“SMAC” – A New Buzzword for Pharma in 2013

No, I’m not talking about the Salsa Music Appreciation Club or the Students’ Museum Advisory Council of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. I’m talking about the intersection of Social, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud. Although it would be a stretch to say that the pharmaceutical industry will become proficient in all FOUR of these technologies in 2013, I will go out on a limb and predict that SMAC will be popping up this year as a buzzword at many industry conferences and in vendor white papers.

I first heard about SMAC from Philippe Kirby, EUCAN MCM IT Director, MSD (Europe) Inc. during a January 16, 2013, Pharma Marketing Talk interview, where we discussed the near future of pharma digital marketing especially regarding use of the iPad, social media, and analytics in physician detailing. The following is an edited excerpt from that conversation. You can listen to the entire interview here: http://bit.ly/PMTalk187

The logo included in this post is from the SMAC LinkedIn group, which I joined to learn more about this trend. The group was established by Jithesh Sathyan, Technology Architect and Pre Sales Solution Manager, Mobility Practice at Infosys.

The current discussion topics of this group include:

• Forrester Research: "The Future of Mobile Application Development" - Forrester urges an omni-channel approach in which software services and applications work everywhere. Netflix, which works on tablets, mobile devices, TVs, laptops and game consoles was cited as an example.
• #SMAC becoming a priority for CIOs - CIOs need to be just as strong at strategic planning and execution as they are at technology. Many are quickly prioritizing analytics, cloud and mobile strategies to stay in step with their rapidly changing customer bases.
• SMAC News Weekly - the latest news and numbers relating to SMAC

Most of this is too technical for me and probably most pharmaceutical marketers. However, that should not hinder the proliferation of presentations at drug industry marketing conferences that drop "SMAC" into the mix of acronyms.