Marketing

Geir Ove Harnes, senior communications manager, MSD Norway, on why you should be on FaceBook

Geir Ove Harnes, senior communications manager, MSD Norway, on why you should be on FaceBook

Social media are about giving something of yourself, says Geir Ove Harnes, senior communications manager, MSD Norway. He explains the impact of social media on his own life by describing how a typical day starts. He gets up at 7 a.m. and is in his favorite coffee bar around 8:00. He chats with his friends, but they are not there this is all done via the iPhone. He checks into brightkite, which transmits where he is to his friends using GPS.

At 8:59 Harnes is in his office, and logging into LinkedIn, where he follows many discussions. One idea emerging from these is to publish all kinds of complaints from multiple sources into a kind of wailing wall', the purpose being to make people feel that they are being listened to. Harnes connects briefly to FaceBook, and then gets on with work.

The importance of communities

After lunch he remembers that he is to give a presentation in the afternoon. He goes to slideshare.net, where he can find presentations that have been uploaded, reviewed and rated by many users. After work he goes running. There is an online Nike community that shares information on running performance, using chips in shoes that connect to iPhones. This enables many shared activities.

Users can even design their own shoes if they pay for it and people are prepared to, says Harnes. Very large events are organized, with tens of thousands of people running in cities around the world for various causes. In the evening, Harnes goes to a football pub. He could watch at home, but this is another community.

Communities are people talking about common interests, and they could be talking about you and your brand. Actually they already do. At rateadrug.com patients review and rate the medicines they are taking. What can the poor pharma man do in this situation? asks Harnes. The initial problem is that all these communities create awareness, but do they create action?

From awareness to action

Another barrier is an attitudinal one on the part of pharma executives. It is too easy to clam up when negative perceptions of pharma are voiced, when it would be better to engage with the challenger and invite their participation in a dialogue. Harnes describes various ways of doing this. You could go to FaceBook and home in on existing discussions that are relevant (the easy way), or you could build dedicated interactive Websites for interest groups. The Being Girl site from Proctor and Gamble is an example of the latter, which has 2.5 million users in 39 countries now.

Harnes recommends The Groundswell by Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li as an excellent introduction to the use of social media in marketing. These authors grade participants on a six-point scale from inactive visitors to creators. You need to know where your customers are on this scale, says Harnes.

But what about FaceBook itself? It's a place you do three things meet, share and show. There was a misunderstanding at the beginning, Harnes says. People thought it was a place where people just met their old friends. The statistics are staggering; 200 million users, 850 million pictures uploaded, 25 million groups. In Norway, 38% of the population use FaceBook.

Facebook is not just for kids

Harnes points out that it is not [just] for kids - the fastest growing age groups in many countries are 30-50, and in some over 50. The data users enter are so rich that finely targeted advertising is possible. The beauty of it is that you pay for what you get. The advertiser decides what they want to pay, which determines the number of times the ad is presented. If nobody clicks on your ads, you don't have to pay anything, Harnes says.

On top of that, you get detailed statistics on customer activity. Harnes finds that an ad on FaceBook costs a quarter of one on a major Website with roughly similar exposure. However, the FaceBook users were identifiably within the target group unlike the unidentifiable Website visitors and gave valuable feedback on what they thought of the ads.

Harnes' message to pharma isget involved. Some companies have, but their profiles are usually boring. They need to remember that this is cheap and effective advertising, but that it takes commitment and effort.