Today, the IgniteBLOG reported the first ever branded pharma tweet. The tweet came from twitter.com/racewithinsulin. Of course, I found out about in on Twitter.
This development is interesting from a couple of perspectives. The twitter feed is from a brand advocate, rather than a company. The twitter homepage includes both Levemir and Novolog important safety information and logos as part of the page background, making it almost like a brand.com website. Ignite did a very nice writeup on the effort in a previous blog post, so I won’t repeat the analysis.
The tweet itself – apparently the 12th tweet made – includes both the full product name (brand name and generic), and a link to the prescribing information. My knee jerk response was to say this was out of step with the recent FDA crackdown and the new rules for paid search. But it’s not. There’s no indication anywhere (I had thought diabetes was in the twitter username – obviously now I see that it’s not). The link is even to the PI, rather than a brand or unbranded website. If you were weird enough to view it on the Twitter homepage for the account you would get the whole story. It’s like wearing belt and suspenders – they’re covered a couple of ways. To my mind they could have linked directly to the brand.com.
So congratulations to breaking some new ground to the team at Novo Nordisk! Weaving an occasional promo tweet into the stream from this brand advocate seems palatable enough from the point of view of one of his follows. “And now for a message from our sponsors.” Of course, they’ll have to watch the ratio of promotion to hard news, but that seems a reasonable trade-off.
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