Blogging For Highly Regulated Industries

Rick Murry’s short presentation at the business blog summit was good, I especially liked his final question, how can Edelman open up a conversation with heavily regulated industries, such as the healthcare industry. Blogs represent a particularly difficult problem for the healthcare industry, how do you open up a conversation with your customers, when the FDA regulates your industry, and there is a possibility of personal danger even death to patients. The risk of legal liability are high, the process of content authorization on a large pharmaceutical or biotechnology company website can be very long, while its in the nature of blogging that you want to be producing content regularly and timely.

This is a difficult question and something I’ve been thinking about for a while, here are some of my earlier thoughts from my personal blog PR Communications.

“I would suggest the solution lies in the ability of a corporate blog to teach a company more about their customers needs and wants. Patients who are sick, research the web and communicate with fellow suffers, often patients will build their own web sites on a particular topic. Why not provide free blogs to patients.�?

Posted by johncass at August 19, 2005 5:55 PM