Technology has dramatically changed our perception of the world. It has affected how we navigate our environment and consume information, and has changed our expectations about how quickly information should be made available. The new norm for all of us is about immediacy and relevance.

In healthcare professional (HCP) offices, it’s about providing new ways to share information─when it’s needed.  HCPs seek information so they can achieve better treatment outcomes─but again, only when they need the information. They want services and products that enhance their ability to take care of their patients. 

The rep who can play the role of business owner─coordinating activities that solve the problems an office faces, and assuming responsibility for deciding when and where to expend resources for the best return on investment–will excel. 

To meet these new demands, reps will need to develop skills such as strategic planning, data analysis, and business acumen, which will enable them to deploy their resources in the most effective way.

Training will be important, but hiring people who have the natural talent for these new responsibilities will be even more important. The future rep will need a broader understanding of the company than in the past, as well as a clear understanding of strategic territory planning.

A Shift in Thinking

We need to change our understanding of sales reps as deliverers of “the message.”  Message delivering is a push strategy─and physicians are rebelling against being pushed. Instead, pharmaceutical sales representatives need to be conduits to the multitude of services, products, and programs that pharmaceutical companies have to offer physicians and their patients.

What if a new role were established for reps─one of being great listeners and communicators who establish, coordinate, and enhance the relationship with the company. Let’s put them in charge of the business relationship and give them responsibility for driving results in a new and better way.

With this shift in thinking the sales rep is empowered to focus on building trust and earning respect by truly understanding the pressures that HCPs face.

Within the current structure, and with what HCPs are currently being asked to do, I don’t think sales reps can change the relationship much. Some are better than others at building relationships with physicians and their staffs.

A busy primary care physician’s office may prefer to have a rep filter information to physicians through the office manager and staff. The constraints of traditional measures for performance don’t encourage a strategic approach; they reinforce a more cookie-cutter approach. Devising a unique plan for each office’s characteristics and needs is a great first step in building trust. 

Obviously, the talents, skills, and experience needed for this new role are significantly different from those in the current hiring profile for new sales reps. Ultimately, companies must create comprehensive strategic plans that “just say no” to the pushed message.

Part of that strategy is to elevate the role of sales reps, to give them more autonomy in making decisions about using resources to influence brand loyalty. Following that, companies will be charged with finding and hiring people who are a good fit with the new role.

Once the right candidate is found, training will need to evolve as well. This new rep will need to build skills in business management, analysis, decision making, and strategic thinking. But, that’s a discussion for another post…

The importance of color and how it relates to your target audience is a vital part of creating a memorable brand identity. Over time, the color that your company  and agency partner choose may become as important for physician and patient recognition as the brand name itself.

This overview of the common psychological connotations attributed to various colors is intended to facilitate your choice of brand colors. (For additional details on strategic marketing considerations that you should factor into color choice, click here).

Psychology of color (symbolism)

The mind subconsciously relates each color to a feeling. Although perceptions of color are somewhat subjective,  some color effects have universal meaning.

For example, colors in the red area of the color spectrum, known as warm colors (including red, orange, and yellow), evoke emotions ranging from feelings of warmth and comfort to feelings of energy and enthusiasm.

Colors on the blue side of the spectrum are known as cool colors and include blue, purple, and green. These colors often conjure up feelings of calm, but they can also call to mind attitudes of sadness or indifference.

Meaning of color (theory)

Color surrounds us. We see it and are programmed to respond. Color, a powerful nonverbal form of communication, offers an instantaneous method for conveying meaning.

The subliminal message we get from seeing a given color shapes our thoughts about whatever it is that we are observing. With this in mind, using the appropriate colors in a biotech marketing campaign will reinforce the message and emotional undertones that you hope to convey.

Here is a sample of emotions and imagery commonly associated with individual colors. Consider (or avoid) these combinations when creating marketing materials:

• Red: passion, energy, stop, vitality, love, blood
• Yellow: joy, intellect, caution, youth, clarity
• Green: fertility, money, healing, success, growth
• White: perfection, purity, weddings, cleanliness, virtue
• Blue: knowledge, tranquility, calm, peace, coolness
• Black: fear, negativity, death, evil, secrecy
• Purple: royalty, wisdom, spirituality, imagination
• Orange: creativity, invigoration, uniqueness, energy
• Gray: neutrality, lack of commitment, uncertainty

Taking advantage of color—by considering the personality of your brand and the colors and emotional associations that will best suit it—sometimes means daring to be different. Engaging the audience with the most impactful color choice for your biotech product will create an emotional impression that will undoubtedly withstand the test of time.

