EDITOR'S NOTE
LSL
LIFESCIENCELEADER.COM OCTOBER 2014
6
tweet, like, and comment more about others
than about yourself.
Lesson number two — social media = people.
Between June 1 and August 17, more than
28 million people on Facebook posted, com-
mented on, or liked a challenge post. While
plenty of companies posted videos of employ-
ees participating in the IBC, none come close
to those posted by individuals. Thus, while
Pfizer on the surface seems to be doing every-
thing right when it comes to social media (i.e.,
five Facebook pages, eight Twitter accounts,
a weibo page [China's version of Twitter], 12
YouTube channels, SlideShare, and LinkedIn),
all of its accounts include the Pfizer name.
While this approach may be great for brand-
ing, it flies in the face of what makes social
media social — people. Pharma companies
need to allow executives to put themselves out
there and participate in social media and avoid
the temptation to overly police the process. To
Pfizer's credit, Ian Read, the company's CEO,
does have a limited LinkedIn profile which can
be viewed publicly. He is also a member of the
LinkedIn Influencers program.
Lesson number three — social media is
organic and fun. ALS is a terrible disease.
While typical fundraising tactics of guilt can
get people to give, the IBC demonstrated that
more people will engage if you focus on fun. If
pharma wants to get better at engaging with
people and improving enrollment in clinical
trials, it should try making the process fun.
Then, when you find it, don't try to trademark
it to prevent others from using. Where is the
fun in that?
l
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egardless of your opinion of the
ALS Ice Bucket Challenge (IBC),
which has catapulted the ALS
Association's (ALSA's) charitable
coffers to feverish heights, there
are valuable business lessons from which
pharma and biotech executives can learn.
Lesson number one — social media is a very
powerful tool. Let's consider some quantita-
tive and qualitative data from the IBC. As of
this writing, the ALSA received $106 million
in donations from more than three million
donors. Pre-IBC, the ALSA.org website aver-
aged close to 8,000 visitors a day. By the end
of August, the average number of visitors per
day was 630,000 — a 7,775 percent increase
in traffic. If you would have told me a few
months ago you could use social media to
convince Ophra Winfrey, Martha Stewart,
and the second wealthiest person in the
world, Bill Gates, to pour buckets of ice water
over their heads while getting them to give
money in the process, I would have told you
to go soak your head. What pharma company
trying to get people to enroll in clinical trials
wouldn't want this level of engagement?
If you want to be able to take advantage of
the power of social media, learn how to use
it. For example, although part of the IBC's
success resides in the fact that people were
willing to be narcissistic and post their vid-
eos, self-promotion is not the key to success
in social media. For example, one of the most
important rules of social media success is to
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3 Lessons Pharma
Can Learn
From ALS
Ice Bucket Fever
R O B W R I G H T Chief Editor