Pharma marketing more "social" than ever

Great discussion here and one that comes up at every pharma emarketing event I've been to. All Pharma brand managers and emarketing managers know that their customers are going online to talk about their medical conditions and treatment options and experiences. When you have been diagnosed with an illness it's human nature to want to converse with others who have and are experiencing the same set of symptoms and challenges. And all the pharma brand managers know that they should be participating in these discussions one way or another -- and all know that they will be at some point. But the industry as a whole is stuck on how to move ahead. Pharma marketing decisions are so dominated by regulatory and legal concerns not to mention a certain aversion to perceived risk that it is incredibly difficult for them to test out the online social networking waters in the health category. The vagueness of FDA regulations doesn't help either as it creates a policy vacuum in which the pharma marketers need to guess as to what may or may not be allowed. This is a tough challenge that is going to take years to work through.

Robert Kadar
Chairman
Good Health Advertising
www.GoodHealthAdvertising.com

Hi Jonathan - I'm glad to see that we agree more than we disagree on some of these issues.

I'm also glad to see the Patients Like Me example come up. I think there's a difference between filling out a health profile and using actual patient data. I think there's a definite benefit to disclosing information about conditions, particularly if a condition is serious and treatment hasn't been effective.

But I thought we were talking about medical records. I think there are other forces that will be brought to bear on the uses of medical records by digital marketers. One of those forces is the federal government, which I think will start to get wind of how some companies in the industry plan to use medical records for targeting purposes. IMHO, the patient should always have final say in terms of disclosure, but I have a feeling the feds are going to encumber so much of this in red tape that we'll be dealing with self-reported information for a long while.

Getting back to some of your other points, though, I think that site publishers and the folks behind social networks are going to be torn in interesting directions in the coming years. Pressure to monetize their offerings will lead to privacy backlashes as they attempt to balance user experience/privacy with profit motive. One can't serve two masters (effectively, anyway), so I think we'll see certain sites and networks stumble several times along the way. The question will become whether or not the federal govt. will tolerate all the testing and learning in an area as sensitive as patient privacy. I think not. I think they'll clamp down hard. I also think the patient backlash and accompanying recreational outrage from outsiders will amplify the effect.

Totally agree that pharma marketers need to hone their social skills lest they get left out of the conversation. To sharpen that point, though, I think that we will always see patients reaching out to others and discussing treatment options. They'll mention specific drugs and regimens, and thus I don't think the marketer will ever be entirely out of the conversation, but your point is valid. Pharma marketers need to be doing this now, despite all the risks, or they'll be mostly irrelevant as things continue to evolve online.

Thanks for writing. I look forward to continuing the debate.

Like you I had some 'issues' with Jon Richman's article. But I would add in a couple new things to the mix. With the rise of Vendor Relationship Management (VRM is Doc Searl's new gig) personal data store (PDS) privacy settings and their application in places like open forums will enable patients to share things like personal medical records. This means they can exclude pharma marketers from seeing stuff.
It'll be up to Pharma brands to build patient trust and open-ness in these forums. Any failure will mean exclusion from that person's discussions on the forum. Being out of the conversation will be death in the new marketing model.

Rebecca Caroe
ThinkingPharma.com

As the author of the article in question, I guess I should comment here. First, thanks for the commentary. I'm actually with you on some of this, but take issue with other pieces, which is how a good debate should I work I suppose.

First, I actually agree with the point about the title of my article. Yes, the title was "No, pharma's digital future isn't all social media" and yes, the article talks about mostly social type programs. You should know that this wasn't the original title of the article, but AdAge went with something they thought worked better. The original title was "The Future of Pharma Digital Marketing." The version on AdAge is actually an edited-down version of a much longer piece, which you can get on from blog (http://bit.ly/3vJCp).

The whole point of the entire article was to show that pharma marketers are going to need to change the way they approach digital in the future. It's going to be a very different place in five years. If they continue on the same path, patients are simply going to leave them out of the discussion no matter how much pharma wants back in. The tools that will enable this are evolving now. Will pharma find a way to play in these spaces? I'm sure they will. However, the smartest companies will get involved now and shape these technologies so that they are more pharma marketing friendly when they become more mainstream.
Regarding Glue, it's not quite the farthest thing from AOL Virtual Places, but pretty close. Jeramiah Owyang from Forrester actually thinks that Glue is the first tool to enter what he calls the "Era of Social Colonization" (http://bit.ly/A2NZZ). In other words, this is probably the most evolved social media tool out there today (but still has a ways to go).The features of this tool (or one like it) will dramatically change the way we interact with websites and products online.
Seems like you didn't like my idea about patients sharing pieces of their medical histories to enable them being matched with others like them. You said, "There are so many problems with this I don't know where to start. Foremost among them is the notion that people will make public parts of their medical history without a clear and convincing benefit." I totally disagree simply because people are doing this right now and in detail that would surprise you. All you need to do is look through any one of the hundreds of thousands of profiles on Patients Like Me to see this. They are sharing intimate details about their side effects, progression of their disease, the medications they take, and personal information like age and weight. Many use their real names and pictures. They do this because there is a benefit. They know that sharing this gets them the ability to compare themselves with others to see how they are doing against the "norm" and get ideas about what might even better. In the future, instead of having to input this information by hand, you can use the EMR data that you already have and be matched with people based on hundreds more parameters than Patients Like Me can handle...all automatically. After that, the functionality might be pretty similar.

Finally, I think the overall theme of this post really has less to do with my article and more to do with Tom's point that he makes at the very end: "Not every marketing vehicle needs to be a messaging platform. If marketers can influence the discussion via their own people-centric presence, there's a way to effectively influence the decision to pursue a given treatment.”

I happen to completely agree with this. The emerging technologies I included in my article REQUIRE this. So whether or not pharma will find a way to use these channels, they'll have to do it on a very personal basis and be comfortable that they can't include a brand message in every activity.

Nice post and thanks for keeping me honest.

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