Headwinds loom for pharma web strategy

We’ve come a long way since pharma’s websites were “best viewed with Netscape Navigator 1.0” and the web designs that were prevalent way back in the mid-1990s would hurt modern eyes with their lack of sophistication.

Nonetheless, how to best respond to what 30 years ago was still the world wide web remains a question that has yet to be wholly answered. The industry has some pressing new challenges to face in the web space, but many companies also have yet to confront some legacy issues.

Preeminent among these are the huge variety and number of websites that most pharma companies still have. Within a single company these might be in the high hundreds, or even the low thousands, many of which may not be known about at a central level or have no clear strategic intent. Without some serious review or consolidation, this causes significant problems of efficiency, not to mention the negative end-user experiences most of our benchmarks are showing.

Digital Intelligence in PME, September and October 2012

Time for a quick roundup of my recent, new look, Digital Intelligence columns from PME.

The magazine got a gentle redesign in September and, in keeping with this, I started taking a longer, more thoughtful look at issues in Digital Intelligence.

First up was a critical look at the usability and discoverability of pharma content in September’s PME followed, in the October issue, by some thoughts on Boehringer Ingelheim’s Facebook game Syrum.

The digital pharma news that previously made up the Digital Intelligence section can still be found online in the Digital Intelligence blog and, playing around with Delicious tag bundles, links to blog highlights are featured each month.