According to wikipedia – social media are primarily Internet-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings. It’s a shift from one to many publishing to many-many networking and from centralized control content generation to massive user-generated content.

I would distinguish between the social software (blogs, micro-blogs like Twitter, file sharing, messaging, groups and tagging ) with the media itself (MySpace music, Deezer, Facebook ….). I believe that there a number of important applications of social software for pharmas that fit into the current sales model – here are a couple

Pharma social-search – How about a single search page for doctors, consolidating and summarizing data related to the products a pharma sells? – evidence based studies, pharmacokinetics, practical dosage tables and new pipeline.   Provide less data but more relevant science for doctors’ needs. Let a doc choose and let the network of colleagues decide what’s most relevant.   This should work well for the regulatory affairs team since they can approve the content they  feed into the aggregator  and filter out the nasty stuff before-hand. That helps with application number two:

Off-label marketing compliance – Provide mediated blogs for  industry experts to talk about  drugs. This is like a “keep your enemy close to you strategy”. Make it a part of the search page for the doctor.  It’s easier to control a blog you maintain than to enforce what a rep may or may not say to a doctor.  More importantly – it’s a way of proving compliance to the regulator.

Market directly to pharmacists – for the same money you can reach out to the pharmacist and make sure she/he understands the indications properly and slip in some competitive marketing stuff on the high margin OTC items. Like why your homeopathic arnica gel is better than Novartis Voltarene.

Collaborative recommendation – Most social media content is very touchy-feely and it’s hard to quantify information value based on clicks on content like Facebook birthday and favorite car applications  However – for scientific articles we could take the Deezer approach where a doctor in the network creates one or more “playlists of favorite articles. These “playlists” of articles form the basis of the recommendations which look for other articles that have citation patterns (instead of item ratings) similar to the doctor’s “playlist”. This is the approach taken in the Synthese Recommender project

What is surprising is that a lot of people seem to think it’s just a question of time before pharmaceutical companies like GSK get into social media.  I claim that a fashion trend doesn’t make a business case. The buzz of social media and Twitter in 2009 reminds me of the buzz on virtual worlds in 2008.

There are 3 fundamental reasons why  consumer-side social media is not a good fit for pharmas and they all relate to how prescription drugs are sold:

Marketing: Pharmas are the last bastion of traditional door-to-door marketing using medical representatives to influence doctors to prescribe their products to end user patients. Excluding OTC (over the counter products), pharma customers are doctors not end users.

• Doctors like the attention of a face to face meeting, getting the free samples and invites to conferences from the rep
• You don’t have to verify that a virtual online persona is really a doctor before giving them a drug sample. Most doctors are not imposters in person.
• A rep can customize the message to a doctor and work hard on her quota -  aggressively marketing a drug by suggesting that a higher dosage or additional indications are possible (off label promotion).  This is not official policy and it’s normally done by industry experts who are not employed directly by the pharma but it’s still an option in a face to face meeting – for example suggesting to a dialysis center that they should stock up on EPO…
• I really didn’t want to say this, but sex sells.   Good looks are a big asset for a rep, until I write my Pheremone Facebook Application – a good looking female rep will win hands down over a blog any day of the week.

Regulatory – then there is the matter of food and drug safety and regulations against off-label marketing.  Marketing materials used by a medical representative are prepared and approved by the product manager, scientific and marketing staff and legal staff.   This highly controlled approach to content is  diametric to the wisdom of crowds and “user generated content” found in social media like Facebook or Twitter.

Doctors – doctors are far from a uniform community, specialists such as nephrologists are highly multi-disciplinary and may be interested in getting specific pharmacokinetic data whereas the pediatrician down the hall will have just enough time to take a free sample and hear about new pipeline.  Not every doctor has time to read New England Journal of Medicine in the evening after work but some doctors may be active teachers and researchers. A personal visit from a medical representative is not just the personal touch and break from a busy day of kids with runny noses – it’s also a way to customize the content to the doctor.

In summation – buzz is not enough.  It’s not a question of young doctors getting it and older doctors not getting it.  Specialists like cardiologists and endocrinologists  are as high-tech as it gets and family doctors are used to patients coming in with a (usually correct) self-diagnosis from Google.

