Consumers and healthcare practitioners have come to rely on digital platforms for medical advice, but as Google trumps nurses, pharmacists, and friends and family as the second most frequently named influencer of health decisions,* pharmaceutical companies are disproportionately silent in the digital space.

Many fear the wrath of ambiguous regulatory policies, but brands without a digital presence stand to lose their grip on the audiences that matter most.  Although 89 percent of internet users have looked for health information online, pharmaceutical marketers have largely ignored the digital habits of consumers and healthcare practitioners.

To quantify this discrepancy, L2 Think Tank founder Scott Galloway, has devised an annual Digital IQ Index for pharmaceutical brands. As the first study of its kind, the index ranks the digital acumen of dozens of pharmaceutical brands across site, social, search, and digital.

“The industry as a whole disappoints,” Galloway says, “as most brands offer obsolete technology, anemic content and scant social media programs.”  According to statistics from the first and second annual studies,** only 19 percent of pharmaceutical brands maintain a presence on at least one social media platform and less than one quarter of brands advertise on highly trafficked physician portal sites like Medscape, MDLinx, and The New England Journal of Medicine.

In response to the quality gap, users have voted with their browsers. Brands categorized as genius in the consumer study saw an average one year traffic growth of 175 percent while 40 percent of brands in the Digital IQ Index saw a decrease in website traffic.***

Although many brands are starting to catch onto direct-to-consumer marketing tactics, strategy for reaching healthcare practitioners online still eludes most pharmaceutical marketers.  31 percent of brands in the direct-to-consumer study earned Challenged or Feeble Digital IQs, but more than 60 percent of brands’ HCP efforts led to Challenged or Feeble status.****

Most brands are not purchasing HCP-targeted search terms, deploying email marketing programs, or investing in mobile or display advertising on physican portal sites.  This represents significant low-hanging fruit in the industry, but also huge potential losses amongst some of the industries most coveted influencers.

Fear of regulators may leave most brands silent and stifled, but the cost of not participating in the digital revolution will only increase over time.  Facebook ads alone have experienced a 45 percent year over year growth***** and the investment required to capture the attention of healthcare practitioners and consumers stands to rise.

As the digital revolution takes hold, pharmaceutical companies must find a way to follow in the footsteps of Genius brands like Pfizer, AstraZeneca for direct to consumer digital marketing, and Johnson & Johnson’s Concerta in their efforts to reach healthcare practitioners online.

For more information and tangible flashes of genius in the industry, download the Digital IQ Indices from l2thinktank.com/research/reports.

Lauren Procter

*         Capastrat & Public Policy Polling, April 2010
**       L2 Digital IQ Index: Pharma 2010, L2 Digital IQ Index: Pharma 2011
***     L2 Digital IQ Index: Pharma 2010
****   L2 Digital IQ Index: Pharma 2011
***** “Facebook Ad Prices Soar More Than 74 Percent”, Financial Times, July 2011Pharma

Jacky Law

Online physician communities are like sweet shops for brand managers.
Or are they? asks Jacky Law.

For as long as pharma has been around, it has been trying to engage with doctors. Recently, that has meant following them onto the web into a range of physician-only communities. These cater, at one end of the spectrum, for large general medical communities such as Sermo and Physician Connect in the US, DocCheck in Germany and doctors.net uk in the UK. At the other is a long and growing tail representing smaller, often international, communities catering for specialist medical interests.

It is now three years since Pfizer famously partnered with Sermo to explore how it could use one of the first communities to build a strong (30,000+) US physician base. In that relatively short space of time, new networks with new business models have been vying with each other to entice doctors and pharma companies on board.

In the process, both parties are finding interesting ways to engage with each other while the networks build up their businesses. Len Starnes, Head of Digital Marketing and Sales, General Medicine, Bayer Schering Pharma, is convinced these networks will change marketing and estimates there are around 30 sites in the US and 30 in Europe, that started later and are now starting to catch up. “But it is in the Asia-Pacific where the statistics are most mind-boggling,” he continues. “China’s top site, dxy.cn, has 1.7 million members, Japan’s m3.com another 177,000.”

