Social Storm

Last July, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) organized a live webinar to discuss its two new draft guidelines for social media. The guidelines had been in the works for more than five years and the biopharma industry was eager to hear the agency’s presentation. Unfortunately, the online event suffered from technical difficulties—log-in problems, blank screens, sound glitches—leading to some joshing from the industry press. “The audio was intermittent and unintelligible,” quipped BioWorld, “similar, some would say, to the FDA’s message on social media as a whole.”Nearly three-quarters of adults who use the internet are active on social media, according to The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, and these interactions are transforming the business world. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube—they all allow companies to communicate with customers faster and more frequently than ever before. This has obvious potential for improving public relations, advertising and brand building. That may be particularly true for the health sector, with 59% of US citizens turning to the internet for medical information, according to the Pew data.But for the biotech and pharma industry, social media also poses major challenges. If someone leaves a comment on a company’s YouTube video complaining of a rash, should that be reported as an adverse event? Is it possible to fully explain a drug’s risks and benefits in a 140-character tweet? Should clinical trial participants be prevented from using online forums to share information about a drug’s effectiveness and side effects, which poses the risk of unblinding trials? Meanwhile, many advocacy organizations traditionally at odds with the biotech industry—groups against animal testing, vaccines and genetically modified organisms, to name a few—are pulling off successful social media campaigns to influence public opinion.Read more in...Nature Biotechnology, January 2015.