Social Media Wiki

Crushing Pharma’s Digital Marketing Dreams–Part 1

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Part one of two…part two available tomorrow.

I came up with a challenge to all of you a couple weeks ago and now I’m going to report back what you all told me. I had a vision of  a world with no rules in pharma marketing (please read that post first or this one won’t make much sense). I also asked you what you’d do in this imaginary world. The reason for writing the post was simple. I was trying to show that it really doesn’t matter if there are formal rules regulating what we do in pharma digital marketing. Specifically, I’m trying to get everyone past the notion that we need some sort of formal blessing or 937 pages of rules from the FDA before we can undertake many of the new digital marketing tactics available including social media marketing. That’s the number one reason I hear from companies who aren’t trying anything in social media: “We’re waiting for the FDA to publish guidelines on social media before we do anything.” Well, if that’s you, then my one piece of advice is this: settle in. You’re going to be waiting for a while.

Rules or no rules, I’ve talked with many pharma marketers who know the programs they’d love to do if only they were allowed. Many dream of doing something innovative in digital marketing. So today, I’m going to crush some of the dreams you’ve had for digital marketing. I’m going to try to show you why that one program you’ve always dreamed about isn’t likely to be all that effective. Sorry to do it, but you leave me no choice.

My point from my post was that it doesn’t matter if there are official rules or not, the market will dictate what you can and can’t do. As a recap, here was the warning I issued in my original post (click to read it now if you haven’t yet, as today’s post won’t make sense without it):

While there may not be any rules about what you can say, claim about your products, or do in promotion, there’s an unofficial regulatory body that still does exist. People. Patients, doctors, caregivers, researchers, payors, random pharma critics, and commentators/writers (like me). So, you can say whatever you want, but you’re going to be kept in check by all these people. They are the ones who are going to review what you do and decide what’s right and wrong. For those companies that take advantage of this lawless society, the people are going to react negatively. They’ll reject those that make exaggerated claims, those that mislead, and they’ll also reject programs and promotions that just don’t make any sense.

After this warning, I gave you all a survey to find out what you would do if there were no rules. No rules at all regarding what you could do with your digital marketing. Not just social media, anything digital. Here were the choices: Community on brand website, addition of user generated content, ratings and reviews, unbranded community, “enhanced” product claims, branded Twitter page, expanded search optimization, expanded disease state information, branded Facebook page, or brand blog. I also gave you a blank field if you wanted to put in your own idea.

Because I couldn’t resist, I predicted in my post (after the survey) what you would answer. Here was my guess: “Something social media, probably the community on your brand website.” Tah-dah! I was right about that, but was surprised (pleasantly and yet confounded) by some of the other results as well. With about 50 responses or so, here are the results (percentages represent the number of mentions opposite total mentions, each respondent could select up to three items):

what pharma marketers would do if there were no rules

Tied for first place were community on brand website and addition of user generated content. So, these are the two things that the most number of pharma marketers would like to do, but feel they can’t because of the rules (or lack of clear ones). Let’s look at them one at a time. First, a community on a brand website.

I’m not really sure why this is most appealing. Essentially, you’d have a patient (or maybe doctor) community on, say, the Lipitor brand website. You can picture it: “Click here to talk with others who have tried Lipitor.” Presumably, there would be questions about the drug and side effects and people would be giving their honest opinions and probably saying a lot of things that would make Lipitor blush just a bit. People don’t like to censor what they have to say in discussion groups. There would also be quite a bit of negative too, which isn’t necessarily bad, but also a few rants (you know: “Pharma is responsible for poisoning the world, swine flu, global terrorism, etc.”). Here’s the thing with a really community; you can’t moderate it. You can’t, if you’re Lipitor, simply delete all the bad posts and all the rants. But do you want them on your site? I’m not afraid of a negative review here and there. Frankly, these add to the credibility of any site and is why products with one or two stars almost always outsell those with no stars (i.e., no reviews). Get the stats here. I’ve talked all about how this would work for pharma before. So, your community might not be something you’re really proud of especially when all the anti-pharma folks come out of the woodwork.

There’s another problem. People don’t like pharma companies. Sorry, but you probably knew that. They don’t really trust pharma companies all that much either. Sorry again. So, why on earth do you think they’d want to join your community instead of one maintained by a completely unbiased third party like WebMD? Why? What’s the value? When it comes to a branded community, you simply can’t offer anything they can’t get somewhere else. However, I think there’s a slightly different approach. I encourage everyone who thinks I’m wrong at this point to first read my post  Forget Communities, Create Channels Instead. What’s the difference?

