As I type, most of the attendees of e-Patient Connections will be asleep, apart perhaps from the jet-lagged Europeans, who will be wide awake at 2.30am.

I followed the #epatcon hashtag yesterday rather more assiduously than I had intended to subsequent to my reading about Johnson & Johnson’s solicitation of user-generated content for its YouTube channel for money.

On the basis that this policy was clearly stated on the official Johnson and Johnson blog JNJ BTW over five months ago (‘Calling Mommy Vloggers’, 20 May 2009), you could hardly call this a revelation. I missed this announcement at the time, and it didn’t seem to make waves among attending delegates, although it caught the eye of some remote followers.

So, what’s my problem?

Firstly, I have an innate resistance to the idea that opinions that have been purchased are worth listening to.

Secondly, I dislike the ‘marketing creep’ that activities of this sort are symptomatic of.

Thirdly, I fail to see how campaigns such as this serve to advance pharma’s reputation within social media spaces.

Johnson and Johnson requested content from its viewership for money, and content was forthcoming. This is a transactional rather than a relational interaction which at best you might describe as a relational construct. Yet what has been constructed, here? JNJ BTW’s tag line is ‘our people and perspectives’, and everyone who has contributed to this project for cash merits the possessive sense that the phrase connotes.

Is this what social media are for? To take simple opportunities to share, engage, and learn, and monetize them?

This may explain why advertisers and marketers are so keen to help commercial interests find ways of draping existing business practices over new media environments. Outside of the healthcare arena, this diminution of the progressive potential that inheres within social media does not bother me especially. That is not to say that I like it, rather that I am not surprised by it in view of how deeply immured and desensitized we are collectively to the vagaries of the dominant economic arrangements we endure.

However, within the contexts of discussions concerning healthcare focusing upon the patient (and which conversations about healthcare should not focus first and foremost on the patient), I require more rigorous strictures when it comes to defining the terms of the debate.

As I ask in a video accompanying this post, when pharma treats the people it serves in this manner, whose needs are being putting first?

Update: I created a Twtpoll to go along with this post (‘Should pharma solicit user-generated content to publish via its social media presences for cash?’) which you can find here

There has been a considerable amount of discussion this week in the health care blog world regarding Google sidewiki, a new addition to the Google Toolbar allowing a user to ‘contribute helpful information to any web page’.

Phil Baumann, Steve Woodruff, John Mack and ePharma Rx have posted thoughtful contributions, whilst the #hcsmeu, #hcsm and #hcmktg communities have all alighted upon the question. Debate has polarized between those who think the issue is irrelevant until such time as sidewiki has a substantial user base (‘if no-one is watching, nothing is happening’), and those who consider that a breach has been made in the pharma marketing dam (‘regardless of who is watching, something is happening’).

For the record: I side with the latter position.

Google sidewiki posts will only be visible to those who also have the tool installed and active in their browser. Individuals can edit, delete or share their own posts, but apart from flagging entries as not being useful, nothing can be done by the owners of the website in question to mediate the comment that has been left other than respond to it.

This, of course, is the issue for pharma: will any given company want, or be able, to engage in debate regarding ‘helpful information’ added to its yourdrugnamehere.com websites when it may consider the information submitted as being far from ‘helpful’ with regards to its own marketing strategies.

What if the information (which could, of course, include a patient reporting an adverse event) receives a lot of ‘Useful?’ approvals? (see below).

John Mack has forced the issue by leaving sidewiki posts on the US Viagra and Alli sites to see what response, if any, is forthcoming from Pfizer and GSK:

At the time of posting, John’s Viagra post had received nine positive votes and one negative vote. This is something of a test case, of course, as the health care social media community is currently interested in, and aware of, this topic.

Nevertheless, these interventions have moved the debate from the theoretical to the factual.

Google sidewiki comments now exist on these sites (sidewiki users may wish to check out Alli’s UK site too; click ‘next’ in the bottom right hand corner)

Predictably, pharma is nowhere to be seen. All of the blog posts listed above (but especially Phil Baumann’s) make some valuable suggestions as to how pharma should deport itself. In essence, these can be distilled into one word strategy:

Engage.

At the heart of this conflagration is the industry’s reputation as being controlling, remote, and faceless, which it presently richly deserves.

However, over the last twelve months I have both interacted online and met face-to-face with scores of pharma employees who have overturned many of my own preconceptions about the industry being peopled solely by soulless corporate drones obeying the will of their paymasters and overlords. That’s not to say that there may not be legions of the latter in the sallying ranks of the pharma army, but that’s not my concern.

Rather, I’d like to see the principled, engaged individuals that these companies are lucky enough to have on their payrolls do what they want to do, namely begin to transition their marketing strategies from the transactional to the relational mode using social media.

With Google sidewiki allowing annotation downs to tweet level, right now is an ideal time for pharma to begin to engage. This tool may or may not set a fire under web users’ imaginations, but the next innovation may.

Pharma needs to prepare for an historical inevitability: the appearance of unmediated, non-approvable, unblockable user comments on their websites.

How?

See above.