Doughnut burger served at the 2010 Olmstead County Fair in Minnesota, via Jonathunder on Wikimedia Commons. At the Indiana State Fair in 2010, a vendor of similar burgers was quoted as having come up with the concept after seeing Paula Deen "do it on TV."

Friday, while on Facebook, one of my friends posted this little item from the iPad newspaper, The Daily.

Paula “put a burger and bacon and a fried egg between two donuts” Deen rumored to have type 2 diabetes? It would have been more shocking if she didn’t. The cuisine featured at her restaurant in Savannah, The Lady and Sons, as well as her show on The Food Network, has staggeringly high amounts of fat, sugar, and salt. Come on, when my own mom, the queen of baked goods and goddess of buttercream, disdains Paula Deen’s dessert recipes as being too sweet, something is definitely wrong here.

So, I went on Twitter with this smartass Tweet:

ChristianeTrue Jan 13, 11:14am via HootSuite
Paul Deen: 1.Promote fatty, sugary cuisine to TV audience. 2.Promote Novartis diabetes Rx to same audience. 3.Profit! ow.ly/8stdN

A bunch of us (including Matthew Herper of Forbes, Brian Reid of WCG, and Sally Church of Icarus Consultants) started a frenzy of speculation about which Novartis drug it could be – and we quickly concluded that it couldn’t be Novartis, as their main diabetes drug is not approved in the United States. Novartis actually sent a correction to The Huffington Post, confirming that they were NOT working with Ms. Deen.

Eventually, we started to speculate that it could be Novo Nordisk. I sent an e-mail query to Novo Nordisk’s corporate communications people on Friday, but never heard back from them. Come on, folks, I am not that hard to find.

Now, today, Paula Deen has announced she has type 2 diabetes and she is working with Novo Nordisk, in a campaign called “Diabetes in a new light.” The Novo Nordisk Website copy is punctuated with Ms. Deen’s folksy patter – “ya’ll” and “ya” in abundance – and features lighter versions of her famous artery-clogging recipes. And there are tie-ins to her brands – the version of the Lady and Sons lasagna recipe features “Paula Deen’s House Seasoning” and “Paula Deen’s Seasoned Salt.”

The recipe itself is rather a horror – besides parmesan, nonfat ricotta, and reduced fat mozzarella, it includes low-fat cottage cheese, reduced fat sharp cheddar cheese, Gruyere cheese, and reduced fat cream cheese. Oh, and bell peppers. And no garlic. If I offered this to my Italian relatives, they’d be insulted.

Back in August, celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain took Ms. Deen to task over her cuisine, calling her the “most dangerous person to America.” But he says he is taking no pleasure from the news. But this quote is classic: “When your signature dish is a hamburger in between a doughnut, and you’ve been cheerfully selling this stuff knowing all along that you’ve got Type 2 Diabetes … It’s in bad taste if nothing else.”

And seriously, Novo Nordisk? Seriously? I know you have a great program going with race car driver Charlie Kimball, who has type 1 diabetes. And that you’ve extended that sponsorship program for another year, which is also really great news. Type 1 diabetes can be a devastating diagnosis, and for children and young teens, Charlie Kimball is a great example of success.

But Ms. Deen’s blatant disingenousness about her condition (that she may have been diagnosed as long ago as 2008) and that her own cuisine may have contributed to her condition, plus her recipes shilling her own spice mixtures…seriously? She is not the example I’d want to be holding up as a marketer.

The look on my face right now is the same as Jonah Hill’s as he’s offered a bite of her cheeseburger meatloaf. “I’m not eating that,” he declares.

Good for you, Jonah. I’m not eating that – or buying Ms. Deen’s transformation into an oracle of healthy eating, either.

The Hawthorne Effect picked up an exclusive interview The Script Kiddies did with Student Activist Diary about the hack. The respondent on behalf of the group said Pfizer was attacked because it is “A Corrupt Corporate American Company guilty of cutting corners and killing people:”

“They are guilty of killing people through harmful drugs and clinical tests. For example, their drug Trovan killed 11 Nigerians out of 200 given the drug. We plan to achieve awareness mostly; awareness that the security online is an allusion and also that Pfizer’s crimes are intolerable and we will not deal with them. We will stand up and say, hey, this isn’t right. We will take a stand. Some say that our methods are extreme, but they have to be to achieve our goals. Pfizer is a corrupt giant, so we attacked them. Simple as that.”