“Communities, in their truest sense, are made up of a large number of equally important individuals meeting each other, sharing ideas, and communicating with and amongst each other.  While a community might have a community manager and / or a community leader, all people are – for all intents and purposes – treated equal.

Channels – on the other hand - still have many of the same aspects of community – the ability to communicate, comment, share ideas, and connect – but they are focused on a certain, designated group of content providers who formulate the thought leaders of the group.” Thanks again to Stephen Saber once again for these definitions.

Channels are lead by a handful of experts. The people that you really want to hear from. The people you know aren’t crazy or plain wrong and whose advice you know you can trust. In other words, a completely open community where everyone’s comments and opinion are equally promoted and prioritized isn’t valuable in most cases. A controlled environment where experts (unbiased ones) sift through the information and advice and release what’s valuable and create useful, credible content, is what people really need and tend to use whether they know it or not.

So forget about your branded community and figure out how to do a channel instead. Read my entire post to get more details.

Next, user generated content. You want to add it. Well, go ahead. What’s stopping you? The first example of this in pharma goes back to 2007. Way back then, before every pharma company was on YouTube, Novartis sponsored a contest called FluFlix. The contest was designed to help raise awareness of the flu and why it’s important to get vaccinated. (Funny that we’re doing the same thing two years later, no?)

This contest introduction video alone has had nearly 800,000 views. As best I can find, this is the most popular pharma YouTube video ever by about a factor of about 40. Of all the entries they received, they picked 60 as finalists. In case you’re interested, three winners each took home $500. Here’s one, so you can get a flavor:

This is all user generated content. A bunch of pharma sites have testimonials on them now. Also user generated content. At least two pharma companies are taking a similar approach to Novartis, including using YouTube, to solicit user generated content. There’s GoInsulin from Sanofi-Aventis and My Asthma Story from AstraZeneca. For now, all the videos on these two channels are obviously professionally produced. I don’t know when (if?) they plan to add more videos in the vein of what Novartis did with FluFlix (i.e., produced at home videos).

You can always do user generated content, you just have to moderate what’s actually posted on your brand site. Anything that’s inappropriate (like swearing or completely off topic) you don’t post. Anything that has off-label claims you can’t post.  Make this clear in the submission rules and you’ll get more of what you can use. Almost every single video submission contest or program like this, inside pharma and out, is moderated exactly like this. You can’t post everything and people get that. Just be clear about why you post some things and not others UP FRONT.

Now, if you want to add user generated content because you’d like them to say your drug works for an unapproved indication instead of saying it yourself, why bother? In our no rules world, you can say it yourself. So, you should have picked “enhanced product claims,” but you didn’t. You know that in the end, this is a losing proposition. Doctors and patients eventually see through this type of behavior and reject everything you have to say. Where are you then?

Coming in right behind community on brand website and user generated content was ratings and reviews. I love it. I can only assume that my two recent posts about the importance of ratings and reviews did the trick (see here and here). Since I’ve already talked about this before, I won’t go into it here (hint: read the posts), but suffice it to say, I think this is a big opportunity. So big, in fact, I think it’s worth figuring out how to do it even in the real world where the FDA does enforce the rules. There has to be a way to add ratings and reviews to a pharma brand site that the FDA will allow. One of you pharma companies out there just has to ask them how. Remember that part of the reason why you’re allowing these reviews is to answer questions that people who just started taking your product need answered. Questions that, if handled appropriately and quickly, could be the difference between them continuing on treatment or quitting too soon. No one wins with the latter, so we need to figure out how to prevent it. Ratings and reviews could be a big part.

Unbranded communities came in next in our survey. These are where you don’t have your brand all over the page and instead focus on providing a community and support for a specific disease state. Obviously, in the real world, not having the community on your brand page saves a lot of fair balance. In our world with no rules, you wouldn’t have to worry about this, so why not go for the branded version? My only thought is that you realized (rules or not) that patients might be more responsive to an unbranded effort. They’d somehow be more trusting, open, and willing to join because it doesn’t seem too commercialized. Really? Patients are pretty smart. It would take them about 10 seconds to figure out that the site was sponsored by a pharma company. So, you may as well be open about it. However, it does appear that eliminating any mention of a specific brand does make a difference, but maybe not for the reasons you think.

