ADOTAS

Last year, GetGlue cleared the two-million-user mark, and just a few weeks ago it announced a bunch of new app updates to allow for easier ways to interact with other users, find social conversations users want and check into content. Right, check into content — GetGlue allows users to check into TV shows, movies, books and music, and to view recommendations, communicate with other users, pick up rewards and discounts, and share what they’re watching or listening to or reading, both in GetGlue itself and across other social networks.

The company said the funding will go towards technology development and new hires: developers, a designer, an engineer, a senior product manager and a marketing manager.

ADOTAS

2012 Prediction: From Social to Spatial

It’s no longer just “what are you doing?,” but “where are you going?” and “when will you be there?” that the social universe cares about. While Facebook’s Timeline allows us to answer, for all our friends and followers, those age-old “where were you when …” questions, Foursquare’s Radar functionality tells you when you’re near people or places that you like, just in case you’re up for a bit of a diversion in the future (even if that future is only five minutes from now). As more people transition from using social media to record what we’ve done to using it to help us plan what we will do, advertising and marketing efforts can become increasingly local — even hyperlocal — to reach an engaged nearby audience eager for interaction with companies and brands. Fjord sees a bright future for organizations that are able to harness the power of location and time — categories that, unlike social and search, are still up for grabs.

2012 Prediction: An S.O.S. from the Disconnected Living Room

2012 will see even more “clutter” in the living room. Yahoo’s IntoNow app can determine what we’re watching on TV and share that with our friends via Twitter. Hulu feeds our watching habits to our Facbook Timelines. The Xbox, more than just a gaming console, allows us to access film and video without having to leave the house, or even the sofa. Disney encouraged viewers of its Christmas Day parade to use the Shazam app to get behind-the-scenes content. Americans spend an average of four hours per day watching television, and delivering a more full-integrated experience (or at  least companion experiences) — whether through interactivity, social networking, or simple convenience — can ensure that those are four hours are enhanced. But be careful, 2012 is also the year in which the struggle for sofa supremacy could finally start to see some winners and losers.

2012 Prediction: Your Identity Is Your Currency

There’s something truly remarkable about modern society’s willingness to share so much of themselves with their friends and acquaintances. Modern stoicism is giving way to post-modern openness — but with that openness are risks. The more we share, the greater the odds that what we post can someday be used against us: in job interviews ,relationships, even financial transactions. So in 2012, we anticipate an increased sensitivity to how we value the information that we post — and how we value our ability to keep it at least somewhat private. For every service like OpenID that allows us to safely log into multiple sites and control our information, there will also be an uptick in trends like “Pay with a Tweet,” in which no money changes hands, but the whole Twitterverse can see what you’ve just “purchased.” 2012 may be the year of social media privacy trade-offs; it remains to be seen whether more secrecy or more openness will ultimately win. 2012 will see a host of services that will push the boundaries of privacy — some of these will prevail as “cool;” others are doomed to be creepy. This is the tipping point we call the social dilemma, because nobody knows exactly where it lies. 2012 could be the first year of the Social Dilemma.

2012 Prediction: Say Hello to 24/7 Wearables

One of the most tedious parts of sticking to a workout regimen? Pausing between each set to write down how many reps you’ve done. Wouldn’t it be nice if something could just do it for you? For the cost of a few sessions with a personal trainer, you can get a wearable device that will track your activity over the course of the day — not just at the gym, but on your bike, or even walking around the city. Not into fitness? What about a sensor that tracks your sleeping habits and feeds it to a smart alarm clock to calculate the ideal time to wake up in the morning? Or a pair of earrings that allows you to listen to your iPod wirelessly, without anyone even noticing? We might still be a long way off from having microchips implanted in our brains, but devices that can help us do the things we already do more quickly and easily will be increasingly in demand this year — so brands willing to give that to their consumers will have quite an edge over their competitors. The challenge for wearable electronics is to understand what users will want to do with them, and to take advantage of the growing concept of  ”glanceability.” There will be a battle for people’s “glance.”