Ray Kerins, VP, external affairs and worldwide communications, Pfizer, says the company has been in direct contact with Facebook since the hack was detected and the page taken down. “We want to see exactly how this happened and ensure that it never happens again,” he stated.

The company is trying to get the Facebook page back up as quickly as possible, but needs answers from people outside Pfizer first, Mr. Kerins says. “When we do find out what happened, we will share the learnings with other [pharma] companies,” he says. “I don’t want this to happen to any other companies.”

Despite the attack, Pfizer will not abandon Facebook and other social media channels, Mr. Kerins says. “We’re taking this as a lesson learned,” he says. “We understand the benefits social channels do bring, and we’re committed to using them.”

Bruce Grant, senior VP, business strategy, at Digitas Health, points out that the The Script Kiddies did not have a reasoned grievance against Pfizer, but were just repeating things they had found in the media. Pfizer was a “villain of opportunity,” he says, and the hack was not something that Pfizer could have prevented, since the security issues were all on Facebook’s end.

Ultimately, the incident is a “welcome and useful wakeup call,” and shows pharma companies that they can’t walk away from Facebook. Mr. Grant points out that the branded pages Facebook set up will not disappear, and after Aug. 15, Facebook will require companies to allow comment on the pages (the exception is pages for branded pharmaceutical products).

“It seems that Facebook is pretty determined that if people go to a Facebook page, they will have a Facebook experience,” Mr. Grant says.

Overall, the pharma industry’s biggest concern with Facebook and other social media channels remains the open airing of legitimate grievances about things such as drug side effects, rather than hacking, Mr. Grant says.

“Our advice is you don’t have a choice as to whether you have a page – your choice is whether you want to maintain appropriate control over the conversation,” he says.

(Edit: Ed Silverman at Pharmalot adds his own twist to the story.)

“Facebook’s recent policy change really sparked a ripple of concern from marketers and communicators in the industry,” says Faruk Capan, CEO, Intouch Solutions. “But we believe, in many instances, pharma companies can and should continue to engage with Facebook members. The key is to combine a moderation tool like PharmaWall with monitoring services, so conversations are relevant to the Facebook community yet safe for the regulated environment. We’re happy we can leverage technology to help companies engage while minimizing exposure and risk.”

According to Wendy Blackburn, executive VP at Intouch Solutions, PharmaWall allows companies to take control of the conversation and still allow Facebook comments.

“It gives you a filtering ability that Facebook kind of let you used to have, but now they’ve taken that away, essentially,” she says.

If a Facebook member posts on the Wall, or comments on a post, they get an automatically generated message that thanks them for their post and lets the know that their post is in moderation and will be responded to as quickly as possible. Ms. Blackburn says the client can customize the outgoing message to their liking.

Clients are recommended to set up a system in which they can review these posts “almost near real time,” Ms. Blackburn says, but the function does take into account that companies are usually not able to spare people to monitor a Facebook page 24 hours a day, seven days a week. PharmaWall gives companies the chance to consider whether a post is benign and can be put up right away, or potentially violative, or mentions an adverse event or an off-label use.

“If it’s something that’s never going to get posted, we recommend contacting the person and letting them know why,” Ms. Blackburn says.

Although Facebook does allow comments to be deleted retroactively, “It makes you look bad and it requires almost 24-7 monitoring of that page, which very few companies are set up to do,” Ms. Blackburn says.

As well as all posts, PharmaWall retained copies of decisions to approve, revise or decline are documented for later review.

PharmaWall has gotten a great deal of interest, not only from Intouch’s clients, but from other healthcare advertising agencies as well, who want to offer the tool to their clients, Ms. Blackburn says.

Ms. Blackburn says if FDA ever does come out with a guidance that says pharma companies are not responsible for user-generated content on their social media sites, the need for tools such as PharmaWall would ease. But until such a guidance comes out – if it ever does – pharma will assume that it is responsible for user-generated content and will take steps to control it.

