Digital Influence Mapping Project

Visit NextNow Digital…Now

In 2020, I launched a new digital consultancy, NextNow Digital. All of my new ideas and insights can be found at the new site. The Digital Influence Mapping Project has been a labor of love since I started it in 2005.  This blog may continue to live on in some form or another.

For now, visit NextNow Digital Insights & Ideas. You will find fresh POVs on digital marketing and transformation to help startups, small and mid-size businesses, as well as continued thoughts for enterprise marketers.

Start with this post: Why Launch the Next Digital Consultancy…Now?

 

Why I Published a Blog for 15 Years

My first blog post in 2005 was a short few paragraphs on the Power of Fans. While hardly deep, it did ask a question that remains relevant today – “Why don't more brands leverage fans?” The rest is, literally, history. 

I started The Digital Influence Mapping Project to figure out how digital and social media was changing us and would alter business. I am intellectually and insatiably curious but hardly brilliant. By writing posts, I was sketching ideas and points of view that simply helped me form cogent thoughts (mostly). For me, this is a part of lifelong learning. This led me to connect with other bloggers and marketers wrestling with similar issues.

I blogged to make connections with people. The blog became a great device for an introvert to meet like-minded people (equally curious) as digital behaviors and social media swept the world.  Lucky to have a global position at Ogilvy, I met fellow bloggers in Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, Portugal, Brazil, the UK, Turkey and many, many other fantastic places. We held ‘blogger meet-ups’ where I got to shake hands (remember that simple act?) with someone I had only known virtually.

I felt (naively, perhaps) that blogging and social media would connect a community of people, open channels of sharing, and weaken nationalisms.  I fancied myself an aspiring ‘citizen of the world’ vs. an American. I still feel that way today although I do recognize my indelible “American-ness.” I cannot shed that programming any more than I can pretend to not be a white male in a culture that affords privileges based upon superficialities and chance. No flag-waving for me, I’m afraid. I long to simply be another person on an Earth that values and is curious about all people.

The answer to “why did I publish The Digital Influence Mapping Project for fifteen years?” is really just those two things: to learn how digital technologies and behaviors would change us and to meet interesting, smart people from all over.

Curiosity and connection.

Luckily, many of the people I have met I remain connected to today. I wish I could name them all here in gratitude, but I would inevitably screw that up.  Check my connections on LinkedIn (and Twitter). I am guessing most of these smart, fantastic folks are there.   

So, something new is next and it won’t happen on The Digital Influence Mapping Project. Still, fifteen years of blog posts. That’s something.

3 Great Ideas from Cannes Lions 2014

The Awards are over. The agencies have all packed up their bags and tallied their wins against the millions of dollars of effort. Brand marketers are heading home with trophies or not. Hangovers and trucker sunburns are tended to.

And a lot of inspiration is floating through the air. No matter the pomp and circumstance of a global festival on advertising, there are great ideas that get shared. Many win awards. There were three creative ideas that caught my eye as I browsed through the tons of creative from the comfort of my new Connecticut home.

A Way to Change Deadly Behaviors

Last year, one of the big award winners was Dumb Ways To Die. Put together for Melbourne Metro Trains to promote rail safety, the campaign captured people’s attention as a clever, delightful way to spark people to think about safety around trains.

This year, VW created a theater experience that made the myriad of messages we all hear on distracted driving to life. Having spent time with a bunch of social marketing (behavior change) folks, I cannot swear that this is scientifically effective but I am guessing it is.

Thanks to Dom Heinrich and his Pinterest board of predictions (the place I discovered this gem)

 

 

Creating a Virtuous Cycle of Sharing and Giving

STIFTUNG ARTENSCHUTZ, a German conservation group, wanted to raise awareness and drive people to take action to help save the Cat-Ba Langur from extinction. Part of the job was to acknowledge and overcome the usual placebo effect of social causes in social media (they don’t often drive change).

Now this being Cannes, some type of trendy solution has to wheedle its way into the work. This time it’s 3D Printing. But before your eyes make it all the way around the “roll”, take a look at the video and think about what they have done.

They created a mobile-enabled experience that actually led to the creation of objects that could be auctioned off to raise funds and grow awareness.

Here’s the full entry for more information

Watch the video on Vimeo here

 

 

Mindboggling Technology to Create an Interactive Marketing Moment

More and more we look to use data in creative ways to build relationships with customers or earn people’s attention and their advocacy. OgilvyOne and British Airways took amazing pains to create a seemingly simple and delightful interaction between outdoor billboards and the BA flights that zoomed overhead.

