Leveraging Social Media in the Pharmaceutical Industry - Innovation and Marketing in the Pharmaceutical Industry - page 470

highly accessible and scalable social media, firms need to rethink the way they
communicate with and reach customers. Using social media, marketers can more
effectively connect with customers, join and build communities, collect market
research data, deploy an application, advertise products, announce promotions, moni-
tor, influence, and initiate word of mouth (WOM), and let social media drive sales.
In this chapter, we provide researchers and managers with a comprehensive
review of social media, in particular, in the pharmaceutical industry. Although our
discussion is relevant to different constituents of the pharmaceutical industry, such
as drug manufacturers, pharmacies, pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), and gov-
ernment agencies such as Federal Drug Authority (FDA), Center for Diseases
Control (CDC), and National Institute of Health (NIH), since pharmaceutical firms
are major players in the industry and to keep the scope manageable, we focus on
pharmaceutical manufacturers and marketers. Importantly, we shed light on how
researchers can explore important issues and unearth key insights on social media
and how practitioners can leverage social media for favorable outcomes.
The rest of this chapter is organized as follows. In Sect. 16.2 , we discuss social
media in the context of pharmaceutical industry. In Sect. 16.3 , we review the social
media and the word of mouth literatures and discuss studies relevant to the pharma-
ceutical industry. In Sect. 16.4 , we discuss how pharmaceutical firms can leverage
social media effects.

16.2 When Social Media Meet the Pharmaceutical Industry

16.2.1 Benefits of Social Media for Pharmaceutical Firms

For pharmaceutical firms, social media marketing presents several advantages over
the traditional media. First, social media allow firms to listen as well. Engaging
online customers in dialogs about the company, product, and brand, firms can build
relationships with online influencers, hear feedbacks from customers who use their
products and services and understand the needs of customers and the market.
Second, social media allow firms to speak more cost efficiently, to more customers,
and louder than that of traditional media. Social media are cost efficient because most
social media are free while the traditional promotional activities such as professional
detailing and direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) are more expensive.
Third, social media offer a new channel for firms to reach customers who cannot
be reached easily via traditional media. In the past, pharmaceutical firms connected
with physicians mainly through sales representatives and rarely had any direct link
to patients other than the one-way mass media broadcasting. As the prescription
decision is increasingly becoming a result of joint decision made between the physi-
cian and the patient, pharmaceutical companies are investing significant amount of
resources to promote drugs to patients as well (Ding and Eliashberg 2008 ). However,
consumer adoption of the digital video recorder (DVR) such as TiVo has attenuated
the effectiveness of TV broadcasting.