The license for PharmaWall is about $1,000 a month, Ms. Blackburn say, relatively inexpensive compared with a monitoring service. But a company can still choose to hire Intouch to monitor the Facebook page.

As explained by J. Lyle Bootman, Ph.D., dean and professor of the University of Arizona School of Pharmacy, the problems of medication nonadherence can cost up to $290 billion a year in avoidable medical spending. One statistic cited in the Journal of Clinical Therapeutics paper says about 50 percent of patients who are prescribed long-term medications for numerous illnesses are non-adherent.

The study, which was sponsored by MWV, examined dispensing data from Wal-Mart’s 3,787 pharmacies in 49 U.S. states and Puerto Rico between Dec. 1, 2006, and July 31, 2009, representing 3.1 million people filling prescriptions for the heart drugs lisinopril or enalapril. Data were obtained from the one-year baseline period before (Dec. 1, 2006, to Jan. 31, 2008) and follow-up period after (June 1, 2008, to July 31, 2009) a switch in packaging of lisinopril from loose tablets in traditional vials to MWV’s proprietary calendar blister package design.

According to Barbara Zedler, M.D., clinical researcher for Venebio and co-author of the paper, the study found that the use of calendar blister packaging alone demonstrated a moderate improvement in medication adherence, and patients who were new users had greater improvement than present users. For those patients taking fixed-dose combination – lisinopril or enalapril with hydrochlorothiazide  – the poorest levels of adherence at baseline were those taking pills in vials. The study found that calendar blister packaging benefited these patients even more, Dr. Zedler said.

Dr. Zedler says the next logical study step would be to examine the use of calendar blister packaging with other adherence strategies, because the problem of medication nonadherence is a complex one and will take the use of multiple tactics to address. Her second study recommendation was to look at how the use of calendar blister packaging and improvement in medication adherence has an actual public healthcare impact in cost.

Calendar blister packaging “may be the best investment” a pharmaceutical manufacturer can make to improve medication adherence, Dr. Zedler says. “I can’t think of anything simpler or lower cost than calendar blister packaging,” she says.

Ted Lithgow, president and chief science officer, MWV Healthcare, was very excited about the study results. He says MWV has been in talks with several pharmaceutical manufacturers about the benefits of calendar blister packaging for their brands, but there is no agreement at this point for any manufacturer manufacturer to abandon the amber vial all together. However, he did add that some manufacturers were interested in innovative packaging for their new products. Additionally, some manufacturers with generic divisions may be interested in using calendar blister packaging for their branded products going generic.

For more information about the study and the implications for pharmaceutical manufacturers, please register for a special Webinar on June 20 featuring Dr. Bootman, Dr. Lithgow, and Lenn Murrelle, president and CEO, Venebio.

“AstraZeneca understands that our consumers want flexibility, especially when it comes to health information,” says Donna Holder, senior director, AstraZeneca Information Center. “This new resource enables consumers to have easier access to the information they seek through the convenience of a real-time, online channel.”

Patients who still want to use the phone can call the AstraZeneca Information Center from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday to Friday, excluding holidays, or they can submit an e-mail request form. Additionally, patients who need an immediate call back can use the “Call Me Now” service, which was launched in October 2010. This service offers patients the option of receiving a call from an information center representative without having to go through telephone prompts, wait on the line, or listen to a recorded operator.

According to Rachelle Benson, a spokeswoman for AstraZeneca, click-to-chat was offered for Crestor and Nexium because they are two of the highest-selling prescription products in the company’s portfolio, and “we felt that providing the service would be most relevant to those patients.” Ms. Benson says she is not aware if AstraZeneca will expand click-to-chat to other prescription brands, if the Crestor and Nexium programs are successful.

The initiative “was driven by the AstraZeneca Information Center,” she says; the center is staffed not only by customer service representatives but by healthcare professionals to provide information to patients, physicians, and caregivers. “They’re very excited to roll this out, this is a new concept and new idea for them,” she says.

All the online representatives have been given the same training as phone representatives, and will be applying the same kind of messaging, Ms. Benson says. “All are trained to report adverse events, and all the same kind of information will be collected online as they would offline,” she says.

The Crestor and Nexium chat technologies were provided by a company called Angel. “AstraZeneca is one of the first pharmaceutical companies to use this technology, making it a very forward-thinking company in the pharmaceutical industry,” said Don Keane, VP of marketing and product strategy for Angel.

