Reaching Out to Healthcare Consumers

I’ve been reading Groundswell lately, and have really been enjoying it. There’s so much I can relate to from an Internet Marketing perspective. I recently completed Part I, which did a great job of summarizing how consumers are using social technologies in a way that is greatly impacting, and in a sense controlling, organizations. I especially liked reading about the social technographics profiles businesses can create to target their users, and what social technologies would best suit each profile.

One of the observations the authors make is the strict regulatory compliance healthcare companies face when it comes to using these social technologies. As someone who’s worked with many pharmaceutical clients (during my work at Razorfish), I’ve experience firsthand what a challenge this can be. From a web content standpoint, pharmaceutical companies are already restricted to what claims they can make regarding their products – for example, one company I worked with had a requirement that stated it could only use the phrase “prevent” if it was preceded by “helps.” As far as making their sites more interactive, many of these companies are forced to use “unidirectional” interactive features like videos, questionnaires and stories of satisfied users sharing their experiences. I think it’s great that sites like MyAlli.com and Dailystrength.com have recently started to break that mold by including discussion forums on their sites. Nevertheless, the forums must still be very closely monitored for medical recommendations posted by users, negative feedback, etc.

A great outlet for companies who are not able to utilize “bidirectional” features like blogs and forums – due to government regulations, lack of human resources, or for other reasons – is the microsite. A microsite is essentially an extension of a company’s main web site, branded or unbranded, dedicated to a related cause and designed for community appeal. For example, www.inyourcorner.com was designed by AstraZeneca as a support site for women with breast cancer; at the same time, it clearly promotes the drug Arimidex.

Some related thoughts are posted in the article I wrote for Ad News/Philly Ad Club.