a pharma marketer’s guide - klick health · a pharma marketer’s guide digital strategy ....

An Introduction to Google+ | 1

Klick Pharma

An Introduction To Google+ Revised: November 2011

A Pharma Marketer’s Guide

Digital Strategy . Experience Design . Data & Technology . Online Media klickpharma.com | 1 877 885 9957


ABOUT THE AUTHORS Klick Pharma is a full-service digital marketing agency that specializes in the healthcare and pharmaceutical sector. With a focus on measurable results, Klick Pharma’s talented subject matter experts create and execute data-driven digital strategies that maximize their clients’ online investments. The team’s years of pharma experience have resulted in a unique understanding of proven strategies at all stages of a brand’s lifecycle and the know-how to deliver innovative and effective programs within �a complex regulatory environment. Klick Pharma offers custom end-to-end digital solutions to meet a variety of client needs, including strategy, experience design, technology, media, and learning solutions. Visit KlickPharma.com to learn more.

Eric Portelance Digital Strategist

Jay Goldman Pharma speaker and Klick’s Mobile and Social Media expert



TABLE OF CONTENTS

OVERVIEW ............................................................................ 4 MAIN FEATURES .................................................................. 4

COMPARING GOOGLE+ AND FACEBOOK ......................... 6 +1 SOCIAL SHARING WIDGET ............................................ 7

MARKETING ON GOOGLE+ ................................................. 7 GOOGLE+ PAGES ................................................................ 7 PHARMA CONSIDERATIONS .............................................. 7 PAGE ADMINISTRATION ..................................................... 8 DIRECT CONNECT ............................................................... 9 PROMOTION WIDGETS ....................................................... 9

RECOMMENDATION ............................................................ 9

DISCLAIMER

This document is provided by Klick Pharma as an informational reference and subject to change without notice. Any opinions published here are those of the author(s) and are not meant to be exhaustive guidelines for online marketing compliance. The recommendations cited here been developed based on Klick Pharma’s interpretation of what is currently happening in the marketplace. Every effort has been made to present accurate and reliable information, but Klick Pharma assumes no responsibility or liability for any errors �or inaccuracies that may appear in this document. Furthermore, this document was not reviewed or developed in consultation with the FDA, and therefore all suggested approaches should always be vetted by your internal regulatory/compliance teams and receive appropriate FDA approvals. All brand names used are the trademarks of their respective owners. All of this information is provided “as is” and Klick Pharma disclaims any express or implied warranty, relating to the use �of this information including warranties relating to fitness for a particular purpose, compliance with a specification or standard, merchantability or non infringement.


OVERVIEW Google+ is a new social networking platform from Google. Its purpose is to make sharing and communication easier within the various circles of people in your life – friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues, and more. Access to the service is available to anyone with a Google account. According to Google CEO Larry Page, Google+ has over 40 million registered users as of October 2011. Although the initial growth in users has been extraordinary, it is currently unclear what percentage of these users is actively using the service.

MAIN FEATURES At the core of Google+ is a recognition that sometimes we want to share different types of things with different groups of people – like colleagues or family members. The method that allows you to control who can see the things you share on Google+ is called Circles. When you want to subscribe to someone’s updates so that they're visible in your news feed (also known as “following” them), you have to add them to one or more Circles (e.g., Work, Family, Friends). The Circles are also used when you want to share updates, allowing you to choose one or more Circles to receive them. This makes it easy to share different types of things with your family and coworkers.

Figure 1 - Interface for sorting friends into Circles

Hangouts, a video-based group chat system, are another key feature of Google+. You can start a Hangout with one or more of your Google+ contacts or Circles, or start an open Hangout and invite any of your online friends to join you. Hangouts have been most often compared to sitting on your front porch and chatting with your friends, neighbors, or random passersby. Text-based instant messaging is also available through the existing GTalk Chat system, and a new group-chatting feature called Messenger is available on mobile devices.


Figure 2 - Google+ Hangouts Feature

While Google+ can be accessed from the web browser on most modern smartphones, there is also a native Google+ mobile application on iOS and Android devices. Its functionality is still limited compared to the standard web interface but it allows users to instantly upload photos from their phones to Google+ and use the Messenger feature on-the-go with a single person or a Circle.


Figure 3 - Mobile Messenger view Figure 4 - Mobile photo sharing Google+ also includes a photo sharing application that is tied in to their existing Picasa Web Albums service, location check-ins similar to Foursquare, and a new games platform. The launch of Google+ Games is seen as a major competitive play in response to the success of Facebook's social gaming platform, which has given birth to hugely popular titles like FarmVille and Mafia Wars. Google+ Games launches with a number of titles, including Angry Birds, one of the most successful mobile games of all time, Zynga Poker, and Sudoku. Notably, Google is currently only charging a 5% fee on in-game transactions (e.g., purchasing in-game objects), whereas Facebook charges developers 30%. It is yet not clear if this 5% fee will remain and, if it does, whether it will cause Facebook to lower its own fees in response.