Your brand’s approval date is a lot like a baby’s due date. You can mark off the days on your calendar with a big red marker, but the truth is, it’s on its own timeline, and there’s not a whole lot you can do about it.

What you can do is embrace the nesting phase of your brand development, and make sure you are as ready for approval as possible. Once your brand is launched, you will be working fast and furiously to get your product into the minds and hands of the market, and you won’t want to waste your time or energy worrying about things that could have been done already.

Strategize your registry of tactics

Many parents-to-be, especially those who are expecting their first child, hold that registry gun like a loaded weapon and aim it at everything in sight. Deluxe wipes warmer? Must have! CD collection that plays classical, brain-growing music? Absolutely! Adorable outfit with matching booties and bonnet? Need it in every color!

But when the parents get home from the hospital and realize all they really needed was a onesie, a washcloth and warm water, and some white noise on the radio, they often wish they would have spent their energy—and money—on more of the basics, the things they really will use day in and day out.

Apply the same thinking to your tactic wish list. Which tactics do you definitely need for launch? A core detail aid? Definitely. A leave-behind sell sheet with contact and ordering information? Yes! A slim jim that contains the exact information as the detail aid except it has different visuals customized to your 6 different audience types, which is causing confusion and pushback in your review board? Well… maybe wait and see if it’s still as important after the launch.

Brush up on survival strategies from veteran players

Most first-time parents take a class to learn the do’s and don’ts of having a brand new baby. They turn to the experts for tips and tricks on how to swaddle, give a bath, or dispose of a dirty diaper without passing out. Even parents of older children who haven’t cared for a newborn in quite a while ask their friends about any changes in current practices and the new trends in modern parenting.

Even if you successfully launched a brand 5 years ago, the market is a different place. Technology has greatly evolved, and is playing a bigger part than ever in the way we reach our audiences. FDA guidelines have also changed, and claims you were able to make back then might get you publicly flogged today.

Take advantage of the recent brand launchers around you. Find out what’s trending in the market and how to deal with recent crackdowns of your review board. Just remember, as every new parent knows, to take all advice with a grain of salt, and don’t let it cloud your brand vision and strategic goals.

Have reasonable expectations

Brand launches are many things—exciting, fast-paced, stressful, fulfilling, a little scary—but they are definitely not easy. Just as every new parent knows that he or she shouldn’t expect to get a decent night’s sleep for at least a year, you should also know that it will probably take several rounds of board review to get your detail aid approved.

In addition, your launch date might be pushed back once or twice, and there may be several days in a row—weeks even—that you eat lunch and dinner in a conference room. But as long as you keep your eye on the end result—your beautiful new brand smiling back at you from a journal ad—you should soldier through the madness.

 Enjoy the moment

Take a deep breath and look around you. In just a few short months, your brand will be on the market and you’ll get to see first-hand how all your hard work will pay off. It’s hard to believe, but there will come a day when you’ll look back on even the most stressful moments of planning for your brand’s launch and smile…because it will have all been worth it.

Having spent the better part of the first 19 years of my pharmaceutical marketing career as a client, I now find myself heading up Strategic Planning and Account Management for Dudnyk.  I thought I knew the ad agency game pretty well as a brand manager, but there are definitely things I’ve learned since joining the agency that I wish I’d known when I was a client. 

Lesson 1: Great Creative Takes Time. 

As a brand manager, I was always pushing to beat deadlines because I knew that the sooner I could introduce a new tactic into the field, the faster I could begin generating demand from that tactic.  Sometimes I’d be downright unreasonable to my agencies, asking them to turn around concepts in less time than it took me to explain what I wanted! 

I rationalized my behavior by blaming it on tight media deadlines or conference opportunities.  But in reality, it was my own lack of foresight and planning that caused the “fire drill.”

What I failed to realize is that I was really short-changing the creative process.  Creative ideas are like fine wine; they get better with time.  What I needed to do was to look farther ahead and bring my agency into the planning process earlier, so there would be ample time to develop truly great creative. 

Lesson 2: Great Agencies Solve Problems, Not Just Develop Ads. 

As the leader of several brand teams, I always felt it was my responsibility to have all the answers.  After all, I was often the one answering questions from senior management.  And while I prided myself on considering my agencies as my business partners, I probably didn’t go far enough to leverage the full capabilities they could offer. 

