KOLs - today's pharma thought leaders

In today's volatile market scenario, listening and engaging Key Opinion Leaders or KOLs in your digital marketing plan is very crucial. In order to identify KOLs, there has to be a firm understanding of the issues and circumstances that make them key in the first place. Typically the opinion leader is held in high esteem by those who accept his or her opinions. KOLs are often regarded as the key to business success in Pharmaceutical/Healthcare industry. They are the agents who actively participate in discussions or forums in order to address drug-related issues or queries raised by people. Now, the question is “How do they influence your brand perception?”

KOLs may not necessarily be involved directly with your brand; however, they have the ability to build or destroy your brand image by influencing their followers. They are the people others are watching. Irrespective of the therapeutic field, the use of KOLs is a global phenomenon for business success. In pharmaceutical business research, KOL management and mapping play important role. Your KOL databases have to have the names who can easily tell what your research should focus and what are the target customers’ current needs. In terms of marketing & sales, KOLs act as a the leading indicator of therapy acceptance. Pharma companies generally connect with the KOLs early in the drug development process to provide advocacy activity and key marketing feedback.

To identify the KOLs, you need to know their key characteristics. Market Strategies International conducted a research study among a selected group of 100 national and regional KOLs and came out with the following key characteristics of a KOL:

• Regularly sought out by their colleagues for opinions or advice
• Speak often at regional or national conferences
• Have published articles in a major journal during the past two years
• Consider themselves early adopters of new treatments or procedures
• Help establish protocols for patient care

Identifying KOLs using social network analysis

Mostly medical practitioners use their local network to advice, opine and showcase their expertise. You can term it as a closed community that has the ability to influence millions of people. It needs a sophisticated algorithm that takes into account both the direct and indirect links in the network to identify the best influencers who really can create an impact on your consumers to build an opinion or a sentiment. If you have a strong community management model around your brand, these influencers will bring in more people to talk about your brand. Building an interacting model of communication and closely monitoring the conversation help to build strong brand perceptions which result in increase velocity of product adoption.

So, are you listening???

Salesforce gives the Cloud a new social direction

Is this an aggressive marketing move? Or, is this a step to stay ahead in this social revolution age? Salesforce launching today its new social media analytics software suite “Marketing Cloud” is regarded as a timely push to bring in consumer social media features into business and industrial settings.

Salesforce is no longer a company that provides only online software managing your sales process. It has evolved itself to explore new markets like social media marketing in order to sustain growth. Marketing Cloud is a product of Salesforce's closely watched, $689 million acquisition of Buddy Media. However, the company is getting tough challenge from its rival Oracle, which has captured headlines with its social media-related acquisitions recently.

Marc Benioff, CEO and founder of Salesforce, said at the Dreamforce conference 2012, “Are you and your company going through a social revolution? We see your customers and your employees and your partners are all connected.”

Yes, Mr. Benioff. You are right in saying so. Everyday or rather every moment, big brands face challenges from social media either in the form of opinions or reviews or customer sentiment. Listening, analyzing and engaging – these are the three ways how one can counter the challenges and this forms three closely-related market segments called Social Media Analytics, Social Media Marketing and Social Media Consulting. All the big players like Adobe, Oracle, Microsoft and Google have their own interest to dominate this market. This might be too early to predict who will win the race, but this competition is slowly getting very interesting to watch out for.

IDC report - optimistic on social vendors

IDC MarketScape has released its "Worldwide Pharmaceuticals Social Media Analytics 2012 Vendor Assessment" report. The report says that there is an increasing interest in social media software applications and profiles the vendors such as Brandwatch, Cognizant, Genpact Social and Digital Transformation Services, Indegene, ListenLogic, Meltwater, Radian6, Semantelli and Visible Technologies.

Congnizant has been recognized by IDC MarketScape as a leading vendor for pharmaceuticals social media analytics for the year 2012. As per the report, “Cognizant is highly focused on the pharmaceutical industry and is considered by its customers to have very high pharmaceutical industry expertise.”

Eric Newmark, Program Director of IDC Health Insights' Life Science Business Systems service, was quoted in the release, saying, “Many pharmaceutical companies are ramping up their investment in social media analytics as a large majority of consumers now go online to research their medical condition and treatment alternatives. The information they find, combined with their physicians’ opinion, is often the largest influencing factor on the prescription or treatment sought. Hence companies should understand what consumers are finding online and closely monitor its effect on their brand.”

This is very true. Social media has a measurable impact on PR and analytics. It also gives huge boost to brand recognition. However, many companies are still struggling to identify clear social attribution. Branding in this social media age is very crucial and challenging, where the biggies always need to keep an eye on the social media listening trend.

The findings of the IDC report will surely help the healthcare and pharmaceutical companies to choose the right analytics application and right vendors to analyze their social media brand perception.

“Adobe Social” - will it be a game changer?

Last week, Adobe entered the race of social media analytics by launching its first end-to-end social media marketing and analytics software suite “Adobe Social.”

AllFacebook, the “Unofficial Facebook Blog,” gives Adobe Social a strongly positive review. The blog recommends the product for its extremely user-friendly interface. It states, “Adobe Social’s ability to create and demonstrate business impact from social media will enable the social marketer to secure a seat at the planning table.”

Over the past decade, social media has become an unavoidable and integral part of business strategy. With Adobe Social, the company promises to move social media users “from social media intuition to marketing insight.”

“The ability of Adobe Social to reveal deeper connections across the social activities of our fans and manage key business results and hundreds of Facebook pages and Twitter profiles across a single platform is incredibly valuable,” states Gretchen Fox, VP Social Media, LiveNation, at Adobe Social’s official product overview.

The Tech Crunch blog also gives it a positive review by saying, “The other big selling point is the integration with other products in Adobe’s Digital Marketing Suite — as Adobe puts it, it’s breaking social advertising out of its silo.”

