FDA and Social Media Marketing in the Pharmaceutical industry

Written on 10 Aug 2010 by
Category, Tags : Health

FDA

If you are running a pharmaceutical company or you have been working in the pharmaceutical industry for several years in North America (laboratory, CRO (Contract Research Organization)), then you should have noticed that it’s the FDA that make the rules.

All tasks should be carried out according to the standards set by the American Food and Drug Administration, that’s it and there’s no way around.

But however, what happens, when it comes to the new forms of social marketing like the Social Medias, which are being used to promote pharmaceutical products?

The FDA will soon be releasing some guidelines over the use of Social Media by the pharmaceutical industry; but according to Peter Pitts, a former FDA executive, you should not be expecting some kind of self explanatory regulations or a “How to” guideline for pharmaceutical marketing in Social Media.

There still exist present numerous examples for the use of Web 2.0 in the medical and pharmaceutical sector.

Some definite study cases of Brands are:

-Support community for Alli, weight loss product from GSK
-Valeant and epilepsy: private community between members
-23andME: creation and animation of a blog
-PKU(Phenylketonuria) from Biomarin: Forums + Blogs + Groups + Albums
-Voice of Diabetes: Personal history sharing for diabetes patients, from Novo Nordisk

Dose of Digital also lists the independent social initiatives (for example: BreastCancer.org), online communities for physicians and nurses (for example: NurseConnect), the Facebook pages of labs and others, the YouTube channels (as example: Abbott), Twitter accounts (for instance: Novartis or Roche), the Blogs (for example: Avenir de la Sante, in French from GSK), or the hospitals in social networks (see the list of Ed Bennett).

Here’s an example of case study:

Tech Blogger.

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