Great agencies thrive on solving problems – creative or strategic.  The key is that you have to give them all the input and background info you have, so they can work the problem with you.  They can draw on vast experiences built from working with other clients and categories… and as a result, come up with solutions that are not just merely clever, but are truly effective as well.

Lesson 3: It’s All About the Brief (and the Estimate).  

There are two tools that are essential for project success: the creative brief and the project estimate.  Think of them as your compass and map.  Without either tool you could be lost in the woods for days.  And just like a compass that doesn’t always point north, a creative brief that is not tightly focused on a single-minded idea will not get you to on-target creative. 

Likewise, accurate estimates are the financial maps for any project.  I used to believe that I could “squeeze” my agencies.  But it’s really not about getting a better deal, it’s about reaching project goals – and that means doing it right, not just doing it for less.  What I hadn’t realized is that I was actually compromising my goals.  What I should have done was to make tradeoffs, taking my entire budget into consideration, not just my agency fee. 

So, make sure you understand your agency’s perspective and cut corners somewhere else in your budget – otherwise, you could find yourself with a faulty compass and half a map!

Sharing ideas is what we do here every day at Dudnyk. To showcase our collaborative branding expertise to even more decision makers in the industry, we decided last year to take some of those ideas to the cyber world, in the form of a blog. In the first year of our Dudnyk blog, 90 posts coached brand managers on everything from stress management and work/life balance for mothers  to identifying the best data sources, providing advice for staffing your dream team,  ramping up digital campaigns,  thinking creatively, growing your brand with care, and giving unbranded materials a try. A couple handfuls of agency authors contributed ideas, as well as two industry experts (graphic designer/author David Airey and veteran pharma expert Nancy Bacher Long in guest posts.

We also had a little fun in our posts, referencing Survivor, Austin Powers, Jimmy Buffett, Justin Bieber, Jay-Z, Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot and the car buying proclivities of one of our colleagues. But never fear: the posts ultimately relate to the same kind of insightful advice about bold branding that we are known for giving to our clients.

Here is a roundup of our favorite blog posts:

Arresting Images Are Winning Images

One of the most viewed posts was Why shouldn’t my campaign show a smiling patient? by president Frank X. Powers. Several Dudnyk staff members chose it as their favorite post of the year, for its recommendation of always striving for arresting creative ideas. In his post, Frank discusses three award-winning ads and elaborates on their merits.

“As a creative person I couldn’t agree more,” said Tara Walther, Creative Director, Art. She said it’s a disservice when a biopharma company chooses to stop short of pushing for the imagery that will be most evocative for its brand.

“If more than 80 percent of healthcare ads are focusing on personal fulfillment, it makes sense to strive to create something more unique and memorable to have the greatest impact in today’s healthcare marketing environment,” said Chris Tobias, PhD, EVP, Chief Scientific Officer and Director of  Business Development. “Frank’s post was a good reminder for marketing managers to inspire their teams to explore the unexpected.”

Proper Communication Prevents Curveball Surprises

Speaking of Frank, what was his favorite post of the year? That honor went to It’s launch time: do you know what your position is? by Laurie Bartolomeo, Creative Director, Copy. “Everyone in our organization should read, study, live, and practice the advice in this column,” he shared.

And there’s meat in it for your company, too. Send your thanks to Laurie for a succinct formula for launch-time success: Take the research you get from your audience, craft a laser-focused position, get buy-in on it from colleagues, and use that position as the guiding principle for brainstorming, so there are no “late-inning curveballs from those who have not ‘bought in’ on the idea.”

In addition to Laurie’s post, another popular post also examines the importance of receiving buy-in on projects before proceeding. Don’t let the buzz words get in the way of achieving your brand goals, by Barry Schmader, EVP, Chief Creative Officer, was a hit not only for the hockey vocabulary roundup it included (which sparked some interesting conversations among our office mates), but also for its practical advice.

“Barry’s right that during a brand launch, or during the creation of a crucial tactic, there is no time to waste on semantics,” said Scott Greisler, SVP, General Manager. “Brand managers should always use simple, clear language and confirm that their teams are on the same page with them on the details.”

A Tale of Two Thoughts on Taglines

Also on the short list of popular articles was Frank’s post Taglines don’t matter in biotech branding. Ellen Schneider, VP, Professional Services, pointed out that this post, and another one written by Scott Harper, Account Group Supervisor, entitled Are taglines a must for biotech brands? offer opposing opinions that a brand manager can use to inspire debate among the members of his or her team.

Frank’s post describes what a tagline is, but gives the opinion that taglines are out of vogue because there are no longer premium tactics (like pens and notepads) for which a pithy one-liner would be the sole means of reinforcing positioning. These days, as Frank notes in the blog post, positioning and messaging communicated by the sales team, innovative tactics, and nonpersonal promotional strategy should all be used to address the theme.

Scott’s post, however, argues that taglines are a quick, relatively inexpensive way to increase brand recognition, which may reduce the amount of time it takes for a new brand to get noticed and acquire loyal users in the marketplace.

“These posts demonstrate that there is no one right way for all companies to market themselves,” Ellen observed. “Brand teams, with the help of their agencies, will need to take stock of their objectives and their budgets to determine which school of thought will give them the biggest return on investment in the time frame they have in mind.”

More Advice on Clear Communication

Use of social media in the medical marketing industry—a strategy that has garnered much interest but is governed by murky guidance, at best—was examined in various ways in several posts. Bridget Sullivan, Assistant Account Executive, gave her vote for favorite article to Social media: no country for credibility gaps,  by Danielle Campbell-Angah, Senior Copy Editor. “I am the queen of cutting my Facebook status into Word before posting it because my mind works faster than my fingers. I’ve made some interesting typos when trying to update from my phone,” she said, encouraging brand managers to remember their personal experiences with social media gaffes to understand why it’s necessary to be even more vigilant with company communications.

Offering similar advice for e-mail was Senior Copywriter Kristin Morris’s favorite blog post, Before you hit send! written by Joe Chelius, Senior Copy Editor. “[Joe’s post] reminds us to stop and check for editorial mistakes before sending out a mass e-mail, but I think it also does something bigger. It makes us slow down and really think about what we’re sending.” The same reactive thinking that sometimes goes into responding to one e-mail could also be informing a host of short-term decisions that, taken together, damage a brand’s long-term strategy. “Even though Joe’s blog is specific to checking e-mails, I think it has a larger, more important lesson,” Kristin concluded.

Other favorite posts were:

• 4 rules every biotech manager should know about presentation slides, by Chris Tobias, PhD
• Six tips for adding vigor to your writing, by Joe Chelius
• Your biotech brand needs a good uniform…but that’s not all, by Marielle Albanese, Junior Copywriter
• Use color to build and differentiate your brand, by Tara Walther
• If you ain’t first you’re last! How to act like the market leader, by Frank X. Powers
• Make a good first impression with typography, by Chuck Jeffries, VP, Creative Director, Art
• Hey doc, look at me! by Frank X. Powers
• What can a biotech brand manager learn from the 2011 U2 360 Tour? by Monika Johnson
• The brand barbershop: satirical advice for male marketing managers, by Barry Schmader 
• Laser focus required to position biotech brands, by Frank X. Powers

 What will 2012 bring on our blog?

Check back regularly, as we will be posting articles this year with an expanded roster of Dudnyk authors. Upcoming posts include valuable lessons from a former brand manager now experiencing life on the agency side, a “baby shower” of ideas for teams that are anticipating a brand launch, and a guest post from a sales veteran who explains that AIDA and professional speaking for success is about more than Egypt and operatic singing.

Changing the look of your brand can be exciting and invigorating–and can help change the way the market views your product. The problem is, rebranding doesn’t start and end with just a look.

Consider the University of Maryland Terrapins, a college football team that recently attracted national attention by switching to new uniforms, sporting matching helmets and cleats whose vivid colors were modeled on the state flag.

The Terps had the right idea: to cultivate a unique and powerful look that exuded Turtle (and state) pride on the field. Unfortunately, the team’s new look didn’t help win games. When the loses began to mount, the Terps soon discovered they were no longer a topic of favorable discussion.

When rebranding your product, there are certain outcomes you’ll want to improve. You’ll want an upgrade in sales metrics, an increase in brand recognition, and prevalence in the marketplace. Here are some things to keep in mind:

1. Perfect your image. The look of your brand will get the ball rolling, but it’s not everything. Be sure to give the concept stopping power, but be prepared to back it up with the other brand attributes. Read Frank Powers’s post “Why Shouldn’t My Campaign Show a Smiling Patient?” for advice on how to give your brand that “wow” look.
2. Embrace change. In a successful rebranding effort, change is inevitable. You’ll have to make sure that you and your team are ready to let go of things that might have worked well in the past but are holding you back now. As your brand changes, some of your goals and tactics—and even your teammates—will change as well.
3. Have a game plan. Take time before the launch of your new campaign to plan each step, each tactic, and each move you will need to execute. See Laurie Bartolomeo’s “It’s Launch time: Do You Know What Your Position Is?” for brand planning tactics.
4. Do your research. Relearn your market.  Investigate your competitors, your audience, your product. The more you know, the better position you will be in to move forward with your rebranding effort.
5. Be clear. Don’t let there be any reason to doubt why your brand is the best option on the market. This means keeping your message in its most basic and understandable form for your audience. Don’t lose your audience in convoluted messaging.

Rebranding anything—whether a college football team or a biotech brand—requires dexterity, appropriate execution and, perhaps most important, substance as well as style. So, suit up, brand managers.  It’s game time.

Nancy has spent more than 25 years in the communications business working for Fortune 100 pharmaceutical companies, start-up biotechnology ventures and medical device companies. She established Dorland Global Public Relations, a business unit of Dorland Global, in 1992, and led the business for more than 16 years. Long left Dorland in 2009, and established Ducknot, LLC, a communications consultancy.

To achieve brand success in the evolving world of social media, companies need to rely on the timeless storytelling skills of experienced PR firms.

The healthcare industry is paying more attention to cross-cultural communication. Whether it’s language, age, geography, gender or sexual orientation, there is often a campaign micro-targeted to a particular constituency.

Conversely, in healthcare communication, it is all about integration. Cross-discipline campaigns, influencer marketing, and integrated communication are a few of today’s buzzwords. Agencies are cautioned to “play nice” to execute campaigns that comply with one holistic brand platform.

While much has changed since I started in pharma public relations in the ’90s, one troubling gap persists. As we all seek the “holy grail” of a successful, integrated campaign, my advertising colleagues still lack an appreciation for the process, perspective, and nuances of a successful public relations campaign. As one colleague pointed out–perhaps obviously–PR is the business of developing relationships with the public.  Not a headline, not a tagline, not a brand promise–a relationship.

I came from an agency that offered an integrated suite of services–long before that was considered cool. Although this structure had some benefits in the pitch process, the bigger advantage was in broadening one’s perspectives from public relations and in winning respect from advertising colleagues.

Public relations practitioners are storytellers, and companies must remember that story is the most important thing a company can deliver to its target audience. Through a compelling story a target audience can, after learning about the company and becoming familiar with its brand, recommend its products, invest in its stock–and perhaps even want to work there.

More and more, this kind of storytelling has migrated from the newsroom to the chat room. Blogging, micro blogging, podcasting, video blogs (vlogs), and social communities all belong to PR. Brand identity, SEO, and online and offline advertising campaigns belong to marketing.

So, as campaigns are driven more and more by social media engagement, advertising professionals should keep an eye on the rearview mirror. Your PR colleagues may be gaining on you in the marketing mix. Better understand their language so you can more effectively travel down the road to brand success.

Typography is a vital element of your branding and is considered an art form, but its power in marketing materials is often overlooked. It gives your target audience its first impression of your brand. It can easily pull the audience in to relay a message, or it can render a message incomprehensible and push the audience away.

Typography has a life of its own. It can have a modern or traditional feel. It can be conservative or unconventional. It can be exuberant or reserved. The options are endless for your brand identity. But choose wisely: The typeface that you settle on will have a strong influence on your audience and assist in creating initial and lasting impressions.

Effective Typography

The key to effective use of typography is to balance an eye-catching font with one that is easy to read. Often, the most memorable brand identities are the ones that marry a simplistic approach with a unique approach.

Typographic Classification

Here are some categories into which typography can be classified, with examples of associated fonts.

• Humanist: Includes calligraphic forms of lettering (Centaur, Verona)

• Old Style: Showcases a refinement of calligraphic forms (Bembo, Garamond, Caslon)

• Modern: Portrays a dramatic contrast in individual letters between thick and thin stokes and flat serifs—the small projecting features at the end of a stroke (Bodoni, Modern, Walbaum)

• Transitional: Shares features of Old Style and Modern (Baskerville, Fournier, Bell)

• Slab Serif: Have heavy, square-ended serifs (Rockwell, Memphis, Clarendon)

• Sans Serif: Includes letters without the small, projecting vertical and horizontal features at the end of strokes (Grotesque, Helvetica, Univers)

• Script: Think cursive regarding fonts in this category (Palace Script, Young Baroque)

• Graphic/Decorative: Comprises decorative fonts (Poster Bodoni, Hobo, Dom Casual)

• Digital: Depicts electronic-style lettering (Oakland, Isonorm, Modula)

Type and Color Interaction

Once you’ve settled on the appropriate typography, your team will need to consider the interaction of type and color as a powerful tool in portraying a brand attribute. Typography and color in combination can attract attention, help emphasize the concepts you want to convey, reinforce impact and recognition, create a mood, or strengthen the brand identity.

The primary consideration when joining type and color is readability. A high degree of contrast between the type and the surrounding background is key.

The importance that typography has in relaying marketing messages is similar to a person’s wearing the proper attire for a given occasion. Clothe your words in the font that best reinforces the impression you want to make and the core selling points of your biotech brand.

One danger with using social media is that it can be far too easy to shoot off a message without thinking—or even fully understanding an issue. This recently became a huge problem for actor Ashton Kutcher, following an uninformed statement he made about Joe Paterno being fired from Penn State. Kutcher’s initial outraged tweet has since been deleted from his account, as well as all of the other apologetic tweets he made that night. But impressions have been formed about the star (who has more than 2 million Twitter followers) and his take on Paterno and the scandal.

Biotech managers should do all they can to avoid making a similar critical gaffe on social media. Here are 6 strategies for constructing informed, credible messages.

1. Do your homework. As a representative of your company, resist the urge to shoot from the hip on social media, unless you are very well-versed on an issue. Taking time to grasp the complexities of the situation beats the time it will take to apologize for an errant statement later.

2. Include a link. If you are mentioning news pertaining to your company, include a link to where the public can find additional information on your site. If you’re commenting on relevant external news that you’ve seen in your jaunts on the internet, be sure to include a URL for corroboration.

3. Give attribution. Disclose the source of any links you provide, so people will feel comfortable about the accuracy of the information and exactly whose web page they’re about to visit.

4. Consider the source. Be sure your news URLs and attributions are for reputable news sites and industry experts, rather than spam bots interspersing the day’s headlines with whatever randomness they are trying to sell. If you’ve never heard of the source, check the appropriateness of its timeline and links. Or, better yet, scour Google for someone you trust who is saying the same thing.

5. Double- or triple-check anything that sounds unexpected or hard to believe. News can travel quickly on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn—rumors as well as true stories. I’m reminded of the old journalism adage: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” Check a few different sources covering the same information just to be sure before you put your company’s Klout behind an issue.

6. Use good timeshare practices. Rather than go it alone on his Twitter feed, Kutcher, in the aftermath of his Paterno comment, has decided to use his production company Katalyst Media to “ensure the quality of the content,” according to a Washington Post article. If you decide to have one feed for your company that is written by multiple (trustworthy) people, you will need either to make sure it’s clear that multiple voices are talking (by having individuals sign off on each communiqué in the feed), or ensure that the voice of the account sounds seamless.

These are the kinds of things you’d keep in mind if you were giving a face to face presentation, but there is a lot of temptation to throw convention out the window when it comes to social media, in the name of being the first or most entertaining expert. To best protect your company’s reputation, go with your head instead of your eagerness to transmit information with this lightning-fast medium.

For more great content regarding Twitter, read these posts:

Make nice on Twitter: 5 ideas for biotech brand managers

Justin Bieber can teach biotech brand managers about the power of Twitter

Pharma marketing and the new social media for biotech brands

Social media listening for biotech brands

Why focus on whom you share with versus where you share?
 
First, let’s look at the opportunity that Google is currently sitting on. Google search is by far the most-searched engine on the web, averaging several hundred million queries a day. So, it is safe to say that Google is one of the largest entry points for a majority of users interfacing the web today.
 
Google’s +1 rating technology, which is similar to Facebook’s “like”, has the ability to see how users relate to content much the way that Facebook can with content shared in its network. So, step back from this for a second, put your marketer cap on, and imagine the possibilities of a social based internet, where you are able to rate content conducted in a Google search, suggest or share content with users in your circles, and see how your selected audiences have related to the content you searched.
 
Changes the game a little bit, doesn’t it? Adds some additional value to your research to see how trusted colleagues view the content you are searching. Not just that, it ties into SEO efforts and actually increases the visibility of +1 content.

Don’t think it’s catching on?

The +1 button has reached over 4 billion daily views already, and the capacity of this technology is still expanding.
 
Some of the insights and advantages for biotech brand managers using G+ are the ability to:

• Acquire target-specific audiences and share relevant content

• Gain a broader understanding of how your audiences relate and respond to content

• Gain more visibility organically

If Google is able to pull this off, it’s sort of like losing the walls and keeping the community. Google+ may allow brand managers to stretch beyond the gated communities of the social networks and change the way their audiences interact with content on the internet.