Social Media in a Conservative Industry

This is  guest post contributed by a partner in crime, the very lovely Sarah Morgan.

I’m not a "social media marketer" or "social media strategist" or "social" anything – not by title, anyway. I’m a director at a PR agency who cares passionately (some might say "obsessively" – toMAto, toMAHto) about social media and what it’s capable of.

I work in healthcare: all my clients are pharmaceutical companies, biotechs, medical-device companies, etc. There might be more staid industries… but let’s just say that most aren’t hopping up and down to try the latest wild and crazy way to reach out their target audiences.

Partly, it’s their fault. Corporate-casual notwithstanding, some people still wear suits every day, mentally, if you know what I mean. There are a lot of "lifers" comfortable doing things the old way. And, partly, we – all of us who spend our days talking about medicine – we ARE up against a lot. FDA, CDER, DDMAC – there’s an alphabet soup of government agencies regulating every word we even think about using.

The problem, of course, is that while government is slow, social media is fast. So how do we make the most of these fabulous technologies when the regulations we’d need to abide by don’t even exist yet?

Apart from consultants, the tech industry, and some standout social media rock stars, I think most industries are like this. Everyone is grappling with social media. At this point everybody knows it’s cool – but they don’t know what it is, how it can help them, or – what they really need to know – how it can hurt them… and how it CAN’T.

But here’s the thing.

While it’s not trendy to admit, I remember the 90s.

Do you?

90210 on Thursday nights, Gap overalls – and this brand new internet thing. What this double-u-double-u-double-u-dot meant and whether or not you had to say the haitch-tee-tee-pee-colon-backslash-backslash thing first.
What a website was. What it was for. Whether a company needed one. What you’d do with it if you had one. What good it might do for a company and a brand. Whether it was nice to do someday or necessary to do now. And how terrifyingly it would open a company up to the public. Liabilities. Complaints. Negative comments.

I read this morning about the return of romper shorts. 90210 is coming back to TV in the fall. And as much as we like to think we’re breaking ground in the social media world in the last couple of years – and I’d be the first to say that we are – we can’t forget that we’ve been through this before, too.
All those fears are the the same ones we have now.  Everybody was scared and confused of Web 1.0 too. Everybody tiptoed up to it and poked at it and held it upside down and tried to figure out how it’d fit with their job description, their worldview.

Ain’t nothing new.

But that’s not a bad thing. What if we can remember how we got people comfortable then? Wouldn’t that help us do our jobs faster this time around? Which people led the charge? Which got it, and which were the ones that had to be dragged in? What efforts made people feel comfortable? Which ones were big, expensive, showy busts?

Thinking back – thinking ahead. Not always mutually exclusive. Social media’s creating fantastically cool new ways to communicate, but you might not have to create fantastically cool new ways to get people into it.

Don’t go for the romper shorts, though.

Sarah Morgan blogs here, twitters here, works at MCSPR, and is not sure what she thinks of the 90210 remake – but as long as the sideburns are shorter, she’ll give it a chance.