What happens when you dip your pharma brand into social media?
I’ve been thinking about non-personal promotion a bit more since my previous post on Novartis’ FluFlix contest.
A casual search of Facebook for the top ten best-selling pharmaceutical brands of 2006 reveals that social groups already exist for most:
Primarily, these groups seem to provide an opportunity for support and treatment discussion among patients across the world. So far, no promotional messages are visible other than those along the lines of “Yeah, I take this drug and it works for me.” But it’s not a stretch to imagine pharmaceutical brand teams eventually getting involved in order to inform patients and, of course, promote product.
In fact, it has already started. Take a closer look at the Norvasc group above. Of the links above, only the Norvasc group was not, as far as I can tell, started by patients. It was actually started by some students as part of a pharmaceutical marketing project! I guess I’m not the only one who thought of this.
The number of people in any of these groups isn’t very big yet. Most contain fewer than 100 members. That’s not surprising, because most people taking these medications are older, and Facebook users are, well, not. But what happens when that 13-28 set currently dominating Facebook and other social media sites begin running brand teams in 5-10 years? Or what happens when enough users get to the point where they too require all these medications? And which pharmaceutical company will be first to untangle the regulatory hassle that creating a social media pharmaceutical promotion could entail?
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