The social media analytics market is currently dominated by Radian 6, Cision, Vocus, etc. and will offer a fierce challenge to Adobe Social. It will be watchable in near future how Adobe Social will penetrate into this market segment and proves itself as a game changer.

Social CRM: why it is crucial?

Over the last one decade, social media has changed the definition of traditional CRM. Before, it was just a one way communication process. But emergence of social media and its maximum utility for CRM had made it a two-way communication channel. This evolved the concept of sCRM or Social CRM.

As per Paul Greenberg, “Social CRM is a philosophy and a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes and social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.”

Why sCRM is crucial in terms of your brand perception? Because it is spontaneous…………….. If you do not engage a monitoring system or do not keep a close eye on the developments, you might loose your brand loyalty. At the same time, if you keep your customers engaged with your product/brand and you have a real-time tracking system of your brand’s performance, sCRM can create a win-win situation for you as well your customers.

sCRM is more than just engaging your customers or prospects to your product’s/brand’s microsites or Twitter/Facebook pages or building communities or blog pages. It is not only about social listening or creating a media buzz through your PR agencies. sCRM is a mix of all.

Say, you have engaged your customers through these channels. Now, the challenge is how do you monitor the activities. Is it through some enterprise listening software? Or, some third party service providers? Or self? Well, it is again a mix of all.

Now, the next challenge you might face is your customer’s identity in social media portals. Most often you face the issue of multiple identities of your customers. So, you should have a technology or a practice to integrate multiple identities (Identity Management).

sCRM is all about creating a collaborative environment, both internally and externally. The key to sCRM success is to understand the issues/challenges pertaining to your product or brand and solving them with customer engagement and interaction in a process-driven way.

E-Mail Marketing - 15 ways to take it close to your sales prospect

1. Spam filters: to avoid mails landing up at spam folders of the recipients, you should avoid using product or service promotional words such as discounts, free etc.; special characters such as $, %, #, etc. both in the subjectline as well as in the mail body.

2. Always use a targeted and clean mailing database. Recheck and update your mailing list periodically.

3. Autoresponders: use periodical autoresponder feature to target your sales prospect with high integrity.

4. Sender’s signature: always use a signature to avoid confusion about sender’s identity.

5. Link-clicks: as per studies, internet users respond well to blue/bold/underlined texts most often. You can use this logic to your link-clicks in the mail body.

6. Avoid heavy graphics to minimize the size of the E-mailers. Use only meaningful images relevant with the subject.

7. Use consistent, professional and user-friendly color codes.

8. Put the most interesting content at the top so that if your recipient is using any mail preview feature, he/she catches the most relevant part in the preview.

9. Subjectline: if your subjectline does not able to catch your recipients’ attention, he/she will immediately delete the mailer before even looking at the mail body. To grab receiver’s attention, you should specify the benefits reading the E-mailer at the subjectline.

10. For repetitive E-mail campaigns, you should send all the E-mailers at a predefined time and schedule. Before fixing that time and day, understand the receivers’ working schedule. For example: if your database contains mostly personal E-mail ids, you should send your mailers during the second half of the day; may be just before you leave office. If your database contains mostly official E-mail ids, you should avoid sending the E-mailers in the morning hours.

11. As per some research studies, E-mails that are sent during the middle of the week (Tuesdays & Wednesdays) get maximum readers’ attention.

12. Unsubscribe option: your E-mailer should always give a freedom to unsubscribe your mailers at any point of time. This should not be a hectic and tiring process; just a one-click option.

13. Disclaimer statement: any E-mailer without a disclaimer statement is regarded as unauthentic.

14. Ask for readers’ feedback: you can do so by putting a direct link to your social media pages or creating a short online form.

15. Your E-mail service provider: last but not the least; a lot more depend on your bulk E-mailing software/tool. Test and try different service providers before selecting the best one; also, check different features such as campaign report generation, user-interface, etc. before going for any paid option.

IBM Forward View Virtual Forum 2011

Bangalore - the most lovable city in India

Bangalore or Bengaluru - no doubt whatsoever you say, the taste remains same. Bangalore, the IT-BT hub of India, still remains the hot-spot for job hunters and students. Every year, many people from other parts of India, specially from North East, move to this city with a untold dream - a dream for a better livelihood, a dream for a better professional career. As per latest population-based surveys, Bangalore is the third most populous city in India.

The question that might be asked by some people are: "why national and international corporate houses still prefer Bangalore as an investment hub?" - "why Bangalore still remains a preferred destination for Indian and international students?"

Answer is very simple. There are multiple reasons, such as: A. Good climate; B. Clean city (of-course, not like 10 years back; however, this still remains as one among the less polluted cities in India); C. Very gentle, helpful and friendly local people; D. Less crime or rather no crime compared to other tier-1 cities in India. E. Supportive measures taken up by the state government for creating special economic zones and IT-BT parks. F. A mix of serene South Indian Vedic environment and a cosmopolitan lifestyle. 

But......................

The recent sms or mms havoc had created a mistrust among the people of North-East and surprisingly it spread like an epidemic. I do not want to comment on who had started this or who should be held responsible for creating such a situation. But, we must admire the the way how Karnataka Government had handled the whole situation. This is really commendable that the state Dy. CM/home minister went to the railway station to appeal people from North East not to leave the city. Even the Karnataka government had sent a special delegation to Assam to bring the people back to Bangalore who had left the city with a fear to loose their lives. No state government in the recent past had taken up such prompt steps as a part of confidence building measure between two communities. This will remain as an example for other state governments.

Today, we people from North East can proudly say that we were part of building the Bangalore the way it is now and we will contribute the same way as we did before.

Love you Bengaluru..........