Consumer advocacy group Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) is keeping an eye on pharmaceutical companies’ use of social media. “Current FDA guidance on the presentation of risk information should not be compromised to the detriment of public health in favor of accommodating recent developments in online product promotion,” the CDD writes.
The CDD maintains that drug companies should not advertise in most digital platforms, including third party email and social networking boards. Twitter ads shouldn’t be allowed because its brevity (140 characters) doesn’t allow companies to properly explain potential side effects.
Last year, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) told 14 pharmaceutical companies that their search engine ads were misleading. Those companies immediately reassessed their keyword strategies.
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Real-time search (RTS) engine Wowd released a study this week that indicates over half of its 1,011 U.S. respondents had never heard of RTS. Almost half of the survey participants also thought that traditional search engines did not contain the latest online information and content.
Laurie Sullivan of MediaPost writes:
When asked about the biggest problem with Internet search results, […p]robably most telling were the write-in answers from survey participants who chose ‘other.’ Among them were ‘too many advertisements that don’t apply,’ ‘commercially drive search results over relevancy,’ ‘spam and scam links and irrelevant topics,’ and ‘search engines that offer alternative keywords for likely misspellings often weed out the intended results.’
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Radar.net, a social networking for sharing photos, is closing shop. Laurel Papworth of Social Media Today examines the site’s history and its shutdown process in a recent article. Her analysis of Radar.net’s exit is a useful guide for other social media sites that may decide to bow out.
Source: “FDA Asked To Restrict Drug Marketers’ Use Of Social Media,” MediaPost: Online Media Daily, 05/10/10
Source: “Real-Time Search Study Sheds Light On Consumer Use,” MediaPost: Search Blog
Source: “7 steps to shutting down a social media site,” Social Media Today, 05/08/10
Image by erix on Flickr, used under its Creative Commons license.