A Risk-Reward Reset: Getting Serious About Social Media

SamIna Bari, Strategic Business Advisor, SX2 Ventures

Alex Goldenberg, Director of Intelligence, Network Contagion Research Institute

In November 2022, a Twitter (now X) account claiming to be pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly posted some surprising news: “We are excited to announce insulin is free now.” The account was fake, but it appeared authentic since it had a blue “verified” checkmark. The tweet went viral, triggering widespread reactions about drug prices and inspiring additional fake accounts to impersonate the pharma giant. The real Lilly, facing panic internally, was late to react, responding hours later to debunk the tweet. Its stock fell over 4% that day, erasing billions in value, and took weeks to recover.

In light of the public outcry, Lilly CEO David Ricks, in public remarks following the incident,1 acknowledged the high cost of drugs in the US, defending the company’s pricing but saying more work could be done to reduce the cost of insulin. A few months later, in March 2023, the company announced it would cut the prices of its most commonly used insulins by 70%.

But costly and embarrassing PR scandals aren’t the only risks that pharma companies face from their social media. Russia, for example, has undertaken targeted disinformation campaigns against the pharmaceutical industry, including efforts to spread anti-vaccination narratives during the pandemic to discredit Western technologies and promote Russian interests.2 The campaigns, often fueled by state actors and amplified through various media channels, have led to real-world consequences, such as fabricated scandals being weaponized against companies and consumers’ confidence in pharma organizations being lowered. The evolving landscape of disinformation poses new threats to brand equity and public safety alike.

These episodes illustrate the immense damage that social media can do to pharma companies, particularly when they don’t fully understand its risks or have proactive defense strategies in place. In my years in the industry, including executiveroles at Pharmacyclics, Medivation, and Axovant, I’ve seen firsthand that many organizations aren’t adequately anticipating, identifying, forecasting, and managing the threats they could face. Some companies do try to harmonize their social activities into cohesive efforts, but the gaps in understanding mean no one truly “gets” social media’s complexities, including how quickly it works and how devastating—and rapid—its effects can be. Social media is a normal part of the marketing and communications mix, but it also serves as a portal for risk.

Pharma companies need to start taking social media more seriously. Here’s what they should do.

CREATE A HOLISTIC APPROACH

To more effectively prepare for and respond to social media’s risks, pharma companies need a comprehensive approach. They should embrace a new mindset, one that views social as a key cross-functional initiative that impacts the business. In fact, executives should think about it as part of their approach to cybersecurity. No one departmental function has the expertise to foresee and handle every risk, so marketing, communications, IT, security, and other relevant functions must partner together, pooling their collective knowledge so that the company can not only respond to threats, but anticipate threats, try to actively avoid them, and prepare responses before they happen. This mindset shift also requires pharma companies to view social media more holistically, meaning they consider its various aspects—including monitoring and analysis, security, and senior leadership’s involvement—in an integrated way.

1. Improve monitoring, analysis, and forecasting

Currently, social media monitoring at pharma companies is limited and light. Although it’s influenced by legal and regulatory factors, monitoring tends to be a passive exercise that focuses on a few areas: brand perceptions, competitor actions, investor comments, medical affairs issues, and adverse events. Some functions, such as corporate communications, may handle their own social media; others, such as marketing, may outsource it to external agencies, where the cost of monitoring is determined by volume and frequency and is sometimes more costly than the use of social media itself. In many cases, though, different departments do not share their monitoring results with each other, meaning crucial insights are being lost.

It tends to be the case that analysis of social media is left to whichever functions oversee the company’s various social efforts. Typically, that includes marketing (which may then divide up social by brand), product and/or corporate communications, and sometimes medical affairs. However, companies’ monitoring requirements should be more robust—analyzing patterns, forecasting indicators of threats, and looking at all channels holistically to spot trends or other issues that may pose an imminent or future risk.

Monitoring is especially a problem when it’s outsourced to different agencies, which makes it harder to get a unified view of relevant online activity. That also makes it difficult to take offensive or defensive actions in real time, which is essential since social media is globally active 24/7.

While oversight of the various functions’ day-to-day social usage should remain with those stakeholders, companies should appoint an internal team to take the lead on reviewing and analyzing reports and using them to forecast possible threats in a timely manner. After all, data is of no value if there is nothing done with it. IT is a likely candidate for this role, since this function has expertise in security and technology. Companies also should standardize the type and timing of reports about threats and risks, which would help them obtain a more holistic view of what’s happening online. Currently, social success metrics tend to be more focused on content, viewership, engagement, and sharing, and less so on social’s broader impact to the organization. These kinds of shifts can help change that.

