It seems that most industries are rushing to jump aboard the Twitter bandwagon.
That’s true for most cases, with the pharmaceutical industry being the exception.
David Williams points out the lack of Twitter activity from the major pharmaceutical companies, where many of the Pharma-related keywords being owned by those not affiliated with the company.
Worse, when he looks at the Twitter names for the top 10 prescribed drugs, they’re owned by either spam sites, or “Twittersquatters” who snap up the domain name, waiting for someone to approach them to buy it.
To their credit, the blog over at GlaxoSmithKline responded to the story, saying “the FDA’s recent communications on sponsored links raises questions about how Twitter can be used to communicate about prescription drug products. For example, FDA has made clear that the short 100 or so character ad copy used in sponsored links cannot be used for anything deemed to represent what the product is used for, without also including the safety information about the product in the sponsored link – a difficult challenge in such limited space.”
That said, I believe that Twitter will overtake both blogs and RSS as the information disseminator of choice, and not claiming these relevant keywords seems like a short-sighted social media strategy to me.
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- Tips for doctors who use Twitter
- Can Twitter be used for doctor-patient communication?
- Poll: Is Twitter necessary for physicians and other medical professionals?
- Do drug companies and the pharma industry deserve to be villains?
- Have drug companies really curbed gifts to doctors at medical conferences?
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“That said, I believe that Twitter will overtake both blogs and RSS as the information disseminator of choice, and not claiming these relevant keywords seems like a short-sighted social media strategy to me.”
140 character texts (Just had some Lipitor! This stuff rox!!!)will be the information disseminator of choice? God help us…..
The less the better from Big Pharma
I know someone who works at a medium sized pharma company who said she’s required to give legal two weeks notice of all Tweets. Hardly seems with it, given that.
That said, I believe that Twitter will overtake both blogs and RSS as the information disseminator of choice
I have to strongly disagree with this prediction. Twitter is a tool for brief direct messages in the “moment” messages. Tweets have little to no staying power. How many individual Tweets come up in a Google Search?
None.
Blogs will continue to be dominant for relevant information on topics, RSS will continue to successfully syndicate blog content into all sorts of applications… including Twitter via such applications as TwitFeed.
Don’t believe the Twitter hype.
Technology-wise, I agree that RSS is the far superior for reading feeds and news. Twitter has too much noise.
But, studies have shown that RSS adoption has topped out, and for the masses, Twitter is an easier platform for widespread use in the general public. Long-term I think Twitter will come to dominate RSS use.
Kevin
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