John Kamp, executive director of the Coalition for Healthcare Communications, praises AstraZeneca for taking some of the first steps to interact with patients in this fashion. “Hats off to AstraZeneca for forging ahead with innovative ways to use the new media to engage patients,” he says. “It takes guts these days. Patients are incredibly sensitive about their health information and both the FDA and FTC have rules that are often oblique at best. But, patients are not waiting for us to engage them online. They are there already. We either engage them there or be left behind.”

More information on the consolidation of the companies and the agencies involved in launching the new corporate brand and the new product will appear in the Business department of Med Ad News’ December issue. I spoke with Mark Iwicki, president and chief operating officer of Sunovion, to get more insight into the rationale for the new corporate identity and the organization’s plans for the future.

Mark Iwicki, president and chief operating officer of Sunovion

Med Ad News: What was the strategy behind bringing Dainippon Sumitomo Pharma America and Sepracor together under the Sunovion name, and what efficiencies have been achieved?

Mark Iwicki: The whole idea behind it was a strategic opportunity that DSP [Dainippon Sumitomo Pharma] saw. The history of the company is, they’ve been in Japan for many, many years. The Dainippon part goes back around 100 years. Then they merged with Sumitomo chemical about five years ago and realized that although a major strength in Japan, as many of the other companies have done – Takeda, Astellas, all the predecessor companies, Yamanuchi Fujisawa – that in order to truly be a world class company, they had to expand globally.

The opportunity to do that was around this product lurasidone, Latuda, which we just recently got approved. One of the things that is great about our story is that it’s much more around the strategy of building a global company, whereas a lot of the mergers or acquisitions are purely about synergies. Which corporate infrastructure can we reduce and save some money? That was never the focus for us.

Of course there was a little bit of that that occurred, but in the U.S. there was very minimal overlap, truthfully. The DSP America organization was set up as a CNS research and development group that brought Latuda through Phase II, Phase III, and now the approval. Of course, we have some other indications we’re working on, like bipolar, and some other products. But that organization still exists today. In fact, we’re excited to keep building that out. It’s in Fort Lee, N.J.

Sepracor is an organization that was built on CNS and respiratory history. We have six products in the market, now seven with Latuda. It was a great match because DSP wanted to expand globally, they had Latuda, this great organization in Fort Lee developing the product, but also needed a strong commercial organization to be able to launch that product. They looked at three different opportunities: build it out themselves, partner with a big pharmaceutical company – do a co-promote or something like that as a way to get into the marketplace – or merge or buy a company to expand. And, of course, we’re thrilled that they looked at Sepracor and subsequently purchased us.

Our strength in the commercial area is, I think, the major reason that they wanted to purchase us, and our research and development was very synergistic with what they were doing. We have CNS expertise both in the research area as well as development. We developed lurasidone, we’ve had several other CNS products in development. So, it turned out to be a great fit. Now, with the launch of Latuda, we have a tremendous opportunity to build a new company, Sunovion, and have a really strong presence in the U.S. In some ways, we’re a fully operational and integrated pharmaceutical company with research, development, commercial, everything right here in the United States, and then we have this wonderful backing support and resources from one of the strongest Japanese pharmaceutical companies that also has a great research and development pipeline.

Med Ad News: How have the corporate cultures of DSPA and Sepracor aligned?

Mark Iwicki: I think there’s a very nice influence. This is a very strong company in Japan, and what I’ve come to realize over my first year of being with the new organization is that as much as there are some cultural things that are a bit different, the language of business and of pharmaceuticals is so similar. And the way that DSP Japan has gone about its business was a great fit for how we do it here in the U.S. as well. The real focus is on the long-term vision for the company. They’re very committed to becoming a global organization. Back at Sepracor, that was one of our long-term visions. We were mostly a U.S.-focused organization and were in the process of developing our plans to decide how we wanted to expand globally.

Culturally, the first thing I look at is, are our business philosophies aligned? And they very much are. The second piece of that business philosophy is that DSP and Sepracor, now Sunovion, are both focused on differentiated, specialty-focused brands. Earlier in both companies’ life cycles we both had more of the marginally differentiated blockbuster profile of products, just like many big pharmaceutical companies had. For us it was the isomers, with Xopenex, Brovana, and Lunesta. For them, they had hypertension products and diabetes products.

