Archive for the ‘Pharmaceutical Social Media’ category

What to Expect from FDA Pharma Social Media Guidance

March 23rd, 2010

Will FDA guidance cause pharma to jump into social media head first?

The time for presentations and comments to the FDA on the use of social media by pharmaceutical companies has come and gone. The FDA now has the not-so-enviable task of sifting through those comments and putting out some form of coherent social media guidance.

It’s a long road and nobody can accurately predict when that guidance will come. Yet, hordes of people wait anxiously for the FDA to “rule” on the matter. The pent up anticipation seems to indicate that with one wave of the wand the FDA will magically deem social media the pharmaceutical industry’s play pen. The indication is that the FDA’s silence on the matter to this point is the only remaining hurdle to social media adoption by healthcare companies. It is not. Plenty of hurdles and landmines remain.

By issuing guidance, the FDA will not suddenly unleash a stampede of pharmaceutical companies that were waiting for the flood gates to open. The participation of pharmaceutical companies will still be a slow trickle. Why?

Number one: nobody is quite certain what the FDA will say on the matter. It is quite possible that any guidance issued will be so limiting it will make social media engagement even more challenging that it already is today. That possibility is slim though, as the FDA’s silence to date has acted as a repellant to any would-be social media efforts.

Number two: regulatory and legal hurdles will still exist. You can bet that whatever guidance is issued by the FDA it will not encourage a free-for-all—nor should it. This means that pharmaceutical companies will still have to operate within a controlled and sanctioned environment. The practical implication of this is that the regulatory department inside pharmaceutical companies remains the biggest roadblocks to an engagement getting off the ground. They will still harbor concerns and express a reluctance to move forward. It is the job of the social media advocate/evangelist/expert/wingnut to understand those concerns. The regulatory people should be folded into the process early and often. Embrace them; don’t keep them at arm’s length.

Number three: I am still not convinced that the lack of FDA guidance is the biggest roadblock on the path to social media bliss for pharmaceutical companies. Similar trajectories have unfolded in other industries (albeit, not regulated ones). For example, B2B technology companies have been slow to adopt social media. The reason is a mix of a corporate culture that has yet to embrace it and a lack of clear understanding of where the B2B audience is online. This same dynamic holds true for pharmaceutical companies. In order to move forward with social media engagement strategies, a significant shift in thinking is required.

This list could probably extend on for another 1,000 words and still not encompass the litany of challenges that exist. The point of this is not to dash the optimism many feel about the FDA’s pending guidance. I too am optimistic that this will help nudge some apprehensive companies off the sidelines. Call me cynical (I prefer realistic or pragmatic): I simply don’t think the FDA’s guidance on social media will create explosive growth. Instead, I think it will help to sustain the steady growth path already in progress.

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Posted in FDA and Pharma Social Media, Pharmaceutical Online Marketing, Pharmaceutical Social Media

Setting Pharmaceutical Social Media Strategy

March 22nd, 2010

Where does the patient fall in your social media thinking?

Few people would disagree that strategy is an integral part of any social media engagement. Despite what many people might assume, social media is not something marketers should engage in without a clear purpose or goal in mind. But how to arrive at the strategy is less clear.

Traditional marketing metrics become less quantifiable in social media. You can’t measure the success of a campaign because campaign thinking fails in social media. You can’t focus solely on bottom-line impact or your efforts will come across as blatant attempts to promote. This leaves many marketers in a pickle—without a point to work backwards from; forming a coherent strategy is a difficult task.

But it doesn’t have to be. Too many marketers walk into social media engagement planning focused on how to get the most eyeballs. If that were the only measure that guided social media strategy it would quickly become extinct. There are much more efficient ways to simply hitting eyeballs than using social media.

The better approach is to focus on Return on Health (ROH) and consider the behavior of your patient. Thinking first about the behavior of your patient will guide you to the right platforms. For example, if you are dealing with an ailment that generally impacts children, what is the first thing a parent will likely do upon learning their child is inflicted with this ailment? Most parents search for answers and will head to Google to find them. The trick is to ask yourself, what type of information are they looking for in this search? If they are searching for insight on treatment options, severity and past experiences, you can gear your social media efforts to reflect that. You should also survey what online sources of information already exist. Have you considered Google Health as a source of information for patients? Better still, have you tracked down the sources of information that feed into Google Health and ensured its accuracy? If you are not proactively addressing these questions you are leaving your online presence to chance. What about a platform such as Yahoo! Answers? Have you scanned the discussion taking place there to get a sense for the sentiment about either your brand or the common concerns of dealing with a particular ailment?

