Three speakers discuss how pharmaceutical companies can use social media despite strict regulations. They explain why adverse event monitoring is complicated, why companies prefer cautious approaches like low-risk podcasts over live events, and why listening to online communities and building databases of industry language matters before engaging directly.
are completely averse to— I mean, it's not so much negative feedback, but it's adverse effects and things like that. Unique regulatory environment to pharma. But I guess my question, throwing it back towards you, is how do you deal with your clients in terms of filtering feedback that isn't about adverse effects out of— Because we, as their agency, are not able to see that in theory either. So I'm just wondering if anybody has any experience with that. And also, every company has a different idea about what is an adverse effect. So that makes it doubly, triply complicated.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, it's interesting. We were recently working with a client that was doing stuff in the health healthcare space. And our initial advice to them was, what they wanted to achieve, we were like, it would be great if you could do a conference call with bloggers. We can podcast it. We know the community. Here's people you should be reading. Here's the topics that we should talk about. They're going to love it because they all know each other and they'll have a good time. And we just couldn't do it. But it would be because there was too much risk. They'd never done anything like this. So they're preparing as if they're sewing. They're not even at the sewing stage yet. So we've kind of gone back another step where we're doing a series of podcasts. But we're trying to respond to things that the blogs are talking about. We're trying just to get that easy entry into the community. But engagement in social media ideally will be really open with these really big conversations. I wish with all my clients I could talk about what they've done as much as with Greg. In reality, in the business world, you can't quite do that. But you can, again, you can approach it the right way. At a holistic level, I really think just imagine that you are entering a foreign tribe's village. How are you going to get in there without getting your head cut off?
When you said a bit of the negative, the two things that came to mind were there is this perception of controlling the message that's a holdover from how media was run for so long. So the first thing to do with someone like that is get them over the fact that they have already lost control of the message. And then you can engage very, very actively in social media and never make a peep. Just by listening. And so in a highly regulatory environment and a highly concerned about negatives environment, the biggest thing you could do today is set up listening tools, figure out how to use them well. And even if they don't say anything back for 2 years because they just can't, start building that database right now.
Especially to learn the language and the vernacular and the slang and all the things you have to learn.
And the farmer who takes the lead on this, will be a case study that can go to the FDA and say, here's how pharmacists should do this, and then the rule makers will roll it out. So they should start gathering data.