The single best source of information about PKU is on an unbranded community created by Biomarin. Biomarin makes Kuvan, a treatment for this disease. There’s a great community on this site and Biomarin made it happen. They don’t appear to be involved really in any way except for their company logo appearing on a few pages. Apparently, if you provide enough value, people will come. If you do it right and put patients first, they’ll come. And stay. Follow this model and you can do this right now. The rules don’t need to be suspended. Biomarin and many others have already proven it. Go to the pharma and healthcare social media wiki and see for yourself.

This leads me to my next point about communities. Look at the wiki. Are you going to create a community (unbranded or not) that already exists? If so, how about looking to partner with something already out there? Wasting money to create a community on your own might not be the best idea. If your competitor already sponsors the best community in your disease area, then you might have to look to a completely different tactic. There’s no reason to battle head to head. One more reason NOT to create the community you’ve always wanted is that people don’t want it. Josh Bernoff from Forrester looked at which disease areas would likely benefit the most from social media. If your area isn’t in the top right (or at least top left), you might want to look elsewhere. Here’s Josh’s original post and my take on it as well.

So, according to this, if you’re thinking about doing a community for people with thyroid conditions, you’re better off trying something else. On the other hand, if you’re thinking about something for obesity or certain “mood disorders,” then you might be onto something.

Next up in the survey results, and the final option finishing in double-digits, was brand blogs. There are only a handful of blogs out there from the pharma industry, but it’s much more common in other industries (and here). There isn’t  (as far as I know) a single product-branded, pharma blog in existence. I think this is a big missed opportunity. To be fair to the critics, many corporate blogs aren’t working well. Only 1 in 6 consumers trust corporate blogs. On the surface, this might tell you that blogs just can’t work. However, it should tell you that most companies don’t use them correctly. You can’t make them a 24/7 advertisement about your product and you’ve got to be committed to them. So, everything can’t be a brand message and you can’t let it die. Most blogs die after a short time or they have such irregular postings that they are not worth paying attention to. If you’re going to blog, then be committed. To quote the article linked above, “Launching a blog with nothing to say is like paying for a blank magazine ad … sure you own the space, but you’ve done nothing with it.” Trust has a lot to do with ensuring people that your blog isn’t self-serving and also that you’re going to be there for the long haul.

Why blogging? It’s the best way to create a one on one connection with people. They get to see who you really are and hear why you do the things you do. For those taking your product already, it gives them further confidence to continue their treatment and gives them a very simple thing to share with others who they think might benefit from your product as well. What would you include? How about patient stories, new developments about your product (i.e., research), disease state information, educational pieces written by a healthcare professional, etc. Just make sure it’s not all about your brand.

And, don’t take my word for it. McKinsey just released its report on How Companies are Benefiting from Web 2.0. Really good stuff and worth checking out. I’ll be referring to it quite a lot in the future. For now, check out this chart:

How companies are benefiting from web 2.0

In both the “customer-related purposes” and “working with external partners/suppliers” category, blogs demonstrated at least one measurable benefit more often than any other Web 2.0 channel. What else do you need to know?

That’s all for part one. We’ll tackle part two tomorrow and cover the remaining survey results and also the write-in candidates. I’ll also touch on one more really important piece of McKinsey’s report, their findings on the most important practices for successfully using Web 2.0 technologies.

Emerging Media in Healthcare and Pharma White Paper

After my recent post where I shared my white paper on “The Future of Digital Relationship Marketing in Pharma,” many of you inquired if I had any similar papers. You’re in luck. I have one that’s a different topic, but I think related.

This one is called: “Emerging Media in Healthcare and Pharma.”

Here’s a brief summary:

“There are a significant number of emerging media areas that will affect healthcare and pharmaceutical marketing campaigns in the future. Some will have an enormous positive impact on current marketing practices, while others will have devastating negative consequences on these same practices. The good news is that there are alternatives to the way many current campaigns are conducted that leverage the best in consumer understanding, interactive technologies, and solid marketing strategy (all while staying within DDMAC rules).”