Campfire Labs was headed up by Sakina Arsiwala, who held prestigious positions at Google and YouTube, and Naveen Koorakula, who had worked for Yahoo and search companies Inktomi and Picch. In this extension of Groupon’s recent moves towards honing customer experience — after it bought scheduling/social tech company OpenCal, it used that company’s software to create Groupon Scheduler — this acquisition can likely be considered a talent buy.

In his statement, Allen explains the flush of new users by citing “the holidays, the TV commercials, the Android 4 signups, celebrity and brand appeal, or positive word of mouth, or a combination of all these factors.” (Those are all factors that credit simple visibility, rather than anything Google+ happens to be doing now to set it apart from that other social network.) Nonetheless, he said he expects the rate of new signups — currently 625,000 a day — to continue past the end of December, and he projects Google+ will hit 100 million users by Feb. 25, 2012, and 200 million by Aug. 3. Meanwhile, Facebook cites more than 800 million active users right now.

“Active” is a key word in that last sentence. While Google+ user numbers may be climbing rapidly — in a kind of exponential growth that only makes sense if that growth is fueled by people noticing their friends and acquaintances are on and deciding it might as well be a good time to jump on that bandwagon — but these figures don’t say anything about the degree to which people are engaging with each other, or with organizations and brands, and they don’t say anything about how much time people are spending on Google+, or how frequently they’re logging in. We’re going to need a fresh study to contextualize these new stats, but back in July, Experian Hitwise already noted a drop-off in users’ repeat visits to Google+.

Allen wrote in his post that “as more users sign up, the value of the network will increase for everyone… It won’t be long before new users start encountering family and friends as well as the thriving tech and media sharing community that embraced Google+ early on.” But in order for that to happen, people are going to have to keep logging in after creating an account.

Though I haven’t played that much with Path and haven’t added any friends (because none of my closer friends are on Path yet), the early buzz does warrant the question: Can Path unseat Facebook?

If you think it’s too early to pose that question, you’re right — but I thought it would be an interesting exercise to look at what Path is doing now and to consider the potential. I personally never really felt that Google+ had much of a chance of unseating Facebook, but I think Path is doing some things very well, beginning with its homepage. I like the fact that the term “social network” doesn’t appear anywhere. Sure, everyone is calling it a social network, but I like how they’re attempting to position themselves as “a smart journal that helps you share life with the ones you love.” I also like the way it’s been built for a mobile experience, supporting mobile platforms. That differentiation should help it compete with Facebook (if that’s even their objective). Many of the reviews I have read have praised Path for the simplicity and usability of its design, though I personally haven’t used it enough yet to comment.

Another feature that is appealing to me is the 150-friend limit. Personally, I never felt Facebook was the place for lengthy and intimate conversations. The friend limit will force people to be more selective, which will make Path more intimate by design. That said, there are lots of people with thousands of friends who will be challenged by the friend limitation on Path.

At present, Path is not running advertising, which definitely makes sense, given the kind of business it’s trying to build. Without advertising or commerce, it shouldn’t have the kind of privacy concerns that seemed to follow Facebook in its early years (and beyond).

So to return to my initial question: Can Path unseat Facebook? In my opinion, the answer is no.

I don’t think they’re trying to unseat Facebook, because they’re trying to build a totally different experience. And despite the growth of Facebook, there are plenty of users suffering from Facebook fatigue. For many of them, Path will be exactly what they’re looking for — a social non-network.

Editor’s note: Path’s leadership has been adamant that it won’t sell advertising. Instead, it offers up-sells to users. What do you think of this business model?  Is a company like Path sustainable without advertising? Leave a message in the comments section.

1. Facebook will release a social browser. It makes too much sense for them not to. They have too much technology firepower to shy away from it. Facebook is already the center of so much internet behavior and so much marketing revenue migration that launching a browser is a logical evolution and a brilliant way to open a western front against Google. Imagine a Facebook search campaign. For marketers: Keep an eye out for rumors and identify customers that are early technology adopters.

