DigiPharm 2011

This year’s DigiPharm conference stressed, once again, the importance of investing time to develop a meaningful presence, and response, within the social media arena. And subsequently further flagged up questions as to why some within healthcare communications still do not see social media as a ‘fit’ for them.

I attended on day one, when innovative speakers included Alex Butler, from Janssen and now founder and MD of The Social Moon; Tom Pryzgoda, from Abbott; and Judith von Gordon, from Boehringer Ingelheim, plus others.

Jens Monsees, from Google also shared his insights in his presentation ‘Mobile, the acceleration of everything – how to engage with the connected consumer’. He led with the memorable quote: “Digital for pharma is like high-school sex. Everyone is talking about it, everyone wants to do it, but no-one is doing it properly.”

Monsees acknowledged that pharma still has a long journey ahead and to aid this movement encouraged the industry to embrace the five digital trends: video, local, mobile, social and search in their communications. He stressed the importance of integrated campaigns and invited us all to engage in more real-life sharing via platforms such as Google+. 

Perhaps most pertinent, at least for me, was Nick Broughton’s presentation ‘Making it up as you go along– reconnecting ethics, courage and commercial sense.’ Within this Broughton focused less on the rules and regulations and rather the meaning behind them. He encouraged us to take a step back and re-evaluate ourselves: our own ethics, our own values, and not to depend on rules to guide the way we behave.

As Broughton, MD at Pharmaceuticalethics.com, acknowledged, the digital sphere offers a myriad of opportunities in which to communicate – and rules cannot be written to determine how we behave each step of the way, rather we need to act with ethical intentions. “Find a position and have some courage to defend it,” he said.

There were also some engaging panel sessions such as that on ‘Digital Strategy and Change Management’, with participants Daniel Ghinn, Len Starnes, Kai Gait and Tom Pryzgoda. Here, the need for digital to be an integrated part of the marketing platform was reiterated, as was the significance of measurables: to determine what you are ‘getting back’. The need for digital expertise within pharma was also raised, ie, not just within the agencies it contracts, not least to help marketers ensure that the agencies’ strategies make business sense.

DigiPharm has been criticised by some for inviting back some familiar speakers from last year and/or from the conference circuit in general. However, as innovators in the field, reappearances are perhaps to be expected. What is arguably more strange is the reappearance of delegates who, perhaps through no fault of their own, have not been able to push their digital and social strategies forward during this time.

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