Here was the brief: “The objective was to raise awareness of the breadth of destinations offered by British Airways, their new routes and frequency of flights.” I am pretty sure they delivered.

Here’s the full entry for more information

 

Related articles

Cannes Lions 2014: The Winners

Social Media Success Needs Evidence-based Testing

Behavioral economics plays out everyday in social media. We see clear expressions of the lessons that drive human behavior made popular by Cialdini, the Heaths and Dan Ariely in the use of social networks by major marketers like Ford, Unilever, Nestlé and others.

We have taken learnings like how reciprocity, authority and scarcity can drive persuasion and action (Cialdini concepts) and how “finding the bright spots,” “shrinking the change,” and “pointing to the destination” (Heath Bros. concepts) and built them into a sensible way to plan predictably great social programs.

And we learn more each time we deploy a program. We see many brands gaining experience in using social media well. But as marketers get more and more focused on driving behaviors versus hard-to-appreciate attitudes and intentions, there’s just not enough testing and reporting of what works best. We all think we are internalizing these lessons through shared case studies, the sharing that happens in the few great communities of interest inside companies (think social/digital “center for excellence”), and the “test and learn” habits of individual experts. It’s still not enough.

Richard Thaler told the story of collaborating with the British Behavioral Insights Team led by David Halpern in the New York Times. Richard Thaler is a professor of economics and behavioral science at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. The Behavioral Insights Team is all about trying to drive behaviors by applying behavioral economics to public policy issues.

 He simplifies the most important tenants of their work into 2 things:

1. If you want to encourage some activity, make it easy
2. You can’t make evidence-based policy decisions without evidence  

We get the “make it easy” part although even that is a lesson routinely overlooked by many an ambitious marketer. As for evidence-based policy decisions, well, we are trying to do that every day in marketing. We are just not as aggressive about formally testing our theories and accruing formal lessons.

The Difference Between 

Whose got tougher demands for accountability – a public policy leader or a CMO? Having worked with both, I think these two groups have so much to learn from each other but have suffered from ‘terminal uniqueness’ that keeps them believing each has special circumstance the other cannot possibly appreciate. But their worlds are coming together. Just look at the recent “red paper” from Ogilvy’s behavioral econ team, From Cause to Change. The main hypothesis of this team’s work states that the rigor of behavior change as practiced in “Social Marketing” (do not confuse with social media marketing) is highly relevant to business not simply governments.

There are differences. Crafting health behavior change is usually led by scientists accountable to public servants. This makes them insanely tied to science and unequivocal proof. Most CMOs want short term evidence that will ultimately be revealed as effective in sales or stock price.

More Evidence

The British Behavioral Insights Team has published a white paper, Test, Learn, Adapt: Developing Public Policy with Randomised Controlled Trials. Okay, it’s a bit intense for consumer marketing. It lays out a discipline of constant testing and learning. That’s the lesson.

Many brands are increasingly active in social media. There’s some high quality work that wins out in the WOMMY Awards and the Effies and Cannes Lions. But how great are these organizations with formal test and learn exercises to more precisely understand what is working and what is not. And how good are they all, we all, at capturing and sharing best practices, lessons learned?

Facebook Building a Learning Culture

The media gave Facebook a hard time in the wake of their IPO. How could they justify the huge valuation? And weren’t the stumbles in the early stock price the inevitable calling out of the ‘emperor’s new clothes?’

Meanwhile, Facebook has been publishing case studies on Facebook Studio, a series of white papers that summarize lessons-learned and launching a training program to make marketers smarter about succeeding on Facebook. They continue to share their ‘try and learn’ culture which is more accepting of failure than any CMO I know can ever afford to be (Implicit in the ‘fail fast’ credo is that failing fast gets you to even bigger successes faster, too).

For all the complaining about Facebook, they are finding the evidence and sharing it out of benign self-interest. They have built a community of marketers in their Facebook marketing group and the Product Council that I sit on, committed to documenting the evidence of what works.

There is a terrifc article in Technology Review that talks about their Data Science Team and how they are trying to use the petabytes of data at Facebook to understand what drives behavior. 

As brands deepen their commitment to using social media, they ought to prioritize knowledge-sharing and real test-and-learn experiments meant to prove the efficacy of different strategies. We need to understand how we can nudge, inspire, and be a part of new consumer behaviors through digital and other expereinces. It's not enough to try and find some grand ad-equivalency in all this new digital and social media. 