The bottom is this: social media strategy too often focuses on superficial measures as its guide. Metrics like unique visitors per month, pages viewed per visitor and bounce rate should not inform our course of action. These are only surface observations and are weak when used as guiding lights. Social media strategy should start with the patient.

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Posted in Pharmaceutical Social Media, Return on Health

Tags: Pharmaceutical marketing Pharmaceutical Social Media Return on Health

Dissecting Novartis’ Comments to the FDA on the Use of Social Media

March 18th, 2010

Novartis is one of a slew of pharmaceutical companies that have submitted comments to the FDA on the appropriate use of social media. As I have said before, I applaud the effort of any organization willing to step above the noise and offer pragmatic solutions. Far too many organizations criticize from the sideline without proposing a plan to move forward. That’s a futile exercise.

(Note: If you’d like to read Novartis’ full comments, John Mack of the Pharma Marketing Blog, has the document posted along with his thoughts)

The Novartis document covers a wide-range of issues, but I would like to cover the two most relevant to the business of moving social media forward.

1.) The Use of Shortened Links and Hashtags

Novartis tackles the space constraints of social media—particularly Twitter—head on by suggesting the use of a “bit.ly for the FDA that points to drug information on an FDA controlled Website.” The idea is that any time a pharmaceutical company engages on a topic that requires fair-balance and risk information, it could provide an FDA-approved link providing all appropriate risk information. This would pertain to both branded product communications and disease-state conversations. Novartis has made an interesting suggestion here. But the problem of space will remain. What happens when a pharma company would like to direct a patient to an educational site? This URL, along with the FDA-approved URL, would make space limitations a huge hurdle. There would be virtually no room remaining for additional text. Perhaps this idea would be better suited as a solution pertaining only to product communications. This would ease another major concern I have—that a solution like this would tempt far too many companies into abusing social media and constantly pushing product. To its credit: Novartis seems to recognize this can’t be the case. On more than one occasion, the company points out that a clear line has to be drawn between social media efforts with the intent to education and those with the intent to promote. The latter has virtually no place in social media.

In addition, Novartis suggests the use of standard hashtags that would be approved by the FDA. These hashtags would follow any sanctioned communications coming from the pharmaceutical company. For example, if a company had a product intended to treat diabetes, each communication would be followed by a tag such as #diabetes. This is more of a suggestion for the FDA than it is for the pharmaceutical companies. One of the major questions surrounding the use of social media by healthcare companies is who will assume the burden of monitoring these conversations? The FDA is clearly concerned that the newfound volume will cripple the organization. It’s a legitimate concern, and the goal of Novartis’ suggestion seems to be geared toward offering a solution to that end. Even still, while this suggestion might lessen the burden, it does not eliminate it entirely. There are far too many treatment options and health conditions to manage under one roof (or hashtag as the case may be). The suggestion by Novartis acknowledges that without working with the FDA to manage the process, it likely will fail before it starts.

2.) Redefining Adverse Events

If you surveyed ten execs inside of pharmaceutical companies, nine of them would tell you the biggest hurdle they face in getting social media efforts started is how to deal with adverse events. Right or wrong: this remains a major issue.

In its comments to the FDA, Novartis correctly points out that the AE reporting system was not intended to function in the fluid environment of social media. The identifiable reporter section of adverse event reporting is particularly sticky when it comes to social media. How is a pharmaceutical company supposed to decipher identifiable reporters in the anonymous world of social media? It can be near impossible. With that in mind, Novartis has proposed a reworking of the AE reporting structure to account for this difficulty. Essentially, Novartis has suggested an extra layer that would deem a reporter as identifiable only if they can be privately contacted.

Whether or not this type of suggestion is taken seriously by the FDA, Novartis has pinpointed a key problem: you can’t apply outdated systems to new-era communication technologies. It would be like retro-fitting a 2010 Corvette with the engine of a Chevy Nova—you won’t get very far.

As we continue to sift through the comments made by pharmaceutical companies, the FDA will be tasked with the job of boiling it all down to a succinct recommendation. I don’t envy their task. Everyone has an opinion on how this should go. Inevitably, some people will feel the FDA did its job while others will feel slighted. But that’s not important. Currently, we have been working within a self-imposed set of regulations. The regulatory environment has been so uncertain that marketers have proceeded with extreme caution. Whatever the guidance will be, at least it will provide some parameters for pharmaceutical companies to evaluate and move forward.

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Posted in FDA and Pharma Social Media, Pharmaceutical Social Media

Tags: FDA and Pharma Social Media Pharmaceutical marketing Pharmaceutical Social Media

Course Correcting the sanofi-aventis Social Media Firestorm

March 12th, 2010

Don't let your social media strategy go up in flames.

Nobody ever said social media was easy. sanofi-aventis is learning that lesson the hard way as its Facebook page has been the target of an onslaught of negative commentary from a patient named Shirley.

Before I go any further with this post, let me first point out that I am passing no judgment on Shirley and what she has gone through nor am I condemning sanofi-aventis. I fully realize that there is a heaping pile of information that very few people have access to in this case. So again, this is not about criticizing Shirley’s actions; it is about evaluating what we can learn from this situation as outside observers.

First a quick synopsis: basically, Shirley is contending she was deceived about the side effects of cancer drug Taxotere—which she claims is responsible for permanent hair loss. She goes on to indicate that after numerous efforts to get in touch with sanofi-aventis through traditional channels, she has taken her quest to social media channels. If that is in fact the case, then sanofi-aventis has a bigger problem on its hands—a fatally flawed customer relationship management process. Keep in mind, people don’t geenrally turn to social media as a first-line venting platform but your efforts on social media can bear the brunt of failures in other parts of your company.

In this case, the target of her attacks has been the sanofi-aventis VOICES Facebook page (after posting it to a fake sanofi-aventis page that tipped its hand by botching the proper company branding—another post for another day). She has also seemingly recruited her friends and family to join in the cause.

To sum it up: Shirley has hijacked a Facebook page to air her discontent with the adverse effects of a cancer treatment. Pharma social media folks: we have a problem.

Given the situation that sanofi-aventis has found itself in, what can it do to course correct? More importantly, how could it have better planned for such a social media calamity?

It is easy to point the finger at sanofi-aventis without understanding the dynamics of Facebook. Facebook itself has no advanced moderation functionality (again, a post for another day) if it is set up as an open group. This means companies setting up a presence on Facebook as an open group are provided two options: allow open commentary or disable the feature entirely. For some industries, that’s an easy decision, but for pharmaceutical companies the question is enormously difficult. sanofi-aventis is not the only pharmaceutical company to allow open and un-moderated comments on its wall. Johnson and Johnson has done the same and has weathered the storm during recent negative publicity events such as the Tylenol recall and a round of layoffs. But this is different. This involves the worst fears of every opponent of pharmaceutical social media—adverse events.

So was this preventable? Could sanofi-aventis have designed a social media strategy that would have prevented the firestorm that occurred? Here again I feel it is worth mentioning I am not suggesting sanofi-aventis should have covered up Shirley’s claims. Rather, I am suggesting that with better planning, those claims could have been directed to the right department and aired in the right forum. I have been sitting on this since the news first broke, racking my brain to pinpoint where it went wrong and figure out how to prevent future missteps. While I do think there were missteps, I’m not sure it was entirely preventable. sanofi-aventis made the decision to allow un-moderated content. Short of completely disabling conversation—this situation was not preventable. However, sanofi-aventis could have taken some precautionary measures to mitigate its risk. The other options with these types of groups would be to make them entirely closed off and not viewable by the outside world. This allows only members to comment and see the content. The group is not even searchable on this setting. There is an in between that allows the administrator to approve all members, but the content is still viewable by all.

Instead of preventing this from happening, what could sanofi-aventis have done differently to keep it under control? First, there is some benefit to limiting the hours during which comments are permitted on Facebook. For example, you can lock down the wall during the hours when there is no employee available to monitor commentary. At least this allows a company to prevent inappropriate comments during off hours. If they occur during office hours, they can be handled accordingly and directed to the right channels. Of course, this does not prevent the situation, but would help to mitigate the risk. In evaluating what happened here, most of the comments came during office hours. It begs the question: what took so long to shut the wall down? You can forgive one, but after the second comment, the wall should have been shut down entirely until further notice. Now you have to be careful here. It could certainly appear as though you are attempting to cover up information. People that work in the pharmaceutical industry know that there are far too many risks associated with having a discussion like this in a public forum. Upon shutting down the wall, sanofi-aventis could consider posting a message to the wall that indicates why the wall was shut down, that the compliant was being handled through appropriate channels and that once resolved it would be opened back up for discussion. In doing so, you would effectively acknowledge the situation and not hide from it, but allow it to be handled in an appropriate manner.

