alex de carvalho

tl;dr: So you’ve been tasked with “tack­ling” social media for your orga­ni­za­tion: now what? At the Eye­For­Pharma eMar­ket­ing Sum­mit 2010 in Berlin, I pre­sented “5 Keys to Imple­ment­ing Social Media,” a frame­work to help you define your organization’s social media activ­ity. This post sum­ma­rizes the first key, mon­i­tor­ing your brand online. As a dis­claimer, I am the co-founder of a brand mon­i­tor­ing ser­vice for the life sci­ences indus­try.

If mar­kets are conversations …

“Any savvy party goer knows to lis­ten before jump­ing into a con­ver­sa­tion at a cock­tail party.” -Jere­miah Owyang, Part­ner, Altime­ter Group

“There’s no tagline” to con­ver­sa­tions, accord­ing to the Clue­train Man­i­festo: “For thou­sands of years, we knew exactly what mar­kets were: con­ver­sa­tions between peo­ple who sought out oth­ers who shared the same inter­ests. Buy­ers had as much to say as sell­ers. They spoke directly to each other with­out the fil­ter of media, the arti­fice of posi­tion­ing state­ments, the arro­gance of adver­tis­ing, or the shad­ing of pub­lic relations.”

All sell­ers and brands may not be fully aware yet (see the social media adop­tion matrix) but their con­sumers sure are talk­ing about them. Whether you believe these inter­ac­tions should be called “con­ver­sa­tions” or “self-publishing,” research by Penn State Uni­ver­sity found that “20 per­cent of all tweets—or one out of every five updates—mention spe­cific brand names or prod­ucts.” As for the value of these tweets? “There’s room to glean qual­i­ta­tive analy­sis about brand per­cep­tion and affin­ity from them, at least.” -Jim Jansen, Penn State (and some “Com­pa­nies court tweet­ers and blog­gers”).

A large pro­por­tion of these con­ver­sa­tions are related to health. Accord­ing to Pew Inter­net, 61% of Amer­i­can adults look online for health infor­ma­tion (June 2009).

Fully 42% of all adults, or 60% of e-patients, say they or some­one they know has been helped by fol­low­ing med­ical advice or health infor­ma­tion found on the internet.

In Ger­many alone, “there are more than 100 health-related search queries per sec­ond,” accord­ing to Jens Mon­sees from Google, cit­ing 2010 search stats at Eye­For­Pharma in Berlin.

… are you listening?

Accord­ing to Jere­miah Owyang, “In the social media com­mu­ni­ca­tions life­cy­cle [pic­tured above], com­pa­nies often fail to lis­ten .… One of the biggest prob­lems for [online] com­mu­ni­ca­tors today, just like a real con­ver­sa­tion, is learn­ing to listen.”

For exam­ple, do you know:

• Whether your clients and con­sumers are men­tion­ing your brands, prod­ucts, and ser­vice experiences?
• What are physi­cians dis­cussing online, and who’s becom­ing influential?
• How do patients feel about your brand?
• Is the med­ical con­tent accurate?
• Is your pro­mo­tional activ­ity effective?
• In what con­text are your brands mentioned?

By becom­ing aware of your online men­tions through­out social media sites and plat­forms (see the con­ver­sa­tion prism), you will effec­tively and quickly gain new insights, to:

• Under­stand your cus­tomers and your community
• See how and where your brands are mentioned
• Pin­point cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion issues
• Find out what really con­cerns physi­cians and patients
• What and where is the false information?
• How are com­pet­ing brands perceived?

Social media mon­i­tor­ing tools help keep your team orga­nized and on top of mar­ket trends. For exam­ple, like a canary in the coal mine, online men­tions of Avan­dia were clearly mul­ti­ply­ing pre­ced­ing the announce­ment of the drug’s recall. On a more pos­i­tive note, the buzz on Her­ceptin increased five folds fol­low­ing pub­li­ca­tion in Europe’s Lancet about pos­i­tive results clin­i­cal tri­als for Her­ceptin, a part of the chemother­apy reg­i­men for HER2 pro­tein pos­i­tive breast can­cer (The Lancet, 2002). How­ever, some physi­cians and patients had allegedly been using Her­ceptin treat­ment before chemother­apy, to reduce the size of lumps in HER-2 pos­i­tive patients, and shar­ing their expe­ri­ences online. After recent clin­i­cal tri­als were per­formed, these proved the drug did indeed improve progression-free sur­vival before start­ing the chemother­apy reg­i­men (The Lancet, Jan­u­ary 2010).

That’s all very well, but how does one keep track of online mentions?

Brand mon­i­tor­ing platforms

There’s a grow­ing cat­e­gory of Soft­ware as a Ser­vice called brand mon­i­tor­ing, with a num­ber of sys­tems that work to col­lect and ana­lyze the online buzz about your brand and the key words that mat­ter to you. Rather than con­duct­ing daily man­ual searches through blog search engines, these sys­tems are con­ve­nient when you need to per­form the fol­low­ing activities:

1. Pull men­tions from blogs, videos, med­ical resources and forums, patient and physi­cian social networks;
2. Track specific top­ics, drugs, dis­ease, ther­a­peu­tic areas;
3. Graph­i­cally dis­play daily men­tions, rolling averages;
4. Con­duct sen­ti­ment analy­sis and other types of data mining;
5. Cre­ate auto­matic alerts for unusual or increased online men­tions activity;
6. Fil­ter out low-value or irrel­e­vant mentions;
7. Del­e­gate men­tions for fur­ther action by your team;
8. Ticket men­tions to keep track of issue res­o­lu­tion and prob­lem solving;
9. Anno­tate and archive men­tions for record keep­ing and future retrieval;
10. Export weekly, monthly, or quar­terly inter­nal reports;
11. Post responses on social sites like Twitter;
12. and more.

Your social media busi­ness case and resource allocation

When con­sid­er­ing social media for your orga­ni­za­tion, there are few steps as impor­tant as under­stand­ing where you fit in the con­ver­sa­tion online. Social media mon­i­tor­ing allows you to more effec­tively man­age your rep­u­ta­tion, track your com­peti­tors, and mon­i­tor mar­ket trends. As a side ben­e­fit, what you find out in terms of the qual­ity, vol­ume, and scope of men­tions online regard­ing your key terms will help you cre­ate the busi­ness case for social media adop­tion (or not) by your orga­ni­za­tion, and deter­mine the resources you will require.

If you are inter­ested in the “5 Keys to Social Media Imple­men­ta­tion” and the “Social Media Adop­tion Matrix”, please see the full deck on Slideshare:

social media, brand mon­i­tor­ing, strat­egy, imple­men­ta­tion, mar­ket­ing, online men­tions, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal, pharma, her­ceptin, avan­dia