Some of these numbers should be approached with caution, however. In China and India, for example, doctors are rarely authenticated, making the figures rather less useful. Even where doctors really are doctors, it is one thing to sign up for a network, another to actually use it. Nevertheless, all the evidence suggests doctors are gravitating towards them in growing numbers.

The networks are doing everything they can to sign up doctors. That means, among other things, constantly improving the news and journal content, helping to keep conversations interesting and, often, offering money to take part in market research. If the doctor is with doctors. net.uk, that money can take the form of surfing points for simply staying on site. Pharma companies, meanwhile, find themselves confronted with a number of digital universes all filled with doctors talking about difficult patients who could be taking their drug, disease areas that could be swung round to discuss their drug, and everything else that doctors talk about. It is hardly surprising that the first activity to take off, in the US at least, was strategic listening — literally eavesdropping in on what doctors do actually talk about.

Efficient eavesdropping

Strategic listening quickly led to active market research and a gradual deepening of appreciation of the advantages of the digital world. For example, no-one ever knows for sure how many doctors see an ad in some obscure medical journal. Online communities take that kind of metric for granted and routinely give page view numbers and time on page for any aspect of a promotional campaign. Moreover, their business heads are constantly grappling with the same questions and with the same intensity as a typical brand manager: how can this community in its daily activities make doctors see and take notice of a particular product?

The result is a fast-evolving landscape of physician-only networks, fuelled by greater chunks of pharma’s promotional spend and apparently being lapped up by doctors. “The danger,” says John Mangano of comScore, a company that measures activity on the web, is that “it is a slippery slope as to how sites are monetized. From the networks’ perspective, it is important to ensure the actions to provide access don’t drive the visitors away as the relationship can be jeopardized if it is too overtly commercial.”

This financial dynamic, along which doctors and pharma companies will eventually diverge, also provides the best pointers as to how the landscape may evolve. From the networks’ perspective there are already various degrees to which they welcome pharma involvement. Ozmosis in the US, for example, separates its community of physicians from its business activities, using insights from running the former to inform the latter. And the largest UK site, doctors.net.uk, allows no direct pharma access while at the same time encouraging companies to use its community as an ideal promotion platform.

The reason the sites give is their belief that doctors value trust above all else — that and the click-of-a-button ease with which they can move from one site to another. If pharma companies share this belief (that doctors want to be seen as more than just potential prescribers), and use such sites accordingly, then the commercial tone is turned down and their integrity preserved for longer.

Conclusion

Potentially important new insights are emerging all the time that suggest new ways of engaging doctors. One is how online dialogue is revealing a whole new kind of key opinion leader, not necessarily the consultants or academics pharma has traditionally engaged with. Rather, they are the doctors who are listened to and have the most followers. Finding these people and really engaging with them means using tactics designed for the digital age. That, in my book, probably means supporting sites that fiercely protect their communities and instead sell their insights into how doctors engage with each other and may like to engage with pharma.

Click here for the FirstWord report, Digital Doctors: Marketing to Online Networks.

I was at the 2nd European DigiPharm conference in London last week. I didn’t manage the whole two days, but what I did see left me a little concerned that pharma is still struggling with digital marketing.

This is not a criticism of DigiPharm organizers. Intermitent Wifi woes notwithstanding, the  event was executed with surgical precision. It’s not a criticism of the presenters I saw, they delivered their messages with style and offered good solid advice. And it’s certainly not a criticism of the enthusiastic audience: DigiPharm was packed, row after row of eager marketing execs, laptops, iPads and smartphones at the ready, eagerly tweeting nuggets out to those less fortunate and unable to attend.

My concern centres on the obvious disconnect between the conference speakers, the people in the room and their bosses, or maybe their bosses’ bosses. Some of the questions and comments from the floor were from people genuinely nervous of breaking out of the digital marketing 101 mindset. My least favorite one-liner of the day was this: “If you’re not in digital marketing within five years you’ll not be in marketing.” It strikes me that this was true in other commercial sectors five years ago. So what, all the analog marketers moved to pharma?

