What I have been watching

Fight for Kisses. This brilliant website provides a glimpse into the (near) future of consumer marketing. I can only imagine how many amused fathers and mothers have forwarded the video trailer to friends and family, effectively giving instantaneous viral momentum to the marketing campaign among the target customer segment.

The heavy Flash website is undoubtably a stumbling block for search spiders which draw a blank when scurrying around for content, keywords, and links. Yet, the website is clearly highly visited and very top-of-the-mind among certain internet users. There are certainly ways to assist the search spiders and bring the website content into search indexes, but why bother when your customers are busy propogating the promotional campaign through e-mail forwarding and blog postings?

What I have been running

WT Detector. An excellent companion script to the indispensible WT Debugger, which I mentioned in a previous post. I confess to occassionally checking out the source code of favorite websites in an attempt to figure out which Web Analytics software is running behind the scenes. WT Detector greatly simplifies this task, scrounging the source code of any given website for the tell-tale javascript code of the major analytics vendors. On a side note, an amazing number of otherwise professional websites seem completely devoid of web analytics software — a baffling phenomenon given the availability of completely free, easy-to-install software such as Google Analytics.

10+ Awesome Firefox Extensions for Developers and Bloggers.
I was considering putting together a list of the best Firefox extensions for web developers, but the job has already been done. Ajax Ninja has captured the best of the best in his list. I hadn’t known about Seoquake, to my eternal shame. Now I just need to find a list of the best Firefox extensions for Web Analysts.

What I have been reading

eMarketer: Pharma Industry Failing at Web 2.0. A new study from eMarketer finds that the pharmaceuticals industry has been slow to adopt Web 2.0. For those of us on the front lines of pharma marketing, this information is hardly breaking news, but it is true that an embarrassing majority of senior management would likely struggle to come up with a vision for web marketing in their business, let alone any meaningful definition of Web 2.0. (For those wondering, the study author rudimentally describes Web 2.0 as social networking, blogging, and video). More worrisome, internet apathy tends to extend throughout marketing organizations, although line managers may be avid consumers of web applications themselves. I’ve yet to come across a product manager with a blog, but pharma marketers do seem to make great web lurkers i.e. visiting YouTube, forwarding viral videos, and managing their Linkedin/XING profiles whenever possible.

However, it is an oversimplication to blame the marketing staff for failing to adopt Web 2.0 strategies. In most big pharma companies, marketers are kept on a short leash, making investment in unproven and unconventional areas virtually impossible. After all, pharmaceutical sales and marketing is highly regulated, both within the corporation (self-regulation) and from the outside world (law and government).

Web 2.0 has emerged as a conundrum for pharmaceutical companies. Patients, physicians, providers, and other stakeholders of the health care system have taking their discussions, criticisms, and commentaries to the web, yet conspicuously absent from the conversation is an entire industry. Pharmaceutical companies will need to find innovative ways into the conversation, while remaining within the confines of industry regulations and true to corporate ethical standards. Until this happens, we can look forward to more product sites with circa 1999 brochureware.