Last night was the capstone event for ENET this season—the Boat Cruise around Boston. The weather couldn’t have been better. I had a great time seeing all the sights of the harbor, and even watching Old Ironsides firing a cannon shot at sundown. It was the perfect end to a great year at ENET and I can’t wait to get rolling again in the Fall. I only joined ENET for the last 1/3 of this year and I’m looking forward to the topics I missed out on such as Launching a Company, Building Teams, and Start-Ups. Tomorrow I’ll going to 2 more networking events, one called the 2011 Social Networking Breakfast held by the IFMA and CPFA in Boston, and the other called the 2011 Mass Technology leadership Council’s Award Reception which I received a scholarship to go to courtesy of StayInMa. You’ll be hearing all about it…

I wrote a blog post entitled “FDA Misses Own Deadline On Social Media” in December of 2010. Well, it’s almost seven months since that post and halfway through our third calendar year, the pharma & biotech industries are still waiting for the FDA’s guidelines on social media.

Today I read a news summary from FiercePharma about Bayer apologizing for two tweets, one about the erectile dysfunction drug Levitra and the other on Sativex, a multiple sclerosis treatment. BNet Pharma includes the offending 13-word tweet in its entirety in “Bayer Apologizes for Tweeting: Pharma’s Never-Ending Social Media Nightmare“. To quote from the article:

“The tweet was an extract of a press release that had been internally “certified” by Bayer’s compliance people, but the PMCPA, which regulates drug promotion in the U.K., said that wasn’t good enough. As the tweet promoted a prescription drug to the public — which is illegal in Britain — it was in violation.”

And Bayer’s troubled tweet could land them in difficulty with the US FDA because it could be interpreted as an efficacy claim. Hold onto your hat! This story could have a very long tail.

So my Droid is coming in today and the timing couldn’t be better. Today is the last day to sign up for $30 unlimited data from Verizon and as of tomorrow it will cost many times more for tiered data packages. Good timing for me! I intend to use it for GPS and internet radio which over a month would destroy the limit of 5gb per month at the new $30 plan.

I sent an email to Verizon explaining about how what their doing is a very poor decision. They are trying to limit the 20% of customers who use a lot of data for the sake of the network. Their solution involved everyone constantly monitoring their usage out of fear of huge overage fees. Bad feelings translate to a bad company. Data is cheap to provide, and yes I’m aware of the huge overhead changes, but if money is the driving factor then appealing to customers should be the solution. Throttling overusers would be a better solution than this. Something tells me they make money with the current plan and are trying to squeeze more out of greed or because “everyone else” is doing it. Why not stand out as a good guy and win all of the unsatisfied customers from other carriers, instead of creating your own. Marketing 101 Verizon… In the words of Ice Cube, “Check yourself before you wreck yourself.”

But enough about me, oh wait this is my blog post muhahahaha!

Next week we are going to roll out our Customer Satisfaction Survey to a selected list of customers. We want some brutally honest feedback to work with so let us know truly how you feel about TRA360. In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve been making a lot of changes recently for the better- And we are just getting started! Feedback is critical to this process, so if your one of the lucky few who are asked to helped please do- It’s for the good of everyone involved. Stay tuned…

So yesterday we sent out our first mass emailing to our corporate database. It was very excited to start executing the plan we’ve been working on for a few weeks now. The response so far has been strong and already more people are joining TRA360’s social networks. Building brand awareness is a goal of ours and I think we’re growing it successfully. We’re planning on offering free materials and know-how on the site sometime shortly, so let us know what specifically you’d like to see. In addition, work samples for our various practices will be hitting the site soon so we can represent.

The next big project in the pipeline will be a survey for the customers so we can figure out how to be Super-TRA360! I joked with Tim the only options for opinions should be “Good, Very Good, and Excellent.” That way, 100% of the responses will be positive 😉  I’ll do my best to make the survey unbiased so it can be of actual value though because the goal isn’t glorification, it’s improvement.