They realized that the future is in the highly differentiated products and also moving toward higher unmet need areas. Those areas are not always the multi-billion dollar opportunities. It’s always good to have a couple like that in your portfolio, but also where there are the higher unmet needs, you have the chance to do great science and improve the lives of patients.

That’s the same strategy we were embarking on here at Sepracor. So, from a cultural standpoint, it’s been a great fit. We were both independently moving in the same direction toward the specialty-focused products. We ourselves had started to reorganize our own portfolio toward these areas, and so had DSP. And now together, we have a chance to get focused using both R&D pipelines and highlight those products we think will create the biggest differentiation and make the biggest benefit for patients.

We’ve had a great opportunity culturally to blend the best of both companies. They also have been very excited about learning the American way of doing business, and we’ve tried to reciprocate by doing the same thing, to learn the Japanese way of doing business. This is where we found there are way more similarities than there are differences, and they’ve enabled Sunovion to continue in large part to be run fully as an American organization. The vast majority of our management has a lot of American experience. Even our CEO, Saburo Hamanaka, was 35 years with Takeda, and a large part of his experience at Takeda – he started TAP and then started Takeda Pharmaceuticals in the U.S. – was helping Takeda start their U.S. businesses.

Its been very good for us, the way they’ve approached the U.S. market, and allowing us to run our business and grow, I would say in a very measured way, bringing our two companies together so that we both built on each other’s experiences rather than having to concede to one way of doing things or another.

Med Ad News: With that in mind, a very important part of career growth for executives is getting overseas experience. Will there be opportunity for some of your executives to work abroad in Japan or other global markets?

Mark Iwicki: Yeah, we’re really excited about that. In fact, we’ve already started to integrate some of our senior leaders in with the Japanese team. One of our top attorneys has gone over and will probably stay there for a year or longer. We’ve had several of the Japanese executives come over to our organization. Our head of R&D is Nobuhiko Tamura. He’s been in the U.S. for four years already. He was one of the people that started that R&D organization down in Fort Lee, N.J. I’ve mentioned already Saburo Hamanaka. We have three or four other Japanese leaders who are here, and we think there is more opportunity for our American leaders not only to go to Japan… I think the bigger opportunity actually is to start forming global teams. Global R&D teams, global business development teams are probably where we have the most synergy, and that gives a chance, rather than someone having to move from one country to the next, but the chance for us to work together and share learnings and become a much stronger team between the two organizations.

In the corporate development and licensing area, this is a big focus for the company. We very much want to continue to bring products into the pipeline. We’re active in all stages. We’re looking at research collaborations. We announced one a couple of weeks ago with SanBio. We’re very interested in Phase II assets and even look at Phase III oriented assets.

This has been right from the beginning a global effort. So, there are members from Japan, there are members from our Fort Lee R&D organization, and there are members from Sunovion here in headquarters. I think that has been one of our biggest successes so far, working together. That is creating more opportunities for these global teams to emerge.

Med Ad News: The intention has been stated to expand the Sunovion brand in certain strategic international locations. Can you elaborate on those plans at this time?

Mark Iwicki: Right now we have operations in China for DSP. And there’s a DSP operation in Europe right now. And we’re still, I’d say, working on a strategy, but the intent is to use Sunovion and our U.S. headquarters as a way to expand in Europe and South America. I think that’s where our global CEO and the board feel that the U.S. strength can be leveraged to expand in those markets.

Job number one for us is to make sure Latuda is successful. That we keep building our pipeline here, that we grow Latuda as quickly as we can. That will be the springboard, then, to start looking at Europe, South America, and other emerging markets as well. We of course are working hard to see if Latuda can be a viable product in other markets, and that activity is going on and can be a stepping stone for future expansion.

Med Ad News: Obviously a corporate brand is important on the customer-facing side. What does the launch process for the new corporate identity involve?