There are great digital marketing initiatives and great digital marketing people out there in Pharmaland. But whether its lack of regulation, fast-moving technology, big-company bureaucracy, risk aversion, whatever, the excuses are running out.

I came away feeling sorry for attendees who got all fired up at this conference, only to go back to the digital desert of their home offices. My big takeaway from Digipham 2010? Never mind engaging with patients and HCPs, pharma CEOs need to start engaging with their own marketing people, listening to their strategies and their concerns, and give them the support they need to execute innovative digital campaigns and ongoing social media programs.

I’m not saying it will be easy, but for an industry that’s headline objective is to cure cancer, it shouldn’t be impossible.

Jacky Law

Sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll are infiltrating pharma. Jacky Law reflects on the benefits of the digital world.

Epiphany moments come when you least expect them. I had the taste of one recently when I heard a senior pharma sales manager on video describing his previous life as a rock journalist. The jolt came not so much from a ‘sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll’ experience infiltrating the industry, but that the career move should have seemed so effortless. Far from there being no apology for not having slaved it out as a sales rep for years, a whole new world was to be glimpsed in the simple confession that the transition had been perfectly natural: same work, just pharmaceuticals instead of drugs.

Suddenly, there was greater insight into the sheer scale of development in the e-world and why people who can prefix their job-title with an ‘e’ are so sought after right now.  I could see for the first time that just as one can never be too rich, too thin or too young, right now one can also never be too digital.

You don’t have to look far for reasons as someone has to take on the task of integrating this mounting wave of new collective and collaborative thinking into pharma’s famously conservative structures and processes. As a rule, the pharma mindset, at least at the marketing end of the business, has always believed that control of the message was not only possible but also desirable.

Digital, meanwhile, is more of a language. It can, and is, being used to try to control the message but new ways of working are being explored that use the medium’s connective and collaborative nature to maybe better effect. Knowing what to measure, how to measure, where to measure, are all up for grabs as teams become increasingly adept at integrating the powers of search and curiosity into the marketing mix.

A glimmer of the kinds of things that are possible came in an extension of the epiphany moment I described earlier when listening to Paul Wicks, R&D Director of PatientsLikeMe. Talking at the DigiPharm 2010 conference last week in London, Wicks described how patients, pharma’s real stakeholders, are gradually starting to demonstrate their power through sites like his and the changes they can produce in how their conditions are perceived and presented.

Sites like PatientsLikeMe, FaceBook, LinkedIn, YouTube, the ones that have become hugely popular because that is where everyone is, exert an influence and a power that is still being appreciated by e-illiterates like myself. My epiphany moments have been about a sense of the potential that is opening up as the practice of medicine evolves at a faster rate and in more dimensions than anyone – pharma, regulatory bodies, healthcare professionals, patients – previously realised. It really is very exciting.

Meanwhile, the PatientsLikeMe business — among others — presses on and produces, for example, its own validated real-time patient-reported research. The site is concentrating resources in a few communities — multiple sclerosis, HIV, fibromyalgia, organ transplants and epilepsy — and is actively seeking pharma companies to suggest how data in other disease areas might be used. Wick’s talk was called, ‘Maximizing data-driven partnerships between social media and pharma’, which means ‘Let us help you make sense of, and profit from, what patients are saying about their conditions, how they take their medicine, if they take their medicine, and a whole lot else that may become more important as the patient voice becomes louder still.

PatientsLikeMe is transformational because it makes it possible for patients to see new things as well as old things in new ways. They can see how they perform compared to other people with their condition, for example, or they can see what happens when patients like them take a ‘treatment holiday’. The most crucial thing, however, is that they have been given a real collective voice.

This voice, emanating from a digital way of interacting, could hardly be more different from the traditional pharma mindset and its engrained ‘control-the-message-at-all-costs’ instincts. But it is without doubt the voice of the future along with all those rock journalists and other geeks who not only get what is happening but are also in a position to help shape it.

