Digitas SVP: Pharma Marketers Must Listen Before Joining Social Media Party

Healthcare communications expert Bruce Grant testified about pharmaceutical marketers’ use of social media before the Food and Drug Administration in the fall of 2009. Grant has more than 30 years of experience in pharmaceutical promotion, medical education, digital media design and production. Prior to joining Digitas Health, he served as managing director of the pharmaceutical marketing consulting firm eStrategies and director of innovation at Frontier Media Group.

I chatted with Grant about how pharmaceutical marketers can participate effectively in social media and potential scenarios for FDA regulation of social media.

eMarketer: Can you provide a brief synopsis of the testimony you offered to the FDA last fall?

Bruce Grant:

We reported on research results that applied to one of the questions the FDA asked, which was, should special considerations apply to pharmaceutical communications in social media or online banner ads? We had conducted research in the fourth quarter of 2009 on the treatment of risk information in banner ads and suggested that there was a case to be made for the so-called one-click rule that would place the full text of the risk information one click away from the ad.

eMarketer: Are the issues surrounding social media different than the online advertising issues facing pharmaceutical marketers?

Grant:

They’re totally different. Advertising is premised upon the assumption that marketers can tell people what to do and think and that if we tell them often enough and interrupt them in enough different venues, that they will do and think what we tell them to do. Social media is premised upon people turning to each other, not large institutions, to get the resources and the information that they need.

In many ways, social media are used by consumers as an antidote to a particular kind of interruption marketing that consumers, for the most part, find unhelpful. The FDA certainly looks at what kind of communications pharmaceutical manufacturers can make. Under FDA regulations, essentially everything promulgated by a pharmaceutical company that touches on its brands is considered to be either advertising or what it calls “labeling.” Ads are ads. Everything else is labeling and, essentially the same regulations apply to both of them.

If you’re a pharmaceutical manufacturer communicating about a prescription drug, your message has to be fairly balanced between information about the benefits and the risks associated with your brand. You cannot promote uses for your brand that are not on the label. You cannot overstate the benefits of your brand or minimize the risks associated with your brand.

eMarketer: Online hubs including PatientsLikeMe, HealthCentral and WebMD help facilitate a lot of conversations among consumers around symptoms and treatments. What do you make of them?

Grant:

Those are examples of large aggregators of patient communities. I think what’s important to note is that this is not a new phenomenon. The truth of the matter is going back even before consumers had any kind of widespread access to the Internet, there were dial-up services like America Online and CompuServe that offered communities, forums and chat. In some ways, these newer sites are simply carrying those ideas forward and are opportunities to commercialize or provide avenues for pharmaceutical marketers.

eMarketer: What do you think the FDA guidelines on social media will suggest?

Grant:

We believe that the FDA will issue one or more guidance documents probably by the fourth quarter of this year. It won’t provide channel-by-channel instructions for using Twitter and Facebook, but will clarify things for marketers about participating in social media.

In our view, the real barriers to the pharmaceutical industry participating in social media are the same ones we saw in other industries over the last three to five years. The industry needs to start from the premise that social media is about people getting what they need from one other rather than from large institutions.

The challenge is how do marketers relate to this? How do they exist in a world where there’s a big conversation that’s been going on before they arrived on the scene? How do they exist where the level of trust that people participating in the conversation have for each other, is higher than the level of trust they have for any marketer seeking to enter the conversation?

eMarketer: What can marketers do besides creating best practices for participating in social media while they wait for FDA guidance?

Grant:

Marketers haven’t yet fully learned how to listen. That’s the first thing you do. It’s a no-brainer if you think about real-world conversations. You listen to the conversation that was going on before you got there. Who are the participants in the conversation? Who has influence in the conversation? What are their concerns? What are the topics of conversation?

We recommend creating a structured program of listening as an ongoing process. After you’ve been listening for a period of time, and you’ve gotten a sense of the participants and their concerns, there comes a time when there’s an opportunity for you to say something. And in a real life conversation, the most important thing you can say is something that responds to the conversation that’s been going on.

Do you have something to offer? Can you point people to a resource that’s relevant to the needs and interests that have been expressed in the conversation? As you do that, then you pick up credibility. People come to know you. People come to trust you. And you can reach out into the conversation with an idea of your own. You can change the subject at that point because you’re known, because people trust you and because you offered something of value and relevance into the conversation, perhaps repeatedly up to that point.

Listen, respond, reach out. Sadly, there are people from social media properties who are out there just trying to sell ad space, sponsorships or other things.

Look, in contrast, at what AstraZeneca is doing with its Twitter account AZhelps. The company is monitoring Twitter for any mention of the AstraZeneca brand, for people having problems getting the brands under their prescription plan, being able to afford AZ brands and problems with side effects. AstraZeneca is responding to patients with very brief, direct messages on Twitter. For example, “saw your tweet about the cost of Nexium. AstraZeneca may be able to help. Call 1-800” and so on.

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