Social media and social networking are at the forefront for many industries, and the life sciences industry is no different. George Ng, a partner at Gordon & Rees LLP, highlights the many uses and benefits of social media and social networking, as well as the associated risks.

Social networking websites are currently at the forefront of worldwide public awareness. Social media and networking is a recent extension, and some would say revolution, of the traditional social network, which primarily consisted of relationships and ties between individuals and families in towns and villages. Social networking involves using websites to build and bring together online communities of people with similar interests and common activities. Social media includes information, in various forms (from written text to music to video), that is disseminated through social networking, as well as the online tools for such dissemination. Together, social media and social networking have resulted in a new way of communicating and sharing information, by allowing people to access the information of and from other people located anywhere else in the world while only requiring an Internet connection.

Social Media Marketing
One of the major developments and trends is social media marketing, i.e., to utilize social media and networking to market services or goods. Many companies are using social media tools, such as Facebook share widgets, to market their products. For example, these share widgets appear as small buttons or thumbnail images, on a Facebook page. When anyone clicks on that share widget, another box or website with shared content (oftentimes, with links to other web pages) is opened. In this manner, these share widgets may be used as mini-advertisements to attract and bring users to more robust content on another page or website.

Another prominent use of social networks is to monitor the activities, thoughts, trends and feedback of individuals, as well as targeted groups. For example, in the consumer goods industry, many companies utilize various social network sites, such as Twitter, to monitor public sentiment toward their products, as well as to address criticism and reported problems. There have been instances in which pharmaceutical companies have partnered with physician social networking sites, such as Sermo, to gauge the opinions of physicians in certain topics through surveys and other tools.

Social networking is also being used by companies to help position their products or services by allowing these companies to convey a desired message about those products or services or to educate physicians and/or patients, such as through patient networking websites (e.g., Childrenwithdiabetes.com). For example, a company may purposefully send messages or posts through Twitter or another social networking site to highlight a recent improvement or a new version of its product or services. Additionally, in the case of Twitter, through sending out carefully-crafted tweets, which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters, some companies have utilized Twitter as an extension of their customer service departments to publicly counter complaints or address concerns or questions.

Specific to the life sciences industry, in the past, some pharmaceutical companies have also partnered with patient networking sites, like PatientsLikeMe.com, to recruit patients for clinical trials. In one instance, a patient networking site sent out a message to its members interested in a specific therapeutic indication alerting them to a particular clinical trial in that indication.

Regulatory, Compliance and Legal Risks
Social media and networking have many uses, but not without risks. In particular, many social media tools are limited in the amount of space they can occupy, which is a part of their novelty, but this limitation (or advantage, depending upon the perspective) has posed a problem from a regulatory and compliance standpoint. Indeed, on July 29, 2010, the U.S. Food and Drug Agency (FDA) sent a warning letter to a pharmaceutical company regarding its use of a Facebook share widget to post shared content about one of its pharmaceutical drug products. The FDA asserted that through the share widget, the company made representations and suggestions about the safety and efficacy of the drug product was shared, but without directly communicating any of the risk information associated with the drug product. In the shared content of the widget, there was a hyperlink to various drug product websites containing risk information, but the FDA concluded that use of the hyperlink was an inadequate method of conveying risk information.

Another area of risk is in monitoring. Although gaining physician and patient sentiments about drug products may be the goal of monitoring, adverse event information will likely crop up as well. This adds the extra burden on companies that monitor to develop and have in place the appropriate policies, standard operating procedures and mechanisms to compliantly track and report adverse events gleaned from monitoring.

Aside from the regulatory and compliance issues, there are other legal risks associated with the use of social media and networking within a company. For example, employee use of social media can cause a number of problems for employers in the areas of security, disclosure of confidential information and privacy.

Conclusion
Although some life sciences companies have embraced social media and networking, many life sciences companies are wary of potential regulatory, compliance and legal risks and have taken a "wait-and-see" approach. Exacerbating these concerns is the fact that many government regulatory agencies, have yet to issue any formal guidance on the use of the Internet, social media and networking in the marketing of regulated medical products. For example, although the FDA held an open hearing to receive public and industry input on this topic back in November 2009, it has yet to issue any formal guidance on the subject. Indeed, the FDA recently announced a second delay in issuing its long-promised guidance documents on social media.

However, doing nothing is also not without its share of risks. Delay in registering for websites and social networking accounts for desired names, such as a company or drug product name, could result in losing those websites and accounts to another person or entity that registers them first (or the hassle of going through legal and administrative proceedings to recover them). Also, not putting into place a carefully-crafted social media and networking policy, or otherwise providing guidance and/or restrictions on employee use of social media and networking websites, could lead to disasters, from harassment lawsuits (from, for example, employees posting inappropriate information or pictures and sharing them with co-workers via social networking sites) to inadvertent disclosure of sensitive and confidential, company information.

All in all, social media and networking have unquestionable value, but their utilization in the highly-regulated, life sciences industry requires careful consideration and planning.