Social Media | Pharma Strategy Blog

Social media is NOT a strategy…

By MaverickNY on August 6, 2010

No, it is not a strategy in and of itself.

It is, however, a useful collection of tools that can be used tactically as part of an overall brand strategy… one element or part of the whole, if you like. To make social media work well you need to integrate it with more traditional approaches that capture the imagination and inspire people.

New (digital) toys on their own will not do much for your brand or ROR, return on relationships. Adding value, will however, make a huge difference. Deep down, we all know this intuitively, but it’s easy to get distracted by shiny lures and forget the basics of marketing.

Joe Chernov and Valerie Maltoni illustrate this conundrum perfectly (see link below for the cartoon source):

Source: Eloqua Blog

If a consultant or agency comes to see you Pharma folks touting “social media strategy” you instantly know they’re a fake and don’t know what they’re talking about ;-).

Isolated tactical execution without a strong focused brand strategy is doomed to failure from the start so avoid that trap.

Think differently.

Does lung cancer have a stigma attached to it?

By MaverickNY on August 2, 2010

At the recent American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) meeting in Washington DC, a press conference was held to discuss new treatments and options for people with lung cancer. In a break with tradition, the briefing was held not only with some of the top researchers in the area including Drs Ed Kim and Roy Herbst from MD Anderson, but the local Georgetown doctor brought a couple of her patients with her to drive home some important messages:

Clinical trials are important to provide access to new medicines
It's a devastating disease
Not all people with lung cancer smoke
Not all people with lung cancer are elderly

It struck me at that moment that of all the main cancers (say breast, lung, colon, prostate), lung cancer unfortunately seems to have the most stigma associated with it. Perhaps this is because of the smoking association, but quite frankly, one fifth of people with the disease will be never smokers, often younger with families. This was illustrated by the two gentlemen at the press briefing – one had never smoked and one had smoked a little in his youth, yet both had lung cancer and both were young (they looked under 45 yo).

My Twitter buddy, Dr Jack West at Swedish illustrated this point well with his very sad but poignant blog post about a young (42 yo) woman who died over the weekend. A tragic loss, and no, she had never smoked.

Looking at the American Cancer Society figures, you can get a better picture of how devastating this disease really is:

"About 222,520 new cases of lung cancer will be diagnosed (116,750 among men and 105,770 among women).

There will be an estimated 157,300 deaths from lung cancer (86,220 among men and 71,080 among women), accounting for about 28% of all cancer deaths.

Lung cancer is by far the leading cause of cancer death among both men and women. More people die of lung cancer than of colon, breast, and prostate cancers combined."

From those figures alone, you can see that many people will have maybe, 1-2 years from the time of diagnosis, unless they are lucky to be diagnosed very early and have a chance of cure with surgery and chemoradiation. More people die from lung cancer than the other big solid tumours combined – that's an astonishing statistic in itself.

One of the other things I've noticed is how breast and prostate cancer groups are extremely active in advocacy, lung cancer not so much. There are some great people doing good things though to address this gap, though. Some examples include:

AACR have been very active in this field and are making great strides with increased efforts to harness the integration between basic research (including biomarkers) and clinical practice through their alliance with the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) organisation. This will hopefully speed up new developments from bench to bedside.
If you haven't seen it, Dr West's website, GRACE, provides some truly excellent education resources and information for people with lung cancer – it's well worth checking out.
On Twitter, WTFlungcancer through the sterling efforts of Jennifer Windrum, are raising awareness of lack of funding for lung cancer initiatives through social media outreach.
Another great resource on Twitter is LUNGevity, which seeks to help raise funds for lung cancer research, as well as providing support for people.
Pharma and Biotech companies are also doing their bit with over 1,000 trials posted on the clinical trials database to help with access to new experimental therapies and pipeline agents.

There are many other examples like this, but changing the stigma associated with the disease, and more importantly, developing better methods of early detection, diagnosis and treatment is going to take some time.

