Social Media has revolutionized the way companies connect with customers and prospects by enabling two-way, online public conversations between brands and customers. Brands are quickly transforming from big, nameless institutions to approachable, valuable and trusted sources of information, content and connections.

So where is Pharma in this revolution? For the most part, they are still on the sidelines. Given the uncertainty of the rules and regulations related to social media in pharmacuticals, many companies have decided to wait. That’s a mistake.

Given proper preparation and planning, it is possible for Pharma companies to conduct open, public two way conversations that can go a long way to rebuilding trust and brand favorability with their target audience. Here are some steps to consider:

1. Clearly define your process for both proactive and reactive conversations. Make sure to consider the nature of the social media platform and understand the type of control you have over comments.
2. Define your terms and conditions for each social media platform and make sure people can easily find them and reference them. When Woodhouse first launched a campaign for one of our Pharma companies and industry blogger picked it up and examined the terms and conditions in detail. You can see her post here.
3. Create a cross functional team from legal, marketing (or corp comm.), medical and safety. Train them on the process and the social media platforms so they know their role and have the proper knowledge to make decisions.
4. Beg, plead and beg again for legal to commit to turning around approvals within a day. This is crucial for reactive conversations. Things like commenting on a wall post from one of your Facebook “Likes” become irrelevant when they are posted a week later.
5. Plan content and updates well ahead of time. Develop an editorial calendar and submit blog posts, Facebook updates and Tweets weeks ahead for approval to ensure you have a library of approved content to be posted each day (we recommend multiple times a day). Content should reflect the interests of the community and not the interests of the company. Think of yourself as a magazine publisher planning a new magazine targeted at your niche community.
6. Hire a community manager that is an expert in both online conversations and the dos and don’ts of the Pharma regulatory environment. In most cases you will need to look to outside resources for this hire.
7. Allow for open commenting across all social media platforms. Monitor each platform 2 to 3 times a day and quickly remove and post or comment that violates the defined terms and conditions. This one scares most Pharma companies with concerns of Adverse Events and improper mention of drug names. Woodhouse is lucky enough to work with a progressive Pharma company and we have allowed open commenting for over a year now. There has been zero Adverse Events to report and rarely any mentions of drug names. When a community member breaks the terms and conditions (by mentioning a drug name or using foul language) we quickly remove the post and send the community member a message of why we removed the post and ask them to repost.
8. Buy a Social Marketing Platform tool. These new breed of tools sit on top of all your social media accounts and enable resources to approve content and comments easily before it can get posted. Some also offer the ability to create a “Black List” of words and then work with Facebook, blogs and the like to automatically restrict users from posting if they use a word on the “Black List”. We have done an extensive analysis of the tools in the space and highly recommend Shoutlet.
9. Be proactive. The community manager should be actively reviewing the blogs in the disease area relevant to your product and comment on others blogs. This establishes trust and relationships. A relatively new development is the ability of the admin for a Facebook page to use Facebook as the page. Community managers now have the ability to go to another page and comment as the brand (or name of the Facebook page you created).
10. Know your influencers. Do the research at the beginning of the project to find the bloggers who write about the disease that is relevant. The community manager should reach out to them individually and introduce themselves. If you have done something interesting, point it out and ask them to write about it.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 2nd, 2011 at 1:10 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.