2. B2B companies will start to take advantage of social media. This will be the start of new, smaller customer segments that have high value. LinkedIn is an excellent example of a leading player already utilizing this approach. BtoB plays will need to be rich in content, and offer high value for their followers.

3. Content Marketing will become critical to brand marketers. The brand is the media. The brand is no longer just a buyer of media. Social media is the place where brands will become more aggressive, and it could be the most important brand trend of the next year.

4. Data overload. What do you do with “big data?” Marketers were overwhelmed with the wealth of data provided when online advertising took off. It’s nothing compared to performance and audience data provided by traditional media these days. And it pales in comparison to the data now available thanks to social media. Expect the technologists to wear marketing hats and vice versa. Marketing will go from one of the hardest things to measure to one of the easiest.

5. The mobile floodgates will open. The numbers around mobile migration continue to be staggering. It will be well north of 50 percent by the end of 2012. The crossroads of mobile and social is an exciting opportunity for marketers, because for the first time a brand can create a bridge between the digital and physical worlds. Everything you have been accessing from your desktop will now be reaching you in-market while shopping, eating lunch with friends or at your kid’s soccer game.

6. Reanalysis of Customer Strategy. The overarching takeaway is that 2012 will be the year brands approach social media not as an experiment or as a race to get the most followers, but as a way to get to know the people who use it. It’s time to identify behaviors and attitudes, find differences in the customers that have them, and address them accordingly.

Save the IPO valuations for the analysts. It doesn’t matter to marketers as much as the real work of making social media a reliable and exciting way to reach the right customer at the right time: That’s the big news for 2012.

Social media — from blogs and forums to networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube — have inserted a very powerful force into the buying process: peer-to-peer dialogue on a network scale. While shoppers always have been able to talk with a few friends and family members to seek out a product recommendation, today they can talk with experts on a specific product or service anywhere in the world. They can find reviews of their prospective purchase in just seconds online and rapidly compare features and prices for competing brands.

So where does the terror enter the mix? How do you measure and quantify these discussions?  Where are the most important conversations taking place within the social grid, and how can marketers keep on top – let alone activate – the same?  The sheer pace of digital innovation has made it difficult for marketers to feel proactive and confident about how to measure progress and what really matters to their brand portfolio.

Furthering the fear factor is one matter of the discussion that may not be on the new marketing radar. My company MotiveQuest’s analysis finds that as many as 90 percent of online conversations are not about brands at all — they are about categories and the motivations that drive people within those categories. Dashboards and other numerical ways of measuring favor in social media may help in calculating a brand’s reach, but marketers must dig deeper to learn what consumers actually are thinking and what really will persuade consumers to buy. Marketers then need to try to connect their brands to those specific motivations. Dashboards won’t provide the intelligence that marketers need to capitalize on motivations in the marketplace — only listening where the conversations are really happening and analyzing the motivations behind the words — will do that.

Stop Asking and Start Listening

The best and only valid way to measure what is driving the market is to stop asking questions and start listening to conversations. In this new social environment, we can actually observe the buying behavior of consumers, rather than merely asking them about their behavior. We can measure if, how and why people are talking about a product. Instead of asking them if they like it, we can measure the positive or negative words and context they are using. Perhaps of greatest importance, we can observe individuals as they make recommendations to friends, acquaintances or even strangers in a group or forum.

It turns out, not surprisingly, that the sorts of things people talk about around the kitchen table are the same sorts of things they talk about online. Of course, social media conversations are just a sample of all conversations, but online forums enable us to overhear those networked conversations, which were already happening but which we had no way of listening in on before.

A Stunning Discovery

We have previously noted the motivations that drive conversations in social networks are the real treasure to be mined by marketers, because the more we explore online conversations and reveal the motivations that are common to all of us, the more effectively we can position our brand, and ourselves, to be unique. But the consequences of examining motivations extend beyond brand positioning — they can be a precise and predictable indicator of future sales.

