Will Pharma put their money where your mouse is?

“Digital for Pharma is like sex for high school students ‑ everyone's talking about it, wanting it, but no-one's doing it properly.”

Or so said Google’s Industry Head of Consumer Goods & Healthcare Jens Monsees at the recent DigiPharm Europe meeting ‑ Europe's leading digital marketing conference for senior pharmaceutical executives. While digital for Pharma is still in its infancy, particularly when compared to other more consumer focused industries, the two day meeting showcased a number of Pharma companies that are leading the digital Pharma charge. Some great examples included:

• Pfizer ‑ Man MOT and Can you feel my pain
• Janssen – Psoriasis360 and Living with ADHD
• Sanofi ‑ Sanofi.Tv,
• Boehringer Ingelheim – Drive4COPD and Famously Unpronounceable
• Bayer – Didget

Cohn&Wolfe’s Healthcare practice has been part of this push, such as working with Medtronic, the Medtronic Foundation and the Arrhythmia Alliance to develop the Know Your Pulse iPhone app, or with Lilly to develop an online training platform focused on digital.
 
However, there seemed to be general confusion amongst those at DigiPharm as to the importance of social media for the Pharma industry. At the conference opening, delegates were asked if social media was overrated for Pharma. Most answered yes, but in the two days that followed there were robust discussions on the key role that social media will, and does, play in allowing Pharma to engage with patients and healthcare professionals.
 
The time for questioning the relevance and impact of social media has long passed. It would be like questioning the relevance and impact of other media channels; when was the last time you heard a PR or marketing professional say that TV, radio or print was overrated? Early on, Janssen’s former EMEA Marketing Communications Manager Alex Butler made the point that if Pharma are going to be doing anything online, they’ve got to be doing it socially – anything else is irrelevant. Jens Monsees, pictured to the right, supported this when he said Google believes that social will be, and already is, a huge, tremendous movement on the web ‑ not just for Pharma, but for everyone.
 
It was discussed that social media gives the Pharma industry the chance to humanise itself, which it needs to do to build trust. If Pharma companies aren’t personable, presenting a human face in their social media communications, patients and the public won’t trust them. Silja Chouquet, the founder of WhydotPharma, noted it used to be that companies needed to be trusted to enter into social media, but, now, companies need to be in social media to be trusted. Digital provides a great opportunity for Pharma companies to inform patients about how they work – a chance for them to be viewed as individual companies, not a monolithic industry.
 
Despite this opportunity, one of Pharma’s key problems with digital remains; Pharma follows a legal framework of which most of the public, and patients, are unaware. The challenge is whether this legal framework of behaviour supersedes the ethical framework in which their online activity should take place. That is: it may be legal, or fall within a regulatory code to do something, but is it the right thing to do? And how will doing it be perceived online? As Nick Broughton, Managing Director of Pharmaceutical Ethics, noted: in the digital space, ethically competent companies will dominate ‑ rule based hand-sitters will fail.
 
You can check out the DigiPharm conversation yourself on these one and two Twitter streams.