tl;dr: First post in a series sum­ma­riz­ing the “5 Keys to Imple­ment­ing Social Media” pre­sen­ta­tion, start­ing with “The Social Media Adop­tion Matrix“

Check­point Char­lie, Berlin, and the pharma indus­try

The recent Eye­For­Pharma eMar­ket­ing Sum­mit 2010 was held in Berlin, a fit­ting place to talk about social media for the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal indus­try. The Mauer Museum at Check­point Char­lie exhibits the many ways civil­ians and sol­diers attempted to escape from East Berlin. By air, land and sea, peo­ple tried to cross the bor­der by every con­ceiv­able method, includ­ing light air­craft, bal­loons, ziplines, hid­den com­part­ments in cars, under­wa­ter propul­sion, and so on. Their imag­i­na­tions were lim­it­less in break­ing down that great bar­rier to com­mu­ni­ca­tion, the Berlin Wall.

This was my sec­ond visit to Berlin; I love the energy and cre­ativ­ity with which the city rein­vents itself, as it dis­tances itself from the past. Pharmaceutical firms and reg­u­la­tory agen­cies must also rein­vent their com­mu­ni­ca­tions prac­tices as quicker and eas­ier to use tools allow physi­cians and patients to pub­lish to vast audi­ences online.

The Social Media Adop­tion Matrix

At the Eye­For­Pharma con­fer­ence, I pre­sented “5 Keys to Imple­ment­ing Social Media.” If you’ve been tasked with look­ing into social media for your com­pany, this is a sug­gested frame­work to help you define the busi­ness case and strat­egy, deter­mine resource require­ments and allo­ca­tion, and set inter­nal con­trols and per­for­mance metrics.

Let’s start with the adop­tion matrix. In short, it’s a rep­re­sen­ta­tion on how active your com­pany and your cus­tomers are in con­ver­sa­tions online. The hor­i­zon­tal axis plots how engaged your cus­tomers are about your com­pany and related prod­ucts and ser­vices; the ver­ti­cal axis plots how aware your com­pany is of the social media activ­ity sur­round­ing your brand, prod­ucts, ser­vices, com­peti­tors, and indus­try. In other words, are peo­ple talk­ing, and where do you fit in the conversation?

First quad­rant: The Mar­ket­ing Neanderthal

Nean­derthals and mod­ern humans were con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous species, co-existing with Cro-Magnon in Europe for about 10,000 years. Despite their larger phys­i­cal size and brains, Nean­derthals are believed to have expired due to behav­ioral and cul­tural traits not shared by their more suc­cess­ful rivals.

Are your company’s mar­ket­ing efforts floun­der­ing while your com­peti­tors achieve mile­stones online? Are you aware of your customer’s online con­ver­sa­tions about you, if they exist? If your com­mu­nity is not active, do you under­stand the trade offs you’re making?

Most hos­pi­tals (some excep­tions here: Hos­pi­tal Social Net­work List) and edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tions fit in this quad­rant, with nei­ther the inter­est nor resources to devote to research­ing how to develop and con­nect with their com­mu­nity online. How­ever, they are mean­ing­ful spaces which are poten­tially rich with conversations.

Sec­ond quad­rant: The Wise Monkeys

So you sus­pect your cus­tomers are engaged in con­ver­sa­tions about your brand, prod­ucts, ser­vices, or cus­tomer ser­vice online, but you’d rather turn a blind eye? Maybe only Apple can get away with that, and only while their prod­ucts rock. At least they no longer sue leak­ers. But Inter­net bas­tions Google and Ama­zon paid their dues recently. Motrin too.

What about Nestlé, who was absent from the con­ver­sa­tion, and then showed snark? Here’s a sum­mary, from ime­di­a­con­nec­tion:

Now, by all accounts it was Green­peace that “started it” – with the cre­ation of a snarky viral video (more on that in a moment).  Then, enter Nes­tle legal claim­ing trade­mark infringe­ment and ask­ing that the video be taken down.  This resulted in a fairly coör­di­nated protest (some have called it attack) on Nestle’s Fan Page.   Then, Nes­tle cer­tainly didn’t do itself any favors – with a few ham fisted responses.  Help­ful Safety Tip to every cor­po­rate PR / Social Media Man­ager: delet­ing com­ments, or whip­ping out the “copyright/intellectual prop­erty” jus­ti­fi­ca­tions are the social media equiv­a­lent of “let them eat cake”.

