Paul Vogelzang: Welcome to Capitol Communicator TV. I’m host Paul Vogelzang, and it’s a pleasure today to be talking to Mark Senak. Mark is a senior vice president with Fleishman-Hillard, is the author of Eye on FDA. Mark, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for joining us.
Mark Senak: Oh, sure. It’s my pleasure.
Paul Vogelzang: Great. Well, let’s spend a little time talking about PhRMA and social media. Certainly, you know, health care is being talked about from every corner today. PhRMA absolutely has a perspective and, you know, an opinion about where social media can kind of play a role and help get a message out, particularly in this era of reform. What’s the edge that PhRMA can kind of move towards, with regard to social media? Can they just simply put DTC ads up on their website? Is that kind of the approach?
Mark Senak: They can. It wouldn’t be a good idea. I mean, actually, there’s several points about the whole social media landscape. One is that I think a lot of pharmaceutical companies and biotech companies still don’t take it very seriously. Social media has funny names, like “Twitter.” But there was a time when “Google” sounded funny, too, and then it was $500 a share. You know, social media is much more than twittering about the hamburger I had for lunch or, you know, what movie I saw. It has become an area where brands are being shaped, both company brands and product brands. And, you know, there’s earned [ph?] media, there’s paid media, there’s owned media with their website, and now there is shared media. And to not be in that, and not have a communications strategy that takes a sweet spot aimed at the center of all of those, leaves you out of the mix when it comes to the formulation of your brand. So that’s just one reason to be involved, and one area that companies need to start thinking about is being in that space. Now, the different vehicles-- what’s happened is that a lot of pharmaceutical companies have started taking baby steps, and it’s like, “Well, let’s open up a YouTube channel,” or, “Let’s open up a Twitter feed.” And the problem with that is it comes off as a one-off sort of thing. It doesn’t look like it’s part of the big, integrated strategy. You know, what’s really needed is for companies to sit down and say, “Okay, what’s our business goal, and what are the communications tactics, digital and nondigital, that will fulfill that goal? And then how can we get involved without tripping any regulatory wires?” And I think part of the problem is that companies have become so focused on what they can’t do that they are not at all engaged with what they actually can do. And let me give you an example.
Paul Vogelzang: Okay.
Mark Senak: Let’s say you are a black woman in the Bronx, and you have breast cancer, and you’re a candidate for a clinical trial in breast cancer. Would you want to sit down with a strange doctor who’s going to convince you that you should participate in this clinical trial, or would you rather watch a video of a black woman from the south Bronx who’s been through a clinical trial, who can tell you what her motivations were, what her fears were, what her experience was? What’s going to be more convincing? Why isn’t YouTube being used as a critical tool in clinical trial recruitment? Another example: employee recruitment-- using people inside of a company to talk to people outside of a company about the culture and what they like and what their research means to them. And, to me, one of the best examples is with the new REMS programs. REMS is Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies, and they’re being required of more and more drugs as they come out of the pipeline. In fact, last week, a drug was under consideration, and one of the things discussed at the advisory committee meeting was a communications plan to help convey the risk. Where do people go for health information? They go to the Internet. And so it’s not the kind of thing where it would take a very-- it doesn’t take, you know, rocket science to figure out, “Gee, we could put together a REMS program by putting together a whole YouTube channel that’s just devoted about how to use a product safely, or to get right to doctors and talk to doctors about the potential for addiction to a certain compound, and how you look for it, and things of that nature, and have people sign a statement that they’ve watched it. So there are a lot of creative ways to be using the digital media and social media that nobody’s doing because they’re focused on the fact that we might find an adverse event if we talk to people. And the whole nature of social media is about people talking, and that’s why a DTC ad slapped up on YouTube, it’s no good, because what people want is conversation, they want news they can pick up and carry to other people, and people don’t trust large institutions anymore. I trust you, but I maybe don’t trust who owns this building, that it’s really about, “I want to hear something from somebody I trust. I want it so that I can pass it on to the next person.” And that’s the whole dynamic of social media, and so what pharmaceutical companies have to do is think about packaging information, risk information, clinical trial information, support for patients, and packaging it in a way that people can use and pass on. And one other thing, and then I’ll shut up, is that, you know, the future happens to be right in my pocket here, and it’s a phone. People want applications on the phone that are going to support them, so there need to be diabetes applications from firms that make diabetes drugs. There need to be blood pressure apps for people, you know, and there need to be cholesterol applications, so that people can get information from their phone and coordinate what they’re doing. And that kind of support is going to be essential moving forward, and people are still so focused on what their fear is of the FDA, who has a very primitive understanding of how people use the Internet for health care, so they can’t do that.
Paul Vogelzang: I think the FDA is even changing with regard to some of this social media space, and so having that insight is something that you’re really sharing now with everyone.
Mark Senak: Well, and I think they are changing somewhat, but they have not caught up to understand, first of all, how people are using the Internet for health care. And second of all, their mantra, which has been, “It’s not the medium, it’s the message,” doesn’t address how the Internet has many nuanced situations that come up that can’t be-- that there are no answers for the questions that end up coming up as a result, so that just as print and broadcast have different rules, there needs to be consideration as to how some of the unique situations that are presented by the Internet for patients actually can present new problems that require some new thinking and new answers. And the thing about it is, is that it’s not stopping. I mean, we are in Web 2.0. I think Web 3.0 is when these systems begin to integrate and coalesce. Google is going to launch Google Wave [ph?] later this year. Google Wave is going to revolutionize the way we work, the way we communicate. I think it will do to e-mail what e-mail did to the fax machine. And it alone is going to present whole sorts of new problems, and it’s about cre-- not problems, but questions, that need to be addressed, and it’s going to create a whole new venue for people to be sharing information and communicating that does integrate things like Twitter and Facebook and video all in one application. And so we can’t afford to wait, necessarily, for the FDA to grasp how quickly the world is changing, and what they need to be thinking about. They really need to be more ahead of the curve, and industry needs to be pushing them ahead of the curve, not just waiting.
Paul Vogelzang: But I think we are going to quickly be in a point where we’re not going to be able to afford health care, and with reform on everybody’s minds, social media offers a way-- a very effective, cost-effective way, efficiently-- of pushing some of this information out into the end users’ hands, the insureds’ hands, so that we can take some responsibility for ourself, because we actually, as you say, we have that content right in our pocket.
Mark Senak: Right. And not only is it a matter of being cost-efficient, but the metrics that are built up around online use. Now you can look at a YouTube video and see where audiences begin to fall off, at what point they lose interest. You can learn so many things about-- I mean, when anybody comes to my blog, I can tell what their screen resolution is, I can tell what operating system they have, I can tell what browser they use, I see the search terms they put in to whatever search engine they used to find whatever it was that they were looking for when they came to this site. There are no secrets on the Internet, you know? And so using these tools actually affords us an opportunity to find out so much more about people and patients and patient habits than we can find through years and years of surveys and studies.
Paul Vogelzang: It is very powerful, and, Mark Senak, thanks so much for being here. We of course find you at Eye on FDA [ph?]. Where else can we-- how can we follow you on Twitter?
Mark Senak: It’s also Eye on FDA handle, and there’s an Eye on FDA YouTube channel.
Paul Vogelzang: Great. Mark Senak, thanks for all this information. We’d love to have you come back, talk some more about it.
Mark Senak: I talk till the cows come home.
Paul Vogelzang: Great. Mark Senak, senior VP, lawyer, bon vivant, author of Eye on FDA blog, thanks very much for being here with us on Capitol Communicator TV.
Mark Senak: Thanks.