I just finished a few days at Digital Pharma this week and it was a great conference. One of the trailblazers in pharma social media, Shwen Gwee, was the chair for the conference and, as an advisor, I got to watch him push for the best of the best content and format. It worked. If you want a great recap of what happened, head off to Twitter and pour through the stream for the conference’s hashtag, #digpharm.

I had seen and heard a lot of what was discussed at this meeting before simply because I get to spend a lot of my time thinking about it. For others that have a different focus in their day-to-day jobs, I’m sure they took away even more than I did. For me, the best part of the conference was the informal, “unconference” discussion that took place for the last two hours of the final day and was lead by Brad Pendergraph from Novartis. There was no stage, no slides, no official speakers, just a bunch of people really interested in digital pharma marketing talking to each other. It’s perhaps not surprising that the conversation almost exclusively focused on social media, as it seems like THE thing to talk about right now (and has for a while). The upcoming FDA hearings on this topic naturally make it more relevant and top of mind (PS: I’ve been invited to speak at the hearing and can’t wait to get in my two cents).

The participants of this final discussion were a good mix of pharma employees and agency/consultant types like me. I mostly listened to the conversation and took a few notes. At some point, I heard one of those simple statements that suddenly helps it all make sense. The “ah-ha” moment.

With constant debate of can we?/can’t we? in pharma companies when it comes to social media, I’ve been saying for a long time that we’re making it too complicated. While there are a lot of objections and concerns within pharma companies when it comes to social media, the one I hear most often and that really bugs me is about the internal regulatory/legal process. There are a lot of other objections that come up, but this one seems to particularly bother me. Here’s what I’m talking about. Let’s say your company starts a corporate blog and (imagine this) allows people to comment. Sure, moderate the comments if you’d like. No problem, just let through the legitimate ones.

Now, here’s where I get frustrated. Let’s say one of the comments is something of a question…something like this: “Great point, but don’t you think that [insert whatever ending you want]?” Clearly, it’s something that the person would like an answer to. They want to engage with you and have a discussion. It’s a great opportunity, right? You know that, so you decide to respond…and that’s when the wheels come off.

Since you’re going to create a response to publish, you have to send it through your review process. It takes a solid two weeks to do that using your normal channels. Or, maybe you’re lucky, you have an expedited process for this type of thing and you can get something out in a couple of days. Of course, by this time, the commenter probably has forgotten all about you. You likely missed a chance to make a major, positive impression. But why? Why did your response have to go through your whole process? “Well,” you say, “you know the answer to that Jonathan. If we post something online, then it has to through our regulatory process. Same rules as if we created a printed piece. What’s wrong with you…have you forgotten everything you learned working at a pharma company?” Okay, so maybe you’d leave out the last part, but you’d say the first part pretty much exactly as I wrote it.

“But, why?” I ask again. I have actually struggled to come up with a simple response to why you could justify NOT putting something like this through your official review process, but hadn’t come up with something yet. As pharma expands its social media efforts, at some point, this becomes a major issue. Are you going to review every tweet, every Facebook status update, and every “Hi, welcome to our forum” comment? You must either really love those regulatory meetings or you really have way too much spare time. Clearly, this isn’t going to be practical. At some point, you have to trust that people will do the right thing and follow the rules without reviewing every single thing they say before they say it.

Crazy…I know. Or is it? As I said, I struggled for a way to simply explain why this isn’t pure madness. It came to me while in the discussion at the conference. My epiphany came courtesy of Brad, who I mentioned earlier. He had the perfect analogy. I’m going to paraphrase just a bit, but here’s the gist:

When someone calls your company’s call center with a question about your product, do your representatives answer the question or do they tell the person that you’ll get back with them in 2-3 weeks?

Not to be outdone, Steve Woodruff, added to this (again paraphrasing):

When your reps are talking to a doctor and the doctor asks a question about your drug, does the rep have to pre-clear a response and get back with the doctor 2-3 weeks later?

Think about both of those statements for a minute. Obviously, we don’t make our call center representatives or sales reps wait for our regulatory process to review their answers before responding to a customer’s question, so why would we have to do this to respond to a customer question on our company blog? Do we trust our sales reps more than the person responsible for our blog? Do call center people get a special set of rules?

I don’t know the answers. I really don’t. You might argue (especially if you’re a lawyer), that the blog response  is “on paper” and therefore, more discoverable while the two analogies are just conversations that aren’t recorded. I suppose it would be harder to “get in trouble” if they aren’t recorded. Of course, this doesn’t put too much faith in your representatives to follow the rules and, the last time I checked, we had these things called voice recorders. If someone really wanted to get you in trouble, they could. Does anyone know the answer to this? I’m not saying that you should let every Tom, Dick, and Harry at your company respond to blog comments, but shouldn’t someone be allowed to do this without having everything approved before they say it?

One final comment that was said around this discussion came from Xavier Petit from Shire. His point related to the fact that we simply can’t ignore that people want to talk to us, so, basically, we have to respond when they come to us. We can’t just ignore them. His analogy was something like this (again, paraphrasing because I can’t write fast enough):

When we realized that people were going to call us on the phone when we gave out our number, did we suddenly decide to cut all the phone lines?

Of course not, but isn’t that what we’re doing when we don’t respond when someone asks us something via a social media channel? We create places for people to comment, but when we realize that they’ll actually do it, we cut off the communication. Actually, it’s exactly the same thing.

So, why are you still here? Shouldn’t you be calling your IT group and telling them to turn off the Internet?

Possibly related posts (auto-generated):

1. Healthcare and Pharma Social Media: It’s All About E.V.E.
2. Social Media: More Questions Than Answers?
3. Patients WILL Have the Final Say on Pharma Social Media