Maybe it is the fast-approaching conclusion of 2009, but recently I have been doing a lot of retrospective thinking.  In some ways, 2009 was a banner year for pharma social media.  Look no further than last month’s FDA public hearings for proof positive.  For sure, significant progress has been made in paving the road to widespread adoption and acceptance of social media as a marketing tool for pharmaceutical companies.

On the flip side, huge challenges still exist.  Despite the fact that the FDA met to shape its thinking around how to handle new media technologies, guidance still seems like a mere speck on the horizon.  And despite all the great work that is being done to dispel the adverse event myth and quell fears around other regulatory issues, concerns still persist.  As much as we sometimes write off these hurdles as excuses to stay out of social media, I would venture to say they still stand as the greatest hurdle.

The good news is the nature of that challenge has changed.  It used to be that the first conversations you had with a pharmaceutical marketer were focused on selling the value of social media and why various emarketing techniques could provide more bang for the buck than traditional TV ad spend.  Discussion on how social media could help the company was not even on the table until social media itself was proved as a viable marketing vehicle.  A number of recent conversations I’ve had with people inside pharmaceutical companies have convinced me that we are moving beyond that stage.

The stage where marketing people need to be sold has come and gone.  For the most part, the marketing folks inside pharma companies understand the value social media brings to the table.  Instead, the selling aspect of a social media program has shifted from the marketing department to the legal and regulatory department.  Even if the marketing department believes in social media and is ready to move forward with a program, the legal and regulatory group can pull the plug at a moments notice.  In fact, some marketing departments are so close with their social media plans that they are literally ready to flip a switch once they receive clearance.

If pharma social media is ever going to reach its potential, the role of the agency is to arm internal marketers with the ammo to convince regulatory and legal that social media is not a lawsuit waiting to happen.  I firmly believe that the majority of this discomfort is a lack of knowledge and understanding around what these tools are.  The result is they are dismissed off hand.

In tomorrow’s post, I will outline the role of the agency in helping to arm marketers with the information needed to educate internal departments.  In the meantime, I am curious: what role do you think the agency can play in educating legal and regulatory departments inside pharmaceutical companies on social media?

In my welcome post to this blog, I reposted content I originally published on a few different blogs.  The oldest appeared in 2007.  Yet, here we sit heading in 2010 and many of the same issues remain at the forefront.  Marketers at pharma companies are struggling with how to engage with patients, doctors and care givers simultaneously.  They are still grappling with how to move beyond traditional methods of marketing.  Pharma companies are still weighing the prudence of jumping into social media.  Three years is a long time to weigh your options—isn’t it time to take action?

Are pharmaceutical companies afflicted with myopia when it comes to marketing?  Have they effectively been stuck in neutral for the last three years?

To answer this question, I think it is instructive to consider the arc of marketing outside of the pharmaceutical industry.  Four years ago, the idea that a company would engage in Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter (not yet around) would seem preposterous as a credible marketing technique.  Bleeding-edge types were just beginning to see the value of this form of customer engagement and were starting to convince early adopters to try “wild and crazy” things like blogging.

Those first companies were mostly consumer-focused.  The logic was simple: their customers were easily identifiable online so it made sense to start marketing in the communities where customers were already engaging.  Traditional B2B companies came next.  Name brands like IBM and Microsoft were jumping into the mix realizing that social networks were not only for personal use, but were a valuable professional tool as well.  In the early stages, many of the tactics were what would now be considered rudimentary—mostly engaging on blogs.  Slowly but surely, blogging became Facebook Fan pages, YouTube Channels and Twitter engagement.

The point is: industries with fewer hurdles to clear than pharma have not been at this social media thing for very long.  It was a slow grind in those industries so why should we expect pharmaceutical companies to recklessly dive in head first?

Are pharmaceutical companies myopic?  In recent years, the industry has moved away from the blockbuster drug strategy and focused more heavily on alliance management.  It has started to shift away from treating high-emotion conditions such as baldness to treating diseases with high unmet needs.  The pharmaceutical industry has even started to rethink the traditional model of deploying a sales force, trending toward targeted relationship building rather than blanketing every inch of every territory.  Even in the world of marketing, companies like Johnson and Johnson and Pfizer (among others) are embracing the potential of social media.  All of this indicates one thing: the pharmaceutical industry is not myopic—it just needs time.