1. Consumers as curators.

Everything is curated now. We view the world through filters – trusted sources like friends or online communities to which we belong. ‘I want to look at topic X through your lens because you are someone I trust.’

It’s almost difficult to pluck examples of curated experiences because they are so deeply woven into the fabric of our daily routines online – everything is curated. If you’re reading this blog post, you most likely subscribe to the blog’s feed (“I want to hear from Dachis Group.”) or you arrived via the recommendation of a friend on Facebook , Twitter, Google+, etc.  (“I am interested in this topic and know that my friend John passes along good information.”).

A strong emerging platform and fun example is Pinterest. Warning: it’s highly addictive and may decrease your productivity during the workday. Pinterest is a highly visual social bookmarking site. Users catalog images of things they love plucked from around the Web in different categories on “trend boards.”

Brands can use Pinterest to identify influencers and advocates. Who is talking about your brand? How are your products being categorized and shared among influencers? And be sure to check out the trend boards on Pinterest. They represent potential engaging and relevant content for you to adopt.

2. Brands as content.

This one is simple. Consumers use your brands to express themselves.

Therefore brands have to provide variety and portability if they want to show up in their customers’ content stream. By allowing people access to the raw material of your brand, they can better identify with your products and amplify your messages.

For example, many consumers “Like” brands on Facebook because they want that particular brand to show up as part of their profile. In a sense, ‘brands as content’ is why social media has been able to become such a force in our everyday lives. Consumers are willing to let brands into their lives for the value received in return, and much of that value has to deal with the simple association between consumer and brand.

3. Brands as curators.

Proper positioning allows brands to apply their expertise, act as smart filters and become the go-to destination on certain topics. This is what we’re all striving for.

Think back to Pinterest. Brands like Nordstrom and HGTV have recognized the power of actually having profiles on Pinterest to curate cool products and ideas relating to their brand identities.

Remember the early days of the web? Users were left to wander down whatever dark alleys of the Internet they stumbled upon (and some of them were dark indeed). The rise of search engines made content discover a more precise practice. Today, content curation allows good content to surface itself to us.

Content curation is a hugely important new consumer mode in the social (and digital) space. Brands have a great opportunity to provide content for curators to use, as well as become curators themselves.

Of course everything below is open for discussion, commenting, re-interpretation addition and/or questioning.  The number of use cases I had in mind as I drafted this were just too many to get down in a single blog post.  Hopefully though, through the discussion, more use cases and examples will come to light.

For now though…

Current Awareness

Most organisations try to keep abreast of the latest news and developments in their sector and it is especially pertinent to do so in the pharmaceutical industry, traditionally one of the most knowledge-hungry industries.  The appetite for data, information and knowledge in the industry comes as no surprise when you consider the vast sums of money involved.  Getting a $1bn drug to market just 1 month earlier means an extra $83m in revenue.  Factor in the advantage of being first-to-market or first-in-class and the timeliness of information retrieval and digestion comes sharply into focus.

When it comes to information flow, currently, RSS is king.  Whether it’s the library receiving and passing on competitor analysis, the in-house lawyer keeping up with the latest precedents or the researcher staying up-to-date with peer reviewed publications.  RSS offers a way to pipe information between individuals, groups and departments in a much less intrusive manner than emails.

Using a single example to extol the virtues of RSS will undoubtedly lead to RSS being undersold, but for this post I’m going to focus on re-purposing the platform discussed in Robin’s post.

Below is a simple flow diagram explaining how the Climate Pulse site aggregates content from across the web.  In this example content is pulled from sources such as blogs, Flickr, Twitter etc.  The important thing is that, whatever the source, there is a way of pulling information from it and into the platform, either by way of RSS or an API.

