PR Communications

Companies Lower Drug Development Costs Through Collaboration

Snapshot: Competitors that collaborate on technology evaluation for the pharmaceutical and biomedical industries have the opportunity to lower healthcare costs for all. Trust was only established between the competitors because of peer interactions within a private social networking community.

Eric Glazer, VP marketing for Cambridge Healthtech Associates (CHA)* and DSEC managing director recently told me how The Drug Safety Executive Council (DSEC), a group of drug safety executives, developed a collaborative technology group. The group does not collaborate on new drugs, but the viability of new technologies that test the safety of new drugs.

The collaborative technology evaluation group puts a different spin on the concept of using social media to crowd source customer ideas and suggestions for innovation. Instead competitors come together to research the viability of new technologies in order to evaluate the worth of a new technology for determining the safety of new drugs.

Drug safety officers want to determine if a new drug that is in development is going to sufficiently improve patients’ lives, and not kill or injure them. A drug company will abandon development of a drug if the company determines the new drug is going adversely affect a patient. Safety technologies that can help predict the likely adverse affects of a compound can significantly lower risks and the time it takes to develop a drug. By collaborating together to determine if a new safety technology works, pharmaceutical companies can help themselves, their collaborators and the industry, but avoid giving their competitors an advantage.

By collaborating drug companies are able to test different compounds from their compound libraries with a new technology. By providing data about a new safety technology for many more different compounds several drug companies are able to quickly determine if a new safety technology is viable much faster, thereby lowering the cost of determining the efficacy of a new technology at an earlier stage, by also in part spreading the costs of determining its usefulness across a number of companies.

What was interesting to me in this story is that the collaboration between safety officers was only possible because the officers had come together to join the The Drug Safety Executive Council (DSEC) a social networking community for safety officials at pharmaceutical companies. As a consequence of the relationships built within the closed social network, enough trust was formed between competing firms to develop the collaborative technology evaluation group.

Semantic Web Companies In Boston

As my interest in web 3.0 grows I thought I'd create a list of semantic web companies in the Boston area.

Affiliate Media Network, Inc. Colin Britton

Cambridge Semantics Inc. Sean Martin, Founder, President, and CTO

ClearForest

Clinical Semantics Group

Echo Nest

Information Extraction Systems, Inc Win Carus, Founder and President

Invention Engine

Jarg Corporation  Michael Belanger President

Metatomix

OpenLink Software Kingsley Uyi Idehen

Internal Communicators Use Semantic Technologies

Currently, many large companies have some difficulty with thinking about how to monitor social media to understand what their customers are discussing as it relates to their company and industry.  Often the reluctance to make use of such business intelligence is because there is an understanding that it takes time to analyze the volume of content within social media.  Yet if a company does not start the process of building a monitoring system for social media, there are potential crisis communications dangers for a company, here’s two recent examples:

Target received a response about one of their ads, and their response was to state that Target does not consider bloggers to be part of the media. The statement generated more consternation amongst bloggers than the Target ad, but both succeeded in creating a lot of publicity for the issues with the ad and Target’s lack of knowledge in how to deal with Target.

Motrin posted an ad that was offensive to many Mothers. The ad did not get pulled until the following week, demonstrates the importance of being on 24/7.

Even with an understanding that social media should be monitored, companies are unsure about where to start. I’d suggest internal communicators are in the perfect place to shepherd in the changes that are needed in order to deal with communications crisis both inside and outside a company.

Companies are concerned about the time it takes to monitor social media. Using web 3.0 technologies companies are starting to use semantic technologies to monitor and find opportunities online. Semantic technology companies like Visible Technologies, Radian6, Cymfony, Umbria etc. spider the web to develop a database of content. The content is scanned for keywords related to a brand, product or issue, and then words surrounding the keywords are analyzed for context, perhaps the sentiment of writing about a particular brand or product.

Dell Inc has used several of these technologies as part of its effort to listen and communicate directly with customers online. Semantic technologies help to identify negative discussions about a product, customer service and public affairs issues. Tools vendors even give companies the ability to route online opportunities either automatically or through manual triage, more importantly those incidents and a company’s response can be tracked using existing CRM systems or custom databases.

Building a resource to monitor and respond to customers online is less about hiring new staff, though that certainly may have to happen, and is more about thinking about reorganizing existing communications structures to handle the new way of communicating. Some of the principal reasons for monitoring and responding to customers within social media are customer service, innovation management, customer evangelist promotion, and crisis communications.

Not every company will have a need to build an infrastructure to handle all of these goals, but for large companies with a large number of consumers or b2b customers it is likely most of these goals will be part of the social media monitoring and response structure. I’d suggest the following steps need to be in place for a social media infrastructure to be successful.

