Almost a year has passed since H.M. Pharma Consultancy made a decision to fully embrace the newly emerged digital media channels. When we stepped up our blogging, became more active on LinkedIn, and joined the “Twitterverse” some might have believed this to be a self promotional effort, purely driven by economic interest.
Well, obviously H.M. Pharma Consultancy is a revenue-driven organization, inasmuch as net income, minus cost of business, minus investments in said business, and minus the unspeakable taxes must be a figure larger than zero, and sufficient to pay for our people’s lives outside out said business. (Yes, contrary to popular belief, there is a modicum of such for all of us!) Nevertheless I remain convinced that attempting to ride the digital media wave with only self-promotion in mind can never succeed — not for an individual, and never for a company.
In the professional segments of the social web, two of the most fundamental principles of religion apply, simply because they are community-building: (1) give, and you shall be given; (2) ask, and ye shall receive. If you are just listening in, that’s fine — after all, having more people in the audience than on the stage is what all stage performers crave. However, to participate you must share something that is of value for at least some people who follow you. And the great thing with knowledge and information is that these are not diminished by sharing them.
We are now starting to see results. Take our Twitter presence as an example. Whenever we find something of professional interest on the web, we share the link on Twitter. As a result, more and more Twitter users have become followers (graph courtesy Twittercounter), and while the absolute numbers might be very small the great majority of these are long-term quality followers — corporations and influential individuals. (This is just as it was in March 2010, with fewer followers, as communicated here. Note that the lag period was 9 months, from January to October. You don’t build a good and permanent community of followers inside a few weeks.) On the other hand, we have stopped combing the health sections of the major wire services for interesting news ourselves; we just look at what the Twitter users we are following share there. Join us by following @hmpharmacon on Twitter! If you are on LinkedIn, follow H.M. Pharma Consultancy there! Lets interact, lets build a community, and the life science infoverse will expand a tiny bit more — to our mutual incremental benefit.