2. Take a cybersecurity view

The threats that social media can pose have become increasingly clear over time. To respond to those threats, and even prevent them from harming the company, pharma must consider a mindset shift to start thinking about social in cybersecurity terms because nothing is completely safe on the internet.

There are a few elements of this mindset shift. First, pharma has to begin viewing social not only as a marketing or corporate communications tactic, but as an area of potentially significant security exposure. That includes allocating more budget toward monitoring and analysis, or even combining those efforts within the same social media budget. Second, the functions that use social should partner more closely with each other and with security and IT teams to share information and discuss what they’re seeing on their various channels. In fact, it would be ideal if senior leaders with IT and cybersecurity expertise were involved in discussions about the company’s social media activities, online presence, and risk implications.

Third, companies should try to minimize the number of agencies to whom they outsource their social media activities, to help provide a holistic view of their internet channels. Fourth, social media-savvy executives should work with legal and regulatory colleagues to ensure that they fully understand not only potential risks but also opportunities related to the organization’s social content; too often these colleagues either simply approve content for functions to post or are overly risk-averse and reject innovative thinking. And, finally, boards of directors should have an understanding of cybersecurity and social risk that allows them to ask the right questions about how company functions use social media and how they are prepared to mitigate potential risk.

To help make this shift, companies will need the right talent, people who understand not only social media’s opportunities and threats but also how it impacts their business. Often companies lack employees with this expertise, which is a reason they outsource their social efforts. Because of the impact social media could have, giving it the weight and priority it deserves will require sufficient in-house expertise.

In addition, pharma companies should appoint a champion to oversee the shift. This person needs to know how to work with marketing and communications teams to look at the big picture and maintain accountability about how social activity could expose the company to risks. A senior IT or cybersecurity person could make sense for the role. They should work also to educate other necessary functions, such as legal, regulatory, and medical, to ensure all parties have sufficient knowledge of social threats and to create consistency in the company’s decision-making about uses of social media.

3. Engage senior leaders and boards

The final element of creating a holistic social approach is for senior executives and boards to lead the way, showing the company that there’s real urgency to revamping its social efforts. High-level perspectives are crucial here, because while many pharma companies have playbooks and rapid response teams for online threats, the people involved usually are too low on the organizational chart to fully understand risk tolerance and mitigation for corporate issues. C-suite leadership can spur the company to truly embrace a holistic view of social. At the same time, senior executives can help ensure that risk tolerance is calibrated correctly, so the organization doesn’t shut down innovative and industry-standard work in an effort to avoid any risk.

To do this, executives and boards must understand social’s risks and invest appropriately to manage them while ensuring all positive opportunities are leveraged. Annual budgets are approved at the board level, yet few—if any—board members truly appreciate the enormity of how social media can expose a business to threats. Boards of directors are largely formulaic in their composition, with a focus on general business and P&L management, finance, science, and marketing. Directors may be experts in one of these areas, but they tend to be less adept at understanding external reputation, perception, and image, as well as their impact on the bottom line.

When boards are formed or members are replaced, these considerations must be taken into account, especially in this dynamically evolving ecosystem. And when budgets are being approved for various departments, they should include consistent levels of budget for monitoring, analysis, forecasting, and reporting to ensure apples-to-apples comparisons and transparent discussions of social’s impact, influence, opportunities, and risks. This way, a company’s overall online presence can be quantified more uniformly.

Social media is an essential tool for pharma companies to connect with patients and customers, but it also can expose them to a number of serious, material risks. By taking a more holistic, integrated view of social activities and by employing more rigorous and uniform standards for monitoring, analysis, forecasting, and reporting, organizations can be more proactive about spotting and more effective in responding to threats before they have any negative business impact.

SamIna Bari is Strategic Business Advisor, SX2 Ventures; Alex Goldenberg is Director of Intelligence, Network Contagion Research Institute

References

1. Harwell, D. A Fake Tweet Sparked Panic at Eli Lilly and May Have Cost Twitter Millions. The Washington Post. November 14, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/14/twitter-fake-eli-lilly/

2. Sohn, A.; Goldenberg, A.; Paresky, P.; et al. The Future of Disinformation Operations and the Coming War on Brands. Network Contagion Research Institute. https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/NCRI-%E2%80%93-The-Future-of-Disinformation.pdf