To understand the correlation between social media and sales, we must first determine which aspects of online conversations we should measure. Five years ago, MotiveQuest began working with statisticians at Northwestern University to examine all the components of these conversations and attempt to find the most impactful elements.

Our simple goal was to determine which elements in online conversations have the biggest influence on sales and market share. We looked at correlations and metrics related to such factors as the number of times a brand is mentioned, likeability of the product or service, and the power of influencers. We uncovered what ultimately became a stunning discovery: The highest correlation — and a direct, measurable correlation – between social-media conversations and offline sales occurred when people online went out of their way to pick a brand and recommend it to a friend.  Statements like, “I would recommend the iPhone” — rather than, “You might like the iPhone, Samsung or Nokia brands” — led to precise correlations with offline sales.

We began to linguistically pull together all the ways people talk about recommendations, and from these cues we developed an Online Promoter Score, an index of the strength of the online community’s recommendation of a brand.

The Best Metric of a Brand’s Health

The most important, unalterable finding that we drew from listening to and scoring the ways people recommend products is that these recommendations — actual advocacy of a brand in online conversations — continue to correlate with offline sales in virtually every category. The type of product doesn’t matter; in these conversations, only the level of advocacy influences sales. The best metric of a brand’s health in online conversation, we were able to declare, is advocacy — the number of individuals actively promoting the brand.

Note that advocacy measures the number of individuals making recommendations, not the number of conversations. And further, understand that advocacy, not sentiment, offers the highest correlation with changes in market sales or shares.

Finally, metrics must be based on insights — and insights are not gathered through an automated process; rather, they are developed by applying hard work, thought and analysis.

In our research for a national financial services company, we measured the number advocated a particular brand to other people. Among those who discussed more than one brand, we assigned a score to their most favored brand.

Our analysis showed, with statistical significance, that people’s willingness to advocate for the brand online is a leading indicator of the brand’s new-customer acquisition. Even in relatively low-interest, low-engagement categories like personal finance, then, what people say online allows us to predict shifts in consumer behavior offline.

A Canary in the Coalmine for Market Shifts

All this is not to say that the correlation between online advocacy and offline sales means that online advocacy necessarily causes increased sales. What it does mean is that advocacy is an indicator of the offline and other unmeasured conversations that are going on around a product. The Online Promoter Score is the canary in the coalmine for brands, telling us something is going on in the real world, as well as in online conversations, that is boosting sales or forcing them to plummet.

The power of listening for recommendations produced astonishing results for Sprint, the phone carrier. Sprint was losing a steady stream of customers to rivals AT&T, Verizon and TMobile, but it didn’t know why. MotiveQuest launched a project for Sprint designed to find the reason and the solution. We built custom linguistic models to understand the essence of the conversation about the company online, categorizing those who posted their opinions in social media as current or former Sprint customers. We then aggregated carrier advocacy conversations — messages in which one brand was being actively recommended over another — to learn what drove recommendations and retention.

We discovered that customers had three primary reasons for staying loyal to a carrier:

1. Customer service

2. Models

3. Coverage

Sprint trailed competitors in all three areas. The company determined that its best opportunity resided in upgrading its customer service; we discovered that it was the biggest driver of carrier advocacy, ahead of models and coverage. Sprint implemented a number of initiatives to revamp customer service, including the retooling of its programs and rewriting scripts for call centers based on the consumer expectations revealed in our research.

Subsequently, a Consumer Reports satisfaction survey of carriers ranked Sprint second, and five months later, the American Customer Satisfaction Index ranked Sprint first in customer service. Most importantly, after listening to the advocacy conversations, Sprint’s reinvigorated customer service efforts pulled in 644,000 net subscribers in a single quarter, an astonishing turnaround from its loss of 565,000 during the same period the previous year. Six months later, it added 1.1 million net new customers in a quarter.