What initiatives would you like to see in this area? How can we help change things for the better?

{UPDATE: originally, I intended to link to Fard Johnmar's excellent post on lung cancer pessimism and the stigma associated with it after a Twitter discussion we had about the topic, but got distracted by some urgent client requests that came in. My sincere apologies to Fard for forgetting! The study with their non-profit partners, The Lung Cancer Alliance, is here – it's well written, nicely produced and worth checking out.}

Photo Credit: Andreia

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Simplifying data capture and blog post workflow

By MaverickNY on July 15, 2010

Recently, I’ve had a lot of enquiries as to how I manage to write so many blog posts, either in terms of finding the time or staying current.

The answer is simple – I use tools to help simplify and minimise the effort involved. You could also use this kind of web 2.0 approach for creating a database and tracking data, intelligence, keeping current if you work in the Pharma or Biotech industry, whether a scientist, a marketer or a PR professional. Of course, you could spend hours Googling stuff or reading a few health sites online, but there are other ways to stay ahead of the pack.

The key parameters at play here can be summarised:

Gather data
Process and understand information
Perform analysis
Generate Insights

Far too many people often only do the first two tasks, but without analysis and insights, the data means very little. So what are the tools of my trade?

1. Evernote

I’ve talked about Evernote in the past, which is a nifty data capture tool we use daily here at Icarus Consultants. They have both free and premium versions to suit everyone’s pocket.

When starting projects, we clip relevant information from the internet into a new Evernote Notebook and gather it all in one place. You can use a desktop or a smart phone for this task and dump as much information as you like into it for later searching. This makes it easier to digest when looking at the big picture and gathering ideas and seeing trends. You can also search your own database for existing information, which is very useful for blog posts or writing reports around a topic.

I often create and write blog posts in Evernote too. The research information is already there and it’s straightforward to use the editor as well, as backing up and synchronising the information across multiple platforms. We’ve all written something in Word or a Blog Editor and lost the content >.< but l have found Evernote more reliable for saving information, which can then be cut/paste with minimal editing into the Blog platform or Office for reports. I also have a bunch of articles, reports and blog posts that get part drafted and finished later, acting as a useful repository for gathering ideas.

Other good uses? Need some information on the road while talking to someone? A quick search in the app my iPhone will usually bring it up.

The other side of the coin is generating and gathering data. I’ve mentioned that you can clip research to an app such as Evernote on the go, but I also have a LOT of information in RSS, whether it be news items, feeds for the latest articles in tens of cancer and science journals, blogs from a variety of sources, rss alerts by topic or keyword etc. Keeping track of this huge volume of information used to be unwieldy.

2. My 6 Sense

One tool I really love and have been using for a while is My 6 Sense. This cool app takes all the rss feeds from my Google Reader, which is clumsy and awkward to read, and processes them into a more manageable fashion.

Several times a day I can check the app on my iPhone and see what’s new or relevant. Over time the app algorithms learn what your particular interests are and creates a page of what it considers to be useful items of interest in your RSS feeds via the Relevance tab or as they come in (the Time tab) as shown below (left photo).

Data is social, though; it cries out to be shared with others. The M6S app allows you to add social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook etc and share any interesting items with your friends or colleagues too. Here, you can also see the items from my shared stream as an example of what I found interesting and streamed to others to read:

Over time, as you use the app more, it gets much better at predicting what you like or may find interesting. One thing I miss from the M6S app is a Search button – what happens if I want to find a bunch of interesting articles in my RSS database on a given topic, eg PI3K or something similar? At the moment, there’s no obvious way to do that as far as I can tell, but it would certainly be really useful to me.

3. SimpleNote

I confess that after years of losing data unexpectedly, I’ve become a bot of a plain text geek. On my Macs, TextEdit was something I use daily, especially when taking notes from market research interviews on the fly. Then one day, someone mentioned SimpleNote, which is a beautifully simple yet flexible tool for gathering text notes.

