by Steve Woodruff
Take a look at the screen shot below, from Pfizer’s homepage. Believe it or not, I, or anyone else, can now leave comments “on” any website (such as Pfizer.com) using a new tool (currently in beta) from Google, called Sidewiki.
Game-changer? You bet.
While the use of Google’s Sidewiki has ramifications across the entire web, for every type of site or industry, I’m going to focus here on the pharma industry. Because in pharma, it’s all about controlled messaging via corporate sites, and by and large, the idea of people being able to freely comment on (just about) anything is anathema.
The locus of control has just shifted. You can turn off comments on websites and blogs, but now, people can have their say, and the comments are accessible right there via Sidewiki when people come to your site.
How does this work? Google is not the first to try to allow user-generated commentary on any site, but they are certainly the biggest and most sophisticated. All you have to do is have a Google account, download the Google toolbar for your browser and activate the Sidewiki capability. That’s it.
I decided to go to fellow blogger John Mack’s site and leave a Sidewiki comment there (above). Now John allows (and welcomes) comments, of course, but with Sidewiki, that is irrelevant. And even for those sites where comments are reviewed before approval, Sidewiki allows commentary completely apart from the intervention or approval of the site owner.
How will this change the game with regulatory issues? Well, it’s a big monkey wrench. A pharmaceutical company already cannot control what people say about it, or its products, on various sites. But now people can express themselves with annotations that are, in essence, sidebarred on company sites! Can a company be held liable for, say, off-label discussions that happen on Sidewiki in association with a product site?
It’s a good thing that the FDA will hold hearings in November about the use of social media/Web 2.0 in pharma communications, because we now have a new issue to put on the table. How does industry and its regulatory bodies view user-generated content that cannot be controlled, yet exists in conjunction with company-sponsored sites?
Some question whether the adoption rate of Sidewiki will be significant enough to make a huge difference. It’s a fair question, but I don’t believe that’s the point. The really important thing is: the wall has been breached. I’m not sure there’s going to be any going back as this kind of approach evolves – it’s a Pandora’s box.
The rules of the game just changed again. There’s going to be a lot of mixed feelings about this one.
Steve Woodruff is Founder and President of Impactiviti.
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{ 3 comments }
Who will be responsible for abusive comments posted via this service? I mean, what if an angry patient harmed by some drug manufactured by a particular company, posts defamatory comments to that company’s website? If the site owner has no control over them (as current site owners do, eg. via comment moderation), how can the pharma company deal with this? What if another pharma company sends out people to post about their own product on the opponent’s site?
I can imagine that thing becoming so spamful as to be useless.
…but if you depend on users to remove spam then the drug companies would use it to remove all criticism.
Can’t think of any way this remains a useful tool for long, but Google is clever–perhaps they have some algorithm for that?
So, the rule of thumb is, be very scared when you expect the Feds to get it right in a no-brainer situation.
Precedence exists for Pharma being able to treat Sidewiki *exactly* as a non-branded property. Why is this even a consideration? Throughout this whole issue I’ve only seen the attention grubbing chicken little types pervasively decrying its so-called Pharma implications for their 15 minutes.
I have TWELVE portal sites I can name off the top of my head that I can build a sidebar or i-frame application to emulate this exact functionality. I just need to pull feeds into a sidebar for any site my script deems relevant. Many of these already exist. Why isn’t Pharma scared of that? The natural fact is that the genie has been out of the bottle for a while. This November, both Pharma and Google need to partner on this to make sure the Feds get this right. Otherwise, this sets a poor precedent for the other majority of third-party tools and sites on the web which will make life much much harder for pharma – because the net effect is them now requiring extension of their monitoring domain to these third party properties.
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