The Secret of Boosting Online Advocacy

What, then, is the secret to boosting online advocacy for your brand? Above all, consider ways to create products and services that are remarkable; inherently, that’s the best way to ensure people remark on them to each other. Social networks turbo-charge this process, accelerating good products to the forefront and quickly killing off products that are disappointments.

For your product to become remarkable, you should attach it to a core passion or movement in the marketplace in a three-step process: 

• First, identify what your best customers are most passionate about. 

• Then, figure out how you can be useful around that passion — how you become part of the movement. 

• Finally, create buzz-worthy products and services that help serve the passion. For instance, Apple created MacWorld, a conference that is little short of a religion for its advocates. MacWorld is a movement.

Connect your brand to a passion, something people care about at their core, and you create the foundation for advocacy that can lead to higher sales offline and improved market share.

1. Decide what you want to promote or communicate. To be effective and successful with paid social advertising, you need to think carefully about what you are tweeting or posting to your brand or company wall. You need to have a strategy relating to what pieces of content you want to promote with paid social. For example, using a promoted tweet for a new product launch or an event is a good use of promoted tweets. Likewise, using promoted posts on Facebook is smart for product launches and events as well. These paid posts will significantly extend your organic reach to a broad audience that you define.

At my company, Covario, our most successful promoted tweet so far has included a shortened URL for an infographic for a large semiconductor client. This particular tweet was retweeted three times more than the second-most retweeted content for this client. We added paid promotion as soon as the organic tweet posted to the handle.

Some best practices include promoting content as soon as possible (ideally within 48 hours of a post), using hashtags on Twitter or @ symbol call-outs on Facebook, and featuring a direct call to action or asking a question.

2. Make the content short and engaging. Consumers are deluged with information. For your paid social media efforts to succeed and have a better chance of going viral, write short, engaging content with a clear call to action. Ask your fans or followers a question, or invite them to do something. Get creative, and keep in mind that only 90 characters of content will display on Facebook promoted page posts, so grabbing their attention early in the post is very important. In a recent paid social campaign for a client in the high-tech space, Facebook page posts that were under 90 characters and included a visual element, such as a video or image, generated 60 percent higher CTRs on average than posts that were text only.

3. Mix up your posts using a variety of promoted content. In addition to text, with Facebook you can use videos, pictures, and questions or polls, and link posts for paid promotion. Using posts that have a video, photo or link will make your paid page post larger in size and also incorporate a visual element that, as research shows, garners greater visual attention from consumers.

With Facebook ads you can promote an external website, Facebook app, page or event. You can also promote sponsored stories and page posts. Sponsored stories are similar to Twitter promoted tweets. The major difference is that the user defines the content seen on Facebook, not the advertiser. Four types of user actions can be turned into promoted stories: likes, check-ins, actions within apps and page posts.

4. Grow your audience with advanced targeting. Make sure you are testing a variety of targeting and interests to determine what specific audience responds most enthusiastically to your content. Testing a variety of broad category targets or making your own precise interest groups will help you understand what niche groups are most receptive to your brand messaging. As you pinpoint these pockets of receptive profiles, you can isolate them in specific campaigns just as you would isolate high-performing keywords in SEM (search engine marketing).

For a recent client campaign in APAC, we discovered that users interested in the sport of cricket were a 45 percent lower cost-per-connection group than the average interest target. We then isolated this interest group with a dedicated campaign to maximize budget allocation and lower overall cost per connection for this initiative by 75 percent.

5. Promote social engagement on your website. Fully leverage the power of social engagement by putting the Facebook “like” button and Twitter “follow us” icon on strategic areas of your website. This allows consumers to easily promote your brand’s page and products to their friends. This allows you to reach prospective consumers you might not reach otherwise. It also gives a brand instant credibility, due to the endorsement of an actual person rather than traditional brand advertising spreading the word.

6. Determine your evaluation metrics to determine your level of success. Just like with any marketing initiative, ensure that you are working toward a measurable goal. This may sound obvious, but in social media this step is often overlooked. The goal might be all front-end-engagement-focused metrics, such as driving connections on Facebook or retweets and replies on Twitter. Regardless of the campaign’s focus, ensure that you are using the right ad types and have the right goals at the outset, with a realistic estimate for campaign performance.