Step by step, here’s how the example above could apply to a research situation within pharma:

1. Find, Monitor and Aggregate – The sources included for aggregation would be systems such as internal document management systems, peer-reviewed journals, research data repositories and electronic laboratory notebooks.
2. Curate and Editorialise – The curation step could be used to highlight results for lead chemical compounds or series, knock-out false positives, highlight particularly important articles and organise competitor analysis.
3. Display and Participation – The display of information would serve as a project dashboard, available to all project members.  It would act as a jumping off point, from which colleagues could enter the sources of information directly.  It would also allow for commenting from the producers of data as well as therapeutic area leads.
4. Output – Since the platform can be built to be open the output can either be directed to groups or individuals or the audience can decide how to digest it. For instance the information for several projects can be aggregated into a therapeutic area view.  Alternatively the output can be pushed back into the data generating areas of the company as a prioritised to-do list.  And, if you are brave and prepared to challenge some pharmaceutical industry paradigms, you could even bridge the firewall and publish some information direct the external scientific world.
5. Disparate Participation – Widgets can be built which take information from and push information to the central information display allowing disparate groups to focus on the information in a manner most suitable to them.

Expertise Location

Most companies attempt to maintain a directory of all employees.  These directories are usually limited to a simple headshot, contact details, which department the colleague is in and other basic information.  At most they include a very simple “biography” entry and maybe an “expertise” section.

Inevitably, as the company changes structure and adapts to external stimuli, people move departments and change the focus of their professional specialism.  Classic corporate directories do not capture this well due to their inherent static nature.  Since social business technology is built around dynamic core principles they are much better suited to reflect the fluid structure of most modern companies.

Most, if not all of the leading social business platforms can:

• be linked in to Active Directory to produce an automated organisation chart;
• provide customisable profile pages that enable people to quickly and easily describe themselves through biography entries;
• provide an aggregation of a person’s activities throughout the system;
• use a person’s activity to suggest connections to similar people;
• index a person’s activities to use during searches for expertise;
• include some form of unstructured expertise discovery.

At a very basic level, the use of these, more social, profiles provides colleagues with a corporate directory.  On top of that, in an industry that thrives when cross-discipline teams work well together, these profiles supplement already existing knowledge networks by making use of the metadata involved in every comment, blog post, discussion, vote, poll answer and uploaded document.  This provides a dynamic and searchable database of colleagues, which can be used to discover a single expert in a company of thousands, which is something of a regular occurrence in pharma.

Collaborative Document Writing

People need easy and accessible ways to work together to turn information into actionable insight.  Very few knowledge-based industries escape from this fact, especially pharma.  The number and sheer volume of collaboratively authored documents in the pharmaceutical industry is phenomenal; from the research presentations to SOPs; from journal publications to regulatory submissions.

There are plenty of images and videos explaining the problems associated with the current workflows used to produce collaboratively authored documents .  My current favourite is an advert for IBM Connections showing how email proliferates when only a few people are involved (3mins 35secs).

Now transfer the workflow demonstrated in the video to something more akin to a research publication, something which is exponentially more complicated than a client pitch.  Checking facts, collating data, having each team member add their section takes many more emails than shown in the video.

This is where wiki-like functionality comes to the forefront.  This allows people to concurrently edit documents, comment on documents, version control their documents and publish them in a variety of formats.  Most enterprise wikis also allow for file attachments enabling authors to collect all the supporting documents in a single space and once a simple workflow is overlaid the wiki becomes a fantastic way to author, review and approve a document for publication.

For those who shy away from wikis, due to workflow, security or mark-up language concerns, with the release of Jive SBS4.0 we’ve seen a blurring between traditional office documents and a more wiki-like approach with their inline commenting.  For those instances where the source document has to be very tightly controlled this functionality enables a social layer to sit across the document.

Hopefully those three examples will be enough to start a discussion on how Social Business Design can be used behind the firewall of pharmaceutical companies.  There are definitely more exciting and challenging discussions to be had:

• how self-publication will alter the nature of scientific journals and the peer-review process
• the use of APIs and open data standards behind the firewall to aid cross-discipline sciences such as PKPD;
• crowd-sourcing the interpretation of complex data;
• publishing research data outside of the firewall;
• driving clinical trial recruitment for rare diseases through the use of social media;
• how the interaction of pharma companies with their audience is regulated by agencies such as the FDA (a very pertinent question following the FDA hearings on Social Media);

to name just a few, but I’ll save those for future posts.

This post originally appeared on the Headshift blog.

In all these situations, which will be familiar to anyone who has ever worked at the social media collision point between audiences and organisations, very little of value is extracted from what can be a costly exercise, primarily because most “social platforms” have been built to pull in audiences and allow moderators to police user activity.

