The pharmaceutical social media credo: “add more value than you extract.”  Do you buy that?  If so, then the primary value a healthcare company can add to social media is providing access to information for all key stakeholders.  The fact is: life sciences companies have access to some of the best doctors, research and medical treatments in the world.  By acting as a clearinghouse of sorts for information, pharma companies can provide a unique level of access to information that would otherwise be difficult to find.

At least that’s the theory.  But what happens when that theory is flipped on its head?  If patients no longer need pharma companies for access to quality information their role in social media becomes a bit murky.  This is exactly what’s starting to happen with the advent of Google Health and Bing Health.  As Jon Richman details on Dose of Digital, Google Health and Bing Health not only point patients to credible information, they provide access to it without ever having to leave the search engine.

Check it out:

A search for Melanoma returns the screen on the left, with links to Google Health, Mayo Clinic, Medline Plus and WebMD.  If you click on the Google Health Link, there is hordes of information gathered from highly credible sources.  The result is much the same with Bing, except Bing takes it one step further by providing treatment options and access to patient ratings of those treatment facilities.  With so much information available after one simple search, there is little reason for a patient to click further.  This is a very real threat to pharmaceutical companies hoping to provide patients with access to pertinent information.  Jon outlines steps pharmaceutical companies can take to help themselves from an SEO standpoint.  His suggestions are spot on and I suggest you click through and take a read.  For my lazy readers, I’ll summarize here: find out where the information is coming from and ensure its accuracy, improve the performance and content of your own Website and don’t neglect paid search to boost the prominence of your own performance with relevant search terms.  Since Jon has that part covered, I’ll focus on how this impacts pharma social media and what pharma companies can do to respond.

First off, remember the central question of pharma social media of what’s the Return on Health (ROH) for the patient?  In other words, keep your patient front and center when considering how to engage in social media within a framework where Google and Microsoft are attempting to limit the reason for your customer to ever leave their respective sites.  As a pharmaceutical company focused on ROH, you know your patient better than that.  You know very few patients dealing with a serious illness are content to visit just one site—no matter how credible it may be.  So don’t panic.  Continue with your listening programs and evaluating where your patients are congregating.  Those are still worthwhile destinations for transparent interaction and patient participation will not diminish as a result of Google Health.

There is also an aspect of “influencing the influencer” here.  By understanding how Google and Bing Health are populated, as a pharmaceutical company you can engage directly with those sources both in a traditional PR capacity and at the social media level.  In doing so, pharmaceutical companies can play a role in shaping the content the patient will see when searching on health conditions.

Finally, pharmaceutical and biotech companies need to commit to creating better content.  Google will inevitably win at its own game.  But that doesn’t mean that pharma companies should simply throw in the towel and call it a day.  As we stated earlier, healthcare companies are the gate keepers to a wealth of knowledge.  Use this as an opportunity to break the gates wide open.  Social media provides the platform for the democratization of knowledge.  Quite a noble goal huh?

So there you have it: Return on Health, influence the influencer and create better content.  If you couple this social media strategy with the SEO pointers provided by Jon, pharmaceutical companies can play nice in the Google sandbox.