Drug companies, marketers need to monitor their brands on social media
This post is by Adam Gaub, lead editor, SmartBrief for Health Care Marketers.
A new report issued today by marketing-technology company wool.labs analyzes seven years of social-media data and details the decline in consumers’ trust of GlaxoSmithKline’s diabetes drug Avandia, as well as in their doctors and the Food and Drug Administration.
GSK has survived many calls for the FDA to have Avandia pulled from the market — but the company may have been better off had it pulled the drug pre-emptively. The damage to both the drug and the company’s reputation in the eyes of the public has been tremendous — especially since 2006, when the heart risks associated with the drug began to be more widely discussed.
An FDA advisory panel voted in July to keep the drug on the market with new limitations, while also voting that the drug posed more heart risks than competitors’ products, such as Takeda Pharmacuetical’s Actos. The FDA is expected to issue a final ruling on the status of the drug in the weeks ahead.
Wool.labs cites 2006 as a critical year for GSK and the drug, as “patient anger grows because they have to figure out too much on their own.” Patients had been putting up with weight gain and edema associated with the drug for several years, but when doctors continued to prescribe the drug and others like it (Actos and Rezulin) after connections to congenital heart failure started coming out, patient confidence in their doctors also dropped.
A recent Consumer Reports survey backs this up, as 69% of those polled say they believe drugmakers influence doctors when it comes to prescribing medications, while 81% say they harbor concerns about the rewards pharmaceutical companies give doctors for writing a certain number of prescriptions for a particular drug.
The wool.labs report outlines how Avandia’s public standing further declined in 2007, as comments on forums and social-media sites began to shift toward anger at the company and doctors for not disclosing the full nature of possible side effects that were beginning to be reported by media outlets. Today, comments analyzed by the firm register more on the surprise scale than anything else — surprise among consumers that Avandia is still on the market.
With GSK facing numerous lawsuits from patients and families of deceased patients who had taken Avandia, wool.labs warns that a closer eye to social media could have given GSK — and other companies in a similar situation — a better idea of what consumers were saying, and given them a leg up on reacting to address concerns.
Image credit: dra_schwartz, iStockphoto
Posted by Richard_Meyer on August 27th, 2010 at 10:13 am
This article does not tell the whole story behind Avandia. As recently as this week a new clinical trial has reported that Avandia is as safe as Actos another diabetes drug. How can a drug company use social media to explain to ordinary people the results of what clinical trials are actually saying but more importantly will the FDA allow them to ? Social media is NOT the channel for this but transparency is and that is where GSK dropped the ball. The perception is that GSK put sales ahead of patient safety with Avandia and to compound the situation there were reports of hidden data from the FDA and health care professionals. The other issue is that even if GSK had used social media the majority of consumers dont trust drug companies when it comes to social media. What GSK should have done is just be up front with everyone rather than point fingers and deny. Social media is not going to save drug brands
Posted by Adam Gaub on August 27th, 2010 at 11:06 am
Hi Richard — good insights on the blog posting. We're working on getting the updated wool.labs report up, which delves into this a little more in depth than we went into here, obviously, and I'd agree with you that GSK failed with transparency. I think what the wool.labs report is getting at is that GSK and other firms can do a better job simply by monitoring what is being said and then using that to direct how they interact with the populace – though not necessarily via social media in return.
It does raise a larger question of who, or what the American people trust. Multiple studies over the past decade or so have shown a declining trust in traditional media, and much of the public has always been skeptical of whatever government tells them, regardless of who's in power. In this day in age, what then becomes the most effective way to reach consumers on issues where they will actually listen with some measure of open-mindedness?
Posted by Carla Bobka on August 27th, 2010 at 1:24 pm
Vacuums wreak havoc. And those who fill them own them, not those who watch them being created even if you own the brand in the middle of it. This is about acknowledging risk areas. The FDA restrictions on communication topics and formats are a fact of life for drug makers and patients alike. As a business you still need to know about where those vacuums are and how you will deal with them when the system you're in allows you to. It's part of risk management.
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