1)    Executive support.
2)    Combine resources from several departments.
3)    Communicate the progress of the combined resources to the whole company.

Internal communicators should be at the forefront of any social media initiative, working to build a task force that includes the employees who need to be involved for building the infrastructure.

Remember the goal is to get the whole enterprise involved not just certain constituents who adopt social media because they see it as a power opportunity to continue their control of the enterprise. Internal communicators will need to marshal their communications tools to explain the new culture of social media and how to communicate within that new culture. Internal communicators will also have to do the mundane work of helping to build the social media monitoring and response infrastructure. Here, public affairs and customer service people will have to come together to work on responses to customers that are both customer service answers and opportunities for public relations.  Designing a workflow process that allows for a speedy response but diminishes diplomatic hiccups is the real issue with managing social media. To speed the process of monitoring and response companies will have to adopt semantic technologies that integrate CRM tools.

Some of those same semantic technologies can be deployed on internal databases to help with highlighting innovation internally, or the development of social networking within a company. The successful development of social networking internally in a company has more to do with people internally in the company feeling it is okay to criticize and contribute to the network. Internal communicators again can help with the adoption of internal social networks by pinpointing examples using their existing communications tools. However, semantic technologies that integrate with CRM tools can be harnessed for employee social networking monitoring and response.

Transforming Government Online

After seeing this white paper on transforming online government, produced by the Federal Web Managers Council, I was thinking that some of the expected resources put towards employment might go towards more community managers for Government sites. I was also thinking that the Government like business will have to build an infrastructure for engagement. Check out the article on Personal Democracy, especially with two of the suggested efforts recommended by the group:

Engage the public in a dialogue to improve our customer service

Ensure the public gets the same answer whether they use the web, phone, email, print, or visit in-person

SNCR Study On Dell, Comcast & More

Earlier this year I wrote two case studies for the Nuance study on customer care and brand reputation for the Society for New Communications Research as part of my role as Research Fellow.

The two case studies were about Dell and Comcast.

Dell’s case study was an update and outline of the work Dell has completed in social media over the last few years, I attempted to focus on what infrastructure they built and timelines. And the Comcast case study was on their 2008 entry into the world of social media monitoring and response, the study covers the Michael Arrington twitter incident.

SNCR published the full report and case studies; you can purchase the report or download a free pdf online.

Thanks to my colleagues: Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D., Paul Gillin, John Cass, Susan Getgood, and Francois Gossieaux for their help and participation in the report.

Thanks to Richard Binhammer at Dell and Frank Eliason at Comcast for their help in the preparation of the case studies.

Drafting A History Of The Integration Of Monitoring & CRM

I'm interested in writing a history of text analysis or media monitoring as it has progressed to integration with CRM systems.

My understanding is that in the 90's many text analysis companies provided services to the government and military, because text analysis companies needed a large volume of content to analyze, if you sold such services, you probably sold them to the Government.

When the web got going, it took a few years for companies to start to recognize that there was opportunity with analyzing consumer information online. Again, government clients were early clients. Then in the last few years the PR industry has been an important market, and after that marketing.

Now with the integration of monitoring with workflow and CRM systems, I think we are again seeing a shift with these products. The integration with CRM systems means we are now looking at enterprise tools, a market already largely developed and competitive, with companies like SAP, Oracle, and Salesforce.

As such it will be interesting to see how CRM companies react, will they integrate, develop in-house expertise, or purchase the start ups? In the last few years we've seen traditional media monitoring companies purchase the media monitoring start up's. I think the next wave of acquisitions will come from the CRM sector.

I am on the right track with this sequence of events; curious to hear your thoughts?

FIR’s Trust In Blogging Panel

Josh Bernoff's new report on blogging discovered that only 16% of online US consumers trust corporate blogs.

Neville Hobson & Shel Holtz invited me to join a panel discussion on their BlogTalkRadio show and For Immediate Release podcast.

Rather than abandon the idea of blogging completely, the group discussed what strategies companies should use to connect with their customers and communities using social media.

This conversation was very timely for me because I've been thinking a lot about the purpose of lists that feature companies using social media or blogs.

Here are a few lists; Rachel Happe, Peter Kim, Debbie Weil, New PR Wiki, and Twitter Brand Index.

(if you know of more let me know, I will add to this post.)

Those lists indicate which companies are using social media, and do very little to rate the how well a company is deploying an engagement strategy within social media. The fortune 500 business blogging wiki lists blogs, and also links to a list of independent blogger reviews so there's some value in the reviews in gauging which companies are conducting engagement effectively.

My recent post on finding social media engagement leaders is an attempt to both develop a methodology for determining what a social media engagement leader and build a list of successful engagement leaders.

