One route was proposed by Andrew Spong at his insightful STweM blog (we recommend you sign up if you don’t already). Andrew suggests that a progressive pharma company in the UK could safely engage in small scale, relational, indirect social media activity. In other words, help patients access third party resources that are not pharma branded (but acknowledge support). This could lead to patients sharing the story (and potentially the information) within communities they are already a part of.

The phrase ‘you only get what you give’ is pertinent here. It involves giving quite a lot, although could go a long way to building trust and essentially having receptive online communities to tap into for a number of reasons. If you give, who knows what you could get back in return?

Andrew argues yes, since nothing can be done by the owners of the website in question to mediate the comment that has been left other than respond to it, other than actually engage in a conversation with those who are commenting. Obviously, regulations rule this out, so we will have to wait for new ABPI guidelines on this before anything can be done. This leaves pharma as sitting ducks. Technically, they cannot even listen to the conversation on sidewiki under current regulations so there is no way of even using the information as general feedback to act on. We’re now in a position where the internet is moving so quickly this needs to be addressed by the rulemakers – and quite urgently too otherwise the ideal of a ‘healthy conversation’ may never become a reality.