I identified eight emerging media trends that about which I think every healthcare and pharma marketer should be aware:

  • Medical Social Networking: Beyond Facebook and MySpace, patients are now connecting with one another online and taking each other’s advice, sometimes over their physician’s advice.
  • Live and (Almost) in Person: YouTube is fine for delivering content, but it is instantly outdated. Consumers want to use video to interact with a real person to get the freshest information all from the comfort of their homes. This includes their doctors.
  • Secure Communications: People will begin to trust more of their confidential information online, but will expect that it be protected through constantly secure channels.
  • Micro-targeting: Targeting consumers has evolved dramatically in the past 10 years to the point where it is possible to find and communicate with a small group of brand supporters in a highly cost effective manner.
  • Instant, Dynamic Content: Online content must now immediately change based on user inputs. Providing the same content for everyone regardless of what they do on your site is a losing proposition.
  • Mobile Grows Up: Typically seen as a marketing platform that could only reach teenagers, older users are beginning to adopt some of the same habits as younger consumers, opening up a range of new promotional options.
  • Managing and Leading Word of Mouth: Tracking down everything that someone says about your brand was impossible without Internet-based technologies. Now brands are expected to track, and where appropriate, join in the conversations that people are having about them.
  • Print Goes Interactive: Print isn’t dead, but it needs to leverage interactive technologies to stay relevant and match consumer behaviors.

If you want more information on each of these trends, then you can download my full white paper on this topic: Emerging Media in Healthcare and Pharma  (1742 downloads)

As an added bonus, I want to share a copy of an article I had published in Pharmaceutical Executive last year called “Exercising Your Brand.” This paper outlines these rules healthcare marketers must follow to help ensure a successful digital program. I’ll share the link with you via DM on Twitter if you send this tweet about today’s post (PS: make sure you’re following me, so I can DM you). Deal?

If you want to be informed of any new white papers I publish, just fill out the form below. Your information will only be used for this purpose and will never be shared under any circumstance.

Note: Stay tuned for an updated version of this paper in the coming months. Emerging media changes quickly, so it’s difficult to stay current no matter how often you’re updating.

Why Pharma Needs Product Reviews

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We see them everyday on pretty much every site we visit…except for pharma. We often use them to make decisions about what products we buy and which we keep buying…except for pharma. We give our opinion to manufacturers, as the people who know what the product really does, to help them improve…except for pharma.

I’m talking about the product review. If you have bought anything online or researched a future purchase online, chances are that you referenced user-created product reviews. It’s becoming fairly standard practice for most companies, as they’ve come to realize that this is pretty much an expected feature among today’s consumer. But it wasn’t always this way. (note: I mentioned product reviews in my article “The Myth of Adverse Event Reporting.”)

One of the big reasons that product reviews were slow to appear for a long time is that companies were afraid of negative reviews. It turns out, of course, that simply having reviews can increase traffic, conversion rate, and average order value (see more detail here). In addition, negative reviews aren’t an issue so long as there aren’t only negative reviews.  Consider this situation. You’re checking out a product online and all the reviews are glowing. What do you think about that? You’d probably feel like the results might not be all that authentic. Instead, when there are negative reviews, it actually can lend credibility to the product (and site) because people know the reviews are actually genuine. Negative reviews don’t immediately turn people off. They read them and consider whether the negative would actually bother them. For example, someone ranks a product 1-star and says “this didn’t work on my Mac.” Well, if you have a PC, you aren’t worried. Simple example, but you see how it works.

AdAge just published an article about product reviews with a great title (good article, too): “Forget Twitter; Your Best Marketing Tool Is the Humble Product Review.” This title says it all. We’re talking an awful lot about Twitter lately, but let’s get back to the basics. Yes, it’s important to monitor Twitter to see what people are saying about your brand, but if you’re expecting some major insight or great new idea, you’re looking in the wrong place. AdAge quotes Sam Decker, CMO of Bazaarvoice, a” company that manages product-review platforms:” “His offline analogy is a room where everyone is there to talk about your product [product reviews] vs. a room where they are there to talk about anything [Twitter].” Tough to find the important conversations about a specific product in the latter.

