Digital Pharma: The industry’s real social media question
Published on 23/03/10 at 09:54am
Alex Butler
Alex Butler
There is a tremendous amount of discussion at the moment about how trust is now the key to corporate reputation.
That is fine, but the trouble is that you can't buy trust it has to be earned. Even more frustratingly, it is about long-term behaviour and communication - there is no quick fix.
Trust is something that has frustrated and fixated the pharmaceutical industry for years. The latest Edelman Trust Barometer suggested that about 53% of educated top quartile participants trust pharma – so thank God for bankers and the insurance industry.
In the UK the ABPI is currently engaged in a very laudable project called VITA (Value, Innovation, trust and Access). A part of this, the Trust stream, has involved engagement with stakeholders through social media. I obviously support this development, I just have one problem.
Developing a twitter presence or constructing a facebook page is not a strategic objective. I wish people who are desperately trying to catch up with the social media revolution (like an elephant on roller skates) would stop talking platforms and start thinking about what actually lies behind this dramatic change in communications - open and transparent dialogue.
If you don't change how you listen to your customers or stakeholders and you continue to push out the same messages, hoping you won't get any difficult questions, you will completely miss the point.
"How can we develop a presence on twitter while minimising the risk?" You may ask. Perhaps the risk is that people may start to understand how important their opinions really are.
If big pharma can hide behind regulation and good practice to subvert the social media conversation and remove any interaction that is uncomfortable, we will do even further damage to our industry. An industry I am proud to work for.
So, I was pleased to have been involved in the Q&A document being produced by the PM Society for the PMCPA, outlining recommendations for the pharmaceutical industry in digital media. We have to understand as an industry that control is dead, the next great challenge is to have influence. If not, how can we be a force for good in the future?
When people care, they want to be part of an interactive community. If people want to ask about what really constitutes value in medicines? Why we have withheld clinical data for a differential marketing position? Or how much money we have given to the recent Haiti disaster? We should make sure we have a good answer.
Alex Butler is communications manager at Janssen-Cilag and runs its UK Twitter account. The opinions expressed in this guest post are his and not necessarily those of his company.
This article also appears in The Digital Pharma Guide 2010.
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Comments
I think this article is excellent, Alex, and the work of the PM Society has gone a long way in trying to provide some clarity on issues relating to social media. I will be pleased to see it finally printed!
While there are issues and challenges ahead of us, we need to tackle them head on and embrace the opportunity to learn from our audiences and demonstrate that we listen and respond.
There's also an opportunity to build trust if we can find ways of engaging in dialogue and providing accurate information about medicines. The obvious challenge we face is that information has to be requested by the public, but I wonder if the fact that people are actively seeking information online could be argued to be a request (of sorts). I'd love you to share your thoughts here: http://auroracommsblog.com/is-fox-mulder-right-should-we-trust-no-one/
Cheers,
Aaron
Thanks for the comment Aaron.
It will certainly be interesting to see how the PMCPA responds to the PM Society's Q&A document.
With regards to providing medicines information, among the growing number of non-pharma sites in the UK there are a couple of pharma sites where patients can find accurate information on medicines, and hopefully these are helping to build trust in the industry.
GSK's health.gsk or AstraZeneca's simply4patients are the ones I've seen and both happen to be surveying users at the moment.
The challenge they face is from consumer sites like Netdoctor, which consistently out-perform them in terms of search engine rankings.
Dominic
Web Editor, InPharm.com
Thanks Aaron for your interesting response.
I think that the Pharma industry is using regulation as a smokescreen at the moment. The PMCPA are quite clear that we can provide a high level of information, including relevant clinical trials, on our public websites but very few companies do this.
We are also completely free to engage in dialogue with the public in an open and transparent way without promoting our products.
If we push for written guidance at this stage we will stifle innovation and progress, not encourage it.
the trouble is that most people engaged or more importantly responsible for communication through social media do not have any expertise.
On the other hand, regulation does need to step up to the mark here in the UK. The most interesting submission to the FDA Social Media panel was from Astra Zeneca. The point they made was around taking into account the whole conversation when regulating in social.
A specific example could be a disease support community in Facebook. Even if your intentions are made clear you could get rogue posts discussing product-if these are taken down within a reasonable period (1 day?) they should not constitute a breach. Until there is a test case we will not know how the panel will react, they need to prove they have the right level of knowledge to be relevant in the next decade.
Thanks for your insight guys! We are keen for a client to sign off such a project and are working with a number to put the processes in place to support social media. We’ve found it really effective to get all departments around the table early, and particularly med info and drug safety.
I’d like to know your thoughts though on engaging with patients. Hypothetically, do you think it would be possible for a company medic to correct an inaccuracy about a medicine that is observed on a social media platform, such as a Facebook group? I don’t see why not as long as the content you post in response is accurate, fair, balanced and certified, and you are transparent that you are a pharma company representative. However, I believe that many companies would say that this could still be interpreted as promotion to patients, rather than the provision of information, as the patient has not directly requested the information you provide.
Theoretically, the act detailed above is no different to issuing a press release, which is by definition a non-promotional activity – it is purely the provision of information to audiences. I guess the key difference is that a press release is provided to a journalist who then filters the content before channelling it to patients. But in a digital age of citizen journalism, where people want to learn and engage, how much longer can this theory hold? Especially when we now consider that the trend to paid-for online news is increasing and people may turn to social media more and more.
As I understand it, the key issue is information vs. promotion and this needs to be resolved in the European parliament. Until then, can we make progress?
It is great that you are thinking about how you can engage with patients.
I think there are greater problems accros Europe at the moment. There is a two tier system in many countries where people who are able to read English can access information not available to others in their country. They will have to come in line with UK model in the end or become irrelevent.
At the moment we are supported to provide information by the PMCPA.The problem is when people demand black and white clarification. Information can become promotion and vice versa dependent on the context.
The trick is to engage with people in the right manner. If someone posts something in discussion on Facebook do they want to be openly corrected? Do people want to feel pharma are waiting to jump into help forums? It may be that sending a link to a good quality pharma patient resource is enough.
If you are talking about a Pharma 'sponsored' Facebook disease community page I would say that discussion of drug is not necessary-there are better places for patients to do this completely free of any censorship or pharma regulation. If we produce high quality information we will hopefully have patients sharing this amoung themselves with a much higher level of credibility.
Thanks Alex for a fantastic post, you have really cut to the heart of the issue. I will personally send a link to the senior management in my company I am so passionate about the argument you make.
One final question, what about a monthly blog on InPharm? I would like to hear more of your opinion.
Thanks again
This is a really interesting post. I have signed up for InPharm just to make a comment.
It is great to hear some expertise coming from the UK pharma market, although of course J&J have been doing some great work in the US already and it is maybe no surprise that Janssen have the right people working in the UK.