(thanks to Peter Keusch, University of Regensburg for the great picture)

Welcome to Social@Ogilvy!

(this post is also found in s similar form on our new Social@Ogilvy site)

The Social Imperative

Brands will spend between 17-18% of their total marcom spend on social media within 4 years. They will spend more on social business solutions. They are seeing value and expecting more every year. 

The key reason? 90% of us look to friends and family for the most trusted recommendations on products, service and issues. 70% of us count on consumer opinions online above traditional media. And it’s only going to grow. Millennials are three times more likely than Boomers to look for a social opinion on choices they make. 

The future is brand advocacy. And it cannot be faked, gamed, or outright ‘bought.’

There are only three ways to connect with and build a strong relationship with customers and stakeholders these days. 

1. Deliver highly relevant content or service. This could be advertising, media relations or what we call ‘owned’ content (including valuable services). Now it’s all highly targeted and tailored. No more 360 degree ‘onslaughts’ of interruptive advertising. Now our messages must be deemed highly relevant to our targets to earn their attention. Lets use the ‘10 degrees’ that matter. Useful content to run a sustainable business from DuPont. Better ways to use member ‘points’ from American Express. 
2. Be discoverable in search. When people search Google, Baidu or Yandex, brands need to be there for all the topics that intersect between a person’s intent and where the brand can add some value. Ford on fuel efficiency. Hellmann’s on Real Food recipes. 
3. Earn our way into their ‘social graph.’  To succeed in social media, we must become genuinely valuable to the people we serve and earn their attention, their advocacy and their business.   Inviting people as VIPs into the launch of the new Ford Explorer in Facebook. Sparking a social conversation about the dreams of the next generation of Chinese from Johnnie Walker. Helping Hong Kong parents celebrate their baby pictures in a much bigger way from Huggies.

How we form opinions about products, services and issues is constantly changing. It’s imperative that we make social a new way we do everything.

What is Social@Ogilvy? 

Social@Ogilvy is the global, cross-discipline team of social experts from across all of Ogilvy’s businesses delivering social solutions to all parts of our clients’ business. This is new. This is bigger than before. We have been designing and executing social media marketing and communications programs for 7+ years as 360 Digital Influence – a specialty practice born out of Ogilvy Public Relations. We quickly grew to deliver social solutions for all sorts of marketing and communications clients. 

Now we have grown into Social@Ogilvy. We are a true global network with a common approach. 

Integrated Social Media Matters More 

The whole PR vs. marketing battle is moot. Social media will inform every discipline and deliver business value for the foreseeable future. Social media as a standalone specialty doesn’t make sense. All the power and potential in social based solutions comes to life when you integrate it into marcom and other functions. 

We design integrated social solutions that combine deep disciplines like crm, public relations and shopper marketing and rooted in what drives behavior.  We plan around owned, earned and paid media working together for a compound effect and at its heart our work is ‘social by design’ – phrase used now by Facebook but that captures what we do quite well. 

A Global Shift

We do believe there’s a new customer and stakeholder journey defined by the increasing impact our networks have on purchase decision and our behaviors. How we buy, vote, and form opinions has changed. We tap into our 130 friends (the Facebook average) to discover, consider, compare, decide and rave about products, services and issues.

This shift is happening in one way or another all over the world. Growth markets like China, Indonesia, Brazil and Turkey will define the next episode of social media use. They are all growing their social network use and outpacing western markets including the US. That’s why we have grown the world’s largest global team delivering solutions relevant in each local market.  

And it’s more than just marketing, we design social business solutions that use the collaboration and advocacy strengths of social media to drive value internally and in customer relationships while at the same time managing risk. 

 

Join Us

We will be participating or hosting 23 events in and outside of Social Media Week this week in NYC, London and Hong Kong not to mention a dozen other markets. Join us as we launch this new ambitious business. It's been a wild ride to get to this point and we would love to see you. You can find out more at our new Social@Ogilvy site.

A Great Facebook Integration for Social Marketing from Safefood

A week ago, I had the great chance to speak at an event hosted by Ireland's Safefood, an organization "responsible for the promotion of food safety on the island of Ireland." They brought together social marketers from the region to share about their experiences working in social media. Folks from Bord Bia, Ireland's Food board and the Irish Blood Transfusion Service all shared some interesting cases.

