Healthy Skepticism Library item: 16103

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Listening to consumers on social media and the drug industry
World of DTC Marketing 2009 Jul 26
http://www.worldofdtcmarketing.com/files/aa28e3db6a7e5fe0a97139c9f2b36a71-756.html#unique-entry-id-756

Full text:

The final results are in from a quant study we did on social media and the drug industry. The bottom line? Sites that bring people together to share and learn are good but most consumers don’t want to have a dialogue with drug companies. Why? Because they have better sources of information and they are not sure that any drug company could provide them with a value exchange in a conversation.

The purpose of this research was to determine, before allocating resources, whether a social media strategy was viable for a new drug that is going to be launched later this year pending FDA approval. In addition to the quant study I also conduced and internal capabilities review to determine if the company has the necessary resources to execute a social media strategy to achieve the results they wanted to meet business objectives.

First we found out that the primary users of social media, for health information, are women (DUH!). Men might go there if there is a trigger event, such as illness, but women tend to be more thorough when it comes to the number of health sites they go to and the amount of information they collect. A page on Facebook, where people can interact and educate themselves, was a winner whereas a Twitter page was not. “Women embrace the community when it comes to health and are more willing to share stories and exchange information”. Twitter did not score well because people (it was people who are aware of what Twitter is but we also provided a summary of Twitter) wanted to know “what can a drug company tell me that the Internet and the my doctor can’t?”

We also found that although people will go a health social media site they will view the information with a degree of skepticism. Thus social media is just one more channel to research health information on the long journey to learn all they can to be empowered patients. What we did also find is that people believe a social media site sponsored by their physician would be of great use if it helped them save time and money.

As for internal capabilities we did find that to keep patients and consumers engaged social media sites need to be updated a lot more frequently than typical drug.com websites. There was considerable feedback on patients who has bookmarked sites only to find that the site had not been updated in 3-4-5 months. Patients want to know the latest news on their health conditions and especially want to know about new potential uses and side effects of drugs already on the market without having to search for it on the Internet.