A visionary for the future of Pharma marketing? Or just slow progress

Jon Richman has done a fine column in Advertising Age about the future of digital marketing for pharma. He is drawn into five major predictions
1. Patients will have a portable network tool showing recommendations from trusted friends
2. Service companies who match patients with similar conditions to each other using opt-ins from electronic medical records
3. Pharma will abandon their own websites and put all their information onto forums and public shared sites not within their ownership and control using personalisation through aggregation.
4. This will drive personalised newsletters focused on your personal interests
5. Insurance companies will pay doctors to participate in forums with patients

Some of his predictions are already here. Friendfeed can provide something like 1 already and 4 is being delivered B2C in other markets and industries.

This is backed up by research into patients and their views on social media done by Richard Meyer into whether consumers want to interact with Pharma companies using social media. He finds
1. They don’t
2. They research health on SM but are sceptical of advice found
3. Patients seek community engagement - ‘real life’ experiences for health issues
4. WOM is the most powerful tool.
5. Patients don’t associate FB, Twitter etc with health information (yet)

Take a look at his slide 5 where Richard writes the ‘perfect’ social media page for prescription drugs where they can learn what they need from a range of expert and public sources.

He concludes that one to one communication is NOT desired by patients (phew that’ll save a load of marketing $ cost). That brand ambassadors can spread the word on SM sites proving that WOM remains the most powerful tool but reinforcing the dominant female interest in this medium for pharma. Women like WOM and use it more than men.

I don’t think that the regulatory environment will hold pharma back for long. There was a flurry of excitement when Pfizer joined Twitter this week. Watching the growth of the Thinking Pharma twitter feed which I am monitoring and promoting, we went from a (near) standing start 3 weeks ago to 373 followers this morning blissfully ahead of some and way behind more established pharma bloggers and commentators. What is clear is a strategy of regular posts backed by comments and twitter engagement is putting the team onto the SM map and getting them noticed.

I particularly like the notion of pharma putting information onto third party sites with a low regulatory harness. Care will be needed but it should be possible to achieve. The strength of well used community engagement sites is speed of response to questions and a tool that enables the ‘dross’ answers that are not voted helpful to drop from the top of the list.

And so onto my other question for the morning, what will a branded drug advert look like in 2013?
Sticking my neck out here are my predictions
1. The images won’t be very different from today’s advertising
2. It will be interactive with links to a range of supplementary information which the viewer can choose.
3. If you want the parmacology dosing advice or the second stage drug testing results or access to a community of patient sufferers, it’s all there.
4. Pricing is public and any differential pricing (c.f. HIV/AIDs drugs) is openly stated

Any other suggestions?