Spin your science into gold1: direct to
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consumer marketing within social mediaplatforms
David Egilmana, *, and Nicholas M Druarb
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aDepartment of Family Medicine, Brown University, Warren Alpert School of Medicine, 8 N. Main Street, Suite401,Attleboro,MA, USA
bNever Again Consulting, 8 N. Main Street, Suite 401,Attleboro,MA, USA
Abstract. We describe the emerging issues related to warnings with respect to pharmaceutical company use of the internet as avehicle for direct-to-consumer marketing (DTC) and market research. We describe the various techniques pharmaceuticalcompanies have used to exploit this new communications medium which permits two way exchange of information. The Foodand Drug Administration (FDA) has not issued any specific regulations to control internet based misbranding. We describesome examples of the FDA’s application of historic regulations to pharmaceutical company use of this new medium and sug-gest
Keywords: direct-to-consumer, web 2.0, pharmaceutical, social media