It has been a rather slow week for much interesting news – and so a twist to the Weekly Roundup this week.
From time to time, I look to see what is going on with pharma and FDA in the various social media platforms – taking the temperature on Twitter or looking to see how folks are doing on YouTube. I thought that this week for the Weekly Roundup, it might be fun to feature a few videos that caught my eye when looking over all of the pharma and FDA YouTube channels. The industry, for the most part, has not exactly mastered YouTube, though there have been some exceptions and some bursts of creativity. Here are a few that caught my eye this week for being either innovative or interesting. Had a lot of trouble embedding them, so there are links to the videos.
- It Gets Better – As many know, there has for a while now been a campaign known as the “It Gets Better” project that speaks out to lesbian and gay youth to let them know that if they are the victims of bullying, they can get help and life will eventually get better and many different people and institutions have posted videos to send that message including government agencies and high profile celebrities. Posted this week to YouTube, GSK joins them putting up the company’s own “It Gets Better” video featuring an entire chorus of GSK employees. You can view it here.
- Connecting Hearts Abroad – YouTube is a wonderful way to bring home an understanding of what can be, and is being, done on the ground in the way of global development and philanthropy. LinkTV created ViewChange.org which is a great example of bringing stories from around the world that we wouldn’t normally see about global development. For pharma, YouTube is a great way to demonstrate that kind of philanthropy in action, but is largely under utilized. This week Lilly put up three videos about a program called “Connecting Hearts Abroad”. The first video introduces the program by Lilly to choose up to 200 employees to send around the world during 2011 to serve in a volunteer capacity for community development, education and in health clinics . You can view the inaugural video here. What would make this really great is to have the employees take videos that show the work done in-country and then put those up on this channel in their own playlist.
- Managing Chronic Disease in Rwanda – In the same vein, the Medtronic Foundation is bringing us video from an in-country effort. They support Partners in Health which worked with the Rwandan Ministry of Health to create a model for the management of chronic disease. This video, actually posted a month ago, overviews the project in a simple, but very effective way and you can view it here.
- Raising Disease Awareness and Having Fun – The people at the PfizerUK channel rarely disappoint. In this video you can see a few hundred people on the street in London wearing flesh colored body suits sculpt themselves on the street into the shape of a hand to raise awareness of Dupuytren’s Disease. Clever, short and attractive and getting a very impressive number of viewings, and you can be one of them by clicking here.
That was fun wasn’t it? Now go forth and emulate….
