Will pharma twitter?

The technology is still in its early days, but will more pharmaceutical companies take the plunge? And will they fare better in the Twittersphere than they have in the blogosphere? To date, only a handful of pharmaceutical company blogs remain active. Among them are Johnson & Johnson’s site, JNJBTW (www.jnjbtw.com), up and running for more than two years, and GlaxoSmithKline’s (GSK’s) “ American Health: More Than Medicine” (www.more thanmedicine.us.gsk.com/blog), which went live in January 2009. GSK’s branded site, AlliConnect, and Centocor Ortho Biotech’s site, CNTO411, launched last year with much fanfare, have both gone silent. Centocor blames its blog’s inactivity on “structural changes” to its organization, but one wonders whether the pharmaceutical industry is still not quite ready to take on social media marketing and the regulatory hurdles around reporting adverse events, presenting a fair balance of benefit and risk information, and avoiding the promotion of off-label use. Pharmaceutical companies face a new opportunity with Twitter and a new challenge, not only in complying with regulatory guidelines but also in finding valuable ways to use it to connect with the patients and physicians they serve. Whether companies will successfully embrace Twitter or resist it and be left behind is a hot topic among those who blog about the pharmaceutical industry, and everyone is weighing in with opinions and predictions. Some question the ability of pharmaceutical companies to achieve fair balance within Twitter’s 140-character construct; others say there are plenty of beneficial uses for those tweets, from enhancing customer service to providing physicians with insights into patient needs and feedback from the online community. One blogger theorized that the “tweet limit” might actually strengthen Twitter’s appeal to those in the pharmaceutical industry, especially compliance officials and lawyers: “[They] think it’s harder to get into trouble in 140 characters than it is with the endless sheet of blank web space that is a blog.”2 Still other bloggers say the ultimate key to Twitter’s success in the pharmaceutical industry is how it is used. As Silja Chouquet noted on her patient-focused Web site, WhyDotPharma:3