Safefood is humble about what they have accomplished themselves in social media. They organized this event to accelerate sharing towards everyone's benefit. Just that step - hosting a sharing conference - shows an innovative spirit and commitment (disclosure: safefood works with Ogilvy in Ireland) Despite their humility, Safefood has one of the best Facebook integrations I have seen from any marketer not just the social media community.

The program

Weigh2Live could be described as a typical social marketing health campaign. Its got the clever name and the ambition to help the population help themselves towards better eating habits and weight management. 

 

How they integrate with the social Web

When you visit the safefood organization site, the first two things I notice are:

1. clear navigation based upon whether I am a consumer, educator or professional
2. great cross promotion into their various social networks including

• Facebook - engaging consumers via Weigh2Live program
• Twitter - an organizational handle for all relevant news
• Linkedin - a prioneering use of the "Companies" function to connect people with the people at safefood
• Ning - access to a private network

Safefood also maintains a blog on their main url. Here's how the author, who is a great guy, introduces himself: "My name is Dermot Moriarty and I live with my beautiful wife and two boys in Dublin. During the day, I work in the communications team at safefood and count myself very lucky to enjoy what I do, working with great colleagues in Dublin and Cork...." Here's a great post to give you a flavor - "Social media and our food." 

Most organizations would then create an informational Website to ensure they did their duty of delivering the correct, approved information for consumers to seek out. Most government organizations for years assumed their job was to offer the information on their own Web site. Knowing that most have not embraced sophisticated SEO programs, that means they expect consumers to seek their Web site out from all the other health, wellness and food sources out on the Web.

Not safefood. They went to Facebook. 

How they use Facebook

The Weigh2Live program comes to life in three ways on Facebook. Smartly, they set it up that once you are registered in the program, you never have to leave Facebook to interact with it. They have also kept the program, itself simple and I believe, credible. Rather than join the diet fad race which requires some innovation to draw weight plan fanatics convinced there is some model out there that allows them to eat what they ought not to and still lose weight, safefood offers the basics - information, simple tools and a way to get support form others.

Facebook Tracker: They have essentially pulled all of the tools from the microsite into a Facebook tab. I can maintain a dead simple food diary, activities and my weight goals - all within the page. Most importantly, I can post to a private wall that only select friends can see. We often joke about "death to the campaign microsite." Microsites have a purpose. That is largely to serve as a billboard for a program and provide good Google juice (good search results). But today, we bring the interaction into the social networks themselves. For a typical campaign, I would spend less than 15-20% of my non-media budget on a microsite and all the design effort would go towards SEO performance and a solid brand presence. 

Your Friend's Support Group: I can select from my Facebook friends which will have access to my Weigh2Live posts. This relieved my first concern - that facebook users would not want to share weight-related updates with the same crowd that sees their daily wall updates. This is a great strategy for any sensitive issue. It allows people to form their own support group from their friends. That has some campaign advantages later should you want to target some supporting engagement ads to drive acquisition and participation (see Facebook's "learned targeting")  

 

Community Discussions: The weakest part of the program so far is the just launched discussions. I have yet to see a great Facebook marketing page with a vibrant use of the discussion tab. safefood has launched specific discussions for about 9 different groups including conversations dedicated to women, politicians and even bloggers. For now, these remain largely empty although they did just launch. Vibrant discussions are the hardest to catalyze. It may make more sense to find the one conversation that people are dying to have and help make that happen or grow vs. launching nine.

A Great Integration

Safefood is a small, scrappy public organization. They may be humble about what they have accomplished but they have done a lot of things right:

1. they activated Weigh2Live fully within Facebook making it possible for people to take advantage of the program without leaving their social network of choice

2. they combined utility with the unique community aspects of Facebook to create real value for participants (this is no Facebook "bolt-on")

3. they are innovating and trying solutions not planning for months the perfect plan (which is never perfect)

4. they are letting their personality come through. Their willingness to be seen and heard via their blog and LInkedIn pages is a fantastic way to let the people and their passion shine through  

What is social media literacy and why should it matter to the UN?

The UN established the 8 Millennium Development Goals (MDG) to rally the world around a worthy BHAG (big hairy audacious goal) which can be summed up as end poverty by 2015. Talking about social media in relation to some of the catastrophic problems they are trying to solve like gender equality and HIV/AIDS seems like, well, it seems trivial. But I actually think social media can help. 

