HealthContentAdvisors

Social Media Blurs Lines Between Advertiser and Publisher

• Posted May 5th 2009
• by Janice

I recently attended Social Pharmer, an “unconference” in Cambridge, MA as part of Health Camp Boston.[1]  Most of the participants consisted of pharma marketers or ad/media agencies that work with pharmaceutical and life science clients.  With my background in digital publishing, I had a different perspective than most. 

Social media to me represents the elusive “interactive” component that publishers have been seeking since the early days of two-way communication that the Internet enabled.   For media agencies, social media represents a way to further engage prospects and customers.  Whereas agencies used to have to rely on publishers to build communities of interest to the marketer, the marketers are now building communities directly with social media tools.  It’s not yet time to declare that marketers no longer need publishers to help them spread their messages, but publishers should take note of how their advertising clients are moving more directly into the content creation and community-building arenas.  Publishers no longer have a lock on content creation and community building (aka audience development).  

At Social Pharmer, it was interesting to observe that these agency folks who are accustomed to creating engaging content in short bursts lacked experience in organizing and managing content on a continued basis, tasks that publishers have honed over the years in print and digital environments.   I couldn’t help note the complementary skillsets of the agencies and the publishers.  The area where publishers are struggling -engaging readers in on online environment-is where the agencies are having success (the myAlli campaign was repeatedly called out for its success); the area where agencies need guidance - how to manage content that is produced by others, especially in a regulated environment-is where the publishers have the experience edge. 

[See related post by John Mack’s about creating guidelines for social media publishing in pharma on his Pharma Marketing blog.]

My colleague, Russell Perkins, is currently at the ABM Annual Conference and reported that a key theme there is how publishers are acting more and more like agencies in offering a variety of programs to help marketers reach their target audiences, and conversely how agencies are acting more like publishers as they create and publish more and more content online.  John Battelle included the same theme in his 2009 predictions , where he wrote:  …” media companies have realized (or will soon) that their job is to create platforms for communities to make media. Publishers are agents for communities, agencies are agents for brands. They need each other. It takes both agents to get good media made“.  This isn’t a new theme.  I wrote in 2003 about how agencies were increasingly using the Web to extend the type of content they were creating beyond advertisements. The roles of agencies and publishers will continue to evolve as digital publishing becomes more mainstream for consumers, publishers, marketers and agencies. 

 

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[1] See Report from the Social Pharmer “Unconference” by Amber Benson, Pharma Marketing News, VirSci Corp, April 2009.