Advice You - Internet and Businesses Online

What is the accepted standard for signatures? Who sets these standards? The signatures in question are those blurbs that we include after the body of our main message content in our emails for the purpose of identification and contacts.

I'm

According to USFDA, a combination product is one composed of any combination of a drug and device; biological product and device; drug and biological product

really not referring to signatures in the respect that Usenet Newsgroups see them. It is pretty much agreed by established netiquette that Usenet signatures should be limited to five lines or less. They should, or may, contain:

; or drug, device, and biological product and fixed dose combination would include two or more combinations of drug.

Examples of combination products may in

our name: Doug Davis

Your email: dougd@cros.net

Your company: Northern Research

What you do: Publisher

Your URL: http

lude drug-coated devices, drugs packaged with delivery devices in medical kits, and drugs and devices packaged separately but intended to be used together.

://www.couch-potato-marketing.com/ezine

You can shave a line or two from the above by combining your name and email address plus your company with what you do:

Doug Davis dougd@c

here is enormous increase in the number of combination products entering the market in the recent years. Combination products have proven advantages but fixe

os.net Northern Research, Publisher http://www.couch-potato-marketing.com/ezine

Getting away from Usenet and, some lists, into the rea

d dose combinations are still in the process of convincing regulatory authority on their advantages over the single ingredient formulations.

Combination pro

l nitty-gritty of internet marketing, signatures have become a way of sticking that extra ad in there. For better or worse we seem to be stuck with this practice, so don't expect it to go away soon.

How wide should your signature be?

Text

ucts have become life saving products for the pharmaceutical companies who doesn’t have many innovative molecules in their product pipeline and have been inc

terminals usually had and have a width of 80 characters; this means they can display just as many characters in one row. This is the practical reason why the ultimate text width of email messages and sigs should be no more than 80 characters

easingly used in the product life cycle management. Even the companies having product patents are trying to extend their product life cycle through the combi

.

But this doesn't work very well in practice. We reply, we forward, we quote, and each time we do we add those little angle brackets to the lines of text in our messages, ">>>>." So we end up having short lines and long lines staggered thr

nation products and maximize the revenues. But the companies involved in this practice are overlooking that they are burdening the patients both economically

ughout the text. This looks very unprofessional, even if you're just sending to friends. That's why all the recommendations for different line lengths. Some will not set their character length to anything greater than 72; some 74, others 76,

and physically. They need to rightly judge the benefits of the combination products and they have to even look at the risks involved when combining the produ

etc.

In publishing ezines and newsletters online, however, the standard seems to be 65 characters. This is what most submission guidelines that I have read, recommend. My ezine wraps with hard carriage returns at 65 characters. Almost all

ts. Some of the combination products were well accepted by physicians while others suffered. Companies involved in development of combination products are fi

of the article submissions I receive are wrapped at 65 characters. If they're not, then I have to reformat them to fit my layout. I don't like reformatting -- it's a time wasting task I could do without.

Naturally, sigs in my ezine, and man

ding difficulty in defining their combination products and facing various challenges from selecting a combination to marketing it.

Following aspects would a

y others, can't be longer than 65 characters either.

How many lines?

It depends, I suppose, on where you are posting or sending your emails. Discussion lists should be about the same as Usenet, in my opinion. On the other hand if you are p

dd to the challenges in developing combination products:

Which markets to tap where the combination products can do fairly well?
Which combination prod

sting to opt-in mailing lists for the purpose of advertising your business offerings, there are no rules. It's whatever you can get by with really. Who cares whether you have 20 lines of text and a 4-line sig? How about 4 lines of text and a

cts are meaningful and rational?
Which therapeutic categories to select?
Which Combinations can address unmet needs of the patients?
Do combin

20-line sig?

I have exactly 128 separate sigs in my MS Outlook 2000 sig file. Some of these are actually 12 line, or more, ads; it's just easier to paste them into the email that way.

Remember the aim of your signature is to be read. If y

tions increase the patient compliance?
What would be the developing cost?
How to tackle the risks encountered during combination product developmen

ou have a humongous sig it not only won't be read, it will possibly provoke anger -- an emotion you don't need in your prospective customers.

Signature Dashes

The "signature dashes" actually is a line which is used as the first line of a s

t?

As combination products don't fit into the traditional categories of drugs, medical devices, or biological products, the USFDA is in the process of devel

ignature. This is described in the "son-of-rfc1036": If a poster or posting agent does append a signature to an article, the signature SHOULD be preceded with a delimiter line containing (only) two hyphens (ASCII 45) followed by one blank (A

ping new procedures for reviewing their safety, efficacy and quality.

Professional from academic institutions, pharmaceutical industries, health care indust

CII 32).

The sigdashes act as a separator which allows easy recognition of signatures. This line consists of two dashes and a trailing space, ie "-- " (note the space) and thus can be recognized in a data stream as the character sequence "(

y and representatives from various regulatory agencies are working out to design the regulatory requirements for manufacture and sale of combination products

newline)(dash)(dash)(space)(newline)". Some programs recognize a signature by the (sigdashes).

Let me make this perfectly clear: There are no additional characters before, after or in between. This means no whitespace before the dashes, no

.

As there is an increasing trend of the combination products companies manufacturing such products should be able to tackle the problems involved in the de

additional dashes, one space at the end, followed only by an newline which ends the line. That's it!

Synopsis:

If you are posting to newsgroups or discussion lists keep your sig as short as possible; try not to go over four lines. Personal

elopment. They need to be wiser in analyzing the market trends and the regulatory requirements.

Companies that provide selfless information through particip

messages probably should be the same; why would you need all that sig space when you have the entire body of the message?

When I'm posting ads to opt-in lists I usually don't include a sig at all. I want the ad to be the focus, not the sig

tion in industry events and feedback to regulatory authorities would be able to face the challenges and will be successful in developing combination products

HTTP = HTML link (for blogs, profiles,phorums):
<a href="http://www.adviceyou.org.ua/article/80480/adviceyou-Signatures--The-Long-and-Short-of-It.html">Signatures -- The Long and Short of It</a>

BB link (for phorums):
[url=http://www.adviceyou.org.ua/article/80480/adviceyou-Signatures--The-Long-and-Short-of-It.html]Signatures -- The Long and Short of It[/url]

Perhaps the biggest problem newcomers face is in finding appropriate images that look good. In many cases, images are found using a simple Google image search. More often that not, these images will be under copyright and using them risks potential legal action.

Time was, in the country, the local “doc” was as likely to get paid with a couple of chickens as a couple of dollars. Doctors these days won’t stand for that, of course, but while some people have mo...

The format you’ll witness in a professional resume sample can be compared to a fusing of a targeted resume and a chronological resume.

Tags

Links

Advice You - Signatures -- The Long and Short of It

Related Articles: