Pharma online: does regulation or corporate social media policy need to change to allow a real dialogue about medicines?

‘Big Pharma’ is a good example of a major industry that is finding that the Internet is a minefield as well as a field of plenty. It’s a great place to sell your goods and everyone is talking about medicine and health online. Yet, in most countries like the UK, they is strict legislation on what they can do to ‘promote’ their wares directly to the digital public. And, of course, there are all sorts of reputational hazards. Katherine Relle, a former LSE student and Polis Intern won our 2012 Human Digital/Polis Social Media Research Prize for her work on trying to understand how pharmaceutical companies might benefit from understanding what people are saying about them online. We celebrated the prize with a seminar that included social media marketers, researchers and pharmaceutical professionals. You can read more about Katherine Relle’s research here. This report on the event is by Polis intern Lucia Cohen.