Almost all the major pharmaceutical companies are using Twitter now (or about to start) and there are Facebook pages and sponsorship deals with social networking sites tailored to doctors or surgeons. Most of these efforts are commonly described as social media because they are all forms of social communication.
Sometimes the most anti-social efforts online, however, are actually the ones that use the principles of social media best. Reading a book or a magazine is typically an anti-social activity, for example. Not because it makes you less personable, but because it is an activity you do by yourself generally with little interaction with others. Activities that are not inherently social are easy to underestimate in this time of an overly socialized Internet.
When you consider the target audience of physicians and medical professionals, you could make the argument that they have even less time to indulge this socialization need. Why can’t technology and social media be used to support this type of online interaction as well? This seems to be the premise behind a site from Sanofi-Aventis called iPractice that is getting quite a bit of attention from those who talk about social media efforts in the healthcare space.
It is a portal of information for healthcare providers about everything from effectively running their own practice to getting CME credit by taking courses directly online. The site features content from both Medscape and Sermo (two of the largest information providers) and integrates the ability for medical professionals to speak directly with the pharma brand’s people about their drugs directly.
The site aggregates useful content, integrates products without feeling too “salesy” and it offers an easy way for their customers to get in touch with them regarding their products for any reason. Like many new efforts in the pharma space - competitors and industry watchers are paying attention to this site to see if it may be a model worth considering. The significance, though, is not that this is just another social media example to be added to a list or passed around internally. What Sanofi-Aventis gets right is their focus on offering content that is useful and serves a need. At its heart, it is content marketing supported by social media - and this is the real lesson worth taking from iPractice.
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