Product reviews have become so mainstream and so important in brand consideration that many companies use product reviews received online in their offline advertising. Makes sense, right? If product reviews drive conversion rates and increase order values, why not advertise your reviews?  Best Buy was one of the first to do this. Bazaarvoice’s blog (company CMO quoted above) had a good article about this and reprinted this example picture of a Best Buy Sunday circular:

With all of this increased adoption of product reviews (and increased sales from them), are any pharma companies using product reviews on their sites? I haven’t found one, so please correct me if I missed one. I’ve seen content reviews, where users can rate thumbs up or thumbs down or assign a number of stars to a specific article or page, but not product reviews. At least, I haven’t seen them on pharma websites. But reviews of pharma products do exist. Meet iGuard. iGuard has user ratings on thousands of drugs including aggregated stats and comments. As an example, you can view the profile for Lipitor on iGuard here (registration required).  Here are some of the overall ratings for Lipitor:

Lipitor iGuard Reviews

But, how reliable is this information? The Lipitor ratings are based on 45,430 surveys sent out by iGuard (more on their process here). That’s a pretty good sample to me. iGuard also collects information about what patients wish they knew about the drug before they started. For Lipitor, 18% wish they were told more before starting treatment. iGuard used to include what specifically people wished they knew in the drug profiles, but it appears that they no longer post this information. My guess would be that they would be more than happy to sell you the information. This is a great opportunity to figure out what to include in future patient educational efforts.

There are also 80 comments (i.e., product reviews on the site). That’s going to tell you a lot about Lipitor. I’m going to warn you right now, the comments aren’t pretty overall and do include quite a few “adverse events,” but there are some great comments as well. Here’s a sample of each:

“I have taken lipitor for many years and have recently developed chronic inflammation of the pancreas and a triclycercide count of 636. I am not overweight at all, don’t drink, exercise and eat healthy. Can lipitor cause this.? [note: comment unedited]“

“I am a 62 year old female who with out this I can not walk to shop or any thing in my home that took any being on a step stool or walking in my home, now I can walk 8miles to do shopping, do the shopping & with a full 4 wheel personal cart walk back. [note: comment unedited]“

Yes, you will have to deal with adverse events if you go with product reviews. With a simple process, you can moderate every comment and deal with it appropriately. It’s ironic that pharma companies always cite this issue of adverse events when it comes to getting feedback from patients particularly when discussions about social media come up. However, at the same time, more and more companies are voluntarily adding links (which I bet will be required soon enough) to the FDA website and a phone number encouraging people to report adverse events directly to the FDA. This tells me that pharma companies aren’t necessarily afraid of what they might hear, but rather that they simply don’t want to deal with the information. That is, they don’t want to create a process to deal with it. But all these companies already have processes in place for adverse event reporting. An electronic version would flow quite simply into this. Also, keep in mind that you aren’t required to post every comment or review on your site. Those that are inappropriate (not just negative, but contain rants or foul language, for example) can be taken out. You simply need to ensure that you are transparent about your policy on how you moderate comments and which you post and which you don’t.

So, how is adding product reviews going to help you sell more of your product? One of the first things they teach you in sales and marketing is that a customer saying “no” to your sales pitch isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The reason why is because, with some questions, you can figure out why they aren’t interested, and deal with these issues. But going through all of this effort is very expensive. Just look at the budgets pharma companies allocate for field sales teams if you don’t agree. When it comes to pharma, or any industry, keeping your current customers is always cheaper than finding new ones. The people writing reviews on iGuard, for example, are already on your product. You’ve spent money on DTC TV, iMedia, the sales team, print ads, and a thousand other tactics, but now you’re about to lose them. Unless you don’t.

When comments are on a 3rd party site like iGuard instead of your own, you can’t be involved in the conversation. Imagine instead that they were on your site. This would allow you to do two things. Since you would require people to register to leave a comment (and you would), they also would provide their contact information. You can ask them if they’d like someone to contact them about their issue when they sign up. In this case, when someone posts a review saying they are having a certain side effect, you can do something to keep them on your product. Chances are that if this patient doesn’t get an answer, they’ll stop your treatment. So, you can have a nurse or other professional call and talk about the person’s issue. You can even go so far as to contact with the person’s doctor (with his or her permission) and explain the problem. The doctor can then follow up with appropriate actions like dosage adjustments, side effect management, or, where necessary, switching the patient to something different.

Think for a minute how this would be perceived by the medical community and patients. Wouldn’t doctors like to know when their patients are having a problem with their medication? As you know, patients aren’t always forthcoming with this information, as many simply stop treatment on their own before talking with their doctor. So wouldn’t this be a really valuable service? Wouldn’t this also give you an opportunity to talk with the doctor about your brands? I’m not saying you should “detail” the doctor when you make one of these calls, but you would be sharing relevant clinical data about the product during your conversation such as side effect rates and efficacy. This would certainly keep your products top of mind in a meaningful way. As for patients, they’d also find this service useful. Sometimes they don’t know how to communicate effectively with their doctors. Maybe you can bridge this gap.

