the press. Initial reports were that he took this step after being angered over some media reports that he was responsible for a rider protest that occurred in Milan during the Giro D’Italia. But what’s interesting is that he is still talking to his fans, daily. And he is talking to  his fans directly through Twitter and his video blog postings without the traditional media.
In Robert Mackey’s article in today’s New York Times “Lance Armstrong Covers Lance Armstrong” Mackey writes:
Given his immense fame, and the power of the new media tools he has obviously mastered, Mr. Armstrong is now free to cut out the middle man and go straight to the people.

Ever the competitor, Mr. Armstrong even seems to be enjoying tweaking his new rivals in the press corps, secure in the knowledge that he is scooping them hour after hour as he posts regular updates to his chatty Twitter feed, where he banters with other cyclists, comments on his comeback and even answers questions from some of his more than 933,000 followers.Last week he even took a moment to post this comment on a news report saying that some members of the cycling media had stopped quoting his tweets, in an effort to force him to engage with them:

Bitter sports reporters are boycotting @lancearmstrong’s Tweets. Good luck with that, and welcome to 2009.
Whether you applaud Lance for his media blackout or not what lessons can your brand take from his use of social media to stay in touch with his audience?
Filed Under: public relations, social media, twitter, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

Big Pharma Beginning to Join Social Media Party

May 18, 2009 By

Marissa Miley and Rich Thomaselli reported in Ad Age last week that “Big Pharma is lumbering into the digital realm, using a growing chunk of its $4.7 billion DTC dollars to reach patients and prescribers on blogs, Twitter and YouTube.”

While this might not seem newsworthy to most, according to the article “Big Pharma Finally Taking Big Steps to Reach Patients With Digital Media” is big news to anyone following the adoption of social media in the Pharma space. Miley and Thomaselli found that “Johnson & Johnson keeps a respected and popular blog; Novartis, Boehringer Ingelheim and AstraZeneca all use Twitter to deliver news about their respective companies; and most recently, Sanofi-Aventis and AstraZeneca each launched branded YouTube channels to reach certain patient groups.”

Why has it taken Big Pharma so long to begin to adopt social media? Mark Senak, senior VP at Fleishman Hillard and author of the blog, Eye on FDA is quoted in the article, “They’re late to the game because no one wants to get a warning letter.”

Miley and Thomselli write:

To further illustrate the complexities of a digital world without clear DTC guidelines, it took AstraZeneca more than eight months of meetings with a team of 15 to 20 company experts from the      regulatory, legal, compliance, corporate, and brand management departments before it put up a YouTube channel for its asthma drug Symbicort. “The social-media space is very much a gray area,” said Dana Settembrino, senior brand communications manager for the drug. “In that sense it makes it challenging.”

The good news is that Big Pharma is taking steps to engage their customers that will hopefully in the end benefit their customers around the world that are suffering from health problems. You can read the entire article here.

Filed Under: social media, twitter Tagged With: , , ,

Is your Brand Boring?

May 14, 2009 By

According to Josh Bernoff, senior analyst with Forrester and co-author of Groundswell (my favorite book to date on social media), there are two kinds of brands in the world–brands that people like to talk about and brands that people don’t like to talk about.

In his recent post “Social Strategy for Exciting (and Boring) Brands”, Bernoff writes, “Brands that people don’t like to talk about – I’ll call them “boring” brands – are everywhere. If, like most marketers, you market a boring brand, then you’re really earning your living as a marketer. That’s because you are trying to get people interested in something they don’t really care about.”

Bernoff is right–it can be difficult to get people or rather potential customers interested in a brand that is viewed as boring.

In his post, Bernoff writes:

The boring brands have different problem, but social applications can help them, too. The key with boring brands is to get people talking about their problems, since they won’t talk about your brand. In advertising, you can force messages on people watching other things. In a social context, this fails miserably.

Applications that talk about customers problems create “borrowed relevance,” since you generate talk they care about, then make yourself a part of it. And in perhaps the most dramatic example, Procter & Gamble knew girls wouldn’t talk about tampons, but would talk about music, cliques, and school, so it created beinggirl.com as a vehicle to deliver (very quietly) the occasional feminine care products message.

Apple retro
Creative Commons License photo credit: kyz

The key –whether using social media or traditional public relations and marketing– is to focus on talking about your customers problems and how you are helping to solve them. The key to success if you have a boring brand is not the product or service you are selling but how you are changing lives or companies through your product. But, this is a bitter pill for many companies to swallow. Many of the boring brands have fallen in love with their products and don’t want to accept that they are not the story. The engaged, happy customer is the story.