I spoke on a panel at the UN during International Literacy Day. The event featured former First Lady Laura Bush who has been a champion of education every since her early career as a teacher. The focus of the event was clearly on literacy and education and how they can contribute to reaching the MDG. These goals require global commitments to build and staff schools, change culture and a whole lot more to make any of this add up. So, why does the emerging world of social media matter? Simple, I think they are looking in every direction for solutions big and small. And while I admit that teachers, schools and shoes for children to get to those schools are clear priorities, I do believe social media can help. 

Social Media Literacy 

There are two ways that social media can even come close to addressing any problem in the MDG. One is by giving individuals more choices through the benefits of digital and social media. The second is by strengthening the efforts of the worldwide non-profits trying to solve the problems head on. Unlike the field referred to as 'media literacy' which generally talks about understanding the vast media landscape and how messages are crafted and delivered, social media literacy is that plus understanding how you, too, can use it to reach your goals. 

Here are 5 practical applications for digital and social media literacy. These could be described as the benefits of knowing how to use and understand aspects of social media accessed by mobile devices, PCs (including the One Laptop Per Child) and other emerging devices.  

Communications via a Social Graph: building a network of “socially useful friends.”If I can connect with others in my community quickly, they can offer help, advice or verify my experience. If a citizen is turned away from a polling place they might check with their friends/social graph to see if they had a similar experience. 

Relevant Information On-Demand: getting and sharing relevant information when most needed. When Indian farmers access crop prices via mobile they are tapping into market information when they most need it. MetroTeenAIDS in DC uses an SMS text system to let teens find HIV/AIDS testing facilities in DC.

Social Grassroots: growing and activating support communities to change conditions and behaviors. Six people were arrested in Mozambique for sending the original text messages protesting the price of water and electricity. 

Collaborative Communities: Building global connections around affinities vs. political or geographic boundaries. We are building global wikis all the time around interests. They are intended to help people collaborate on work across all sorts of geo-political boundaries. Ogilvy’s social media wiki is a great example albeit a professional one. 

Spontaneous Innovation: Digital and social technologies combined to solve community problems. The everyday application of new technologies sparks development of new ideas like the use of M-currency in Africa that allows people to send unused mobile minutes as currency to family members (M-Pesa from Vodafone is a commericalized version of this phenomena) 

Some of these 5 are more practically useful  to organizations trying make a difference in markets with low Internet or broadband access. But remember, there are 5 billion mobile phones in hands across the world. Add to that a few other tangential data points and the possibilities of social media in the hands of individuals across developing countries becomes real: 1/5 of Facebook access is via mobile device and even Uganda has almost 220K members. Social media literacy - understanding and capacity both for the individual and the organization trying to help the individual could contribute to reaching the goals.

Social Networks Change Behavior

A Washington Post story covers a new study by Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School and James Fowler at the University of California at San Diego published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine tracking the pattern of smoking - actually quitting smoking - through a social network. They are not refering to an online social network but rather to the more common offline network we all participate in - in this case one whose core focal point is geographic.

You can get the WaPo article here in its entirety.

Here are the interesting parts:

• Over the course of 30 years, the number of smokers in the network dropped from 45% to 21%
• Closer relationships (family, co-workers in small companies, etc..) had more influence and impact
• Yet a single person's quitting seemed to have an effect at least through 3 degrees of separation

There are two assumptions the article reports that I question:

1. The drop in smoking was probably the effect of a shift in 'social norms.'
No doubt. And 'social norms' have become a common lever in social marketing circles (behavior change). We hear it a lot from clients in the government trying to affect change. It has always been around but seems to have risen to the surface of many campaigns via the messaging - e.g. "most people form a driving contract with their teenagers...."

Think about smoking. I quit early in my twenties. When someone quits in your 'circle' you talk about it. It does not remain a secret. People ask what's up, how are you doing with it, how long has it been. The 'quitter' explains their irritability, the different programs they are trying, how long it's been. There is tons of conversation and word of mouth. The researchers previous study focused on obesity. While impolite to mention a ballooning weight, it is also visually obvious. Talking about it, if even in more hushed tones, is inevitable.

I would love to know how many conversations happened between network 'members' about smoking. What was the role of word of mouth?

2. The remaining smokers ended up on the fringes of society. The illustration "proves" this point. I have no doubt that the role of smokers in society has dramatically changed in 30 years. In fact in a recent post, I reported someone's observation that they had become the last true counterculture. They cluster outside office buildings in the scorching heat or bone-chilling cold in small groups to pound back a cigarette.

But are they really the outcasts the article and study suggest? What if you layer in all of the other social networks they may belong to: movie lovers, scifi enthusiasts, wine afficianados, Harley owners? The geographicly rooted social network is one dimension of a "n" dimension of affinity groups we all belong to formally or informally. While the smokers may become isolated in the original network, they may lead vibrant, connected lives across other social networks to which they 'belong.'

Using Social Networks for Social Marketing

The implications of the study on social marketers' use of social media and social networks is great. Can behavior change experts embrace the use of new digital networks to accelerate the spread of social norms and word of mouth? They will need to let go of some control - a lot of control - to do so but we may just find a way to produce behavior change in something under thirty years.

The report confirms the usefulness of engaging influential groups within a network:

"Moreover, medical and public health interventions to encourage people to quit smoking might be more cost-effective than initially supposed, since health improvements in one person might spread to others. Finally, the isolation of smokers within social networks suggests that blanket policy approaches (e.g., advertising and taxation) may be usefully supplemented by interventions targeting small groups."

Roll Up Your Sleeves

If you are interested in how social marketers will begin to use social media (don't get them confused), you shoudl check out Nedra Weinrich, is in town on June 2th to hold her 2.5 day Social Marketing University. This is more than Social Marketing 101. Nedra is a leader in defining how to harness digital innovations and social media for behavior change (social marketing). You can sign up for the regular course Next Generation Social Marketing Seminar on June 4th.

Her blog is Spare Change

WeMedia 08/Miami: Digital Health Empowerment

At WeMedia 08, Scott Mowbray from Health.com is talking with  Kendall Lockhart, Co-Founder, Nenuphar Mobile Media (and yoga practitioner - you had to be there for his intro) about what it means to empower people.

Ways of 'digital health' empowerment
1. Voting
2. Personal empowerment: during a prsonal health episode, it is critical to know what to ask for, what to demand from all of the health providers involved in your care

Social Marketing & Community
Kendall asks 'What if people don't want to change (e.g. lose weight)'
I would throw back - "what about transtheoretical model of social marketing?" that and other models to describe what causes people to change is begging for the suport systems now possible through social networks/communites. In general there is too much emphasis on simple delivery of credible information (vs. building credible community).

Kendall: Is there more 'community' now?
Scott feels that we live in a one-brand (WebMD) world. We are at an early stage of development of alternative sources for credible information.
I would throw back - what about the vast array of LongTail patient affinity groups? Are we really headed towards a model of a handful of WebMD competitors or will it be long tail from here on in with patient affinity groups like those hosted by Inspire.com and PatientsliekMe?

GlaxoSmithKline Gets Social

GSK has launched a blog authored by their very own Steve Burton, VP of weight control for GSK consumer healthcare. (Thanks to Debbie Weil who posted and consulted on this).

Alliconnect just launched. The blog is in support of their alli, weight loss medication. The product site can be found here.  Before jumping to the blog, consider the product site with fairly active message boards. They are allowing lots of good discussion including this excerpt:

"If anyone is expecting a miracle drug in this product, you are NOT going to get it. The information on this product is so misleading. It says you can lose up to 50% more on this pill than dieting or exercising alone..."

But later on in that thread another poster (and others) share different POVs:

"I think that they mean following the alli plan will allow you to lose 50% more weight.  I noticed the problem also, but then realized that I would get the benefit of not absorbing all the fat AND be forced to eat a low fat (usually low calorie also) diet. I have a hard time overeating things that are low in fat because they usually not very interesting"

Allowing this type of open dialogue is a great step for a pharma. I believe it will pay off for them (the drug must be good, too.)

Alliconnect, the blog, is there to officially answer questions. They have a "legal stuff" blurb that goes like this:

"This blog is written by employees of GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare who are authorized to speak on behalf of the company. 

Our posts and answers to your comments reflect our company's point of view. They are based on the latest in science and what we've learned from talking to consumers.

When we offer personal points of views, or talk about our experience with alli, we'll make sure that's clear."

I particularly like that Steve Burton of GSK who authors the blog says that he used the product to lose 60 pounds and has kept it off for 3 years ( I guess that means he used the drug in clinical trials as it was just released). Here is a drug category that really requires the patient to play an extremely active role. GSK makes that clear and is offering some of the tools like discussion boards that can help.

This step forward into social media will be a huge leap for pharma. It is particularly valuable for this category but others will follow.