Tunnah's musings: Welcome to the new online home of the pharma industry

You might have noticed that things have changed on pharmaphorum recently, with the launch of our new website, so Paul Tunnah muses this month on some of the key changes to create a more useful home for those who work in, or are interested in, the pharma industry.

It has been a long time coming but we have finally launched the new website for pharmaphorum. I certainly don't see this as the end of the process though, but merely a fresh look that gives us the platform to develop it further and keep bringing new ideas, innovation and thought leadership to the pharma industry.

As they say in digital, you are 'perpetually beta' and you can expect to see more changes coming as we listen to your feedback – so please let us know what you think!

For my 'musings' this week I thought it might be useful to summarise some of the key changes.

"Expect to see more changes coming as we listen to your feedback..."

New sections

The articles remain a core focus of the site, but we have now split out our news stories and are aiming to cover more once things settle down. In addition, we have a dedicated media section, where we will be posting audio and video pieces (which you may still find embedded in longer articles) for ease of reference. In addition, I am pleased to launch white papers on pharmaphorum, with our first pieces now going live. If you are interested in how we can help with such media pieces then get in touch.

The 'forums' section has gone, which may appear a little odd given our name, but we found that not much free discussion was taking place and so will be looking to drive more discussion around the content itself. With this in mind, we have installed Disqus for comments on content, which should make it quicker to share your views.

The Global Pharma Showcase remains, with associated jobs and events, but has been revamped so more on that later...

Tags / search

Every piece of content on the site is now 'tagged' so that users can more easily find content relevant to them. There are four types of tags we are using overall:

• 'Master tags' (which you see on the drop down menus for each section) relate to what function within pharma a particular piece of content primarily relates to.
• 'Geographic tags' are applied when a piece is relevant to a specific geography, e.g. US, Europe, India etc.
• 'Therapeutic area tags' relate to particular disease areas, as the name suggests.
• 'Specialism tags' are applied to 'disciplines' that are multi-functional and include things like 'market access', 'sales force effectiveness' and 'patients'

In addition we have a much better search functionality for the site (it kind of had to be because we didn't really have one before!), which uses much more intelligent keyword search, allows you to filter by content type (e.g. articles, news, white papers etc.) and allows filtering by tag. You can also use the tags at the bottom of the main website page as a quick search for all content with that master tag, or likewise at the top of the different content sections (and in the drop down menu) to quick search within a content type.

The new pharmaphorum website homepage

Registration / bookmarking

The registration process has been amended and we are now asking new users to provide their real name (we think this is important fortransparency), email address, password and some brief demographic information. Your email and demographics are not passed on to anyone else, but we want to make sure we understand our audience and can develop pharmaphorum accordingly. Registration only takes a minute and existing users can still login using their email address as username – NOT their old username itself – whereby they will be invited to complete the additional information.

One exciting feature of the new registration and profile is 'bookmarking' whereby on registration you must select one master tag that is the area you are most interested in (but can select more) and any new content that is loaded with that tag will appear as a link in the 'Bookmarks' section of your profile (either click on 'YOUR PROFILE' in the top right of the top menu when logged in, or the little star that will appear between this and 'SIGN OUT' when you have new bookmarked items. You can quickly delete unwanted bookmarked items and we are also developing a weekly email notification of new bookmarks.

"One exciting feature of the new registration and profile is 'bookmarking'..."

Global Pharma Showcase

Based on feedback we received from the previous version the Global Pharma Showcase has evolved and will continue to do so. We want to create a platform where, alongside the content we are loading every day, organisations relevant to the pharma sector can directly share their exciting updates and content. To add your company to the Global Pharma Showcase simply create a personal account and within your profile page click on the 'Your Showcase Profile' tab or the 'SIGN UP NOW' button in the 'Join the Global Pharma Showcase' box on the right hand side. You can then quickly add some basic information to create a Facebook style page for your company.Once created, you can add 'posts' to your Showcase page to flag updates and link to offsite destinations for more information. You can also flag what type of information the offsite link goes through to, such as:

• Articles
• News
• Audio
• Video
• Appointments

Everything mentioned above is completely free of charge – we want organisations to get involved and start sharing their updates with our relevant pharma audience.

There are three additional post types that do come with a cost (which can be purchased by direct payment or invoice via the 'Your Listing Bundles' menu on the right-hand side of your Showcase screen when you are logged in). These additional post types place information directly into the relevant sections of the pharmaphorum website:

• Events: Share the name, date, venue and details for an upcoming event along with a link through to the event website, which appears on our 'Events' page.
• Jobs: Share details for a job opportunity with a link through to your job listing, which will list the job in our 'Jobs' section.
• Press releases: If you wish to share the full text of a press release (rather than just a headline and link offsite as per posting a 'News' item) you can do so here and it will appear in our 'News' section. Given our audience and strong search-engine pickup it is likely to get more coverage.

"We want to create a platform where organisations relevant to the pharma sector can directly share their exciting updates and content."

Those are the major changes for now, but we want to keep on developing pharmaphorum to make it more useful. I can't stress enough how important it is to get your feedback in order for us to do this, so please leave your comments below, email us directly via the contact form or Tweet me @pharmaphorum.

We might not be able to implement all your suggestions straight away but I promise you we will listen and everything possible will be factored in!

Until next month, enjoy the new site, please tell your friends about it if you like it and stay well.

About the author:

Paul Tunnah is CEO & Founder of pharmaphorum media, which provides digital content marketing and communications solutions for the pharma sector and also manages the industry leading channel www.pharmaphorum.com, a digital podium for communicating thought leadership and innovation within pharma. For queries he can be reached through the site contact form or on Twitter @pharmaphorum.

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