Digital Pharma: The industry’s real social media question
pharmafile | March 23, 2010 | Feature | Medical Communications | Janssen, digital pharma, social media
There is a tremendous amount of discussion at the moment about how trust is now the key to corporate reputation.
That is fine, but the trouble is that you can’t buy trust it has to be earned. Even more frustratingly, it is about long-term behaviour and communication – there is no quick fix.
Trust is something that has frustrated and fixated the pharmaceutical industry for years. The latest Edelman Trust Barometer suggested that about 53% of educated top quartile participants trust pharma – so thank God for bankers and the insurance industry.
In the UK the ABPI is currently engaged in a very laudable project called VITA (Value, Innovation, trust and Access). A part of this, the Trust stream, has involved engagement with stakeholders through social media. I obviously support this development, I just have one problem.
Developing a twitter presence or constructing a facebook page is not a strategic objective. I wish people who are desperately trying to catch up with the social media revolution (like an elephant on roller skates) would stop talking platforms and start thinking about what actually lies behind this dramatic change in communications – open and transparent dialogue.
If you don’t change how you listen to your customers or stakeholders and you continue to push out the same messages, hoping you won’t get any difficult questions, you will completely miss the point.
“How can we develop a presence on twitter while minimising the risk?” You may ask. Perhaps the risk is that people may start to understand how important their opinions really are.
If big pharma can hide behind regulation and good practice to subvert the social media conversation and remove any interaction that is uncomfortable, we will do even further damage to our industry. An industry I am proud to work for.
So, I was pleased to have been involved in the Q&A document being produced by the PM Society for the PMCPA, outlining recommendations for the pharmaceutical industry in digital media. We have to understand as an industry that control is dead, the next great challenge is to have influence. If not, how can we be a force for good in the future?
When people care, they want to be part of an interactive community. If people want to ask about what really constitutes value in medicines? Why we have withheld clinical data for a differential marketing position? Or how much money we have given to the recent Haiti disaster? We should make sure we have a good answer.
Alex Butler is communications manager at Janssen-Cilag and runs its UK Twitter account. The opinions expressed in this guest post are his and not necessarily those of his company.
This article also appears in The Digital Pharma Guide 2010.
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