Pharma Strategy Blog

Hopefully, by the time y’all read this we have arrived here we are in Stockholm after a nighmarish week with Continental and United messing up big time with flights booked six months ago. Sometimes big corporations really fail to understand the importance of communication and customer loyalty. Eventually, it is only when there is competition, they stop and wonder why many people used the Law of Two Feet and walked. Maybe that is a subconscious metaphor for Big Pharma 🙂

Anyway, enough of all that. Let’s take a look at some of the social media tools being used at the ECCO conference this week as it seems to be an increasing trend for conference organisers to incorporate social media into their event. They have taken several forms, including downloadable apps for the schedule, subscription to talks and webcasts on iTunes or encouraging open dialogue on Twitter and Facebook amongst participants.

Two excellent examples I’ve seen this year, in terms of well organised and integrated social media tools, have been the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) and American Urological Association (AUA). While the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) inevitably gets the largest volume of tweets by dint of its sheer size, the smaller organisations have perhaps been more aggressive and creative in developing and utilising the tools more effectively for their members.

I’m really looking forward to seeing how things have progressed in Europe at the ECCO meeting, having had a very positive experience with planning most of my schedule on their new app. You can browse the sessions by day or type and add them easily to your calendar in local time in Stockholm. They appear in my calendar as ET but adjusted for the time zone. That’s a very nice touch many forget about and so the schedule goes wonky if you download it one time zone and attend the sessions in another! It looks like that will not be a problem with this app. Excellent!

Let’s take a look at what I could find in the ECCO program.

Social Media tools at ECCO

As mentioned yesterday, the official hashtag for Twitter is #emcc2011 and you can also follow the ECCO organisation on:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn

They also have some slick apps accessible by links or QR codes as preferred, to enable you to search and plan your schedule from the program:

• Apple iPhone/iPad
• Android phones

Tweets will most likely gather steam on Friday with the corporate symposia kicking off, as Thursday was the travel day for many.

Meanwhile, for those interested in following the conversations, as usual, we’re curating all the conference tweets below.