Medimix International and University of Miami Social Media Lecturer to Present at EphMRA- Berlin 2010

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Medimix International CEO, Henry Gazay, announced that Medimix has been selected by EphMRA (European Pharmaceutical Research Association) to present “Will Market Researchers Be the Neanderthals of Homo Marketingus?“ at the annual conference in Berlin, June 22-24, 2010. Co-presenting will be Alex de Carvalho, adjunct professor of social media at the University of Miami School of Communications, and co-founder of ScanbuzzTM, an online tracking service for reputation management, blogger relations and brand monitoring in the healthcare sector.

Miami,(December 17,2009)

Medimix International CEO, Henry Gazay, announced today that Medimix has been selected by the Programme Committee of EphMRA (European Pharmaceutical Research Association) to present a paper entitled “Will Market Researchers Be the Neanderthals of Homo Marketingus?“ at the annual conference in Berlin, June 22-24, 2010. Co-presenting will be Alex de Carvalho, adjunct professor of social media at the University of Miami School of Communications, and co-founder of ScanbuzzTM, an online tracking service for reputation management, blogger relations and brand monitoring in the healthcare sector.

The theme of this year’s conference, “Business as Usual”, in reality is a call-to-action to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing market environment. The introduction of social networking, blogging, and Twitter have opened up entirely new avenues of communication between healthcare companies and their customers, as well as affecting the relationship between physician and patient.

Medimix’s presentation will explore some of the revolutionary changes that are occurring in market research with the advent of social media. Web 2.0 platforms now allow companies to reach extended communities, listen to the “buzz”, comment and ask questions--all part of a broader trend called “crowd sourcing”. And suddenly the old traditional methods appear slow, expensive and antiquated.

The traditional structured questionnaires seem limited in the context of social media, where opinions are expressed spontaneously and made widely available through web 2.0 platforms. The challenge is now for marketing researchers to move from a rigid mode of collection and analysis of scarce and expensive data, to analysis of abundant, unstructured and spontaneous information. The wisdom of the crowd is replacing the postulate of the few, and new modes of analysis are required to comprehend the mass of information that can be harvested online.

Will marketing researchers adapt to this new paradigm, or will they be surpassed by a new generation of social media experts, the way Homo sapiens took over Neanderthals?

"Social media provides unlimited market research possibilities," says Alex de Carvalho, "offering marketers the chance to identify market trends, discover potential problems, and find new product development and other marketing opportunities."
Mr. Gazay and co-presenter Alex de Carvalho will support their presentation by describing the results of a survey completed the second part of 2009 among 500 GPs, oncologists, hematologists, and cardiologists in ten different countries (Europe Top Five, United States, Brazil, Mexico, and Asia), on the use of social and professional networking sites. It was found that despite their busy agenda, healthcare professionals preserve time to frequent sites several times per week, most often for information but also for social connections.

This behavior will be commented upon, analyzing in particular how new platforms can be leveraged for marketing research to identify large market trends, potential problems, and new opportunities. The presentation will reveal global patterns and specific regional variances that will help pharmaceutical companies better focus their e-marketing strategies and build a program integrating SEO, CRM and R & D.

About Medimix International

Medimix International is a dynamic provider of advanced marketing research solutions for the healthcare industry worldwide. Medimix’s proprietary panel provides direct access to more than 500,000 physicians and healthcare professionals from around the world, making it one of the largest panels in the industry.

The staff of Medimix International is composed of professionals with marketing research, pharmaceutical and medical backgrounds.

Medimix specializes in global research. Learn more at www.medimix.net.