Today, pharmaceutical companies are using every trick in their doctor's bag to connect with potential prospects. E-Centric recently talked with Harold Corbran Jr., COO of DraftFCB Healthcare and Mike Brzozowski, director of CRM with DraftFCB New York about trends in healthcare social marketing.
E-CENTRIC: How are pharmaceutical companies using social media?
BRZOZOWSKI: In the pharma space, it's a toughie because of FDA regulations on corporate sponsor initiatives.
E-CENTRIC: Are consumers initiating the conversations online?
BRZOZOWSKI: Sure. We've all seen them. We've all been on blogs and message boards where you can see what people are saying about different therapies and different drugs. But those sites aren't sponsored by the pharma companies because of liability issues. Companies are trying to monitor what has been going on, to see what people are saying. There are some examples of pharma companies actively creating advocacy groups for certain conditions. Wyatt, for example, has something called Vibrant Lives for sufferers of rheumatoid arthritis. But its not an online forum, its more of an advocacy group, and people have to be recruited in through their Web site.
CORBRAN: To the best of my knowledge, Johnson & Johnson is the only pharma company I know of to date that has created a blog (http://www.jnjbtw.com/), and obviously it is very restricted because of regulatory issues. The fact is that everyone wants to know what the electronic conversation is that might be germane to their brand. We technically have the capability of setting up conversations but that's not in the picture right now for pharma clients.
E-CENTRIC: Is tracking responses and determining the ROI a factor?
CORBRAN: No, it has nothing to do with that. It's basically the regulatory and legal aspect of having the pharma company communicate directly to the consumer.
E-CENTRIC: What about on the professional side?
CORBRAN: There are physician-only social networks such as Medic Speak (http://www.medicspeak.com) and Sermo (http://www.sermo.com). Sermo has about 60,000 participants who have collegial and educational conversations, including discussions about patients. The Sermo network has set up a means by which pharma companies, in an appropriate and transparent way, and query physicians through surveys about their feelings on a particular topic. From a healthcare professional standpoint, the interactive conversation that is going on quite frequently.
For more on healthcare marketing, see the September issue of Direct magazine.
