Social Media and Pharma: Issues, opportunities and solutions

As we all know social media can be used by healthcare professionals and the public to talk about a pharmaco's products and brand. But pharmacos, as a general rule, have avoided so

By Denis Kondopoulos on Apr 16, 2009

As we all know social media can be used by healthcare professionals and the public to talk about a pharmaco's products and brand. But pharmacos, as a general rule, have avoided social media for various reasons, including the lack of guidance from regulatory bodies like the FDA on remaining compliant while using social media approaches and difficulties measuring results, tracking popularity and audience activity.

In fact, many companies internal legal and regulatory teams stifle the kind of free communication social media affords because of ever-resident fears of the increased scrutiny and legwork that come with associated obligations like adverse event reporting.

But there are ways to use social media tools that avoid these kinds of quagmires and stand to deliver real value to pharma. This is actually where the true beauty of technology is.  Consider, for instance, using indirect approaches (such as acquiring existing therapy-area related websites or creating unbranded facebook pages) or even emerging social media tools like Twitter for non-traditional advertising forays, such as making announcements about products and activities (eg. twitter.com/boehringer  and twitter.com/novartis). 

E-marketing techniques such as SEO (search engine optimisation), analytics and content monitoring offer pharmacos control over the content, promotion and information, while at the same time allowing companies to use social media merely as a pointer to more traditional sources of information and a platform for monitoring (rather than a platform for contribution).  And activity on this platform can actually be measured, categorised...and all sorts of other nice things that marketing managers and executives like to do!  

So, the general idea is to make your own sites ( the corporate, product or others you may have) the central information storage area. Whatever you want to promote either directly or indirectly lives there (where regulatory uncertainties are less daunting). But then you have to ensure that all your content is exposed to the outside world and to search engines, of course.

So, first you need to search engine optimize your content. This entails activities such as:

  • finding out exactly what you want to promote
  • compiling a list of terms and phrases you want to use for that
  • exploring the popularity of such terms and identifying others which may be relevant but you are not using
  • establishing a final list of terms to be used
  • ensuring that your website content contains the above terms
  • employing SEO techniques for further promoting your content, including exposing the right content to search engines in the right way

Doing so will basically help you write and expose information which is in demand, in line with what you want to promote and also is available for all, the public and healthcare professionals, to find online.

Next, ensure that your search engine optimized website can now track visitors and their actions: what they see, where they go, what they click on. ..the path they follow. This is where analytics come in. Youll want to analyze your web server logs or utilize third party tools to measure any activity on your website. Being aware of and understanding this activity can provide invaluable information, including market trends, personal preferences, regional/organisational statistics and a lot more.

Now, youre ready to turn to social media. Social media tools can now be used without hesitation when they are used to point to traditional and existing information already on your site, rather than to talk about drugs or your company in an open and uncontrolled forum.

So, for instance, if your website contains a wealth of well-exposed information related to a specific therapy area, people will find it and could start talking on social media about it as an information resource. This in turn will lead to more traffic to your own site, from both healthcare professionals and the public, which can be measured, analyzed and classified according to your needs.

The general idea, therefore, is to use good, search engine optimized content to attract attention, analytics to measure it and social media as an extra channel for directing people to your site. Country-specific challenges remain, however.

Regulations in some countries, ABPI guidelines in the UK for example, may interpret this use of social media as promotional and hold you responsible for any links leading to your site, regardless of whether they are informational/educational or truly promotional. However, the fact is that even without social media being used as an extra communications channel, nothing gets the word about your products and content better than a well developed and SEO optimized site.

To learn more about how you can utilize emarketing and search engine optimization techniques to attract the attention of the public and healthcare professionals, contact denis@naxtech.com or visit www.naxtech.com

Denis Kondopoulos is technical project manager and founder or Naxtech, a UK-based Internet Services company specializing in web development and online marketing.

Author: Denis Kondopoulos (MBA,CITP,MBCS ,CEng) , Technical Project Manager , Naxtech.com