The complexities, and lessons, of pharma social media

Pharma social media doesn’t lend itself to the instantaneous, say-anything culture of Twitter and Facebook. There are a lot of regulations about what can and can’t be said to market drugs; more often than not, tweets and Facebook messages must be run by the company’s compliance department for approval. (Other highly-regulated industries such as finance do the same.) PR reps and others involved with pharma social media efforts face a much longer process than counterparts in less regulated fields when they want to engage stakeholders in the social media space. But other industries might want to take notes. There’s a lot to be said for carefully planning the execution for an organization’s social media strategy. Pharma social media requires thought and consideration, which means, for the most part, the industry has been able to avoid the kind of PR disasters we’re always hearing about where someone posted something ill-considered on Twitter and faced terrible reputational consequences as a result. Caution doesn’t have to mean sucking the life out of your social media presence. While pharma social media content has to be worded carefully and vetted by legal professionals, the results can be impressively creative despite all of that caution. Some pharma companies have also found ways to empower customers and other independent third parties to speak about how certain drugs and conditions have impacted their lives, which is sort of like free good PR, so long as the people in question have good things to say. Not long ago, one pharma company that in trouble with federal regulators for posting a claim about a drug on Facebook that hadn’t been approved by the FDA, or something of that nature. This was despite the lack of formal rules regulating pharma social media content. The lesson there: even though there aren’t specific rules on the books, federal regulators are watching, and they are ready to come down on companies that step out of line. It’s probably best to leave pharma social media to professionals who understand all of the legal and reputational complexities that come with it. Luckily, more and more communication professionals are becoming experts on that very thing. The caution required for pharma social media requires the sort of creative thinking and careful consideration that I think should be applied even to social media strategies that don’t involve so many regulatory considerations.