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.

More than 250 people were in attendance for the two-day event, which included pharma marketers, brand managers, and patient education specialists who shared a common interest: The desire to connect and engage an educated, digital savvy population of e-patients and their caregivers.

Some attendees came to hear keynote speakers such as Dennis Urbaniak from Sanofi-aventis, Joe Shields from Pfizer, and Marc Monseau from J&J share their expertise on driving change, patient adherence, and the art of tweeting, respectively. Others like Derek Rago, vice president, strategy and marketing, McKesson Patient Relationship Solutions, traveled to Philadelphia from Arizona for the opportunity to understand how social media and networking influences his clients.

“How will pharma embrace and use social media appropriately? I’m thinking it’s part of a broader marketing strategy and building an appropriate relationship with my patients and social media can play a part of it,” said Rago.

Urbaniak, vice president of innovation and new customer channels at Sanofi-aventis, kicked off Tuesday with a presentation on shifting to a customer-centric approach. “The first mindset shift is the term around patient. We need to stop thinking patient and we really need to start thinking people,” said Urbaniak. “At Sanofi-aventis, we learned that when you’re a person who is first diagnosed with cancer and given the news that you need to undergo chemotherapy, it’s a tremendous impact. We look to see what hospital and grant programs are out there, but then build a program for patients that they want like bringing chemo therapy into their homes if that’s what fits their dynamic.”

Joe Shields, product director, consumer marketing and strategy integration, Pfizer, followed with new ideas for patient adherence. “For me, success is a healthy patient,” said Shields. “The empowered patient will be a collaborator and an active participator. It’s less about the sticking to something, and more about the ‘I want to do this for my health and my family.’ Adherence is starting to elevate the role of everyone in the community, and like health care, is a team sport.”

For the duration of the conference, participants had the option of using Twitter to ask questions and continue conference discussion with tweeters near and far. The live Twitter footage was projected on a flat screen monitor for everyone to follow in the ballroom. It was only natural that J&J’s Marc Monseau was on site to discuss the popular virtual space that the company mastered under his direction.

“We saw the Twitter feed as being a news gatherer and information provider as a starting point,” said Monseau. “When we established the Twitter account, I did not want it to be a bunch of press releases.”

Here are six quick tips for getting started in Twitterland straight from the source himself:

1. Create a business case
2. Connect with other initiatives
3. Establish a personality
4. Set guides
5. Gain legal and regulatory support
6. Tweet, tweet, tweet

In addition to Twitter, Eileen O’Brien, a former digital agency veteran who led a 1:1 coaching session on SEO/SEM during lunch, said that Google’s Sidewiki was the hot topic of conversation among pharma folks. She demonstrated the tool to me, located on Google’s tool bar, by posting her own comment about the drug Allegra on www.allegra.com.

“It’s having a side conversation by posting comments,” says O’Brien, who was a fan of today’s tweeting scene. “It’s really great to see everybody here tweeting in questions and answers.”

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.”

Using the social networking tool, Kimball openly talks about what it’s like to live with Type 1 diabetes and tweets about using Novo Nordisk’s Levemir (insulin detemir) to treat the disease.

Twitter, for those not in the know, is a mini-blog system that allows users to post short-form blurbs for their followers to read. A tweet is slang for the actual post. Novo Nordisk and its agency Biosector 2 did not work with Twitter to establish the site. The account was created for free just like any other Twitter account and updated directly from Kimball’s iPhone.

Online Gamble
Pharma companies have been reluctant to embrace social media tools such as Twitter due to the newness of the technology and to FDA’s reluctance to release clear and concise guidelines as to how pharma can use sites like Twitter.

A few months back, FDA issues 14 warning letter to pharma companies that were improperly posting online text ads. According to FDA, pharma can either create a branded ad and not state the disease state, or create an informational ad with no mention of the brand—not even in the URL.

Novo Nordisk trained Kimball to never write about the brand in the same tweet as the disease state.  Besides that direction, Kimball has free reign to write about anything he wants. The Twitter account was publically announced last week, but the account has been active for about a month so the pharma company could work out any kinks.

“Part of the reason this site works is because we have Charlie,” Ambre Morley, associate director of product communications at Novo Nordisk. “He has become the face of our brand and we are very transparent that the site is sponsored by Novo Nordisk.”

The Twitter page has prescribing information in the top left corner and any tweet that mentions the brand name has a link to the risk/benefit summary. The company said that its constantly working on the site, and currently Kimball is not accepting any friends (or following anyone).

“All companies, by and large, are looking at new media,” Morley said. “We’re kicking the tires, but I think every company is going to have to find a way to do new media effectively and make sure that it we stay within the regulatory requirements.”

Related articles by Zemanta

• FDA Issues Public Health Advisory Regarding Levemir Insulin (fda.gov)
• New study first ever to directly compare once-daily Levemir with another basal insulin analogue (worldpharmanews.com)
• Charlie Kimball: Can I Drive Your Car? (sixuntilme.com)

On day two of the conference, I got the opportunity to sit down with Shwen Gwee, lead business analyst, health informatics and new media, business solutions for Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and get his thoughts about AZ’s recent launch. Specifically, we talked about why, despite having a Twitter account, the company chooses not advertise its YouTube presence on it.

Gwee gives several reasons for the company’s hesitance. First, Twitter is a two-way engagement tool, meaning, as soon as you post something people can access it. Furthermore, space is limited to 140 characters, so a company’s standard press release would not fit. Finally, nobody has a full policy yet for how they want to use this online medium.

Also Twitter accounts come with adjustable settings. For example, you can set one so that people can only follow you. This doesn’t mean that messages are private, but rather that certain individuals cannot message you directly—what they send you could be viewed by anyone. “The biggest challenge people face with corporate communications is its standardized-process type of review. Twitter is a new medium for putting a template out there; unlike a press release, you will get responses—it’s not a broadcast.”

Gwee noted Novartis and Boelinger Ingelheim’s transparency on Twitter: “The important thing is that they are on there,” he says. “I definitely see a trend for pharma adopting Twitter, and I think it will come from corporate communications. First, pharma has to remember that it is not just another broadcast mechanism, it’s a conversation.”

One tip Gwee has for pharma companies is to start internally. There are several Twitter tools that a company can try within its organization before opening up to the rest of the world.

For a review of 19 enterprise-level microsharing tools (aka Twitter!), check out Yammer at www.yammer.com or the Pistachio consultant blog at http://pistachioconsulting.com