With one campaign for a Covario data storage client, a tracking strategy was implemented for all promoted tweets leading back to the company’s website. Tweets were coded with analytic tracking codes with the intent of measuring Twitter visitor engagement versus other media channels. The results showed that visitors from Twitter to the company’s .com were twice as engaged as paid search visitors. With this information, more allocation was given to promoted tweets to effectively meet campaign goals.

7. Integrate your paid and organic social with your paid and organic search efforts. Paid search, paid social, organic social and organic search are all interrelated. You cannot look at these strategies and tactics in a vacuum. Numerous research studies have been conducted that clearly show the interplay between all four media types. Ensure integration of thought and action between them,and leverage each channel’s unique strength. For example, consumers research for product options and price comparisons more heavily via search engines, while using social media as a temperature gauge for brand decisions using the word-of-mouth endorsement of others. Leverage the strengths of search and social to get the greatest bang for your buck.

8. Test, launch and test again. Once you have set your campaign goals and executed your plan, launch and keep a close eye on your paid social campaign — especially within the first six hours. This is critical with promoted Twitter campaigns, where the vast majority of opportunity comes within the first two days of launching. On Facebook, ad fatigue can also set in quickly. When monitoring your campaigns, watch for plummeting click-through rates as an indication of creative fatigue. Pause ads as soon as you see reduced campaign performance, and replace them immediately with new ads waiting in the wings to fill the void. As data accumulates, build best practices specific to your business to implement, refine and repeat.

Less often discussed are the very serious implications this anonymity has for marketers. Nearly two out of three companies describe the extent of their social media activity as either heavy (21 percent) or average (43 percent), representing a 21 percent increase from 2010, according to a recent report from Econsultancy, LBi and bigmouthmedia. Obviously, social media is now in the “must-do” marketing media column for both B2C and B2B. And yet, we’re almost turning the corner into 2012, and there still isn’t a standard way to measure the financial and tangible benefits of using social media.

What is the ROI for social media, anyway?

Ask 10 people using it in their marketing plans, and you’ll probably get 10 different answers. Though marketing budgets are shifting more toward social media efforts (according to a survey completed this summer by Booz & Company and Buddy Media of managers from Fortune 100 companies about their investment in social media),* companies are still struggling to understand the impact of social media on their bottom line.

In fact, two features of social media make such analysis at best indirect, and at worst a waste of time. The first, as discussed above, is the anonymity. Restrictions on access to private information make it, in many cases, impossible to trace social media engagement back to concrete business impact. The second is that brand interactions and discussions happen away from business-owned digital properties. Combined, these two variables create a virtual barrier to the kind of metrics digital marketers have grown accustomed to using in their determination of ROI.

Since there typically is not a direct correlation to the point of revenue, getting too granular on ROI measurement can be distracting. At a certain point, you have to ask yourself, “What is the ROI of determining ROI?

Remembering our roots

So where does that leave us? Well, ironically, this dilemma shouldn’t feel too unfamiliar to marketers — though perhaps savvy digital teams might want to buy a round for some brick-and-mortar senior staff and pick up a tip or two — because it’s not too far from what they faced when the most advanced media around was print and television. Traditional marketing has always involved a measure of trust. Awareness has been a huge part of marketing magic: We put your message out there, try to influence public perception through solid, memorable brand initiatives, and hope that it touches a nerve, that the best message wins.

The time has come to embrace this leap of faith in the social media sphere. In many ways, after all, it actually keeps us honest. Again, people have the power — where once they could turn the channel, now they do their own research. They discuss, investigate, and make decisions about your brand on their own turf, and in many cases, the best we can do is obey the “content is king” paradigm, give them high-quality information about (hopefully) high-quality products, and, well, hope that it touches a nerve.