Mark Iwicki: One of the most exciting things was to create a new brand image for our new company, not only internally, which helps build a culture and spirit of starting something new – this really is a new company – but also for our customers, for them to understand that there is a new brand in the marketplace. For us to build new equity in that brand for what we stand for, our new launch of Latuda. We realized it was very important for us to do it before Latuda was approved, and we did it just in time. We thought that Latuda had a great chance for a first-cycle approval, and of course it did receive that first-cycle approval. About two weeks before that approval, we officially launched the name Sunovion – the strength of the sun and the power of human innovation.

We ran advertisements in Boston. We ran advertisements in the Newark Star Ledger. We’re going to run advertisements in trade journals and other publications. Our sales force is out there already. We have almost 1,200 sales reps. They’re out there now with materials about Sunovion, who are educating the physicians on our vision and what we want to do in the future as Sunovion.

And just to be really simplistic about it, there is nothing better than launching a new product. That gives us a great chance to launch the new product and new name at the same time. So, we’ll be working on that over the next six to nine months. We’re changing all of our packaging as we speak, and we’ll roll that out over the next year or so. We’ve rebranded all of our corporate headquarters. So far, I’d say it’s gone very nicely. Our employees are excited. We’ve had nice feedback from our thought leaders and customers. Our reps are excited to talk about the new company, the new culture. And of course the new approval.

Med Ad News: What are your personal priorities for the organization?

Mark Iwicki: Right now, first and foremost, we are doing everything we can to have a great launch for Latuda. We think the product is going to help millions of patients. We received a very strong label from FDA that is a good representation of all the hard clinical work that was done for the product. We had four trials that demonstrated efficacy for the product. We have a favorable safety and tolerability profile. So, the majority of the company right now is focused on doing a great job with the Latuda launch.

We of course have the rest of our six brands in the marketplace. Lunesta and Xopenex are our biggest brands. And then we have some brands that we launched over the last couple of years: Brovana, Omnaris, Alvesco. We’re focused on growing those brands as well. This is a chance for us to make a mark on the pharmaceutical industry with Latuda but also show what we can do with some of our other brands.

Right along with that comes the job of nurturing our new culture. When we think about our values, it’s doing the right thing for patients first, and it’s making sure we do the right thing for the company and for the employees. So, this has just been a great chance for all of the Sunovion employees to come together, build not only a new culture externally, but a great new spirit.

We try to do things a little bit differently at Sunovion. We launched a new commercial model in 2009. As you know, many pharmaceutical companies use mirrored sales forces where they send three or four reps into the same doctor about the same product. We broke from that. We think we were the first or among one of the first mid-sized to large companies to break away from that model, recognizing that it was a bit outdated.

We have single accountability for our brands with our reps that inspired our company, starting in the beginning of 2009. Our performance on key brands actually improved. We reduced the number of multiple reps selling a brand, improved our performance, and that put wind in the sails for Sepracor and now for Sunovion.

This is a great chance for us to keep building the spirit with our employees. Just bringing the company together has created a lot of development opportunities.

Do a great job launching Latuda, manage our business, and take care of our employees and build this great new company together: those are the things I focus on the most.

• Ian Talmage of Bayer Schering Pharma on how his view of the industry forever changed when he was diagnosed with colon cancer

• Katy Thorbahn of Razorfish Health on the six steps needed to become a social brand

• Bruce Grant of Digitas Health on what high school politics can teach us about social media

• Melissa Bojorquez of Boehringer Ingelheim on how to ensure social media is integrated into a campaign (she also urged the agency people she works with to keep her updated on the most recent social media and Internet innovations. “Send me an e-mail,” she said. “I probably won’t reply, but I will read it.”)

• Peter Korian and Christine Armstrong of Iomedia on understanding the power of fan culture in healthcare marketing, using as an example the custom Websites Iomedia has designed for sports stadiums.

• Bill Jenkinson and Kevin O’Brien of Ortho Centocor Biotech on how to enhance brand effectiveness using a multichannel approach. (They were very blunt in saying how someone selling an Internet solution must have proof of ROI right up front.)

• Jamie Peck of Rosetta Healthcare on how professional (for physician) Websites can be the portal to a larger digital experience.

In addition, there were keynote and plenary speeches by Doc Searls, the author of “The Cluetrain Manifesto” and Bob Garfield of Advertising Age and author of “The Chaos Scenario; and a live Tweetchat on social media hosted by Siren Interactive’s Eileen O’Brien.

