I know that many pharma brand marketers are constrained by their own regulatory people who will not let them participate in social media programs or even monitor the conversation happening all around them. Well here is an example of one company doing just the opposite.
UCB, headquartered in Brussels with a U.S. presence in Georgia, just announced a partnership with PatientsLikeMe (PLM) to create an online epilepsy community that enables patients to track the daily issues they confront living with the disease such as controlling their seizures and achieving treatment goals. The social community aspect should encourage patients, caregivers and researchers to share information with each other and help industry learn more about the disease and treatment experiences.
According to Medical Marketing & Media, UCB and PLM are working cooperatively to create a pharmacovigilance platform that will monitor the site for adverse events (only those associated with UCB products), which will then be reported directly to the FDA. No personal or identifiable information will be sent to either the FDA or UCB without the permission of the patient.
UCB is the first pharma company to partner with PatientsLikeMe to launch a patient community; the epilepsy community is expected to launch in early 2010
I have often said that it is only when those in the C-suite take social media seriously that things will happen. Kudos to UCB’s CEO who championed this initiative. In the press release announcing the initiative he said, “UCB has a longstanding commitment to improving the lives of people living with severe conditions. This partnership is exciting because for the first time, patients will be able to contribute their experiences and real-world data to ongoing epilepsy research.”
It’s always good to see this happening. It’s a must that pharma pay attention to social media, especially with so many off label uses. Their brand reputation is shaped by consumer sentiment and consumers are talking online.
I did a small case study on some consumer generated media about the epilepsy seizure treatment, Vimpat, please visit http://padennoble.com/2009/08/12/social-media-case-study-for-epilepsy-seizure-treatment/.
I chose to run a social media measurement analysis on the Vimpat brand for treatment of epilepsy related seizures as an internal case study. If you’d like access to the full social media measurement report based on the trial run of the software, we’ll provide it. It is a sampling of consumer generated mentions with sentiment about the product, associated keywords like Keppra and Lacosamide and Zonegran. Additionally I have monthly search volume for the related keywords, actual URLs and profile information of those that made the comments.
This was a test done for our social media measurement and brand reputation monitoring tool. We’ll give the data to you at no cost as our software has already collected it.
Excerpt from actual comments:
1. I’ve started the new med Vimpat …I’m not too impressed with it…I was much happier off of it. It is starting to remind me of the time I was on Keppra and that was a time I would like to forget.
2. I was also put on vimpat. … medicare isn’t covering it …this dose is like 1/5 the cost of the lamictal … and they covered lamictal… might take 2 weeks for the HMO to process the neurologists request…no guarantee that they’ll actually cover the meds.