Whilst there is still a place for such propositions, particularly where calls to action can be closely aligned to the editorial or other content that is of value to the owners of that proposition, in many instances it makes sense to move away from moderation towards curation.

A simple enough idea, in practice curation of external and social content has been relatively difficult for media brands and other organisations to put themselves at the centre of the flow of information and content around them. That, at least, was my experience at the BBC where, for more than seven years, I (and others) tried to come up with a solution to this problem, culminating in the well received but ultimately unsustainable, at least within the (non)budgetary confines in which it existed, BBC Manchester Blog.

A few months ago, one of our technology partners, eVectors, introduced me to a tool they’d created which, with the right editorial strategy wrapped around it, can make the job of finding, curating, editorialising and socialising content far more efficient – and interesting – than I’ve seen before.

So, with our friends Paolo and Cristian at eVectors, Nick, myself and several others here at Headshift created a demonstration which we call ClimatePulse. As we say on the site:

“Climate Pulse tracks a wide range of source for information, comment and content about the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference (COP15). It’s different from mere aggregation services because there is an editorial layer and a social layer. The editorial layer allows curators to highlight specific pieces of content. The Social layer gets users involved in tagging and categorising content. In the near future, you’ll even be able to take away a widget containing the flow from Climate Pulse – a widget that lets your friends, contacts or audience to not only consume but to contribute their own content, straight from your site, back into that flow.”

In plain English, Climate Pulse basically monitors and aggregates blog posts, news websites, twitter tweets and a wide range of other sources we’ve configured in the backend. An editor can then curate this content and display it as they wish – for example letting the flow appear as a raw feed, tagging or geo-tagging content, featuring the best stuff, etc. Here’s a diagramme showing the flow of content into the system, the editorial and tagging layer, and the social layer:

For the social layer, in this instance we’ve asked users to declare an interest based upon work based affiliation – energy business, business, government, environmental NGO or journalist. As can be seen in the screenshot below, users then determine whether pieces of content describe a problem or a solution, and add free tags to describe, in their own language, why:

All content is tagged, either by the original author, the editor, users, or by the system scraping the content for key words. When visitors click on a tag, say “nuclear energy”, they get a graph showing how each of the five categories of users voted. Using this example, it’s likely that government and energy business will see nuclear energy as a solution and, because of they’ve tagged the content, we can see that they feel it’s clean, brings jobs, is future proof, etc. Environmentalists, however, area likely to see nuclear energy as a problem because, again based on likely tags, disposal of spent fuel, mining, accidents, etc. Here’s a few possible use cases:

• If the UN, which is organising the Copenhagen Climate conference, or an environmental NGO was using Climate Pulse, they’d be able to see, at a glance, what issues people agree upon and why, and could push delegates to spend time negotiating on topics where it’s necessary to do so.

• Businesses wanting to send the message, “we know you care about this issue, we’re doing what we can understand your views, and we want to be part of the solution” could use a proposition like this to do exactly that.

• A media organisation, wanting to provide coverage and analysis of a range of viewpoints, based upon content from a wide range of sources, could use a tool like this to create a compelling editorial proposition that feeds content to journalists.

One last feature, which would help exposure to the proposition spread virally, is that we can easily build widgets of the flow from the page, and enable site owners interested in a particular issue, for example deforestation, to create a widget that displays, on their own site, that content. Social features could then be made available, meaning that the audience on third party sites could participate on the sites they choose to visit, rather than visiting Climate Pulse itself, and that participation, likely to be ranking, voting or comments, could feed back into the general flow to be highlighted and editorialised by the site curator.

It’s been, and I hope will continue to be, an interesting example of how Headshift, working with technology partners, can help implement exciting and useful propositions that extract real value from audience participation, wherever that participation takes place. It is, to me, a giant leap in the direction of resolving the issue many have grappled with in the past, which is how to find and reflect the content and opinions of a wide range of participants, without being overwhelmed, as is so often the case, by the flood of content and rising moderation costs.

The model here is a nice example of the social business archetypes that my colleague Lee Bryant described in this earlier post and it’s easy to see how we could use the ideas here not just for climate change but any topic or event, such as an election, a popular television programme, a brand, or the research or strategic work being done by an organisation.

You can see the alpha release of Climate Pulse at http://www.climatepulse.org