Another apparent misstep in this process was that there are no terms and conditions posted on the Facebook page of sanofi-aventis. While this would not automatically prevent a user from posting negative comments, it would at least lay the ground work for the actions that would follow and would set a standard for all users to abide by. It should also point patients to the easiest way to report adverse events.

Finally, sanofi-aventis seems to be caught off guard by this situation. It shouldn’t be. Any company opening itself up to the risks associated with social media should have a crisis communications policy in place. This policy should have pre-approved language that any approved administrator can use to handle an adverse event report, off-label usage discussion, etc…While you can never be prepared for every circumstance that develops, you can certainly put the pieces in place to act quickly and decisively.

What this recent social media challenge has demonstrated is what most social media advocates have known all along—it’s difficult and there are risks. That’s why as agencies we need to stop overpromising, neglecting strategy and following the shiny object. There are risks associated with social media and no program will go flawlessly—but your response to challenges will say as much as your initial foray. How will you respond?

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Posted in FDA and Pharma Social Media, Pharmaceutical Crisis Communications, Pharmaceutical Online Marketing, Pharmaceutical Social Media

Tags: FDA and Pharma Social Media Pharmaceutical Crisis Communications Pharmaceutical marketing Pharmaceutical Social Media sanofi-aventis

What Social Media Tools Are You Overlooking?

March 10th, 2010

Yesterday, WebMD launched what it has termed Health Exchange—a portal that hosts both WebMD moderated exchanges, as well as member created exchanges on various health topics. Its purpose and functionality is very similar to Yahoo! Answers except with a narrower focus.

Of course, pharmaceutical social media fanatics immediately started giggling for joy at the introduction of another social media platform to reach patients. But this got me thinking, what social media platforms are you overlooking in your engagement strategy? Everyone trots out plans bursting with Facebook, YouTube and Twitter; but what about the underrated or ignored?

In some ways, WebMD falls into that category. The once-mighty health knowledge portal has been eclipsed (in mindshare) by the likes of Google and Bing Health. Rarely do social media strategies incorporate the need for communicating on WebMD as an engagement tactic. The question is: why not? You have a captive audience of people that are clearly “health information seekers.” If there ever was a community of people open to receiving information on health topics, WebMD would be that community.

The same holds true for Yahoo! Answers. Yahoo! Answers is not bantered about as a social media tool of choice. Why? It’s not the shiny object (remember; heed my warning on shiny object syndrome, a health risk in its own right). And while it’s not one of the trendy tools when it comes to social media, it can be an effective platform to foster engagement. That is our goal isn’t it?

Take a look at this recent search for the term Melanoma:

These results are based on a search conducted today that returned well over 100 results from the past 7 days. Of course, some of these results are not relevant, but there is no denying the number of people interested in learning more about Melanoma. This presents an opportunity for healthcare companies to share its information on the topic. It has to be done delicately given the sensitive nature of the topic; but it can be done. For example, if a pharmaceutical company established a microsite dedicated to educating patients and their families on living with Melanoma, they could offer that up as a resource (with full disclosure as to who they are). Isn’t this the type of information that the folks scouring Yahoo! Answers would find useful?

In developing social media strategies, we focus our attention on the new tools of the day. What this really amounts to is diverting our attention from other forms of engagement that are sitting squarely in front of our eyes. WebMD and Yahoo! Answers are just two such examples—what other social media platforms are we being distracted from due to shiny object syndrome?

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Posted in Pharmaceutical Online Marketing, Pharmaceutical Social Media

Tags: Pharmaceutical marketing Pharmaceutical Social Media WebMD Health Exchange Yahoo! Answers

PhRMA Puts Pressure on FDA to Issue Social Media Guidance

March 9th, 2010

One of the more consistent voices in the quest to convince the FDA to issue guidance on the use of social media for pharmaceutical marketing has been the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). The organization was among the first to offer a workable solution to the problem of providing fair-balance and communicating side effects in the space constraints often associated with social media. And while I have a fundamental disagreement with the premise of an “FDA-approved” symbol, I have always maintained that any organization proposing solutions and not just spouting rhetoric is one step ahead of the game.