Check out the FIR trust in blogging panel podcast.

Dell Drives The Social Media CRM Market

I’ve been speaking with the folks at both Radian6 and Visible Technologies in recent days, to follow up on earlier work I’d completed on a Dell case study for SNCR.org in the case of Visible Technologies, and a response from my linkedin inquiry on social CRM from Radian6 about the pace of change in the social media analysis tool market.

I believe Dell is driving the pace of development in the media monitoring tool industry through its drive for an understanding of the voice of the customer, and how Dell responds to customer opportunities in social media. (If you think of other brands or other vendors that are at the forefront I’d be glad to hear your opinion.)

I first interviewed Richard Binhammer at Dell for Joseph Jaffe's book, and discovered that Dell was developing an infrastructure for social media customer service using a lot of manual tools. Then in December of 2007 I interviewed Richard again and he told me about his work with Visible Technologies and the TruCast product.

The TruCast product enables brands to listen to customers but also builds a workflow process for assigning customer opportunities to people within a company. You can respond to a customer within the TruCast product. I was amazed by the sophistication of the product and its integration with customer management workflow processes.

Richard then met with the folks at Radian6, I believe one of the first meetings was probably at the SNCR conference in California, and liked their product because of the speed at which the product displayed social media opportunities.  It was my understanding for Dell it was critical to display opportunities as quickly as possible, in case the company had to respond rather than wait for any triaging process and placement of content on a social media website by a technology. In addition Ricard’s preference at Dell was for using social media tools for writing comments and other interactions rather than using a technology tool to place content. The one disadvantage with the Radian6 product would be that you might have to do extra work to track any content that was placed in social media. I do understand that TruCast has since updated their system to allow the user to find opportunities but also work within the workflow process and that Dell is using both Radian6 & TruCast.

Over the last six months Radian6 has also developed a number of CRM features that mean companies are able to find opportunities, triage the social media opportunity, and then send the incident to someone within a company to deal with. There is some integration with salesforce.com. You can send data to salesforce.com, but really CRM management still exists within the Radian6 tool. Dell drove a lot of the development of these features at Radian6 just as they did with Visible Technologies.

I suspect we are still in the early days of media monitoring/CRM integration, and that companies like Visible and Radian6 will either integrate their tools with CRM vendors, get purchased, or the CRM vendors will think about developing their own monitoring tools.

What’s interesting to me is that the customer, in this case Dell is driving the pace of development in the industry. The tool vendors really need to anticipate what customers will want next. I think customers require better integration with existing CRM packages.

I also see that tool vendors will open up more opportunities with customers by demonstrating how companies can use their products for sales 2.0 relationship building. With sales 2.0 a marketing and sales team uses social media monitoring tools to gather intelligence on companies and a customer buying group, so any intelligence gathered in social media about a customer influences the buying process from the sales pitch team, but there is an opportunity for a vendor to conduct a dialogue with a customer that means that a customer learns and builds relationships with a vendor through social media. What would be interesting is to develop other web 3.0 tools that enable a company to develop usable intelligence on a customer. Perhaps identifying what communities are most important to a client’s buying group.

Finally, as the leader in the industry I have a question for Dell, (Richard Binhammer most likely) what do you see is the future for these tools?

Do You Want To Interview A Fortune 500 Business Blogger?

Here’s a new strategy for increasing the number of reviews for Fortune 500 blogs on the Fortune 500 Business blogging wiki.

It has been almost a year since Easton Ellsworth and I started the community project to revamp the f500 wiki on corporate blogs. The number of blogs discovered has increased and we have more reviews, but we have not completed the census or reviewed all of the blogs.

In the last six month's I've tried a new technique of interviewing f500 bloggers rather than reviewing the blogs of Fortune 500 companies. The two interviews I've conduct, one for Oracle and the other for Newell Rubbermaid went well, and I even think the analysis by the bloggers at Oracle and Rubbermaid was tougher on their own blogs than I would have given on their blogs.

I still encourage bloggers to write a review of a fortune 500 corporate blog on their blog, and then link to their review on the wiki. But I also propose another way to evaluate fortune 500 blogs; bloggers interview the social media marketing managers at fortune 500 companies about their blog, and post their review on their blog, with a link on the wiki.

Here's a link to a post with the list of questions a blogger would ask of a fortune 500 corporate blogger.

Will Ford & Auto Industry Be The Web 2.0 Turnaround Story Of 2009?

Roxanne Darling beat me to the punch line with this post, "How Ford Can Ramp Up It’s Social Media Turnaround Story of 2009."