Jacky Law

Social networking is no longer something people (patients, healthcare providers, physicians) are merely talking about, or something that’s part of our future. It’s something people are participating in today — right now — as you read this.

A recent report from ROI Research, Inc. — “S-Net (The Impact of Social Media)” — highlights the behavior of 3,000 social media users across 11 consumer categories, including healthcare/pharmaceutical, benchmarking how buyers use social networking websites to get advice on what to purchase, give advice on companies/products, and post content specific to various industries.

The information was collected via a 30-minute online survey from US respondents who access at least one social network regularly. The objective of the study was to determine how various segments of users participate with social networks in their daily lives, specifically with regard to the purchase process for different types of products and in relation to other media channels.

Of the 3,000 survey respondents, 1,888 made a healthcare/pharma purchase in the six months prior to taking the survey. Of those, 441 completed the healthcare pharma section of the survey. The following data, results, and percentages are based on those 441 participants.

Of those 441 participants, 12 percent of respondents follow at least one healthcare/pharma company on either Facebook or Twitter. 12 percent said they discuss pharma/healthcare on social networking sites less than once a month and only 5 percent said they discuss those issues once a week or more. Nearly half (47 percent) of respondents, when they do discuss pharma/healthcare issues, are seeking advice on what to purchase. Other popular reasons for pharma-related talk on social media sites include price comparison (34 percent), current products/releases (32 percent), giving advice (32 percent), and talking about sales or specials (31 percent). Surprisingly, connecting with customer service was the least popular reason for discussing pharma/healthcare online, with only 15 percent of those surveyed citing this as their reason.

Of those who responded to the pharma section of the survey, 33 percent said they are interested in receiving printable coupons from healthcare providers, pharma brands or retailers through social networking sites; 25 percent would like notification of sales or special deals; 23 percent would like information about contests or sweepstakes, and 21 percent would be interested in new product announcements.

However, 43 percent of respondents indicated that they would like to be contacted once a month or less, while only 4 percent would like to be contacted once a day.

Clearly, consumers want healthcare to be part of their online world — but on their own terms, in a manner and frequency they determine, and with participation remaining primarily consumer-driven.

Jacky Law

If m-health advocates are to be believed, more than a fifth of all medicine will be practised online by 2013 and much of that will be by phone. Peter Wagemann, vice-president of mHealth Initiative, goes further, suggesting doctors will no longer be lone practitioners in their offices but conductors of a healthcare orchestra involving a myriad of players. “Instead of the occasional 10 to 30 minutes that patients have with doctors today, mobile technology enables continuous communication,” he said in a new FirstWord report.1

But not, importantly, in person. The crucial thing about m-health is that patients don’t need to see their doctor. Instead they manage their conditions on the move via mobile phone apps, which can help with things such as knowing when to take your drugs or what food you should be eating, or via online conversations with fellow sufferers. If they need contact with a professional, they can always send them a text or email.

Heaven forbid that anyone might suggest lives lived at roller-coaster speed are not always conducive to rude health. Or that so-called empowered patients might have their own reasons why they are not taking their drugs as the doctor ordered. Or that interaction with anonymous folk where specific morbidity is the only thing they have in common also runs risks in terms of misinformation, obsession, introspection and so on. Or even that someone feeling ill and therefore vulnerable might actually appreciate some eyeball-to-eyeball contact with a human being who has experience and objectivity and who might inject some healthy perspective into one’s condition.

None of this is to negate the welcome and enormous shifts in power that are taking place as people no longer depend entirely on healthcare professionals for information on what can be done about their condition. It is simply to recognize that people who are ill are not necessarily rational consumers of information. They are also people who, more than at any other time in their lives, need real contact with fellow human beings who they can trust to guide them through not only what can and can’t be done about their condition but also the emotional maze of being seriously ill. Healthcare professionals can’t always rise to the occasion but there is certainly more chance when they are seen in person rather than via text or email.
Its like the hype for health snacks — healthy food on the go — when everyone knows digestive systems work best when they are not on the go. Similarly, healthcare systems work best when patients are not constantly on the move.