Today, the PhRMA turned up the pressure on the FDA by putting a bit of marketing muscle behind its FDA comments. Knowing full well that few people would take the time to read the entire 16-page document that makes up the PhRMA’s comments to the FDA, the organization issued a statement containing only the highlights.

As expected, the statement built the case on why social media is an important tool for pharmaceutical companies. The PhRMA highlighted that more patients than ever before are going online to access health information and healthcare companies have a responsibility to ensure that information is timely and accurate.

From there, the PhRMA took an interesting approach to forcing the FDA’s hand. They went with what I will call the “if you can do it why can’t we” approach.

Behold: “What’s more, the Agency should avoid chilling manufacturers’ responsible communication about their medical products and should permit them to take full advantage of the same technologies that the FDA and the White House use – including blogs, video, search and such social networking sites as Twitter™ – to communicate important health information directly to patients and their doctors.”

That’s fairly strong language for an organization that tends to tilt toward the conservative when it comes to messaging. There are a number of sections in the PhRMA’s public comments to the FDA that read very similar. Bravo! They are dead on when it comes to this topic. The FDA has demonstrated through its actions that it sees the value provided by social media in communicating information to doctors, patients and other relevant healthcare audiences. The PhRMA is just conveniently pointing that out.

Pharmaceutical companies engaging in social media should do so only if they have more value to add to the community than they extract. They should not be there solely to push product and should focus on the Return on Health of the patient. This means a commitment to creating better health outcomes for patients by providing more access to information. The PhRMA is not-so-subtly driving this message home and attempting to place added pressure on the FDA. I for one hope it works!

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Posted in FDA and Pharma Social Media, Pharmaceutical Online Marketing, Pharmaceutical Social Media, Return on Health

Tags: FDA and Pharma Social Media Pharmaceutical marketing Pharmaceutical Social Media Return on Health

Pharmaceutical Social Media in Phases and on a Budget

March 5th, 2010

Put the building blocks in place for effective social media

If you survey the landscape of pharmaceutical social media, the most prominent examples are the companies that have carved out a large swath of social media real estate. You will see microsites, YouTube channels and mobile applications. To some, it can be disheartening and overwhelming when you calculate the amount of time and money that is sunk into these efforts.

But fear not, large-scale healthcare social media efforts do not have to happen overnight. I have advocated here before that a slow and steady approach to social media is prudent—particularly in the regulation-heavy environment of the pharmaceutical industry. A phased-out approach allows you to put the building blocks in place, and it also has the added bonus of spreading out the cost. Social media does not have to be exorbitantly expensive out of the gates.

First, let’s start with why some social media engagement strategies are so expensive. It’s just like the economics class you took in college; there is a significant barrier to entry for elaborate social media programs. The development of a microsite to house the piles of interactive content you have recently developed does not come cheap. The sheer cost of developing the site, let alone maintaining it, can turn many companies away. Once you have the site up, you have to provide resources for consistent engagement. It’s not social if you aren’t engaging. This too comes at a price. So you can see why the larger foothold a pharmaceutical company places in social media the more the tab balloons. In addition to added price comes added risk. This is not to say these strategies are flawed. Quite the contrary. But building up to this level of social media engagement both maximizes effectiveness at each phase and minimizes sticker shock.

While the barrier to entry for something like a microsite might be high, the majority of social media platforms have minimal to zero barriers to entry. The general purpose of developing a microsite is to house and publish different types of content, share educational material and interact directly with customers. A couple of problems: many companies starting out in social media do not have the brand muscle to direct people back to a newly established site. Instead, a better approach is to realize that people have already staked out their congregating places on line. Why not go where they are and provide content of value? My agency’s principal (and my boss), uses the analogy of leaving a trail of bread crumbs. That trail will be followed and people will find their way back to the origin. If you must have a social media hub, why not consider setting up a presence on Facebook? Here you can post videos, relevant news articles, engage with customers and share your industry commentary. Oh, and did I mention, it’s free?

Look, social media is hard and any way you chose to engage is going to cost money and demand expertise. The point is: don’t shy away from giving social media a shot because you only see monolithic companies with monolithic budgets to match giving it a try. There are building blocks to getting to that point—pillars that are critical for success.

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Posted in Pharmaceutical Online Marketing, Pharmaceutical Social Media

Tags: Pharmaceutical marketing Pharmaceutical Social Media

Hoarding Knowledge Does not Equate to Power

March 4th, 2010

Pharma cos. should not play gatekeeper in social media

As an industry, we’ve generally agreed upon the fact that the greatest contribution of a pharmaceutical company to social media is making its information more widely available. Health information seekers are scouring the Internet for credible resources on disease states and treatment options. The healthcare companies willing to fill that void in social media have a unique opportunity.

There’s one problem. The pharmaceutical industry is not one that is accustomed to sharing an abundance of information. It runs counter to their culture where drugs are dreamed up by white-coated scientists in some far-flung lab. Their efforts, if brought to market, represent a billion or more dollars in time, energy and resources. This is not something any pharmaceutical company is willing to give up just to enhance the information pool of social media platforms. Nor should they.

A common misnomer about healthcare companies participating in social media is that in order to create value, they need to fork over proprietary information. That simply is not true. As mentioned above, the years, brainpower and sheer dollar amount that is poured into bringing a drug to market is not something that should be handed over lightly. But it doesn’t have to be part of the discussion. In fact, patients on social media platforms don’t give a hoot about that kind of information. They want to know what it means. Why should they care? How can this help them to better understand and improve their health?

That’s a philosophy pharmaceutical companies should be able to get on board with. And while historically speaking, the industry might not dole out information freely, that is changing. As I stated before, this is a sea change, not a fad. Healthcare companies are increasingly seeking to uncover partners that help them spread out the risk of bringing a drug to market. These alliances involve shared research and close collaboration. The culture is changing and it’s aligning more closely with social media.

The problem some pharmaceutical companies face is that they think like scientists. They create a new compound and want to hoard all of the information associated with that compound. In their minds, acting as the information gatekeeper amounts to power. In this new era, information still equates to power—but it should be in the hands of the patients, not the pharmaceutical companies.

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Posted in Pharmaceutical Online Marketing, Pharmaceutical Social Media

Tags: Pharmaceutical marketing Pharmaceutical PR Pharmaceutical Social Media

Crafting the Message for Internal Pharma Social Media Audiences

February 25th, 2010

Any good sales person or marketer will tell you that speaking the language of your target audience is crucial for success. No, I’m not talking about the dialects of countries; I am talking about the communication protocols that emerge at companies, within departments and across industries. A new employee joining a company will quickly conform to the language of the organization. A technology consultant will dispense of bits and bytes in favor of profit margin and revenue when speaking to a line of business manager. A soldier will forego describing IEDs and Bravo Company when addressing a civilian.

Where am I going with this? As social media advocates, we’ve largely failed at speaking the language of the frameworks pharmaceutical marketers are accustomed to hearing. We apparently are one of the few sets of people that “don’t know where our bread is buttered.” Tired clichés aside, as marketers that believe in social media, it is incumbent upon us to adapt our language to accommodate different audiences (in this sense, audiences refers to internal audiences that need to buy-in). But therein is the challenge. In trying to sell the concept and benefits of social media, you have a plethora of audiences to consider: marketing, legal, compliance and IT to name a few. Finding a “standard language” for the buy-in process is a near impossible task.

Scratch that—it’s an impossible task. Because the task is so daunting, rather than confront it we’ve tended to stick to the language we created. And we wonder why social media adoption in healthcare has moved at a snail’s pace.

Instead of evangelizing, we need to be educating. Rather that standing pat, we need to find middle ground. The adoption of social media in pharmaceutical circles relies in part on our ability to message to each internal audience. The failure to do so up until this point is ironic when you consider the nature of social media. We preach the need for a personalized message on social media platforms. We demand one-to-one interaction. But when it comes to crafting a message for internal audiences we stick to muddled terms like influencer relations and sentiment analysis. One more tired cliché for you: social media folks are afflicted with the “cobbler’s children don’t have shoes” syndrome. A business executive could give a hoot about sentiment analysis unless you can demonstrate why that matters for his or her business. How is not being on social media costing that company money?

So much energy has been poured in to defining the platform and effective communications that we’ve neglected our own imperative to create a unique message for our own audiences.

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Posted in Pharmacetuical Public Relations, Pharmaceutical Online Marketing, Pharmaceutical Social Media

Tags: Pharmaceutical marketing Pharmaceutical Social Media

Evaluating Pharmaceutical Twitter Accounts

February 22nd, 2010

Naturally, being the pharmaceutical social media advocate that I am, I follow many of the pharmaceutical Twitter accounts that are becoming increasingly prevalent. Like others, I have long observed from afar how these accounts compare to so-called best practices for Twitter engagement. WhyDotPharma has already conducted a two part analytical look at the presence of pharmaceutical companies as it relates to their number of followers, the number they follow and the frequency of their Tweets. I strongly suggest you click on the two links above for a very thorough and analytical look at the pharma Twittersphere.

