Mismatch: Pharma and Social Networking

I’m frustrated. And so are a lot of others!

Pharma (with its highly regulated communications) is a Web 1.0 industry lagging behind a Web 2.0 world. The one-way, crafted, and filtered messaging that mark industries such as pharma means that there can be little participation in the conversational, participatory web.

Social media is changing marketing – the microphone is increasingly in the hands of ordinary people (as I put it in a recently-submitted chapter for a group-authored book), and the lightning-fast and exponentially-multiplied messaging that occurs via social media means that the control of the medium by professional communicators is decreasing rapidly.

But networked, evolving, and uncontrolled communications are the polar opposite of what pharma has to practice. Frustrating.

Here are some recent articles on this conundrum:

Why can’t Pharma move beyond Web 1.0?

Pharma says, What Social Network?

Social Networking sites for Cancer docs: Bang or Bust?

Will pharma be left behind? Will the discussion go on all around the marketplace, with industry players held captive to a “mute” button? Sure looks like it right now – what do you think?