For some months now, I’ve been using the App on my iPhone, which allows me to jot down ideas, tasks, notes to self etc on the fly… essentially simple notes.

Then recently, I realised that the free iPhone app also gave me access to the desktop app, which opens up a whole new world of utility and practicality. Here was something that could help me do multiple things efficiently:

Research and find interesting journal articles or news about say, PI3-kinase in My 6 Sense
Email article links to self via iPhone
On desktop, cut/paste multiple snippets of information to SimpleNote
Search SimpleNote for older articles
Write blog post in SimpleNote
Cut/paste blog post to TypePad for posting
Sync selected information with DropBox and read from any computer later

Take a look at the snapshot below for the basic SimpleNote concept:

You can see how neat and intuitive this is at first glance and how easy it is to find information, whether it be data or contact information or even the reference link months after clipping it by scrolling down in an individual note:

The DOI is really useful because when I blog about journal articles, I only have to cut/paste the DOI into the Research Blogging site and it generates a nifty bit of code that provides easy access to the article via a link for anyone interested in it.

Over time, I diligently put in tonnes of stuff into these tools, whether Evernote or SimpleNote and they come in very handy for research for blog posts and consulting reports. Essentially, I find that I tend to use Evernote for web clipping and SimpleNote for text processing.

Of course, the short answer to the blogging question is you either get more efficient and smarter at gathering, processing, analysing and generating insights or you work longer hours. Being a good European, I’d rather work smarter and hope that people appreciate the insights generated either in the blog posts here or in client report :-).

What are your favourite tools and apps that make a difference to your daily workflow?

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How cognitive surplus will change the world: Clay Shirky

By MaverickNY on June 29, 2010

Here's an interesting and informative TED video I just came across, where Clay Shirky talks about cognitive surplus and how it will change the world.

The idea behind the concept of "cognitive surplus" is that we use spare brain cycles while online to build a more cooperative world. In other words, new technologies enable loose collaborations to evolve.

I'm not sure I like the term 'cognitive surplus' but Shirky is an eloquent, thoughtful and engaging speaker who is well worth listening to:

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Social media and bookmarking

By MaverickNY on May 19, 2010

One of the cool things about using social media sites such as Twitter is the myriad of interesting links on science and cancer related topics that fly by my stream every day. Clearly, the sheer volume means that you can't track them all or even read half of them, but maybe you can capture and search them later.

Well, that was my simple thinking at least and the reason I connected the Packrati.us tool to Twitter and Delicious yesterday, thinking that would be a simple and neat solution (HT to William Gunn for the idea):

Except I forgot one important little bit of detail – I'm also using Delicious to capture my science and academic papers by bookmarking them and sharing the public feed as links to this blog for others who may be interested. Now, when you bookmark manually, you can choose whether the bookmark is public or private, thus sending only science and cancer related links in my case to this blog automatically via Twitterfeed and any personal ones get hidden.

Yesterday, I set the Packrati.us Twitter to Delicious tool up and feeling rather pleased with myself, merrily went off to client meetings for the day. It was only on the way back while stuck in the rain in a traffic jam that I suddenly remembered the Delicious to Blog Twitterfeed and went a little pale at what might have churned out in my absence, one of those *face palm* moments!

Apologies to all those who got any links or stray blog posts from the Twitter links I'm curating. For now, I've turned off the Delicious Twitterfeed so no more links will post to this blog for now. Packrati.us have stated that the little box for private bookmarks is 'coming soon' so hopefully I'll be able to have the best of both worlds by curating interesting Twitter links and sharing ones I like here too.

Cool tools are great fun, but sometimes the implications of the connections and output doesn't always go as you might expect!

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Capturing the big picture of the 2010 Annual AACR tweets

By MaverickNY on April 18, 2010

After being here in DC a day, it didn't take me long to realise that everyone is using a hodge podge of hashtags including #AACR, #AACR10 and even AACR or AACR 2010. Some researchers are tweeting without hashtags, so do check out others commentary such as Prof W Eldeiry too as everyone is attending different sessions. The poster sessions are huge here, three different sections, twice a day as well as a multitude of education sessions, mini symposia and plenty of preclinical, genomic and biomarker research.

