Sermo has garnered the interest of the popular press by drawing doctors into the social networking sphere. Yet among venture capitalists and entrepreneurs the Cambridge, MA, startup has attracted more attention for devising a value proposition to convince the pharmaceutical industry and others to pay for access to its coveted online community of doctors; the first pharma to take Sermo up on that proposition, in a deal announced last year, was global giant Pfizer (NYSE:[[ticker:PFE]]).
Now Sermo CEO Daniel Palestrant says that his company’s list of paying pharma clients has grown to include nine of the 12 largest drug companies in the world (he wouldn’t name names, but think of Eli Lilly (NYSE:[[ticker:LLY]]), GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE:[[ticker:GSK]]), and Novartis (NYSE:[[ticker:NVS]]) as potential customers). This news answers some looming questions about whether Sermo would be able to sell multiple pharmas on the concept of paying for online interactions with docs. What’s more, it may be a positive harbinger for the budding Health 2.0 sector, which is banking on the migration of pharma marketing dollars to the Web as a main source of revenue.
Sermo, with a physicians-only community of nearly 77,000 members, is reaching out to a pharma industry besieged by mounting government oversight of its interactions with doctors, hampering the ability of drug reps to court clinicians through traditional means such as company-paid meals and golf outings. This clampdown is spurring the drug industry to find new ways to interact with its target audience.
“I think what’s happening is that Sermo is very quickly emerging as a medium that can not only allow industry to redefine its relationship with physicians but also to have tremendous cost savings and have tremendous insights,” Palestrant says. “It’s not unusual to have our clients find that the same things that they did offline or through other mediums they can do on Sermo for a tenth of the price and in a quarter of the time.”
Palestrant makes those claims without revealing details about how much his privately held firm charges pharma clients for access to its members. However, he talked about new products luring those customers (Sermo doesn’t allow advertisements or product promotions on its site), including an offering launched in recent months that allows drug companies and contract research organizations
