A View from the Isle

Last night at 3TVancouver David Jones hinted at a social media site from the pharma industry would launch today. I poked him this morning for the link and he sent out the link to this—Bayer Xarelto: Online Media Centre.

Before social media purists start going bonkers about any lack of features, remember the pharma industry in the US and Canada (world-wide actually) is so heavily regulated and restricted that doing much more that this is extremely risky.

How risky? In Canada a violation of the drug marketing rules is a criminal offence, yes like behind bars and orange jumpsuit.

What Bayer has done is right on the money. Well for pharma. David and H&K guided them to make the resources that typically were obtuse to say the least available, searchable, and shareable.

Huh? Why would I want to share info on venous blood clots?

Well I don’t. However health bloggers would. Journalists would. Web-savvy doctors would.

It’s a small step, but having tried to push the envelope (and, ahem, did to the edges of legality and a wee beyond) when I was in pharma, this is a good thing.

David Jones of Hill & Knowlton spoke at tonight’s Third Tuesday here in Vancouver (yes I know it’s Monday) on, essentially, PR 2.0/PR and social media. If you read David’s blog or follow him on Twitter you know that David is a straight up guy. He talks the talk and walks the walk in social media. Since I’ve been pitched by several of his colleagues at H&K, I know he’s doing a good job. In fact, after a recent pitch David touched base with me to get feedback on the pitch. No resting on his laurels there.

Rebecca Bollwitt did her usual awesome job live blogging the whole talk, but here are a couple things that stood out for me.

As David was talking about the “rules” that H&K works under, it became clear to me that the line between our professional and personal lives has become increasingly blurred in this new social media world. What you say on your personal blog does have implications for your work like it never has before.

Sure it was always a part of work life that if you made and ass of yourself in public (or semi-public), you’d have to pay the piper at work, but now, now when something you say can be around the world before your hangover is gone, you have to be very careful.

I was also struck by all the things that David talked about working with clients that he wasn’t selling them a quick fix. There aren’t shortcuts or easy ways to get there. You have to work at it and be willing to go for the long haul because as David said, when you start into social media it’s “an invitation to a conversation.”

You can’t cheat or ghostwrite that, although one member of the audience said he does ghostwrite blogs for clients (wonder where those blogs are).

As a gift to us, okay it’s been out for a while, was David telling us to check out his blog metrics dashboard post to “steal” his example which could also become a WP plugin in the future (now that would rock).

I’m now looking forward to the Brew 2.0 event tomorrow night…who doesn’t like free beer?