Drug-Blog interactions: do blogs have a place in pharma marketing?

To understand the role blogging could play in pharma marketing, you need to understand the implications of web 2.0; where customers are no longer talked at through promotion, but for the most part just talk between themselves.

To fully appreciate what this means you must participate first hand in the ‘blogosphere’ (how well could someone who’s never watched TV understand TV programming or advertising?). Scanning a few blogs (like this one) doesn’t count. You need to get your hands dirty, by at least engaging in conversation through leaving comments, or preferably even starting your own blog(s). It’s easy and free; choose a mix of subjects, from work to outside interests, and if you like remain, anonymous.

Having done this for a few weeks, you’ll start to grasp the fundamentals of the medium. In essence, blogging is about informal conversations rather than promotional lectures, and there are different categories of these conversations.

While a ‘blog conversation’ between a pharma company and consumer is extremely difficult to create (regulations, speed and style of medium), a closed ‘blogversation’ between a company and health care professionals is far more manageable, although not without steep challenges; e.g. does your subject area have the scope to generate a daily or weekly blog post, and who’s going to write it?

The blogversation that most marketers tend to want to get in on is the one between consumers or customers themselves. Trying to infiltrate this blogversation through fake blogging (flogging) is marketing suicide. See my own blog post on that here.

However, observing and learning from those conversations, and even reacting positively to them, is becoming a crucial piece of the marketing mix. Basically, if these people are successful at blogging, they have become opinion leaders, and need to be treated the same way you would treat other key opinion leaders.

In short, blogging, while still in its infancy, is a preview of where modern communication and media is headed. As such, even though there are many barriers (including our own mind-sets) in the way, it’s crucial to really understand this medium rather than either ignore, or crudely trample all over it.

This is part of a fuller review of pharma blogging which you can find here.