Medad Blog - Pharma still doesn’t know how to handle patient anger.

I bring up the last point because of something that happened during the session with Earl Whipple, the senior director of communications and new media for AstraZeneca. As I was Tweeting out quotes from his talk, I was getting requests from Stephany of Soulful Sepulcher to ask about the Seroquel lawsuits against AstraZeneca, in  which certain internal documents unfavorable to the company were released into the wilds of the Internet (or “the 24-hour shouting machine,” as one acquaintance refers to it). Needless to say these documents have gotten around and have created a less-than-favorable impression of how a pharmaceutical company operates its marketing initiatives and clinical trials.

So I decided to ask Earl how a pharma company can win back the trust of patients and consumers with such seemingly damning evidence of corporate perfidy constantly circulating around the Internet, just a Google search away.

His answer was, “By the overall actions of the company,” the good stuff that they do, their transparency, etc.

Guess what: That’s not working. Think about it, folks – when someone betrays you in some way (whether they meant to or not) and then showers you with attention and love but never acknowledges the betrayal in the first place, are you won over? If the burn is minor, you might forgive them in time, but the bigger the hurt, the more impossible it becomes to forgive. So when someone posts on Facebook or Twitter that a drug hurt them or a loved one, or points to seeming evidence of coverups, the carefully crafted corporate platitudes aren’t going to cut it. They’re not cutting it now. They will never cut it.

Ignoring the query or accusation won’t help either, because social media being a public arena, everyone else can see that you are ignoring the person (even though you may have reached out privately, if you don’t say publicly that you have reached out, it leaves a bad taste in onlookers’ mouths. People take conversations offline all the time, but if the conversation was a public argument, letting others know that you’re trying to be adult about the situation wins points in your favor and can defuse people from jumping into the fray).

In the end, pharma efforts on social media would go over better if they sounded a lot more human. (For more thoughts in this vein, you can see my editorial in the November issue of Med Ad News.)

via blog.medadnews.com

Posted via email from Jack's posterous