There's one thing you can say about the pharmaceutical industry: It's not shy about pushing its products. Between stuff to make you happy and stuff to make you sleep, ads for pharmaceuticals have become ubiquitous.
So why are these same companies so shy about engaging with their customers?
While other industries have latched onto the opportunities offered by social media, pharma companies have been hesitant to do so, research shows. And it's not because they have any doubts about its potential value.
A recent study by Cutting Edge Information found that 82 percent of the big pharma companies surveyed recognize the advantages of using social media. But many of those same companies conceded they're keeping a cautious distance due to concerns about regulatory issues and return on investment (ROI).
Does it pay to engage in conversations with your customers? Cutting Edge researchers contend that demonstrating ROI has long been a shortcoming of digital marketing in general, and social media in particular -- across the board, not just for pharma.
In fact, when asked about the importance of "demonstrating ROI," survey respondents rated it 7.2 on a scale of 1 to 10.
As everyone with an interest in analytics knows, it's not easy to measure ROI in social media -- at least compared to traditional channels like print and television. Social media -- and the data it generates -- is a different animal altogether, isn't it?
Some people understand that: They acknowledge that social media is more about listening and engaging with customers. While that's hard to translate to dollars and cents, it does create other long-term benefits, like a better understanding of consumer behavior.
Because of this, some pharma companies are jumping in, creating patient and healthcare professional communities, Facebook pages, YouTube channels, and Twitter feeds. According to a September report from IDC Health Insights, "Worldwide Pharmaceutical Social Media Analytics 2012 Vendor Assessment," pharma marketing departments are "starving for new ways to measure market sentiment, competitive analysis and promotional effectiveness" in areas that were previously difficult to gauge.
The report notes:
While spend on outbound social media marketing is lagging in 2012, investment in social media analytics software and services is growing and expected to increase significantly for the next several years.
More health-related conversations to come? What do you think? Are you comfortable discussing your treatment options for something like wrinkles on Facebook? What about a life-threatening disease? Do you want to engage in casual conversation with other people who may or may not know what they're talking about? And what can the pharmaceutical companies learn from the conversations?
Beth writes Anne Hale, senior director of analytics at Pfizer, summed up the pharma industry quite nicely .... "We're like the Mad Men of industry. We're struggling along in many ways in 1950s mode because of our industry and business model." While so [many] industries are dealing with big-data, pharma struggles with "no data," she quipped. Listening to Hale it seemed pharma may have bigger fish to fry than social data. (Hard to believe, right?!)
Given the increasingly competitive environment of Big Pharma, I'd think you could lay money on their jumping into social media, sentiment analysis, etc. bigtime in a frenzy to try to get an increasingly precise handle on what new pharmaceutical delicacies they can concoct, or at least how they can make their current offerings ever more attractive to medically hysterical consumers...
I'm not a pharma user at all (knock wood) but I suspect those taking drugs may have some aversion to checking twitter for 'latest' news about a drug product.
TV commercials, and print advertising is a way to sell products to a huge audience. Shotgunning the message seems to work well. Using Twitter might just be a bit of a stretch to efficiently make sales or keep customers buying. But testing ROI can't hurt.
Twitter also is more targeted because it can use followers, where TV broadcast commercials are simply put out there for people to see and hear, or not. Twitter isn't the most highly tailored marketing channel, but its more refined than simple broadcasting.
@ mnorth - True, but commercials are broadcast to chosen markets, which hopefully are in compliance with the law in where they are being broadcast. Twitter however, is international.
"...almost impossible to see who exactly you are tweeting to..."
Couldn't the same be said for TV spots? It's impossible to know who you're communicating to when you run a TV ad that says if you have x, y, and z symptoms, you should talk to your doctor about (drug). How does a pharm know when they've crossed the line from marketing into medical advise? I suppose the courts will tell them on a case-by-case basis.
Per the article "One of the tweets in question, relating to the launch of Sativex, read: "Sativex launched in UK for the treatment of spasticity due to Multiple Sclerosis." and the problem lies here. Unless you certify and screen every person who follows you, as Bayer failed to do, then it is almost impossible to see who exactly you are tweeting to. This means that firms could be marketing prescription drugs to the wider public, the main thing the law intends to stop."
