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.”

While I’m not 100 percent positive, it looks like this might have been the first time FDA actually name-dropped a social networking service in a warning letter. Which poses the question: Is FDA watching YouTube, and what does this mean for pharma?

Ignite Health’s Fabio Gratton told me that this ramification could go one of two ways. Pharma could view it as the feds are now treating YouTube with the same degree of importance as television and other media outlets, thereby validating the online service. Or it could scare pharma away from posting videos on YouTube, because that could warrant a warning letter.

So where does FDA stand?

I sent an email to FDA spokesperson Felicia Stewart with one question: Are you guys watching YouTube for pharma ads?

She missed the deadline for the article, but lo and behold, this morning I got a nice, concise answer from the feds.

DDMAC has been and continues to monitor the many vehicles that companies use to promote their prescription drug products. Our monitoring includes magazine ads, TV ads, promotional exhibits at medical conferences, Internet, sales brochures, journal ads, and consumer mailers and brochures. Internet monitoring includes promotion done by or on behalf of drug companies such as companies’ own product Web sites and their placement of promotion on others Web sites. The action addressing promotion by the company on YouTube is one example. Another example is the action addressing Pfizer’s promotion on cnn.com for Viagra.

There you have it. FDA is watching YouTube, and boy, do I wish I was the guy or gal being paid to troll the Web all day looking for errant pharma ads or remixes of the Rozerem beaver singing the Tay Zonday classic “Chocolate Rain.”