Reference:
1. ‘Digital Technologies to Boost Patient Compliance’, FirstWord, September 2010.

It used to be so easy. Patients listened to doctors, doctors listened to pharma and everyone was happy. There was even a time when payers listened to pharma, reimbursing their prices with very few questions asked. Now everyone is asking questions and no-one listens to anyone else.
No-one, that is, except pharma. Branded as the bad guy of healthcare, companies are nonetheless trying to learn the art of dialogue, enlisting medical liaison officers in place of reps, engaging social media experts to navigate the minefields of Facebook and YouTube, and creating whole new departments to become more conversant in health economics and patient reported outcomes.

On Facebook, where it can seem the entire world is engaged in conversation, pharma companies are seriously outcast.

But with every step they take in this new patient-centric world, their handicaps become more apparent. On Facebook, for example, where it can seem the entire world is engaged in conversation, pharma companies are seriously outcast. According to the Dose of Digital website, there are around 50 Facebook pages sponsored by pharma and healthcare companies but the vast majority of these don’t allow comments from the public, thereby scuppering any hope of dialogue before its even started.
Dose of Digital founder Jonathan Richman cites three reasons for pharma companies’ reticence to fully engage:
1. They don’t want people to post adverse events.
2. They don’t want people to post off-label information about their products.
3. They don’t want to deal with negative comments.

All good reasons but a fourth — incurring the FDA’s wrath — is arguably the most potent. This happened when the FDA sent a letter to Novartis on July 29, warning that using Facebook’s share button (ie, allowing dialogue) on its Tasigna page amounted to promotion of the leukemia drug. This should have been expected, because the regulations as they stand simply can’t handle sharing technology, where information about a drug can whizz round the net losing, at countless different junctures, the balance it must maintain in terms of risks and benefits.

Why all the talk about the benefits of social media when real dialogue is impossible until the rules change, if indeed they ever will?
So, why all the talk about the benefits of social media when real dialogue is impossible until the rules change, if indeed they ever will? One reason is the clear evidence that patients are the way forward and that they gather to talk about their conditions in ultra-convenient communities.
Patients are indeed the way forward.

In a recent international survey conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit, the overwhelming conclusions were that patients are speaking up as never before and changing how healthcare systems work. The respondents, healthcare professionals and people from the life science industries, came from the US, the UK, Germany and India. Specifically, 52% of them said patients expect higher standards of care, 57% said they want more information about their treatment; 49% said they wanted more involvement in relevant decisions about their care; and 49% said they wanted access to the latest treatments.
But patients don’t exist exclusively on the web. Even when they choose to converse in patient communities, they usually do so on sites sponsored by patient groups, where their views and concerns are collated by people who are accessible by email, phone, even, dare I say it, in person.
Pharma could start its forays into meaningful dialogue with patients by engaging with these bodies. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Another international survey, this time conducted by PatientView into patient groups’ views of pharma, found that just 22 percent of the 665 respondent groups maintained routine contact with a pharma company.

Moreover, although many of these groups said they were opposed to working with pharma, many more told the survey they wanted to forge ties with industry but believed they were not sufficiently attractive to companies for them to be interested.
Whatever the reasons for this belief, patients are emerging as strong and natural allies of pharma and not only in terms of access to drugs. Call me old-fashioned, but given the rules effectively banning real dialogue on the web and the growing importance of patients, pharma could do a lot worse than simply picking up the phone and asking patient groups what their members want.

Bayer's Andreas Fibig introduces Digital Pharma Europe 2010

If anyone had any lingering doubts about an unprecedented era of inclusion and transparency promised by pharma’s newfound, if tentative, embrace of online social media, then last month’s Digital Pharma Europe conference must have gone some way to soothing them. Here, Novartis companionably took the stage with Boehringer-Ingelheim, Roche sat happily alongside AstraZeneca, and they all — along with representatives from other rival companies — were warmly welcomed into the Bayer-Schering headquarters in Berlin to swap stories, explain strategies and generally offer each other support and advice with regard to the latest phenomenon in pharma communications. Indeed, if I was less cynical a person, such a display of harmony and co-operation might have brought a tear to my eye.

