patients are becoming active participants and contributors to research  

Patients, researchers, and pharmaceutical companies are natural allies. They all want the same thing – to find a cure. In the meantime, they want to reduce symptoms and challenges associated with the disease to give patients a full life.

In the past, research on these two fronts has been the province of scientists, with patients anxiously looking on, raising political and social awareness for their disorder in hopes of generating funding, or raising the funds themselves. But now, patients are becoming active participants and contributors to research - not by doing the work themselves, but by contributing collective data. Read More

online is the ideal medium for promoting your brand. 

Stacy Busking, Account Manager at Siren Interactive, contributes this post:

Like most people looking back on the evolution of their professional career, I had no idea that one day I would be championing my clients to do advertising, excuse me, e-marketing… on something called the Internet!? Like most industry-mates born before the 1980s, I fell in love with the world of advertising while becoming infatuated with the sea of images on billboards, the traditional type, in Times Square.

Of course, I started my career pushing paper, literally and figuratively, but now that I have committed myself to eMarketing, the game has changed for both me and my clients.  Now that I’m past being intimidated by it, online is the ideal medium for promoting your brand. As an example, allow me to list a few things that are similar across all advertising initiatives.  First, I will tell you how it was in the traditional environment from my perspective, and secondly, how it is different and better when doing it online.

Read More

Advertising is media, and in such an over-saturated world, it’s hard to get attention. Online, the best way to get attention is by combining content and advertising. We as pharma marketers have the added benefit of actually helping people by providing answers to their health questions. In fact, the better you can match up your answers to their questions the better you are going to do.

This is the best part of web 2.0 in action. People vote with their browsers.

If marketers are already communicating with their key stakeholders they can be prepared so that when unexpected things happen, they are in a position to respond and be believed. 

I listened to Seth Godin talk about his new book, Meatball Sundaes in a webcast last week outlining trends related to web 2.0 that are changing businesses forever. He thinks the new marketing landscape represents an “industrial revolution”.

One of the ideas he brought up that is not talked about in healthcare marketing is the need for speed. Because of the internet, information that used to take weeks to get out is now posted almost when it happens. So when Tysabri had a fatality in a clinical trial the news was all over the patient blogs before Biogen Idec responded. The patients controlled that story.

I think for healthcare marketers dealing with the regulatory process, the only way to control a story now is to already own relationships online with their various constituents. If marketers are already communicating with their key stakeholders they can be prepared so that when unexpected things happen, they are in a position to respond and be believed.