As regulated industries, financial services and life sciences are anxious to use social media for marketing. But, SEC and FDA compliance concerns are sidelining modern marketing initiatives for pharmaceuticals, health care, device manufacturers, insurance services and financial advisers. CIOs and compliance officers are struggling to balance social marketing opportunities with risk and regulation.
How can a regulated industry use social media to market, teach, care and support in real-time? It’s hard, but not impossible. With a combination of training, policy, technical audits and approvals – regulated industries can take advantage of modern marketing methods. Start small with a focused campaign. Use technology to record external interactions and communications – yes even Tweets – in case audits are necessary. In ultra-regulated environments, you can even sequence near real-time prior approvals of content – yes even Tweets – with workflow software. Getting started, getting buy-in, overcoming webs of concern won’t be easy, but it will be worth it. It’s an exciting time. Can’t wait to see a few pioneers get started.
What are your thoughts? Experiences? Observations? Leave a comment.
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August 13th, 2009 at 4:15 pm
While there are perils in social media for highly regulated industries/companies, I agree that there is opportunity as well. Having worked for a major credit card issuer, I can understand the concern about user generated content (who says nice things about their lender?), but they also have opportunities to get out in front of problems and truly demonstrate publicly their efforts to be customer-service-oriented. If they are concerned about putting the “power of the pen” into the hands of employees, then they must identify a handful of highly skilled and trained staff with whom to start, and rely on links to existing content rather than empower fully extemporaneous responses. To some extent, many of them are already doing this through their use of email and LiveChat with a library of canned answers. While this is not a good long term solution, it is a way to get comfortable with the channel and to put their Legal and Complaince departments at ease.
August 26th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
Having worked in both credit card and insurance, I predict credit card co’s may tiptoe in, but it will be extremely difficult to make any progress with insurance or healthcare. The degree of regulation is simply too high and cycles of action too slow to use social media. Just my opinion, but it was incredibly arduous and slow to do *anything*. Not saying whether that’s right or wrong — it’s just the way it is.
November 11th, 2009 at 11:24 am
As a marketer for an independent wealth management firm, I have recently started using social media as a means to help leverage and distribute our PR efforts (media clips, interviews, etc) as well as the bulk of information we generate in terms of newsletters, white papers, commentary, etc. We have found it important to create company policies and procedures for the firm and our staff’s use of social sites like Twitter and Linked In. And I also agree with Teri that in regard to the concern about user generated content and using negative comments from users as an opportunity to address questions and comments in a positive manner and demonstrate our abilities in though leadership. Our compliance officer is still leary about the use of social media as a marketing tool, but my personal opinion is that social media isn’t going to disappear anytime soon so it’s best to build a program along with policies and procedures now so we can be ahead of the curve instead of playing catch up in the long run.
January 7th, 2010 at 9:26 am
Clearly, there are reputation, security and compliance risks in the use of the mainstream, consumer-focused social media tools. We at linkedFA.com believe that a purpose driven social media site, created specifically for financial advisors, will allow you to get the best social media has to offer in developing your business, while protecting both you and your client’s privacy and security. http://www.linkedfa.com addresses FINRA compliance rules for financial advisors.
February 2nd, 2010 at 3:05 pm
A quick overview of our experience in the heavily regulated pharma industry can be found here.
Enjoy !
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