I've therefore captured them in the Cover It Live widget below for easy tracking of everyone's tweets. The event will until Wednesday, when the meeting finishes.

The big focus this year seems to be on relating translational medicine to clinical research, which is a great thing. The big event today is the plenary at 9.45am when some famous names in translational research will be talking. I can't wait!

For those following in the backchannel, do feel free to join in and follow the event remotely.

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Managing Multiple Myeloma: turning an acute cancer into a chronic disease

By MaverickNY on April 16, 2010

The other day while travelling home on a long train journey, I was browsing the NY Times app on my iPhone and came across an interesting story about multiple myeloma in the Health section:

"For many patients with cancers like chronic lymphoma, chronic myelocytic leukemia and now multiple myeloma, longevity lies in the ability of science to remain one step ahead of the malignancy by unraveling its genetic and molecular underpinnings and producing treatments tailored to counter them."

Now, I don't think there is actually something called chronic lymphoma (non-Hodgkins lymphoma (NHL), chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) and chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), yes), but you get the gist of what the reporter is saying – acute deadly hematologic cancers are gradually being turned into chronic diseases.

The main reasons behind this are several fold:

Greater understanding of the science and biology underlying the diseases.
Increased number of available therapies that can be sequenced, prolonging overall survival.
Move from chemotherapy to more targeted therapies, improving quality of life.
Active drug pipeline in myeloma across several companies, offering increased hope for further advancements in the disease as new combinations evolve.
Updating of treatment guidelines and new standards (e.g. see this Myeloma example)

In addition, the growth of Myeloma support groups has provided a wealth of online information, practical advice, and emotional support for people suffering with the disease. Some great resources include:

Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation (run by an incredible myeloma survivor, Kathy Giusti)
International Myeloma Foundation
Leukemia and Lymphoma Society
National Organisation of Rare Diseases
American Cancer Society

In addition, Pharma companies such as Millennium, Celgene and Onyx/Proteolix are also doing their bit to improve research and outcomes in multiple myeloma in R&D, and some provide people with balanced and fair disease information – not everything has to be promotional. One such example is an unbranded site about Myeloma supported by Millennium-Takeda, the manufacturers of bortezomib (Velcade) called My Multiple Myeloma. Velcade is a proteasome inhibitor that has become the cornerstone of front-line therapy either without or before a stem cell transplant.

Now, let's take a look at the My Multiple Myeloma website. I should disclose here that the agency who are responsible for building the site are a client, although I wasn't involved in the website project itself. I've long had an interest in unbranded sites and disease information from my marketing days, so let's look at what's available at the moment.

The opening site page offers some sensible choices with clear navigation encouraging people to take charge of their disease and some shots of real people who are experiencing multiple myeloma, you can click through and read more about their stories and experiences:

One of the things that many people forget is that cancer is a complex disease, not only in terms of treatment options, but all the other factors that need to be considered. Googling for information can be overwhelming and none of the current advocacy sites offer a one-stop shop for everything. The site looks to reduce this overload and provide a central starting repository for information. Further into My Multiple Myeloma, you can find some other interesting and relevant information such as coping with the disease, working with the health care professionals involved, costs and insurance, understanding emotions, lifestyle advice, and where to find clinical trials for example:

It will be interesting to see how the site evolves over time and hopefully adds useful tools to allow people to engage and share information with each other. Providing relevant information is a good start, albeit a static one, but allowing interactivity and sharing of ideas will help bond those affected even more.

It would be cool to add other practical things such as a wiki for transplant centers, contacts, and other academic centers specialising in the treatment of myeloma, for example. That way, people can find a hospital near them, or even a means of finding local support groups perhaps.