In February 2007 I wrote the blog post, "Is Dell The Biggest Blogging Story of 2007?" The post discussed the potential of Dell through its use of social media and strategy to become the biggest corporate story about a company using social media to effectively engage its community and customers. I think Dell was the story for 2007, and 2008. SNCR.org even gave Dell honors by naming Dell brand of the year.

I really was thinking ahead to 2009, and while I cannot honestly say that Ford, General Motors or Chrysler are at this point conducting themselves in social media to the extent that Dell was in late 2006 and 2007. I like Roxanne Darling hope Ford and its American competitors will be able to claim awards and the mantel of the biggest social media turnaround story of 2009.

Dell had it easy compared to the American car industry. While Dell struggled with poor customer service perception, the big three have an ingrained poor reputation in the American market. Not just individual car companies, or brands, but American car companies in general. Dell never had to fight against Americans perceiving American computers were worse in quality than every other country's machines. Yet, that perception is the biggest problem Ford, GM and Chrysler face today.

Roxanne Darling shares my passion for social media, and my hopefulness that an American car manufacturer will use social media to tell its turnaround story to the community. What’s personally interesting about Roxanne's post is that she reveals that her Father is an ex-Vice President of Marketing for Ford, and her whole family worked in the industry.

I don't claim a similar heritage. My Mother's family is British. However, my maternal Grandfather, and Great Uncles worked for Crossley Motors in the 1920's and 30's, working on the construction of buses, locomotives and possibly aeroplanes. I have been a long time car industry watcher on social media for General Motors, Ford and a whole chapter in my book on corporate blogging about the auto industry.

In her article, Roxanne Darling suggests that social media can be used to address some of the obstacles Ford Motor company faces.

1) Financials.
2) Cultural insensitivity.
3) Time.

Will there be enough time to change community perceptions about Ford and American car manufacturers in general. Though I also think it is about the car companies developing a different line of vehicles to compete.

Roxanne suggests social media can address these issues in the following ways:

1) Give Scott Monty more money.
2) Inform the public of what Ford is doing.
3) Get control of the brand back from the agency.

And in detail:

1. Production: Get rid of the high-priced video production team and inject some humanity into the production.
2. Message: It’s off the mark. Here is how I would change it.
3. Conversation: it still barely exists. Here is how I would change it.
4. Distribution: Ford, you are not using video anywhere near to its advantage. Here is how to ramp it up.
5. Speed: Use live-streaming as much as possible, as people don’t like to wait.

The Dell turnaround story with social media worked because Dell focused on changing structural issues as well as using social media to communicate directly with customers. Dell improved customer service and updated its product line. At the same time through micro interactions on blogs and other social media technologies Dell changed people's minds one by one. Structural issues are critical for success whether you are Dell, Ford, GM or Chrysler. But just as social media rapidly brought down Dell in the Dell Hell storm, once the structural issue had started to be addressed; social media helped Dell to turnaround quickly.

Here's my take on what Ford and other American car manufacturers can do with social media to help make selves the social media turnaround story of 2009:

1) Listen: Use social media for listening.
2) Engagement: Engage customers when they have problems. Acknowledge their issues and demonstrate that you are going to either do something about their issues, or why you cannot.
3) Triage Infrastructure: Develop a company infrastructure for triaging social media conversations about Ford and other American car manufacturers. If the dealer network is a problem where customer service issues are not dealt with by Ford directly. Either help dealers build the infrastructure, or build that infrastructure and pass on the customer support issues to dealers. Make sure any customer issues are resolved.
4) Measurement: Measure sentiment about Ford, the American car industry, and brands. Report on the current of sentiment in social media in the same way you report on sales and profits by quarter. Like Dell your goal should be to move the negative rating lower. Once you start changing perceptions in social media there should be a knock on effect with traditional media, as my article on intermedia issues indicates, “Making Sense Of Intermedia Agenda-Setting For Social Media Marketing.”

A number of people don't agree with the Government’s auto bailout and think that it would be better for the American car manufacturers to go into bankruptcy. I don't personally agree with them. But I was thinking that there may be something that everyone who is a user and advocate for social media can agree upon, bailout aside. The plan and path for Ford and other car manufacturers need to take to succeed.

1) Structural reform (Ford looks well on the way here)
2) Use social media to communicate with customers for listening, and resolving issues and in so doing telling the new story through action.

Dell succeeded because the company understood the power of public relations and connecting with people in their customer community. The company also understood it was important to connect with social media influential people on the web and in person. Ford and the other car manufacturers have to get social media enthusiasts on their side; you can do that by structural reform, but also by enabling your social media managers to build the same sort of infrastructure Dell built and connect with your customers directly. Then reach out to the community and don’t be afraid about revealing all the facts about where you failed and succeeded. That transparency will help you to become the social media turnaround story of 2009.