But there remained a niggling doubt that echoes celebrated screenwriter William Goldman’s oft-quoted comment about Hollywood: nobody really knows anything. A scan of the conference participants’ job titles either confirms the healthy buoyancy of the industry’s approach to this revolution in patient, physician and corporate communication, or reflects the fact that everyone has their own conflicting ideas: Director of Social Media, Head of Corporate Internet Presence, Head of Digital Marketing, Lead, New Media Communications and, not forgetting, the good old Director of Corporate Communications.  Still, the very fact that the industry now has some recently re-titled Heads and Directors of Social Media underlines its long-awaited recognition of the importance, or finally its growing fear, of Web 2.0 and what it means for online strategies.

Not surprisingly, the conference saw attitudes to social media’s place in a pharma company vary fairly widely, from “social media is just another communication channel” to “no, it’s not a channel, it’s a platform” (this from speakers in the same company) to “social media shouldn’t be in our job titles, it should be ingrained in all our communication activities” and “there’s no such thing as a social media strategy.” All of which highlighted the concern expressed by more than a few members of the audience: is pharma’s engagement with Web 2.0 still an ‘experiment’ or is it a genuine attempt to spread the social media culture?

Colin Foster, Novartis’ Director of Social Media, told the conference that his role was both to experiment and to spread the culture. “But it soon becomes a question of how you embed social media into the organization,” he said. Novartis has advanced further down this path than some companies. It was one of the first companies to establish an alliance with PatientsLikeMe, an online community for people with ‘life changing conditions’ that has a current membership of around 45,000 patients and which logged over 360,000 posts last year. In 2008, it engaged PatientsLikeMe’s multiple sclerosis (MS) community to boost its registrations for its MS clinical trials. More recently, the company has helped establish an organ transplant community on the site and will use the information gleaned from its discussions in its future research.

But Gillian Tachibana, Merck Serono’s Director of Social Media, seemed to contradict Foster’s stance, saying pharma social media “is not about experimentation. Internally, it’s about education; externally it’s about having a strategy, a vision.” Merck Serono is perhaps more cautious after having had its fingers burnt by one online community it was involved with. Tachibana explained how the company “had a crisis on a message board” when someone made harsh criticisms of a rival company. “We didn’t deal with it too well,” she added. Merck Serono simply shut down the forum, a move that was soon picked up — and criticized — by the press.

As with any discussion of social media, Facebook could not be ignored. But again this was a bone of some contention. The virtues of the site as an important method to build opportunities for dialogue were duly extolled; Facebook, it was noted, has become one of the biggest drivers of traffic to websites; in some cases more so than Google. And it has over 1000 communities for people with chronic illnesses.

But Alex Butler, Communications Manager at Janssen-Cilag UK, reminded us that people on Facebook are there to have fun, not to be sold something, or even ‘educated.’ And with public trust in the industry at an all-time low, is it a good idea for Big Pharma to try and generate ‘friends’ on Facebook? “People don’t want an intimate relationship with a pharma company,” noted Alex. But what pharma does need to do on social networking sites, commented Marianne Gries, VP of Marketing at Merz Pharmaceuticals, is “listen, inform and engage.” Unfortunately, the acronym she uses to convey this message is ‘LIE.’

So, differing opinions reign. But I’ve been to enough pharma conferences in the past five years to know that inconclusiveness is usually the order of the day. I’d probably feel short-changed if I came away with any definite ideas about anything. Still, that doesn’t mean Digital Pharma Europe wasn’t a relevant and potent forum for a very healthy exchange of ideas — indeed it was.  And, in fairness, there was resounding agreement on some inescapable Web 2.0 facts and observations (with thanks to FD Santé):

• A decade ago, product launches didn’t even take account of patients; now they are at the centre of the campaign.
• Younger doctors and medical students comprise a generation that only knows online CME. Now every medical education campaign must include a social media element.
• It is pointless running a symposium unless you are going to broadcast it on the web.
• If we wait for official regulatory guidance on social media, we could be waiting forever, so industry leaders must write it themselves.

