The Internet was aflutter this week when word got out that Pfizer had taken the dive into Twitter, the micro blog site that’s being touted as the next big social media tool by some and a dying fad by others. Twitter works by allowing users to enter a 140-character-or-less tidbit of information on its Web site, Twitter.com, or through a cell phone, and the message is blasted out to everyone who is registered to “follow” that user.

Pfizer told Pharm Exec that its Twitter account is just the latest part of an overarching plan to rebuild Pfizer’s communication/media relation’s plan.

“We are looking at social media to find out what the real benefits are to us at this point,” Kerins said. “The conversations are happening with or without us in places like Twitter, and if we are going to be serious about doing the best we can to spread our opinion about our company, then have no choice but to be on Twitter.”

Pfizer is currently using the platform to send links to press releases and other publically disseminated news, such as quarterly reports, deals, even job postings. But so far, there have been no tweets about branded drugs or health information.

The Pfizer announcement comes a few weeks after Novo Nordisk launched its branded Twitter page, which relies on a spokesperson to tweet about his experiences with treatments. However, Novo Nordisk is very careful to ensure that the spokesperson does not mention a brand name in the same tweet as disease information, and includes a link to fair balance information in most messages.

Kerins said that Pfizer is studying how they could use Twitter for a similar tactic, but there are no plans in place right now for the company to launch a branded Twitter page. “The conversation being had across the industry is whether Twitter can be considered a news-dissemination tool or a promotional tool, “Kerins says. “If it’s promotional, then it needs fair balance language. That’s why most of the industry is a little skittish about looking at the product side.”

Kerins also said that Pfizer has been tracking mentions of the Pfizer corporate name in Twitter, but has not tracked comments about individual brands or responded to commenters. In recent months, high speed Internet provider Comcast has been searching out negative tweets about its product and responding to users directly with some form of customer service.

“We are only two weeks into this so far,” Kerins said. “While I’m proud we had the ability to launch this corporate Twitter site, we are spending more time listening than posting.”

Visit Pfizer’s Twitter Page

The brands in the study were given a social influence marketing (SIM) score that measured two attributes—the total share of consumer conversations a brand has online (share of voice), and the degree to which consumers like or dislike a brand (net sentiment). The SIM score combines the two attributes to measure the favorable impact of a brand.

In the pharmaceutical category, Razorfish measured the SIM scores of the top five brands with the most consumer media spend in 2008: Ambien, Lipitor, Lunesta, Plavix, and Rozerem. Of the five medications, Ambien captured a majority share of voice at 58.8 percent. However, its net sentiment was one percent lower than Lunesta, which received 64 percent net sentiment (but only 9.3 percent share of voice).

“We did conversation monitoring with our partner, TNS Cymfony, and we [analyzed] the online conversation for the last six months of 2008,” said Lisa Flaiz, vice president, group director, national pharma practice lead at Razorfish. “We then established a benchmark index for each industry using the brands we chose to analyze.”

The data does not include conversations that are not publically viewable, such as forums that require registration or private Facebook accounts. However, that still leaves a ton of data from sources like Twitter, YouTube, and comments on blogs.

“The beauty and the curse of these open forums is that you give up control of the brand, and you have to be willing to accept that there will be some negative comments for the greater good of elevating the conversation around the disease state,” said Flaiz. “Elevating the conversation online is now [like a] funnel—it helps create awareness and preference and I think we can be encourage by this.”

Interestingly, Rozerem’s reputedly popular Abe Lincoln ads do not show much traction online, with only 0.6 percent share of voice and a total score of 0.5. That can’t feel good from a campaign that cost Takeda $91 million in 2007.

“That’s share of voice over the total industry conversation,” Flaiz pointed out. “From a volume perspective, you just aren’t seeing that much traction in conversation around Rozerem. I think most of the conversation around the beaver came from industry people.”