Facebook, not FDA, issues social media guidance for Pharma

Did you know Mark Zuckerberg worked for the FDA in his spare time? He might as well since Facebook is now doing more to provide social media guidance for pharma companies than the FDA has done in the past few years.

In case you didn’t hear, Facebook implemented its “no more closed comment walls” change Monday as promised. The net result is that pharma companies can no longer close comments on their fan page walls. This has caused some pharma companies to pull down their pages and others to ramp up their moderation. But what’s really interesting about a change like this is that it shows how much power Facebook really has in our society.

More than half the U.S. population is on Facebook. And a percentage of the population that isn’t on it can’t be because they aren’t old enough. That puts Facebook in a position to push the dominoes when we are approaching a fundamental way in the way we communicate with a certain industry. And don’t think the FDA doesn’t know that.

I’m just taking a guess here — I don’t know anyone who works at the FDA or anything — but I think they see Facebook changing the game on pharma here as a perfect storm. Because now the FDA can sit on its collective hands and adopt a “wait and see” mentality without taking a true stand on how drug companies can or can’t communicate with customers via social. If they wait just a little bit longer, they won’t have to issue any guidance and deal with any controversy. Facebook is doing all that for them.

Allow me to make a prediction. A year from now, pharma companies will be using Facebook like other industry brands do today. They’ll have open walls, fan page policies and they’ll moderate comments. It won’t be that big of a deal. And for many pharma brands, the “what if” scenarios that had them in a state of paralysis by analysis will be a thing of the past. We’re already seeing evidence of this from pharma brands like Sanofi-aventis, that say they have seen no problems from the more than 66,000 people who like their pages.

Consumer brands did this same dance several years ago. They had similar what-if conversations. They were hesitant to be first to get in the water when no one really knew how cold it was. But the one big difference between consumer brands and pharma is the FDA. Or so we thought. Because what happened with consumer brands was that a few brave souls who saw the value of companies participating in social media decided they were going to, sorry Nike, just do it and see what happened. And once they put their toe in the water and the world didn’t end, other consumer brands quickly followed suit.

But few have been so brave when it comes to pharma because of the sensitivity around the product and the threat of the FDA coming down hard on drug brands that tried to navigate the social media waters. Until now. Facebook decided the wait ends this week. And I think the FDA is just fine with that because now they don’t have to make the decision.

What’s crazy is that a government agency and industry full of some of the smartest minds in the world debated the pharma and social media issue for years and would have kept right on debating it with no end in site. But Zuckerberg and friends got tired of the debate. So they stopped it. And that’s the world we live in today.

Related posts: