Facebook has rocked the pharma world with its announcement that pharma ‘whitelisting’ will largely disappear on August 15th. Whitelisting has been a special exemption where pharma has been able to prevent people from being able to Like or comment on their Wall posts. So we might actually have to engage with people rather than broadcasting. Terrifying!
And indeed it is terrifying in our highly regulated world. Comments about products that might be off-label or adverse events are big issues. The extremely negative downside of dealing with these complexities has scuttled many a promising program.
There’s been quite a hue and cry among the pharma Twitterati over the past few months on these changes. Some excellent articles are:
- Pharma and Healthcare Facebook Page Deathwatch
- Pharma Facebook Commenting Is Open: Remain Calm
- WGC: Facebook Page Commenting Changes
- Pharma reaction to facebook changes foregrounds three tiers of Social Media
However, I find two points absent from the discussion:
The Big Loophole: For a person to comment. Like, or interact with the wall, there has to be something there to interact with. If a brand removes all content from the wall, leaving it bare, there is effectively no commenting or Liking possible. There are minor flaws with this approach – a person can still comment on the profile pic, for instance. There are major flaws with this – with no interaction on the wall, your page is on Facebook, but it is essentially invisible, as without interaction it will never publish content to the streams of your Likers. However, it is straightforward, if not simple, to use Facebook’s Social Plugins on a custom tab to maintain virality and one-way publishing to the streams of your Likers. This is the sort of work-around we are used to in our regulated industry. This is a loophole big enough to drive a truck through.
Moderation: Facebook’s native moderation tools have gotten much stronger. Using the block list, it is possible to block almost any questionable post from ever showing on the wall. It is entirely possible to use these tools to create a ‘triage’ type strategy that would divert the most difficult items to a review team, queue moderately challenging items to a regulatory consultant, and allow other comments to stand. These criteria can easily be built by a competent PR agency. If the challenge is too daunting or the potential volume too high, companies such as LiveWorld can work with your legal/regulatory team to build a model that will work.
Facebook has lost patience with the industry in hopes of it producing adverting revenue to offset the special care and feeding the industry gets. Brands and companies are going to have to evolve into what Facebook is for, or abandon ship. The end will be a more rewarding environment for everyone.
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