My article Can Improving Communications and Collaboration Secure Your Global Supply Chain came out last week at Life Science Leader. The article focuses on the easily-fixed holes in existing global supply chains.
Did you know that
According to FDA data, in 2009 there were more than 1,742 drug recalls, a 400% increase from the 426 recalls in 2008.
While that isn’t totally related to issues with global supply chains, it may relevant to the fact that
about 80 percent of all active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) come to the United States from overseas suppliers
For the article, I interviewed Daniel Matlis of Axendia, who wrote the original report, and Brian Scanlan of Cambridge Major Laboratories.
Interesting, the growth in global outsourcing has been a boon for domestic API manufacturers. Why? Because American companies focus about 30 percent of their budgets on quality assurance. Non-domestic outsourcers? Less than 10 percent.
Click here to read the article.
I’ve mentioned I’ve been doing a lot of work lately with Bridge 6, the digital marketing division of One Eleven Corporation. On Friday, we announced a strategic alliance with Medikly, the leader in social learning tools for healthcare.
What’s cool about this release is it adds social learning to One Eleven’s SampleServer, the leading electronic sampling software used by pharmaceutical companies.
You might be asking, what is social learning? It’s basically learning from peers – what social media enables easily. If you want to get all theoretical about it, then click here.
What this means is that a doctor who pulls up information on a drug – whether via internet or smartphone – will be easily able to join a network of other healthcare providers, access information that comes from a pharmaceutical company and peers, and interact with the information and peers. Then, if a doctor wants to get product samples, he has access to those too. Pretty cool huh?
My article on recent tax legislation change in Puerto Rico and its effect on pharmaceutical manufacturing just posted at Life Science Leader.
Until I had written the article, I didn’t know La Isla del Encanto is the world’s fifth largest pharmaceutical manufacturing region after the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and France.
The Island boasts some US$80 billion in pharmaceutical industry infrastructure spread among 89 FDA-approved pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical plants. Puerto Rico is the second largest employer in the life sciences with the largest concentration of life sciences industries per square foot in the world!
Eight of the top 20 biologics sold in the United States, as well as 13 of the top 20 prescription drugs are manufactured in Puerto Rico.
In addition, the Island has some pretty awesome tax credits for earlier stage companies that set up operations there. Those credits can be sold on the market, used against existing liabilities, or can be passed through to affiliates.
That all said, in an effort to balance the Puerto Rican budget, the legislature recently passed an initial 4% tax that drew heavy criticism from the medical, pharmaceutical and biotech industries.
Want to learn more, click the link to view the article.
I haven’t been posting as much lately because I’ve been busy with the new startup I co-founded with the folks at One Eleven Corporation – Bridge 6. At Bridge 6, we’re developing digital marketing programs that help pharmaceutical companies better communicate with physicians. We’re especially interested in the use of social media and mobile marketing to target physicians.
I’ve started blogging there regularly. I may cross-post here on MessagingLab if the post is relevant to my readers.
If you want to know more how to reach physicians, visit the Bridge 6 site or follow us on Twitter.
Life Science Leader just published my series of interviews with 3 bioentrepreneurs – Jim Chinitz of Population Diagnostics, Craig Shimasaki of BioSource Consulting and Stan Yakatan of Katan Associates. It was great fun to interview each bio-entrepreneur. Here’s a couple of key quotes:
Chinitz: The challenge… is how will you communicate your story? Will you conform to telling a watered-down version to an audience that won’t listen or want your pitch packaged their way? Or, do you look for the audience that will listen intently and take the time to get it?
Shimasaki: [To be successful as a bioentrepreneur] You must have passion, vision, and persistence. …you need to create the opportunities to be successful. You need to go out and talk to people, ask questions, take risks, listen to new ideas, and be a part of the larger biotechnology community.
Yakatan: Everyone starts a company with a plan. The biggest challenge is being able to modify that plan. The easiest way to fail is to stick to a rigid plan.
Read it over at Life Science Leader.
What does the death of the Yankees’ owner have to do with biotech and entrepreneurship? It has to do with attitude. Steinbrenner was obsessed with winning. He famously said,
“Winning is the most important thing in my life, after breathing. Breathing first, winning next.”
And,
“You show me a good loser—and I’ll show you a loser.”
(Which incidentally, is also attributed to Vince Lombardi. Shout out to Jim Chinitz for the quote and reminding me to write this.)
Consider this… Swine flu vaccine disposal is your tax dollars at work.
If you have any interest in applying social media to your company (or yourself), you must read Mashable.com, an essential resource for social media marketing. Mashabable ran a feature titled, 10 Essential Social Media Tips for B2B Marketers. I thought it was worthwhile to revisit them and make some comments. I’ve rearranged the tips in what I consider their order of importance to life sciences and biotechnology companies.
1. Monitor Your Industry. Author Christina Warren suggests using Google Alerts, Social Mention, YackTrack or BackType to monitor mentions of your business on social sites. I put this first, because you need to have an understanding of what your audience is saying about you, the industry before you start any conversations.
2. Find and Follow Industry Influencers. Whether you’re on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, you’ll want to identify leaders and influencers in the industry. I recommend doing this before any of the steps that follow.
3. Start a Blog. While this is a no-brainer outside the life sciences and in pharma, there is still a lot of hesitance, especially in companies that have FDA-regulated products. It does take time and requires writing skills. A few week’s back, I blogged about Mary Canady’s article on social media in the life sciences. In that article, she mentioned MO-BIO Laboratories, a small company that runs a blog perfectly targeted toward its audience. Definitely worth taking a look at. Since most people won’t take the time to write a full-fledged blog, at least start micro-blogging on Twitter.
4. Use Twitter Effectively. Mashable’s suggestion is to start Twitter by ’searching phrases relevant to your business and monitoring those searches regularly…’, which is 1 above. Once you understand what people are saying, then join the conversation.
5. Take Advantage of LinkedIn. I am a huge LinkedIn user (16K network) and have easily sold several consulting engagements using that network. One way to build business leads and get well known is to use LinkedIn Groups and to participate.
6. Figure Out Your ‘Social Voice.’ One thing that marketers say social media can do for pharmaceutical (and any other large) corporations is put the ‘human’ back in business. Warren reminds you that your social voice is informal and responds to customers and inquiries. Your brand voice is more anonymous. I suspect that in the not too distant future, the social voice will become brand voice.
7. Be Consistent and Don’t be Afraid to Followup. Consistency means blogging or tweeting regularly. For some that will mean once per day, for others, once per week. Following up means you don’t leave anyone hanging. You respond and acknowledge.
8. Leverage Analytics for Business Metric Measurement. This means paying attention to your traffic numbers, understanding where traffic is coming from, what traffic is responding to and changing your habits accordingly.
There were two tips that I didn’t think applied to most life sciences and biotechnology companies – 9. Use Social Media for Giveaways and Promos and 10. Don’t be Creepy. The latter goes without saying; the former might make sense for companie that produce a lot of product and use samples as part of their marketing.
So there you have it, 10 tips you can leverage today for your social media marketing program. If you have any questions, drop me a line.
