Leveraging Social Media in the Pharmaceutical Industry - Innovation and Marketing in the Pharmaceutical Industry - page 483

16.3.3 Unresolved Research Questions

Whether pharmaceutical marketers should leverage social media is not an issue
anymore. The question is how to strategically plan and execute social media cam-
paigns. Both researchers and practitioners seek better understanding of how online
and offline word of mouth operates in the context of pharmaceutical industry. There
is a long list of unresolved research questions in this field as summarized below.

When : When to enter social media? Are there pioneering advantages and/or fol-
lower advantages (Varadarajan et al. 2008 )? During which stage of a product's life
cycle, should a product be promoted most through social media marketing?

Where : Where should firms start a social media marketing campaign? Blogs,
Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, or across all social media outlets? Should firms spon-
sor an existing community or create their own?

Whom : Who should firms target? Who are the opinion leaders and influencers?
Should drug companies use their existing call plans as a social media target list?
Should firms target loyal patients and heavy prescribers? How should they optimize
sales force resource allocation so that it leverages the power of WOM?

What : What should be the contents of social media campaigns? Should they be
branded or nonbranded? How should firms respond to negative effects or adverse
attacks? How should they leverage social media to mitigate the impact of negative
events such as recalls and competitive launches? Should they take proactive actions
to communicate with patient, physician, and regulatory communities prior to the
outbreak of negative events?

How : How does WOM affect a drug and how does the effect change over a prod-
uct's life cycle? Which therapeutic category should be promoted, using which social
media outlet? Can a new media strategy that proved successful for one brand reso-
nate with another brand's target audience?
Table 16.2 summarizes selected studies on WOM in social media and social
contagion in the pharmaceutical industry.
In the coming years, we expect to see more research on online WOM and social
media to address above questions. To facilitate researchers to conduct research on
social media in the pharmaceutical industry, Table 16.3 summarizes datasets that are
either publically available and those that can be purchased from various sources.

16.4 How to Leverage Social Media Effects

The rapid growth of social media is fundamentally changing how pharmaceutical
brands can communicate with target audiences. Brands not only talk to customers,
customers talk back to brands. The monologue has transformed into a dialog with
millions of people potentially listening and participating in the conversation.