There are many important applications of social software for a pharma. More about that in another post.

Pharmas don’t do social networking – but they know how a bit about Web marketing. Even notoriety is publicity – I think the saying goes.

“Pharma still fears social networking” -Pharmaceutical (as well as medical device) companies lag far behind other industries in the adoption of “Web 2.0″ technologies like social networking, blogs, wikis, podcast and RSS.

or for example, this item on the KillerStartups.com web site, obviously posted to draw traffic in search engines – since Sanofi-Aventis is a shall we say, somewhat more popular search phrase than KillerStartups.com

One of the top 5 largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. Sanofi Aventis portfolio includes research and development and manufacturing of new medications. They cover 7 major therapeutically areas: cardio, thrombosis, oncology, diabetes, CNS, internal medicine and vaccines. The site has loads of information concerning the company such as: Press releases, material targeted to draw the attention of possible investors, access to the Research and development section where you can learn about the newest medications as well as their future plans and their clinical trails plus guests can apply for the different clinical research experiments.

On the other hand – it’s really easy to try out social media and see if you get traction. The energy barrier is so low and the leverage on Youtube is so high, it’s an irresistible force moving a very heavy object:

Sanofi Aventis and AstraZeneca Launch YouTube Sites – Social media has been a buzzword in the pharmaceutical industry for the past few years (see ePharma Summit), but few companies have crossed the line into the world of social networking or conducting two-way conversations with patients online.

The Sanofi channel is part of its integrated GoInsulin campaign, an unbranded health education program designed to give people more information about diabetes and serve as a launching pad to the Sanofi homepage. It features an array of patient videos and a link to an off-site, online game that separates the myths about insulin from reality. The channel has no branded drug material, but lists the company’s name below the top banner.

Although social media like Twitter is dominantly about personal opinions and experiences, social software such as blogs, micro-blogs and file sharing have important collaborative applications.

For example – like how to integrate all the information and care of a patient with multiple issues and care-givers (a typical MSA patient will have a GP, neurologist, speech therapist, physiotherapist, nutritionist and primary care giver at home who is usually the  husband or wife of the patient with problems of their own. Speaking before a conference of the Case Management Society of America in October 2007, Tim Rothwell from Sanofi Aventis discussed their commitment to help resolve problems of collaborative care

The issues and challenges of poor transitions of care, said Rothwell, are critically important to him personally and to Sanofi-Aventis as a company. ‘The problem, of course, is a healthcare system that, for many – particularly those who get bounced around within it – is fragmented and sometimes even frightening,’ Rothwell observed. ‘For those who have family members or friends who have experienced repeated encounters with the healthcare system, the only consistent thing they believe it delivers is confusion and, sometimes, flawed outcomes.’

For a large global company like Monsanto, Merck or Johnson and Johnson, FCPA is an exercise in compliance, awareness training, monitoring and risk management. Clearly – paying bribes directly or indirectly via third party intermediaries, to government employees is problematic from an ethical standpoint and attempts to dilute the problem by explaining that there are gray areas and cultural differences doesn’t change the ethical substance. Like many issues in compliance and risk management, preventing Foreign Corrupt Practices violations is not as simple as it looks although the principle is straightforward – “Thou shalt not give a bribe”.

A seminar at Bioworld last year dealt with the challenge of FCPA compliance using language such as:

• 15 red flags to indicate non-compliance—find and fix these before the DoJ and SEC do it for you!
• Activities for which you can be held accountable, even if committed by foreign subsidiaries, suppliers, or rogue employees
• 5 guidelines for creating FCPA policies, based on recent cases
• 3 foreign official risk areas—did you realize making remuneration to these people could be a Federal crime?
• Who should write procedures, and who should implement them
• Advice and resources for training staff locally and abroad
• 9 ways to audit and assess your FCPA compliance program
• Internal investigations—when to conduct one, who should conduct it, and what to do if you find evidence of non-compliance
• Issues with conducting employee interviews and collecting electronic records