The way I see it, social media is hip-deep (or more) as the new medium for marketing, and big pharmacies have been puring billions into marketing for years, so why not add this channel to their marketing stream? I've gotten to know a number of doctors over the years through a residency program at our local hospital, and they have told me stories of pushes by the big pharms that would make you queasy (such as bald-faced kickback offers). The docs have told me that you'd be surprised how often they hear a patient say something like: "I saw this ad on TV for _____(fill in drug name here)_____, and I need you write a prescprition for it." Now it will be, I read on Twitter some research that says I need...." You get the idea. It's marketing.
@Noreen, Anne Hale, senior director of analytics at Pfizer, summed up the pharma industry quite nicely in a presentation she delivered at last month's Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit (hosted by IE). "We're like the Mad Men of industry. We're struggling along in many ways in 1950s mode because of our industry and business model." While so industries are dealing with big-data, pharma struggles with "no data," she quipped. Listening to Hale it seemed pharma may have bigger fish to fry than social data. (Hard to believe, right?!)
LEADERS FROM THE BUSINESS AND IT COMMUNITIES DUEL OVER CRITICAL TECHNOLOGY ISSUES
The Current Discussion
Visual Analytics: Who Carries the Onus? The Issue: Data visualization is an up-and-coming technology for businesses that want to deliver analytical results in a visual way, enabling analysts the ability to spot patterns more easily and business users to absorb the insight at a glance and better understand what questions to ask of the data. But does it make more sense to train everybody to handle the visualization mandate or bring on visualization expertise? Our experts are divided on the question. The Speakers: Hyoun Park, Principal Analyst, Nucleus Research; Jonathan Schwabish, US Economist & Data Visualizer
To save this item to your list of favorite AllAnalytics content so you can find it later in your Profile page, click the "Save It" button next to the item.
If you found this interesting or useful, please use the links to the services below to share it with other readers. You will need a free account with each service to share an item via that service.
Elizabeth Barth-Thacker, a BI and informatics technology manager at Humana, tells us how her team is creating data transparency and building engagement with the business – with the help of an internal collaboration portal called Humanalytics.
Speaking at SAS Global Forum Executive Conference, Rajeev Kaul, SVP of pricing at OfficeMax, uses a Chinese proverb to explain one of the reasons he's deploying SAS Visual Analytics.
In an All Analytics interview, Mike Cavaretta, technical leader, predictive analytics at Ford Research & Advanced Engineering, shares how big-data is fueling vehicle decisions.
Analytics professionals and SAS executives share how organizations can get on with their work so much faster when working in a high-performance and visual analytics environment.
Analytics professionals who attended SAS's recent Executive Briefing in New York share how they think visual analytics might help their organizations get better value from data.
At Boeing, effective decision making comes down to this simple formula: QxA=E, as executive Jerry Allyne explained at the recent INFORMS analytics conference.
Whether working in major league sports, financial services, or healthcare, analytics, and data, professionals are checking out how visual analytics and high-performance technologies can help them optimize their environments, shrink their cycle times, and improve decision making, as attendees at the recent SAS Executive Briefing in New York share with us.
SAS CEO Jim Goodnight speaks with us at a recent SAS Executive Briefing about getting a feel for what's in your big-data and other new realities powered by advanced analytics.
Dynamic data visualizations let analysts and business users interact with the data, changing variables or drilling down into data points, and see results in a flash. Advance your use of data visualization with tools that support features like auto-charting, explanatory pop-ups, and mobile sharing.
No doubt your enterprise is amassing loads of data for fact-based decision-making. Hand in hand with all that data comes big computational requirements. Can traditional IT infrastructure handle the increasing number and complexity of your analytical work? Probably not, which is why you need a backend rethink. Big data calls for a high-performance analytics infrastructure, as Fern Halper, a partner at the IT consulting and research firm, Hurwitz & Associates, discusses here.
Redbox's bright-red DVD kiosks are all but ubiquitous these days, located in more than 28,000 spots across the country. Jayson Tipp, Redbox VP of Analytics and CRM, provides an insider's look at how the company has accomplished its phenomenal nine-year growth.
InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), a seven-brand global hotelier, has woven analytics into the fabric of its operations. David Schmitt, director of performance strategy and planning, shares IHG's analytics story and his lessons learned.
Tweet This
8 
3 
