If you are responsible for public relations and communications for a pharmaceutical or biotechnology company, it’s challenging for you to make the time to stay on top of the changes in our practice, let alone to analyze and adapt them appropriately for use by your organization.

Your company should be cautious about changing the way they communicate and most are.  However, too many companies see the risk in making changes more clearly than they recognize the risks in not making them.

It is your responsibility to counsel your management so they can make informed choices to manage new risks and seize new opportunities as they communicate in support of your company’s goals and reputation. With so many changes happening so quickly, it can be hard to know where to begin.

Going back to the first point in this post – your lack of available time – here are three things you can do in 2012 to visibly give your company’s communications more impact and to strengthen and protect its reputation.

One –  Media Relations

You can update your media relations practices to help journalists, most of whom are now covering beats solo that used to be covered by two or three reporters.  Save your time and theirs by making information on your therapeutic area/s and the drug discovery and development process easily accessible from the media page of your website. This information will also be helpful to employees not directly involved in R&D, Medical or Marketing. After all, informed employees are your company’s best brand ambassadors.

Two – Thought Leadership

You know the areas where your company is a thought leader.  You can make that thought leadership more visible to the outside world by identifying one or more individuals who are experts in your scientific platform/s or technologies. Ask them to make a small time commitment, for example, one hour a month, to comment on news articles, post opinion pieces or help reporters seeking an expert source. If you are not already subscribed to HARO (Help A Reporter Out), founded by Peter Shankman, you can do that in 2012. It is a valuable source of opportunities for your experts with top tier media outlets. Another resource that looks like it has potential is www.expertengine.com, developed by Jeremy Potter of Journalisitics.  Once your experts are in place and prepared, you can include them in this new database, which is still in beta, by the way.

Three – Social Media

Social media is nothing more, or less, than a venue where your organization interacts with its stakeholders. I have heard pharmaceutical PR executives reject social media outright, seeing it as high risk with very little benefit, a minefield of adverse event reporting and potential FDA violations.

If this is your company’s view of social media, you can take a first, reputation-protecting step in 2012 of monitoring what is being said about your company and your products online. This is also a good time to form a team with your Legal and Regulatory departments to research social media policies, track other companies’ case studies for best and worst practices and discuss what you would do if you had to address a crisis online.

The FDA has issued an initial social media guidance for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. I highly recommend Wendy Blackburn’s take on how to apply this guidance. Her post includes a link to the FDA document.

If you are looking for a way to stay current on social media in healthcare public relations, Wendy Blackburn’s blog ePharmaRx is a  good resource. Steve Woodruff’s Impactiviti is another helpful, targeted blog. To see how public relations practitioners are using social media in other sectors, Deirdre Breakenridge is invaluable. She literally wrote the book on it – “PR 2.0,” and has another book coming out soon “Social Media and PR: Eight New Practices for the PR Professional.”  You can follow Deirdre on her blog PR 2.0 Strategies.