Eli Lilly : Flagging a blog well

Rare positioning to drive returning visitors.

The Site

Eli Lilly, a US-based pharmaceutical group, provides a prominent signpost to its public policy blog.

The Eli Lilly home page is headed by an image panel bearing the message that “Innovation is personal” – this remains constant even though the images change on reload. The main text beneath the panel describes the group’s broad approach under the heading ‘Measuring Ourselves Against the Toughest Challenges in Health Care’. A banner in the centre of the page points to ‘LillyPAD – A Lilly Blog on Public Policy Issues’.

Clicking the banner triggers a new window containing the blog. Recent posts include a story about how Lilly will carry out testing for free on compounds created by others, a meeting by the CEO with President Barack Obama and posts from a Federal Drug Administration summit.

The Takeaway

In some ways the Lilly home page is an object lesson in how not to engage visitors. Its text is worthy but abstract and hard to absorb; the images are unoriginal. But the prominent positioning of a banner for the nicely named LillyPAD blog reflects an understanding that a group’s web and social media efforts should be intimately connected.

It is surprisingly rare to find a standing link to blogs on a corporate home page: as blogs are, or should be, dynamic, it makes sense to drive returning visitors to them as often as possible. Sadly, the LillyPAD blog itself reverts to dull type – the free testing story is a good one that is almost killed by its own prose.

First published on 04 January, 2011