And while I did gather data for this post, my survey of healthcare Twitter accounts will be less focused on the analytical side and more focused on pulling out some general observations and putting them in the context of helping to move the industry forward. Plus, I can’t put together graphs that are nearly as sharp as the ones Silja put together.

For my research, I relied mostly on Jonathan Richman’s unbelievably helpful Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki to identify as many healthcare Twitter accounts as possible. For the purposes of this post, I evaluated 39 Twitter accounts. After pouring through the data, Tweets and usage, I was able to boil it down to a five key lessons:

1.) People Care: The average number of followers for a Twitter account in my sample size was 1,290. That’s a pretty healthy number when you consider that pharma accounts only followed 421 people back on average and had an average total Tweets number of 57. The follow-back rate of 31 percent and infrequent Tweets does not warrant the hefty followers number that pharma has garnered. So why the high number? People care. It’s certainly debatable what types of people are currently following the Twitter accounts of life sciences companies (marketers, social media advocates, journalists, etc…). But it’s hard to question that there is a genuine interest in the foray of pharmaceutical companies into social media. Take the Bristol-Myers Squibb Twitter account for example. BMS has established a presence on Twitter with a corporate handle, but has yet to send out a single Tweet or follow a single user. Despite that, 642 people have followed BMS based on the mere fact that it has set up shop in Twitter land. People care—pharma just need to demonstrate it does as well.

2.) Lots of Back Patting: It’s no secret that pharmaceutical companies are entering uncharted waters when engaging on Twitter. This lack of familiarity is only compounded by the fact that regulatory challenges make the water excessively choppy. The response from pharmaceutical companies has been to skew so far in the other direction that the value of their content is diminished. Paralyzed by a fear of interacting with patients, encountering adverse events or mentioning a brand, healthcare companies have tended to stick to promoting “safe” content such as company press releases. There is nothing wrong with directing people to your company news page on occasion, but the problem is that for many companies, this represents the majority of their Twitter account. You should offer something of value on Twitter that is unique to that user group—not something that can be found by scouring the wires.

3.) Single-Use Accounts Gain Ground: Perhaps it’s a product of an excessively fragmented industry, but what I will refer to as “single-use” accounts seem to be gaining in popularity. What I mean is accounts that are geared toward a specific type of content (SanofiTV), or were established as a result of a specific event (McNeil Recall) or serve a single function (AZHelps). This is not to say that single-use accounts are ill advised. Quite the contrary. If used properly, single-use accounts can have a very positive impact. However, there is a danger with relying on single-use accounts for your foray into social media. There is a potential to treat social media more as a campaign than a sustained engagement. Social media requires a sustained effort to add more value to the community than you extract. That’s tough to achieve if people know you are only there for a single purpose or for a defined period of time. However, uses like the McNeil Recall example and AZHelps are good examples of companies acknowledging the unique platform provided by social media in being able to directly engage with the patient.

4.) Corporate Accounts without Human Identity or Interaction: The large majority of healthcare Twitter accounts lack any type of personal identity. This misses an opportunity to bring a human element to the brand. Is it a coincidence that two of the best examples of pharmaceutical companies on Twitter (Johnson and Johnson and Boehringer) have individuals behind the account? I tend to doubt it. Not to mention, the follow-back rates of 44% and 63% of J&J and Boehringer easily outpace the industry average. The lesson? Engagement in social media demands some form of interaction. When dealing with health, that interaction is almost always of a personal nature. Without a personal side to your corporate Twitter account, you are missing out on a key benefit of social media.

5.) This is Just a Test: The infrequency of Tweets and the general tone of the content suggests that most pharmaceutical companies are just testing the social media waters with Twitter. That’s okay. While it points to a flawed social media strategy in the short-term, it also maximizes chances of future success. Why? Because as I have harped on before, we need social media realists, not purists. A social media realist understands that in order to gain general acceptance at an organization or within an industry, you have to play by their rules. That means, taking things slow and proving the model before you fully immerse yourself in the world of social media.

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Posted in FDA and Pharma Social Media, Pharmaceutical Online Marketing, Pharmaceutical Social Media

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