The air of despondency that is descending over the pharmaceutical industry’s use of social media is perverse.
The air of despondency that is descending over the pharmaceutical industry’s use of social media is perverse.
It has nothing to do with a putative (and also fictive) absence of interest on the patient’s part in connecting with the pharmaceutical industry. It has everything to do with the industry’s anxiety and inability to reorganize itself internally to meet the challenges of interacting with a new audience (patients) in an environment in which it feels exposed and uncomfortable (the social web).
The pharmaceutical industry’s reluctance to utilize social media outside the anodyne contexts of corporate communications is in my opinion ‘perverse’ in its primary sense: it manifests a willful determination on pharma’s part not to do what is expected or desired of it by patients.
A new agenda
Let’s begin by assuming all drugs in any given disease area are equally efficacious, have the same characteristics, and cost the same.
That is, of course, enough to send any pharmaceutical marketer into a swoon. They live to demonstrate that this is not the case. Or, rather, they lived, past tense, to do so.
However, in social environments (among others) this is the actually-existing state of affairs. Why? Because in contexts where promotion is not allowed, pharmaceutical companies must find other ways of distinguishing themselves from their competitors.
Being a visible, reliable, trustworthy participant in ongoing disease-specific conversations on the social web is an ideal place to demonstrate this – and it is possible.
A three point program to effective pharmaceutical participation in social environments:
Is it really as easy as this? Honestly? Yes, and no. You’ll need to be able to discern and avoid the bumps in the road you will encounter, but such insights only come from experience, and in order to acquire experience, you need to be an active practitioner. It’s time to start being one.
Andrew Spong is managing director at STweM and is featured in PharmExec’s April issue, in an article about pharma’s fraught relationship with Wikipedia. He can be reached at andrew@stwem.com or @andrewspong.
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