In the JAN’08 issue of PharmaVoice, Craig DeLarge — my friend and co-panelist from the 2007 Digital Pharma Conference — wrote an interesting article about “Web 2.0 — Opportunities and Drawbacks“. Here’s a brief quote from the article:

In the last month, I have been intensely researching the Web 2.0 phenomenon with respect to its healthcare manifestations… It revealed a set of opportunities and threats whose successful navigation will require a different way of thinking and operating on our part as pharma marketers… this phenomenon holds the potential for enhancing customer relationships, collaborations, and trust building as well as leading to a product and service co-creation environment that we have not witnessed in the history of this industry. If we fail to navigate well, there is the potential to do more damage to our image as an industry.

In brief, Craig shared three rules to help pharma marketers apply Web 2.0 principles within the environment of the healthcare/pharma industry:

RULE #1: Share control of the communication.
RULE #2: Earn your community-cred.
RULE #3: Don’t just communicate, “conversate.”

While these ‘rules’ may seem simple and obvious, particularly to those already entrenched in the world of Web 2.0, the application of these ‘rules’ within the pharma context is probably far more difficult to execute. Indeed, questions surrounding legal and regulatory review, adverse event reporting, and negative publicity risks were very common questions at the Digital Pharma Conference that Craig and I spoke at in OCT’2007.

So, while Craig doesn’t seek to resolve these key issues in his article, he does offer some nice examples and plenty of resources that one can use to develop ideas for how to implement some basic Web 2.0 principles and ‘culture traits’ within the highly restrictive pharma and healthcare industries. Moreover, he also discusses why it’s important for us to do so.

It’s a short and simple article (PDF), which I definitely recommend giving a quick read.