PrintDear all,
Outside the U.S. and a few countries, DTC advertising of prescription-only medicines is strictly prohibited. Pharma companies are therefore limited to disease awareness campaign. The buzz is all around social media but what type of outake and outcomes can pharma companies realistically expect in patient-centric communities? I am usually hearing the following:
- Disease awareness: hoping more people will get diagnosed => more patients => more products sold
- Brand awareness: hoping people will check which pharma company is behind the community => search for products => talk to their doctors
I am not totally sold on those. Lots of efforts for lots of assumptions...
Would like to hear your thoughts or/and experience on the above.
Thanks and have all a great week-end
Jean-Michel
Staff Note: Jean-Michel is an executive at Baxter International. Anyone can answer this question. Simply click the "Add New Answer" link below to begin.
Great Questions: Answers Are Forthcoming
By fjohnmar on Monday, September 20, 2010
Jean-Michel:
Great questions. I'm putting out a call for answers. I'm confident we should hear some opinions on this topic soon.
Fard
ROI
By Anonymous on Tuesday, September 21, 2010
jean-Michael:
An excellent question to be sure. There are only three reason to implement a social media program: to reduce costs, increase revenue or improve customer service. However with social media within pharma, especially outside the US, it's hard to determine an ROI for social media. Please note that it has been by experience that US product websites and social media sites can experience up to 40% of their traffic from outside the US as well.
In research that I led and from Rodale as well as About.com it is indicated that most patients/consumers do not want to engage pharma in a conversation and that consumers will go to several sites to gather the information they need. Amgen recently launched a social media site for ITP patients outside the US that is like an interactive village (http://www.itpvillage.com/) which provides patient with a full list of resources that are needed to learn everything they can about ITP. Patients are allowed to post questions and they are answered after going through a regulatory review. That is one possible solution and it's very good.
Before talking about any social media program we need to start with the objectives of the program. Obviously there are business objectives as well as brand objectives. Within social media OUS you can, for example, bring people together to discuss a medical condition but how you get to solving business objectives can be quite difficult and really depends on the risk your company is willing to take. In working with European clients I have seen push back to develop social media pages with just the company logo and not mention the brand at all.
If you can provide me with a little bit more information on the specifics of the disease state that you are targeting I can probably give you some better ideas on what could be done within Europe. ROI can be a tricky problem to tackle because it's sometimes hard to link the bond you form via social media and patients with brand objectives. It's always better to look at or do some research and ask your target audience "what are you looking for and what you find helpful?" If you can capture that and integrate it into a social media initiative you can measure it via pop-up survey's as well as online metrics that measure how far your social media buzz has taken you. Remember it's not the number of followers, rather it's what your followers do with the engagement that counts. I can be reached at richardameyer@me.com http://www.worldofdtcmarketing.com