You can find my Tweeted comments on the conference here, and search for others using the hashtag #digpharm.

Some conclusions I drew from what I saw:

• Pharma has become a more active participant in social media despite lack of guidance from, or fear of, FDA (37 companies this year are using social media measures in their marketing programs or are at the very least conducting listening operations, compared with just 12 last year).

• Brand and product managers who are proponents of social media usage in their marketing programs are still having a hard time trying to convince senior managers why social media should be a part of these programs.

• Pharma still doesn’t know how to handle patient anger.

I bring up the last point because of something that happened during the session with Earl Whipple, the senior director of communications and new media for AstraZeneca. As I was Tweeting out quotes from his talk, I was getting requests from Stephany of Soulful Sepulcher to ask about the Seroquel lawsuits against AstraZeneca, in which certain internal documents unfavorable to the company were released into the wilds of the Internet (or “the 24-hour shouting machine,” as one acquaintance refers to it). Needless to say these documents have gotten around and have created a less-than-favorable impression of how a pharmaceutical company operates its marketing initiatives and clinical trials.

So I decided to ask Earl how a pharma company can win back the trust of patients and consumers with such seemingly damning evidence of corporate perfidy constantly circulating around the Internet, just a Google search away.

His answer was, “By the overall actions of the company,” the good stuff that they do, their transparency, etc.

Guess what: That’s not working. Think about it, folks – when someone betrays you in some way (whether they meant to or not) and then showers you with attention and love but never acknowledges the betrayal in the first place, are you won over? If the burn is minor, you might forgive them in time, but the bigger the hurt, the more impossible it becomes to forgive. So when someone posts on Facebook or Twitter that a drug hurt them or a loved one, or points to seeming evidence of coverups, the carefully crafted corporate platitudes aren’t going to cut it. They’re not cutting it now. They will never cut it.

Ignoring the query or accusation won’t help either, because social media being a public arena, everyone else can see that you are ignoring the person (even though you may have reached out privately, if you don’t say publicly that you have reached out, it leaves a bad taste in onlookers’ mouths. People take conversations offline all the time, but if the conversation was a public argument, letting others know that you’re trying to be adult about the situation wins points in your favor and can defuse people from jumping into the fray).

In the end, pharma efforts on social media would go over better if they sounded a lot more human. (For more thoughts in this vein, you can see my editorial in the November issue of Med Ad News.)

Earlier this year I had interviewed Mr. Kamp for our Podcast series, The Med Ad News Show. In that discussion, we talked at length about how the pharmaceutical industry narrowly avoided an elimination of the marketing expense tax exemption in the healthcare reform bill. Mr. Kamp talked about how he believes that the idea remains popular in Washington and could rear its head again with potentially devastating effect for the healthcare communications industry.

In light of yesterday’s events, that idea could have more life than ever. The country is clearly deficit obsessed, so this will be a key issue for politicians in the coming year.

“The deficit is going to be something everybody from the Tea Partiers to even the far Left are going to focus on,” Mr. Kamp told Med Ad News. “And nobody is going to want to raise personal taxes between now and the presidential election, so there are going to have to be taxes on businesses. But nobody is interested in taxing business either in the middle of a ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ economy. So there isn’t a lot of room.”

Every possible source of revenue is going to be on the agenda, and the revenue that could come from eliminating the tax deductibility of marketing costs could be enticing.

As far as the healthcare reform legislation itself is concerned, Mr. Kamp does not expect attempts to repeal will have much traction in the short term. “Last night’s vote means that nobody is going to control either house,” he says. “The only thing they’re going to control is the gavel. They won’t control the votes. Every vote is going to have to be bi-partisan, and I don’t smell a lot of bi-partisanship happening today. The idea that somebody could, in that context, totally reverse the healthcare reform vote and not get it vetoed by the President is just not going to happen.”

Some Republican ideas that Mr. Kamp expects could garner some Democratic support include the possibility of tort reform, enabling of low-cost insurance policies for low-income workers, and insurance reform that allows insurance competition across state lines.

One of the major changes will be the fact that Henry Waxman will no longer be chairman of the House Commerce Committee. “That means we’ll have less noise from him,” Mr. Kamp says.