But, here’s the inter­est­ing part, whether you believe them or not, Nes­tle did respond to the Green­peace report by “assur­ing” every­one that they will not use Palm Oil pro­duced by the ven­dor that Green­peace is asserting.  Why they aren’t doing this more vocif­er­ously on their Face­book Fan Page is some­thing of a mys­tery.  Green­peace then responded that their con­ces­sions “don’t go nearly far enough”.

Their con­clu­sion is stun­ning:

But I won­der if, after a few more of these types of storms, we won’t see cor­po­rate brands tighten up and kill off some of the social media channels.   One thing I do know (and I’m not say­ing this about the Nes­tle case in par­tic­u­lar) is that as prac­ti­tion­ers we are going to have to start to call bull­shit on the mob as often as we do the mobbed.  Just because they’re out­side some company’s walls with pitch­forks doesn’t mean they’re right.  Or does it?

You guessed it: cor­po­rate Wise Mon­keys see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil. Check off quad­rant two of the social media adop­tion matrix.

Third quad­rant: The Pris­oner; The Thinker

Ok, so you know there’s some­thing going on, and that you might tap into the poten­tial of find­ing or devel­op­ing or con­nect­ing with your com­mu­nity online. Unfor­tu­nately, you’re held in check, a Pris­oner to your company’s restric­tive poli­cies, per­haps set in place by an overzeal­ous legal department.

For instance, how many insti­tu­tions block every­one from Face­book, like the high school I grad­u­ated from (many eons ago)? Not even the school’s admin­is­tra­tion is allowed access the plat­form that their stu­dents are so obvi­ously using dur­ing the school­day on their iPhones. Or what about Lehman Toy­ota, where I had my car ser­viced last week­end? I had many hours to spare while I waited, so I brought my lap­top. The dealer had three locked wi-fi sys­tems and informed me and another cus­tomer that access was indeed restricted. Gra­ciously, a man­ager offered to hook us into landlines.

To their credit, AstraZeneca is try­ing out dif­fer­ent social media plat­forms. The Nex­ium Face­book page and their AZHelps Twit­ter account are still a far cry from com­mu­nity man­age­ment. Of course, part of the blame sits with the FDA (see this), which has not set out social media poli­cies for the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal industry.

“Thank you for all the recent com­ments! We are in the process of review­ing and post­ing them. We’ll have some new dis­cus­sion top­ics shortly and in the com­ing weeks.” -Nex­ium on Facebook

The Thinker, on the other hand, suf­fers from paral­y­sis by analy­sis, read­ing a lot about social media and attend­ing con­fer­ences, yet not tak­ing actionnable steps. 5 Keys to Social Media out­lines a clear roadmap for imple­men­ta­tion. Which com­pa­nies are over-rationalizing social media? Here’s an inter­est­ing post com­par­ing Ford (which “gets it”) with Chrysler. There’s a lot of room for improve­ment, there.

Fourth quad­rant: The Pioneer

Many brands across many indus­tries are actively engag­ing their com­mu­nity online. Kudos for tak­ing the lead and show­ing the way for oth­ers to fol­low, and case stud­ies abound high­light­ing emer­gent best prac­tices. Mash­able and Read­WriteWeb are good places to start for reg­u­lar cov­er­age of social media suc­cesses and fail­ures by big brands and small.

Where does your orga­ni­za­tion fit on the adop­tion matrix? And where do you fit?

A warm word of thanks to Brett Petersel for retweet­ing (@brett) this pre­sen­ta­tion many times, dri­ving it to thou­sands of views in under a week. The full deck is on Slideshare:

social media, adop­tion matrix, imple­men­ta­tion, strat­egy, busi­ness, mar­ket­ing, process, berlin, pharma, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal