Live from the Delaware

February 10, 2009 – 2:24 pm by Joshua Slatko

For part of this morning I’m blogging from the ePharma conference in Philadelphia – or, more specifically, at the lovely Hyatt Regency on the Delaware River. Thanks to the nice folks at IIR, who were thoughtful enough to set up free WiFi for conference participants.

9:55AM: Josh Bernoff of Forrester is discussing Johnson & Johnson’s Motrin baby-wearing moms fiasco. The moral of the story: consumers don’t just consume marketing messages; they discuss them with each other, draw their own conclusions – and sometimes make fun of you.

10:05: Apparently the four drugs with the largest amount of social participation online are Flovent, Prozac, Lunesta, and Lotrel. And “mood disorders other than depression” has the highest social participation online of all disorders, even more than depression itself.

10:15: Mr. Bernoff cites BeingGirl.com as a great example of using an online social medium to market something uncomfortable – in this case, P&G’s tampons. His words: “If all of you don’t want to talk about tampons, your 13-year-old daughters definitely don’t want to talk about tampons.”

10:17: Mr. Bernoff: The only successful Facebook app for a prescription drug is the one for Gardasil.

10:21: “Listening is essential – and has a lower incidence of side effects than other forms of groundswell. When using groundswell, remember to focus on the interactions among patients (or doctors). It’s not about you.”

For anyone interested in developing online social media, Mr. Bernoff’s book, Groundswell, is worth a look. For those with shorter attention spans, check out his list of the most successful online social applications.

10:30 – 11:00: Break for coffee and socializing. I’m curious – has anyone ever met their future spouse/life partner at a pharma marketing conference? If so, let me know. Also, when are the people that run conferences going to realize that all us folks with laptops need power outlets? I’ve got to sit at the coffee table in the back just to stay live.

11:03: Dr. Michael Roizen of the Cleveland Clinic, bestselling author, Oprah guest, founder of RealAge, etc., etc. kicks off. “There are two revolutions in health today: genomics and stems … we’ll know if butter is bad for your specific genome in seven years. And we’ll be able to regrow your own anterior cruciate ligament too. But none of that will make a difference if we don’t get personalized medicine.”

11:09: A spectacular digital depiction of waste (Dr. Roizen puts it differently) going through the intestines/colon, as an introduction to getting people emotionally involved with the ways their bodies work. “We try to get patients emotionally involved enough, so they can do what is best for them.”

11:12: “…when it goes into the porcelain container, it should be going in like Greg Louganis. If it’s going like a machine gun, you’re not getting enough fiber in your diet.” Not sure what this has to do with e-marketing, but it’s definitely entertaining.

11:20: Smoking a pack of cigarettes a day will effectively make you eight years older. Even better, quantity and quality of sex can effectively make you up to 16 years younger – quantity for guys, quality for gals (“That’s what the data says …” – Dr. Roizen)

11:25: Some hype for the good doctor’s books and Website. “I get a royalty for these, so I hope you buy them.”

11:29: “You get to determine, to a large degree, whether your genes are on or not.” Or, rather, we can determine our own fate with diet, exercise, etc. Bad news for me – all this time I’ve been eating bacon cheeseburgers and counting on my genes  (three healthy grandparents over 90) to save me.

11:35: Apparently the U.S. has twice the chronic disease as Europe, and 3x that of Asia – hence higher healthcare costs. Yowch. “We need to make patients smarter, to drive that down.”

11:36: “Fat under your arms is a dating problem. Fat behind your belly button is a medical problem.”

11:38: Some of the folks in the room are starting to get that “Did I walk into the wrong conference?” look. Dr. Roizen is a fascinating guy, but he hasn’t said one word about e-marketing yet.

11:42: “You have failed, and we have failed as physicians, until we get people to be smart about their health.”

11:47: A fascinating story about some of the urinals at JFK airport in New York. The point: take things that are mundane and make them fun. Though for me, urinals are always fun.

11:50: End of today’s blogging experiment. This is kind of fun. If folks like it, maybe we’ll try again sometime.

Tags: ePharma