Pharma Beginning to Warm to Social Media
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About a year ago, I was eating lunch and bunch of pharma executives were at the table next to me. I inadvertently overhead bits of their conversation and I heard the words, Facebook, MySpace and YouTube mentioned. This suggested to me that pharma was more aware of social media (and its business implications) than pharma publicly cared to admit. Pharma has been reluctant to embrace social media because of possible legal and regulatory ramifications. Nevertheless, a few companies have decided to boldly go where no pharma company has gone before—to YouTube.
The Eye on FDA blog, which is very bullish on social media, has been keeping aof pharma companies that have created channels on YouTube, the video site owned by Google. To date, Sanofi Pasteur, GSK, Abbot and JNJ have taken the YouTube plunge (see SanofiPasteurTV , GSKVision, AbbottChannel, andJNJHealth). I suspect that pharma companies are willing to take a risk on YouTube, because unlike other social media platforms, they can disable the functionality that allows viewer to leave comments, kudos or kvetches after viewing videos. This shields the companies from unwarranted claims, misinformation about its products and negative publicity.
At present, the US Food and Drug Administration, has issued little or no guidance on the use of social media by drug makers. This means that drug makers are in uncharted territory and can experiment with social media without fear of much regulatory oversight or scrutiny. Now that pharma has broken the social media barrier, I wonder whether MySpace, Facebook and Twitter (the hottest new social media tool at the moment) will be next. Interestingly, I learned yesterday that Novartis uses twitter and can be followed @Novartis.
Off the record conversations with MySpace representatives suggest that a number of pharmaceuticals have quietly created branded product pages on MySpace for years. As the MySpace rep put it, how can you ignore an audience of 60 million people? Further, Facebook’s fan pages are growing in popularity and don’t be surprise to see pharma pages begin to appear there. It will be interesting to see how pharma will incorporate social media into its business and marketing models in the future.
Until next time…
Good Luck and Good Video Watching!!!!!!!!
As somebody who's been involved in PodCasting since 2005, and acting as one of the many adhoc digital evangelists wandering in the wilderness in big pharma for... well, it seemed like 40 years... I'm ecstatic that we're taking it a bit more seriously. I'm seeing presentations being given, giving some myself, and engaging in conversations with people about "that social media thing". It's like a dream come true.
#iwork@novartis