The corporate presence
Traditional pharma websites – CompanyName.com sites – have generally been
online for more than a decade. So the first step into social media tends to add
to these sites with an equivalent presence on sites like YouTube, Twitter,
Facebook and even, in some cases, Google+.
The social media accounts are usually run by the corporate communications
team and, allowing for some variation in terms of conversational voice, tone,
level of participation and type of information shared, generally concentrate on
pushing out links to company information.
Regional accounts
These are often the next step in pharma’s social media journey and give
companies a local voice and presence but, because they need buy-in and expertise
on the ground, they are not universal.
Pfizer provides a typical example. The company has Facebook pages for its
operations in Spain, Turkey, Finland, it’s running Twitter accounts for Spain,
France, Austria and Slovakia and has YouTube channels for Europe, Spain, Turkey
and the UK. But when it comes to more time-intensive uses of social media,
Pfizer’s Swedish corporate social responsibility blog (miljö- och ansvarsblogg)
is a rare example of blogging in European pharma.
Disease awareness campaigns
Chronic pain, hepatitis C, cancer and COPD are just a few of the therapy
areas in which companies have used social media to help raise disease awareness
in Europe. But this use of social media, more than other initiatives, tends by its
nature to have a finite, campaign-based, lifespan, and thus is the one most in
need of a clear exit strategy.
Corporate social responsibility
Pfizer’s Swedish blog isn’t the only example of pharma using social media
as part of its corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts. The very nature
of CSR work makes it an ideal ‘good news’ story to seed through social media
channels. Novo Nordisk runs a Twitter account from Copenhagen in Denmark, tweeting
about ‘corporate sustainability’, and Bayer’s head of public policy and environment
Dirk Frenzel tweets on similar issues from Leverkusen in Germany.
Clinical trial patient recruitment
Australian researchers recently concluded social networks had potential in
recruiting patients for clinical trials, but this is new, emerging ground for
pharma. Lilly has run two pilot studies that used social media to recruit patients
for trials in diabetes and head and neck cancer. The company received a
“meaningful volume of responses” and was able to make cost savings of 10-15 per
cent through the elimination of multiple project fees. “Social media is now on
the map for Lilly,” declares Sara James, global enrolment consultant for Europe
at Lilly Research Centre.
Meanwhile, Novartis ran a short pilot using Twitter and Pfizer has a
dedicated YouTube channel – Pfizer Clinical Trials – to provide trial
information.
Πηγή: PMlive