All of these topics, and more, we hope to pick up in our digital magazine, Pharmaceutical Executive Digest Europe, over the coming weeks and months. Whatever your thoughts are on where online social media sits and how it should be defined within your company, there’s no denying that it’s out there and it’s huge — and it’s not going to go away.

PhRMA showed off two versions of its recommended search ad, one with a universal symbol that’s easily recognizable as a link to risk information (the sample one showed the FDA symbol). The other ad includes a short-form version of the adverse event warning, such as “All drugs have risks, click here for more information.”

The two versions of the search ads also include some form of warning information on the actual ad. Pharma marketers originally thought they could have risk information provided on a separate landing page linked to the ad, but FDA shot down this “one-click rule” last year.

Social Media has become a necessary evil for pharma in the past few years. Once upon a time, news took days to spread through media channels; now someone can post an article on a blog or social network site and millions of people view it almost instantly. While some pharma companies have taken advantage of social media, creating their own networks and blogs, others are taking a wait-and-see approach toward such technology.

And with good reason. Last April, the FDA released 14 warning letters to pharma companies for improper use of search link advertising. The agency expressed the opinion that pharma companies which listed the brand name of a drug and included health information without safety information were in violation of pharmaceutical marketing regulations.

Many companies were stunned, and called for a proactive response or guidelines from the agency.

“PhRMA remains an active participant in this discussion, and our goal is to help FDA create standards that will allow truthful and accurate discussions about medicines online, by the companies that research, develop, and manufacturer them,” said Jeffrey Francer, PhRMA’s assistant general counsel.

PhRMA’s final recommendation pertained to Twitter and other microblogs that allow users to post brief statements and link to other Web sites. PhRMA thinks FDA should allow pharma companies to provide news and information about drugs on these sites, along with topics related to regulatory events.

Last November, in a massive public hearing, FDA asked for input pertaining to pharma’s use of the Internet as a promotional tool. Hundreds of speakers gave their ideas, and FDA promised to reconvene with answers later this year.

DJ Edgerton

For those of you who didn’t know, it’s Social Media Week. Granted, the week is almost over, but the panel that you all care about didn’t take place until yesterday afternoon here in NYC.

The panel’s mouthful of a name—“Navigating Social Media & New Technology in Healthcare & Pharmaceutical Industries”—is nevertheless an accurate description of the discussion. Perspectives ranged from physicians (one Jay Parkinson, who essentially started his practice with Google Calendar and an iPhone) to Big Pharma marketers (Ned Russell of Saatchi Wellness).

DJ Edgerton (pictured), CEO of digital creative firm Zemoga said pharma is really dragging its feet on the social media issue because of compliance and liability. “The number one driver of social media in pharma is adverse event reporting,” he said. “So they’re disabling their Facebook walls, not interacting with the community, because they’re afraid.” Which, he added, defeats the purpose of social media.

Of course, once the industry finally does go beyond just dipping a toe in this pool, the implications are revolutionary. Russell and Parkinson foresee the disappearance of the traditional “brand.” Instead, “campaigns” will focus on patient education, possibly directing consumers to the new KOLs—their peers.

Even now, pharma brands have little or no traction in the social media world. While consumer products like sneakers and Slim Jims thrive, as Parkinson pointed out: “No one wants to ‘friend’ Lipitor.” Those who follow companies or brands on Twitter are almost exclusively people in the industry or connected to it. In exchange for real online “patronage” (so to speak), companies need to offer some real value—most likely in the form of information.

Edgerton had some pretty powerful closing advice for the industry: “Be not afraid.” The biggest mistake a company can make right now is to ignore social media. Take the risk and reap the rewards.