Hi.

On behalf of everyone at MicroMass, I’d like to welcome you to our new blog. Pretty soon, we’re going to be re-doing our website from the ground-up. But instead of waiting for that, we’ve decided to go ahead get the blog portion of it up and running.

Because we have a lot on our minds.

The posts you’re going to see here will orbit around the idea of Inspiring Change. It’s our primary driver as an organization and it shows up in a lot of our internal communications. It’s what we set out to do.

And talk about a coincidence.

If ever there were two industries experiencing change at warp-speed, it’s marketing and healthcare. Social media. Conversations. FDA. The consumer-in-control. Web 2.0. Web 3.0. Mobile apps. ROI. Transparency. We’re certainly not at a loss for buzzwords.

The economy withstanding, this is a really exciting time to be in either one of these spaces. They change and evolve almost daily. For me, the idea of working in both is being right on the zenith of our entire culture. Not that I forget there’s a world outside the “net web,” but more of our lives migrate to it every day. The part that relates to our health, especially so.

And that begs the question on all of our minds.

Can Big Pharma and the FDA find common ground and learn to play nice?

I’ll pose an opinion.

Yes.

But they will do it kicking and screaming at first.

Pharmaceutical companies will have to accept the reality (and it is a reality) that the control they cling to so much, simply isn’t there any more. The FDA will have to accept the fact that with this new landscape there is no possible way an organization can control everything said about it or—more to the point—it’s products. It’s going to have to cut these companies some slack on the legal front.

Both of these changes will be tectonic in scale and you can bet that it won’t be an overnight shift. Neither one of these complex entities are particularly known for their flexible behavior unless they have to.

Well, they have to.

At this point they’re both in massive catch-up mode in a communications space that is evolving faster than anything we’ve seen as a civilized species.

And to compensate for that I’m going to predict that this catch up will happen in huge, very visible chunks. A website that defies the conventional wisdom of phama companies and takes a huge risk to its’ brand. A ruling by the FDA declaring comments on a tool like Sidewiki is not the responsibility of a drug manufacturer. Bold moves by both sides.

Time will tell but I simply don’t see how it can turn out any other way. Plus, from a purely capitalistic perspective there’s waaay too much money on the table for things to move at a slow pace. And if anything can inspire change, it’s the Benjamins (Y2K anyone?).

(Cue Don LaFontaine)

Imagine a web where creators of products that affect our lives in the most literal sense possible had the freedom to speak openly and honestly about their cures without the specter of reckless litigation. The openness and learning that could come from a real dialogue between people and the pharma industry would lead to huge breakthroughs on both sides of the equation. And we would probably be a lot healthier because of it.

And that’s a change that should inspire all of us.

Tags: Behavioral Change, Healthcare Marketing, Inspiring Change, Marketing Agency, Pharmaceutical Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Engagement