Most pharma online campaigns focus on raising awareness about a disease and/or a treatment (depending on the legal constraints in each country). Yet, at least for me, they usually fail to raise the emotion and urgency required to drive me to action (ie. sign up for screening, go see my doctor etc.). To be fair, it is difficult for pharma to achieve this. Lots of questions in the back of people’s head make it difficult for the message to go through: Are they saying this only to sell their product? Are they exagerating? What are the chances of this ever going to happen to me?
Raising awareness is also one of the main reasons patients become active online and with the rise of social media, they are now so amazingly good at it that pharma compaigns can often not compete. To illustrate my point, I will compare a powerful patient blog to two pharma sponsored sites in cystic fibrosis.
Nate Lawrenson’s blog, “Confessions of a CF husband“, first caught my eye a year ago, when I saw it nominated for Blogger’s Choice Awards. In his blog, Nate tells the story of his life with his wife Tricia, a cystic fibrosis patient, and their miracle baby Gwyneth. I read his amazing story and I cried (and I am usually not the “crying“ type, I am German, if you see what I mean ![](http://www.whydotpharma.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_wink.gif" alt=){kind=icon}
. The generosity, energy and authenticity with which Nate tells his story make this blog one of the most powerful disease testimonies I know of . It also has become an amazing tools for raising awareness about CF (as well as organ donation, premature babies and Lymphona). Since Nate started to write his blog, it has received 9.3 million visits from across the world.
Nate does incredible things to raise funds and awareness for the causes he supports, like shaving his head live on facebook. He is also very active on twitter and you tube. I read his blog a good two-three times a week, just to check that Nate, Tricia, and Gwyneth are doing ok. Contrary to the pharma sponsored campaigns, Nate’s blog drives me to action: I finally got my organ donor card for example (something, I always had wanted to do, but never got around to before.) It creates an emotional bond to a disease, I knew little about prior to reading his story.
Ok, so what does Nate have to do with pharma’s efforts to raise disease awareness? In the two graphs below, I compared the CFhusband blog to two pharma sponsored CF awareness sites using Alexa’s daily reach: Genentech’s heroes of hope and Novartis CF voice (on the left).
As you can see, only CF husband shows up on the graph. I thus redid the analysis and compared the main website for Novartis and Genentech with CF husband (graph on the right). Nate’s blog gets pretty close to novartis.com, while genetech.com is not showing up.
Just to make sure, that this is not a “CF only“ phenomena, I did a similar analysis for diabetes, comparing dlife (one of the major diabetes online communities), diabetesmine (one of the main diabetes patient blogs) and goinsulin, a very intelligent and well done diabetes awareness site sponsored by Sanofi Aventis.
Again, the pharma- sponsored initiative comes out low on daily reach, compared to the main sites of the strong and active diabetes online community. (I would have loved to add the goinsulin you tube channel to this comparison, but Alexa would not let me 
)
Finally, the point of this analysis is not to criticize pharma-sponsored awareness campaigns, but to show that putting up a website (however much you invest in it) is not enough anymore, if your goal is to reach a maximum amount of people in your target audience online.
With the rise of social media, patients have found themselves “online homes”: communities or blogs that they are loyal to and emotionally engage with. If pharma’s goal is to raise awareness, they have to reach patients in their “online homes“. After all, it does not make sense to set up a huge screen in the desert, if you can reach people in front of their TV, no? Pharma has to get to know the online patient community, identify the most influential sites and understand what they are interested in. They have to reach out and collaborate with patients “online homes“, if they want their online campaign to result in action.
11 Comments on "Raising awareness online- why pharma can learn from patients"
Silja – thanks for the thoughtful post. I agree that people will likely connect with others’ personal stories (as long as those people are engaging content creators) rather than the safe, watered-down, milquetoast versions that any pharmaceutical company would create. It’s reality versus marketing spin; the true beauty of social media.
While it may behoove pharma to embrace the more engaging and open dialog created by real people, I’m afraid that it’s just not possible given the legal & regulatory concerns–not to mention the natural mistrust the general public would have of a pharma-sponsored campaign.
Dear Scott,
thanks for your comment. I agree with you that pharma could not and should not try to reproduce what Nate Lawrenson creates with his blog. It is not going to work. I think though that pharma needs to know who is out there raising awareness already and how to position their efforts accordingly.
Hi Sija
Nice story and Nice analysis. I added your site to my blog role under Pharma social media
http://newbrandstories.wordpress.com/
From by side the best aspect of this blog is the story it tells. What I get is the simplicity of the story and the impact it has. If only Pharma could find these stories at the start of their campaigns the brand offerings would be so much stronger.
Keep posting.
I think this research is brilliant! To be aware of what is out there and what is being talked about is vital, not only to pharma, but to patients.
We drive our business through patient response and awareness!
Awareness is not just what we say or how often we say it, it’s about the patients, the outcome for them, and how it can effect their lives.
Knowing more, being up to date, is a wonderful thing.
Thanks
Karen
Thank you Karen for your kind words. Knowing more and being up to date is crucial for patient’s health, esp. also in the context of the current crisis. Many patients will have to make trade off’s between paying for one medicine or treatment vs. another, or vs. paying other important things etc. I think pharam needs to make the whole case of what are the options for patients, why it is important to stay on teatment, what the outcome is, how to measure it etc.
Thanks for the shout-out. I wonder if you saw my (disconcerted) post about the GoInsulin YouTube channel:
http://www.diabetesmine.com/2009/02/using-youtube-to-promote-insulin.html
Hi Amy,
I am a great fan of your blog! I DID see your post on GoInsulin, and liked it a lot!
Only to then forget to link to it… so thanks a lot for your reply
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Thanks!
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