Awareness and engagement

But, of course, social media does give us a leg up on our marketing precursors. While we can’t use traditional analytics to rationalize social media efforts into dollars-and-cents conversions, there is undeniable value in engaging with consumers in these forums.

Social media is the first immediate feedback loop that we have with our target consumers as a group. Fortunately, many elements of it are highly measurable, thanks to the digital nature of the medium and the early development of robust tools. One popular way to measure social media interactions is to gather data that shows brand awareness and engagement. As a baseline, my company, the Garrigan Lyman Group, recommends our clients start listening and measuring a few basic things:

• Site traffic
•Search volume and terms
• Number of likes, fans, or followers
• Number of conversions
• Number of contributors
• Number of mentions and positive comments
• Number of page views
• Number of shares by your fans
• Number of retweets

These are metrics that can tell you how you are doing as compared to your competitors. They can also be used to determine what impact your social media outreach has on the social web in general. Did our marketing efforts increase engagement with our brand? How were we received?

Stop worrying and start interacting

Over the last 10 years, we’ve learned a great deal about digital marketing — we’ve learned how to track impressions, maximize click-through and drive conversion. But it’s also spoiled us. And now, when encountering a new form of digital media, we’re so suspicious about our inability to measure its impact in the same way that it’s easy to overlook the basic and most important point: the only way you are going to actualize any benefit from social media — let alone get real-time feedback from your consumers about your brand or products — is to stop worrying and start interacting.

* The study found that social media will become a higher percentage of total digital marketing spend in the next three years, with 28 percent of respondents stating social media will increase to make up more than 20 percent of their digital marketing spend by 2014.

Too often we hear from pharmaceutical companies that they see the benefits of social media, but they fear the legal risks, which typically are associated with reporting adverse events. Recently, we tracked 224 pharmaceutical brands, then collected and analyzed more than 257,000 posts across social media sites during a 30-day period. Some of the key findings include:

• 0.3 percent of all posts contained an adverse event (AE) experience.

• Only 14 percent of posts that contained an AE had an identifiable name and contact method to enable pharmaceutical marketers to fill out required paperwork.

• On average, during the 30-day period, each brand received a total of three posts that met the requirements for AE reporting.

These results indicate that pharmaceutical marketers who engage in diligent monitoring of social media for mentions of their brands can expect to see some mention of adverse events. However, adverse events account for a very low percentage of the overall conversations happening online. These conversations can be used positively to help drug makers more effectively identify potential safety issues with a product earlier in its life cycle, minimizing the risk for a crisis and more serious patient outcomes. Social media also offers the opportunity to foster customer relationships and establish more personalized health care services.

As we mentioned in a blog post earlier this year, there are great opportunities for pharma companies to accelerate innovation and build community. Engaging in social media helps build an advocacy program that protects your reputation and leverages public support in both good times and bad.

With social innovation, your company can gain insight into ideas for new products and campaigns, develop the ability to identify and create new advocates, and understand market needs to gain insight into what people are saying about competitors’ products.  Social media provides the opportunity not only to educate your customers, but to be educated by them. There is great value in learning more and being connected to your community in a vibrant two-way conversation.

Get out there, build a community – people genuinely want to help and support each other as they manage and cope with different health issues, and therefore could be important brand advocates. An established community allows for people to voice different experiences when someone posts a negative comment, and to help make sure accurate information is shared in ways that proactively detract from negative comments and mitigate a potential crisis.

The restrictions have certainly not stopped some of the major pharma brands like Johnson & Johnson or Pozen from pursuing their own social initiatives. Pozen, for example, has taken the unusual step of establishing a digital advisory board to help the company form its digital marketing strategy. Johnson & Johnson created the innovative Acuvue Acuminder Facebook application, where people are reminded when it’s time to change their contacts.

Bottom line: The benefits of social media can accelerate market awareness and correct brand misrepresentations, which ultimately outweigh the risks. And the market is moving too quickly to wait another 15 years — it’s time the pharma market kept pace with the consumers in today’s social age.