The Differing Views Of Using Social Media In Pharma

By Cliff Mintz, Life Science Leader magazine

For those of you who haven’t heard, social media is the hottest new technology to hit the Internet since e-commerce in the late 1990s. While social media has already made its way into today’s lexicon, there is some disagreement over exactly what it is. However, most experts agree that the primary goal of social media is to build relationships and create communities around ideas or issues through the use of a variety of interactive online tools. These so-called Web 2.0 tools include online bulletin boards and forums; chat rooms; user-oriented authoring platforms like Twitter, podcasts, and web logs (blogs); and social networking and video sharing sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Flickr.

Regardless of the social media application or platform technology that is used, “It’s all about communication and engaging others in an ongoing conversation or dialogue,” says Ken Grant, a social media enthusiast and director of sales and marketing of Analtech, a company that sells chromatography reagents to life sciences companies.