Tracy Staton | FiercePharma
Marketing
Chatting with
the public is not in pharma's comfort zone. Drugmakers are adept at the one-way
communication known as direct-to-consumer advertising, and some of them deal
well with the media. Some even know how to work with patient groups.
Back-and-forth with doctors? Pharma's daily bread.
But put your average, everyday drug company in the middle of a public
conversation, and it freezes up. Worried it will say the wrong thing, sensitive
to criticism, mindful of unintended consequences, drugmakers usually prefer to
stand by the punch bowl and check their iPhones for messages.
You could say pharma has social anxiety.
In fact, of the 50 largest drugmakers worldwide, only half even dabble in social media. Only 10 use all three of the oldest, biggest social sites--Facebook,
Twitter and YouTube--according to a new study by the IMS Institute for
Healthcare Informatics. And within that small group, few are actually
interacting with patients and the public.
The IMS Institute set out to measure that interaction and assessed
drugmakers' reach in social media, their ability to capture users' attention,
and their efforts to form relationships with others--and then plugged those
numbers into a formula delivering a social-media engagement score. The 10 most
engaged are ranked below. (You can find a detailed explanation of its
methodology, along with the actual statistics used to calculated the engagement
index, in the firm's report here.)
Drugmakers' usual excuse for remaining social-media wallflowers is
regulation, or lack of it. The FDA's guidance on the subject is piecemeal and
tardy; the agency has slapped companies for overstepping bounds they didn't
know existed. But Murray Aitken, executive director of the IMS Institute, says
regulators are only part of the story. After all, the 10 most-active companies
face the same regulatory environment as the rest. And as Aitken points out, the
rules will never be black and white, even after the FDA finishes its
social-media guidance, which it promises to do by July. Drugmakers will have to
be willing to work in gray areas, which, frankly, they do all the time in
marketing.
So, that reluctance also goes back to pharma's fear of socializing with
patients--and companies' willingness, even motivation, to overcome that fear.
"What it reflects is different levels of recognition of the importance of
direct interaction with patients," Aitken said in an interview. "Some
view that as being important and central to their mission; others less
so."
The fear isn't completely unfounded; engaging with patients is risky.
Companies don't know what will happen next and certainly don't know whether
patients' responses will be negative or positive, Aitken said.
Still, with so many patients turning to social media for treatment
suggestions and, especially, emotional support, drugmakers really need to be
"present and involved," he said. Companies don't have to jump in all
at once. "Perhaps a good way to start is with a particular brand or
product or disease area. We see companies that are very engaged, very focused
in a disease area. … You can start gradually and learn as you go."
Meanwhile, pharma can also enjoy another sort of one-way communication:
from the patient to the company, rather than the other way around. Many
companies that aren't committed to the social-media conversation are spending
time and money eavesdropping, to find out what patients are saying about their
products. Some are even trolling for talk about side effects. Collecting
information from social media--whether via patient sites like PatientsLikeMe,
or directly on Twitter--also means analyzing it, so companies will need to
confront the Big Data side of things. But that's anothe9r story, or maybe
another report.
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