Mr. Kamp cautions, however, that this does not mean Republicans will necessarily be PhRMA’s best friend. “PhRMA enabled healthcare reform, working with the Democratic president,” he says. “There’s going to be some old bad feelings there. I’ve heard, for example, that the new speaker of the house, John Boehner, is very upset with PhRMA as an institution.”

Overall, Mr. Kamp believes that industry will need to remain vigilant in light of the election results. “It’s a mix,” he says. “The battles that were fought last year will be part of the context of the battles next year.”

The “director of worldwide innovation” at Pfizer is a new job for Joe; previously, he was product director and team leader for the biologic Enbrel. The product and the position came over to Pfizer when that company acquired Wyeth.

Today, Joe is at Kevin Kruse’s ePatient Connections conference in Philadelphia, and I’ve been following some of the Tweets from there. Imagine my amusement when he made an announcement during his presentation there that he wants patients and consumers to e-mail him with their ideas about how the company can better engage with them. He promises to read them. (Hat tip to Wendy Blackburn, executive VP of InTouch Solutions, for Tweeting that out.)

UPDATE: To clarify that, Joe wants “input specifically on what high-impact areas of eHealth I should focus on, not just any old suggestions for Pfizer. We have other channels for that.”

(Not for nothing, Joe, but if you’re putting yourself out there as a real, live, human contact, at a company that is rather opaque to the consumer, expect to get contacted about anything and everything. My work phone number and e-mail are the most prominent ones on our site, and if the caller/e-mailer can’t get the exact person he or she wants, I’m the one who gets the call/e-mail because I have the fancy title and therefore must be omniscient.)

So, you heard the man. He can be reached at joe.shields@pfizer.com. And good luck getting through all that, Joe

I don’t recall ever seeing what looks like internal corporate social media rules and regs posted in a public place like this. Doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened before – I try not to spend my days scouring big pharma Websites – but this might just be a first.

And Roche’s Rules are full of what looks like good common sense. Like,

The best advice is to approach online worlds in the same way we do the physical one – by using sound judgment and common sense, by adhering to the Company’s values, and by following the Roche Code of Conduct and all other policies.

and,

There is a big difference in speaking “on behalf of Roche” (as an official spokesperson) or speaking “about” Roche, our products or business partners. It is important that you always remember who you are or who you are representing and what your role is in the social media community.

Or,

Do take time – despite the speed and urgency of the new opportunities and challenges – to think through and plan for your engagement in the social media field. Always remember that engaging in social media is not a one-off activity. What is the long-term concept: who do you want to engage with, for what aim and result, what are opportunities and risks?

The underlying implication behind many of the rules appears to be, social media isn’t really different from other communication opportunities – people just treat it differently. Or, put differently, folks are lulled by the informality of the Web into forgetting that corporate communications will always be viewed and treated as corporate communications, no matter where they are found.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the Roche Rules is that half of them are devoted to what the company calls “personal” social media use; i.e., personal activities online where the user might refer to a Roche product or service but is not serving as an official spokesperson of the company. The Rules state a few points for “personal” social media use that seem obvious, but obviously haven’t been obvious. Like,

Be conscious about mixing your personal and business lives. There is no separation for others between your personal and your business profiles within social media.

and,

Mind the global audience. Even if you are posting on a “local” platform, the information may be accessed globally. This is particularly important in our regulated business. While your message may be accurate in some parts of the world, it could be inaccurate or violate regulations in others.

and, most importantly,

Be transparent about your affiliation with Roche. If you are commenting on any of Roche’s or our competitors’ products or initiatives in a public forum or on a website or personal blog, make sure to fully disclose your affiliation with Roche and that your opinions are personal and not attributable to Roche.

An unnamed senior marketing compliance executive for an unnamed big pharma company (not Roche) once told me that the single worry that keeps him up at night the most is regarding employees messing about on social media sites on their own time. He more or less said the same thing the Roche Rules imply – that, in the wilds of the Web, it is terrifyingly easy to forget about consequences. As the great purveyor of pornography, Second Life, AshleyMadison.com, and all sorts of wild gatherings of human oddities, the Internet earns much of its cachet by being a land without consequences. But not for Roche.