This is one way that pharma companies can start doing Marketing with Meaning instead of trying to get people’s attention via interruptive  advertising that people are tuning out. It’s not without complications and it would take a unified effort across a number of different divisions in a pharma company to make this happen, but it would be worth it. The impact you could have on physicians and patients would be far larger than any investment and could go a long way to changing the perception of pharma in the public’s eye.

Social Networking Doctors Overprescribe

Sure, the title of this is supposed to be a little provocative, but isn’t that the point? I’m taking a cue from the source of this information after all (read on, you’ll see). Recently, Pharmaceutical Executive published a report on a recent Manhattan Research study (press release here) looking at the use of online social networking sites by physicians. There’s already been some good debate about this article on several blogs, so I won’t rehash the same things, but rather I’d like to just correct some of the misconceptions of the study. 

First, the results. Here’s the relevant quote from the press release: “With about 60% of physicians already using or interested in using physician online communities, it’s the right time for pharma to look into the marketing and research opportunities offered by this channel,” said Erika S. Fishman, author of the analysis and Director of Research at Manhattan Research.”

So, 60% of physicians use or plan to use online social networks. Great. This shows that using this channel to communicate with physicians might now be a worthwhile opportunity. The study could have ended here and provided some valuable insight to the community. However, it didn’t. Instead, this piece of information has been pulled out from the study as well: physicians using online social networks prescribe an average of 24 more scrips each week than those not using these tools. Pharma Executive actually said this: “Although most of the data from the survey isn’t unexpected (users tend to be younger, female, primary care doctors, or smart phone owners), item of interest is that physicians that troll online forums prescribe an average of 24 more scrips each week than their unwired peers.”

The clear implication is that using online tools make physicians write more prescriptions. Perhaps I’m overinterpretting as I’ve seen on many other blog posts about this article, but I don’t think so. Here’s the next line in the Pharma Executive article: “According to Fishman [the study's author], this prescribing trend could be due to the almost “viral” nature of chat forums and bulletin boards. If one doctor talks about a positive reaction his or her patient had with a treatment option, other physicians could be more apt to prescribe it.”

So, there it is, the study’s author basically saying that these online social networks are making doctors write more prescriptions. No?

It’s great that more doctors are using social networking sites, but the stat about them writing 24 more scripts BECAUSE they use social networks is a bit much. There’s no control group here that accounts for physician age, practice size, specialty, etc. In other words, the likely  real answer is that doctors who use social networks have bigger practices and thus write more prescriptions. Social networking didn’t cause this, but rather is just another demographic point. It could be that older doctors, who practices are also smaller, don’t use social networking and this accounts for the difference. In fact, I’d guarantee this is the case.

I find it hard to believe that using a social network makes you write more prescriptions unless these users are suddenly now giving drugs to patients when they hadn’t before. I doubt this is the case.

A comment I made on this issue on a blog was answered by Manhattan Research and you’ll see that they defend their study, as they should. They say that the study doesn’t suggest that the social networking causes more prescriptions, but I’m just going by what the author herself said to Pharma Executive.

Unfortunately, all this debate has overshadowed a valuable piece of data. Social network use appears to have hit a critical mass among physicians. Indeed, these networks also seem to attract the physicians who write the most prescriptions as well. This is a potentially tremendous opportunity for the first healthcare company that can figure out how to crack into these networks. However, unwelcome intrusions won’t be greeted with open arms, so you must find the balance between promoting your products, but also keeping the spirit of the social network intact (i.e., no selling). People rejected Facebook’s Beacon concept even though it was friends selling to friends, but here, you aren’t even friends, so the backlash could be worse.

I think one of the best uses of these networks is (and will always be) for research and not for promotion. Sermo allows data to be gathered by pharma companies to see brand perceptions of its products and also provides some opportunities for clearly labeled sponsor questions. Listening to doctors talk to one another in the real world (not in contrived focus groups) when they aren’t being watched is where the most useful data comes from. Sermo allows this (after stripping out identifying information) and may provide the best, most accurate data about how physicians view and use certain drugs.

There’s still a great deal of work to be done here, but it’s a good start.

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