Pharma's Facebook Free Ride is NOT Over! Take Advantage of This Loophole Dudes

Today is the day that Facebook will no longer allow pharmaceutical companies to disable comments made to their Facebook pages.

"Today is the day that many pharma and healthcare companies that like their Facebook Pages hoped would never come. Remain calm," said Jonathan Richman on his Dose of Digital Blog.

As Jonathan noticed, so far it doesn’t appear that Facebook has actually turned on comments on any pharma pages.

Facebook may be tardy in carrying out its threat, but that's NOT the "free ride" I am talking about.

No matter when the new policy is implemented, pharma Facebook pages such as this one for Lunesta (see screen shot below) can STILL have comments disabled (listen to this podcast interview of Jonathan Richman for the details).

The difference between the Lunesta Facebook page and the standard www.lunesta.com Web page is:

The Facebook page is FREE! The pharmaceutical company that markets Lunesta (Sunovion; formerly Sepracor) pays Facebook NOTHING to create and maintain this page, whereas it pays to create and maintain the drug.com site.

This is the best deal in town! Call it CUGC: "Corporate User Generated Content."

I hope the pharmaceutical industry doesn't cry too hard if and when Facebook implements its comment policy change. After all, there's a loophole you can drive a truck through.