Comparing Google+ and Facebook Google+ can most easily be compared to Facebook although it differs in a number of important ways. For instance, at a fundamental level, Facebook is a closed community of people you know while Google+ defaults to a much broader level of openness. There is currently no integration between the two services, so it's not possible to find your Facebook friends on Google+, although some have speculated that this feature may be on the horizon. Google+ can, however, find friends using your Google Profile, including GMail


contacts, Yahoo! or Hotmail email accounts, or by uploading your own address book. The service also recommends new friends to you based on friends-of-friends who it thinks you may also know. At this point in time, it's too early to tell if Google+ will be considered a complete replacement for Facebook. Given that Facebook now has over 800 million active users, it's likely that most Google+ users will consider it as a service that supplements Facebook as opposed to one that replaces it.

+1 Social Sharing Widget Google also provides a social sharing widget called +1. This widget operates similarly to Facebook's Like button and Twitter’s Tweet button. It can be embedded into any website to enable easy sharing of that content to Google sites, including Google+. On the Google+ service, it is also the mechanism for sharing and liking content that your friends have posted. This widget allows users to easily share pieces of content with friends they are connected to through their Google Profile. These will show up within Google+ as well as Google search results. Although the exact influence of +1 shared content on search engine result pages remains unclear, Google has made it clear that they are to some extent favoring content that has been +1’ed.

MARKETING ON GOOGLE+

Google+ Pages Google introduced Google+ Pages in November 2011, enabling companies, institutions, and organizations to have a presence on Google+ for the first time. Pages have the same basic layout and functionality as an individual’s profile, including Circles, a Stream with the ability to upload photos and videos, and the ability to host a video Hangout with up to 9 people. As there is currently no advertising on Google+, pages are the only sanctioned way for brands to participate in this service. We expect that Google will inevitably integrate its AdWords platform with the service, but there have been no announcements thus far.

Pharma Considerations Of note for the pharma sector is the ability to lock individual posts in a Page’s stream, such that its content cannot be re-shared by other users. It’s also possible to disable commenting on a post-by-post basis, but there is no global setting to do so.


Much like on Facebook, there is no consistent way to display Important Safety Information such that it will always be displayed when users are viewing your content. Our recommendation for branded pharma pages would therefore be to include it as necessary within the text of an individual post, in addition to including it on the page’s “About” tab.

Page Administration Creating a page is as simple as selecting a category and following a few steps.

Pages have visibility settings to indicate whether the content is appropriate for all Google+ users, 18+, 21+, or whether the content is alcohol-related. The Photos and Videos tabs can also be disabled altogether if required. Currently, the only way to create a Page is by signing into an existing Google account. It is not possible to set up multiple users as Page administrators. We recommend creating a shared Google account for your organization with the sole purpose of managing a Google+ Page. This account’s password should be sufficiently complex to ensure a reasonable level of security.


Direct Connect Google is rolling out a new Direct Connect feature, which integrates Pages with their search engine to allow users to immediately link to a Page by searching for + followed by the Page name. For example, a search for +Google or +Pepsi will lead you to those Pages. Users also have the ability to allow Direct Connect to automatically add a Page to a Circle when the feature is used. This feature is set the first time a user makes use of the Direct Connect feature from Google Search. Direct Connect is currently being rolled out to a limited number of Pages, but others will be algorithmically added based on a page’s relevancy.

Promotion Widgets There is currently no ability to set an easy-to-remember URL for a Page. Each Page is assigned a unique number that serves as part of the URL (e.g. http://plus.google.com/00000000000000). It is possible to register a vanity URL for your Page (e.g. http://klickgplus.com), to use a third party redirection service like http://gplus.to, or to use a subdomain or directory on your existing domain (e.g. http://gplus.klick.com or http://klick.com/gplus) in order to provide a simpler and more memorable URL. Additionally, Google has introduced a variety of widgets that are easy to embed on your website. These widgets allow users to +1 your Page, add it to a Circle, or simply visit the Page directly.

RECOMMENDATION The Google+ platform continues to show a lot of potential for marketers. Pages are thus far off to a slow start as a result of low awareness and a lack of promotion on the part of brands, but show a lot of potential as a social platform. Many large brands have only been placed in user Circles a few dozen times, but we anticipate this will accelerate as they begin to actively promote Google+ on their websites.


In addition, because Google+ is a relatively new service, the number of active daily users and the demographics of those users remain somewhat unclear. We expect Google will continue to rapidly integrate Google+ with its other services, expand developer access to the platform via a robust API, add new capabilities, and include contextual advertising via their AdWords program. Finally, given the impact that the +1 button can have on your site’s search engine results, we strongly recommend looking at including it alongside any social sharing widgets you make already have in place.

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