Digital health and the Social Network
pharmafile | November 5, 2010 | Feature | Medical Communications | Facebook, Red Door, The Social Network, digital pharma, social media
Followers of film will be only too aware that we are about to embark on ‘Oscar season’.
Cinematic features are being showcased in film festivals around the world, while critics and bloggers are starting the frenzy of predicting who will be picking up gold statuettes come 27 February next year.
Among the films being ‘talked about’ is The Social Network released in the UK last month.
At the time of writing I haven’t yet seen the film, but the PR surrounding it is huge – it’s about the early days of Facebook and is written by Aaron Sorkin who created The West Wing, directed by David Fincher who gave us The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and stars the new Spider Man Andrew Garfield – so you can see why the Oscar bloggers are getting twitchy (or should that be tweety?).
The film details how the idea for Facebook was conceived by Mark Zuckerberg on his laptop while a Harvard undergraduate, and chronicles its rise to the top of the social networking sphere, becoming the most successful social networking site in the world.
Italso shows how Facebook changed the way people communicate on a permanent basis and what a revolution it was for the internet, all because of a computer programming genius who sat down in 2003 and didn’t give up on his idea.
Now more than 500 million ‘friends’ exist on Facebook, but Zuckerberg’s path to becoming the world’s youngest billionaire has not always been smooth, and he faces personal and legal problems from those who were around him at the start.
While the film promises to be an interesting comment on current social practices, it is also a fictional account of a historical moment.
Rather like ‘lifetime achievement’ awards – which cynics say signals a time to retire – does a movie about you or what you’ve achieved indicate that you’re history?
Ironically the movie’s timing couldn’t be more crucial as new data from Facebook highlights that, for the first time in the site’s history, they are beginning to face declining numbers of users.
Users of social media have reported that they feel sites such as Facebook have become ‘just another marketing tool’ which constantly barrages them with regionalised and personalised advertisements and new group pages, intended solely to sell them something.
Whether this decline is temporarily halted by the new film remains to be seen. But the advertising/promotional side of the social networking site has not gone unnoticed by the powers that be.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has announced that it will be expanding its remit to cover online and digital media. The new jurisdiction of the ASA will also include websites and social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
So what does this mean? Well, one of the main focuses of the ASA’s new role will be to make sure that brands which advertise direct to the public are not breaching EU nutrition and health claims which have come under increasing scrutiny.
However for those brands and products that are awaiting guidance on rulings from EFSA that are caught up in the huge backlog of claims, it could be quite some time before EFSA can provide greater clarity on what can and can’t be said (be it online or in traditional media).
Where does this leave digital opportunities for health brands?
When it comes to PR then the answer is very simple, with a great opportunity.
With ethical approaches to providing balanced, credible and well-referenced information we are ahead of the game and may continue to place this kind of information online through websites and social media.
The ASA’s remit will not cover journalistic and editorial content related to causes and ideas so, as far as PR is concerned, it’s a ruling we can work within.
After all, the internet is not a ‘new media’ it has been around for a long time and is just another vehicle for credible messaging about a therapy area or where appropriate, brand.
If we as an industry are considering treating online activity as different from any other activity we are doing, then we shouldn’t be doing it.
In the mean time we’ll follow The Social Network’s success with interest.
Although with so many films in contention and so little time for voters to see them, I suspect that its fate will depend on how successful its PR machine is in convincing the handful of highly influential film critics and bloggers who try to predict the awards, that this is a movie which deserves an Oscar.
Catherine Warne is chief executive of the Red Door Group and can be contacted at cwarne@rdcomms.com
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