At the end of his post, Bernoff writes:

If your brand is talkable, your social efforts will surface the brand enthusiasts who have the most influence. If it’s boring, your social applications will help you find your rare but valuable brand enthusiasts, or even generate a few. Pay attention to these people. Because as advertising clutter rises and word of mouth becomes more important, they’re about to become some of your most important corporate assets.

How are you driving interest in your brand?

Filed Under: marketing, public relations, social media Tagged With: , ,

Questions Brands Should Be Asking About Twitter

May 13, 2009 By

I had other plans for my blog today but on my way to writing I stopped by Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang and read his blog “7 Questions Some Brands are Asking about Twitter.” This is an excellent blog for any company contemplating their Twitter strategy to read.

Below are the questions that Owyang wrote that a handful of others brands are starting to ask:

  1. Should we create multiple accounts for different divisions? How should we name them?  How should the content be different?
  2. Is it ok to just tweet out news on our main corporate account? Or should we be conversational?
  3. How do we get our corporate reps (sales, product teams) to use this tool, and be conversational?
  4. Should we follow folks? If so, what’s the protocol? Should we only follow folks that follow us? We don’t want to appear like ‘big brother’
  5. What are the tools to use to manage multiple authors/tweeters?
  6. How can we find other examples of B2B twitter examples?
  7. How should we brand our Twitter backgrounds images?

Twitter
Creative Commons License photo credit: respres

Based on my experience with clients, Brands should also consider asking:

  • Whose voice should we be using? CEO, Marketing? Should we identify who is posting?
  • How do we jump into conversations? And should we?
  • How much time should we be spending on Twitter?
  • What image for our Brand should we be using? Should it be a photo of the author or company or brand logo?
  • What’s the proper balance on our Brand’s tweets? Should it all be self promotion or should we be informational?
  • What is our purpose?

Any questions I missed?

Filed Under: How to, social media, twitter Tagged With: , ,

Pharma and Social Media; Can They Coexist

May 8, 2009 By

For nearly five years (2003-2008) I was the Public Relations counsel for a provider of predictive analytics and reporting software solutions that counted many of the world’s top pharmaceutical companies as its customers. My client’s software enabled life science and pharmaceutical researchers and analysts in drug discovery, development and clinical trials to more efficiently and accurately mine their data and utilize predictive analytics for their analysis. The work these researchers and analysts are doing is exciting and newsworthy.

However, there were many obstacles we ran into in getting the news out about the progress and innovation these researchers were achieving. The biggest hurdle was not with the individual researchers and analysts, but instead with the pharmaceutical companies’ corporate public relations and legal departments. So this week I was intrigued to see on Twitter that the April issue of Pharma Marketing News was “all about pharma & social media.”

Creation of Adam
Creative Commons License photo credit: Sebastian Bergmann

John Mack sets the stage for the issue by writing in the article “Social Media Opportunity or Nightmare” :

“Michelangelo’s nightmarish painting Last Judgement includes the image of a poor soul being dragged down to Hell by the devil’s agents. That image often comes to mind when I hear proponents of social media trying to persuade pharma marketers to just “dip their toe” in the social media waters. The other image I see is a shark lurking just below the water’s surface!”

Mack went on to argue:

“Many pharma marketers within drug companies and within agencies that work for drug companies are trying to move the needle forward to develop guidelines that the industry can follow. So far, however, they have left patients, physicians and other stakeholders out of the discussion. They have forgotten that patient empowerment built the very social networks that they wish to engage in. Personally, I believe pharmaceutical companies need to become truly patient-centric companies BEFORE they can even consider engaging in social media.”

Mack’s article reminded me of Jeremy Owyang’s blog “Troubled, Some Pharmaceuticals Turn a Blind Eye to the Blogosphere” from June 14, 2008 . In Owyang’s blog he reports:

“While this may not hold true for every pharmaceutical company, I recently met one who had banned it’s employees from monitoring blogs, social media and the online conversation.
[Why did this pharma company ban their employees to monitor blogs? If a patient complained about a treatment or medicine having ill-effects, then the pharma would would be liable to take action]. Responding to every customer can be very, very costly, considering how many people may be talking about medicines, often anonymously in online forums.”

It’s exciting to see that the pharmaceutical industry is now realizing it needs to be discussing and establishing guidelines for social media. Will pharma and social media be able to coexist? What do you think?

Filed Under: marketing, public relations, social media Tagged With: , , , , , ,

The Future of the Social Web

May 6, 2009 By

Filed Under: marketing, public relations, social web Tagged With: , ,