In the past, I have seen significant value in watching patients converse, help and support each other in disease forums because many-to-many is so much more powerful and effective than an isolated n of 1. People need to feel that they are not alone in their fight against cancer, having a sense of support and community really does help mobilise heart and desire to beat the disease.

It always annoys me when people think Pharma companies are only interested in promotional or DTC programs that make money or add ROI; in oncology and hematology, I've yet to meet someone from the industry who didn't care about people, improving survival and outcomes or making a difference to people's lives.

Maybe cancer is just a different world… after all, we have very few placebo controlled trials in this arena; new therapies and combinations typically go head to head against the standard of care in a survival of the fittest approach. May the best ones win and make a difference, which is great news for people suffering from any cancer.

Hope is one thing, but improved outcomes and information are even better.

Kumar, S., Mikhael, J., Buadi, F., Dingli, D., Dispenzieri, A., Fonseca, R., Gertz, M., Greipp, P., Hayman, S., Kyle, R., Lacy, M., Lust, J., Reeder, C., Roy, V., Russell, S., Short, K., Stewart, A., Witzig, T., Zeldenrust, S., Dalton, R., Rajkumar, S., & Bergsagel, P. (2009). Management of Newly Diagnosed Symptomatic Multiple Myeloma: updated Mayo Stratification of Myeloma and Risk-Adapted Therapy (mSMART) Consensus Guidelines Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 84 (12), 1095-1110 DOI: 10.4065/mcp.2009.0603

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Using technology to derive Sentiments Analysis in Pharma

By MaverickNY on April 14, 2010

This week offers a nice break in science topics on the blog and a chance to look at how technology can be used to monitor social media, physician and patient sentiments about drugs and various diseases in a practical way. I've been interested in analysing trends in data since my undergraduate days when I created the first automated computerised football (soccer) notation system for looking at strategies and tactics employed by winning and losing teams.

There's a LOT of blah blah talk about social media out there, in particular from self styled gurus and experts, which tends to make me tune out for the most part. In my spare time (away from being immersed in preclinical and clinical data), what I'm really interested in is how mathematical algorithms can be applied to speech and words using modern computer techniques to extract feeling, tone and meaning from sentiments in meaningful ways.

After yesterday's 5 minute Lightening Talk at the Sentiments Analysis Symposium in New York hosted by Seth Grimes of Alta Plana, I received a few requests for the presentation, entitled "Next generation sentiment extraction: light at the end of the tunnel, but will it negate the need for human supervision?"

So here it is for those interested:

Using Sentiment Analysis in Pharma and Biotech

View more presentations from maverickny.

The file is downloadable and I'm pleased to say that the quality is much better than reading it in Slideshare online, which may look a little fuzzy.

I managed to do the brief presentation with 10 seconds to spare. There nothing worse than getting half way through and the buzzer goes before you get to the interesting bits!

If anyone wants any further information, please feel free to contact me. We have several interesting projects ongoing with sentiments analysis in oncology at the moment.

Next week normal service will resume and I will be busy reporting on hot science and research topics at the American Association of Cancer Research Meeting in DC, as they have kindly offered Pharma Strategy Blog a science blogger pass and an opportunity to bring new developments in science and cancer biology to life here. Watch this space!

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Sentiments Analysis in Pharma

By MaverickNY on April 13, 2010

It's turning out to be a busy week already. After two days in Boston, today I'm off to the Sentiments Analysis Symposium in New York, where I'm presenting a lighting 5 minute talk on sentiments analysis in Pharma.

We've been working on some cool tools in our spare time and have started rolling out some analysis in different cancer types such as renal cell and sarcoma as the first examples using an automatic sentiment lens. The presentation today will look at an immune disorder, Lupus, as an example. The technology is something we're very excited about and look forward to posting about this as it evolves.

Oddly, I've discovered that it took longer and more effort to condense some thoughts and ideas simply into a 5 minute vignette than it does for a 30 minute presentation!

The meeting is being held at the Executive Conference Center in Midtown at 1601 Broadway, so do stop by if you're interested in this fascinating area.

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