In continuation of our last blog post about challenges faced while monitoring and analyzing social media data for healthcare, here are some more.
5) Unpredictability of buzz and viral nature of social media
Rarely, any event in social media is entirely predictable. Many a times, companies don’t even realize that the most well intentioned marketing communication may seem offensive to a certain target consumer segment. These consumers, empowered with agility, and wide reach of social media can demonstrate online activism using various formats. The impact of such online viral activism can spoil a brand’s reputation within hours. Blogging mothers’ campaign against Motrin is a great example of such an event.
This also leaves companies with very less time to reach and salvage the situation. Ironically, the quicker way to respond to such activism is through social media platforms. A delayed traditional PR response may adversely affect the reputation.
Real time monitoring, although admittedly difficult, is a necessary evil. Monitoring of social networks, especially during conferences, events and product launches can reveal critical issues and be a harbinger of bad news that can be avoided with prompt action.
6) Scattered social influencers
Use of the internet to find health-related information is growing as evident in various internet usage surveys. The sources of online information in the healthcare world are as diverse as the disease conditions themselves. Although there are some websites that offer information on wide range of diseases and associated medication and therapies, the healthcare communities tend to be clustered around specific disease areas. The task of determining online influencers become tedious and disease area-specific.
The KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders) and KSAs (Key Social Advocates) are specific to a certain diseases area and none of them can be ignored. To get a clear understanding of the social influence of these leaders in the online communities specific to disease area, constant monitoring of their activities is needed.
7) Actionability of information and insights
Social media monitoring and analysis for healthcare and pharma industry can be initiated under two approaches. Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages.
In the first approach, we set specific objectives and try to find information chunks around those objectives. This approach may not always offer satisfactory results since there is no guarantee that patient communities are conversing on issues that we wish to learn about. Most likely, there is always something to find but on many occasions, it may not be significant to support strategic decisions. The information is nevertheless, valuable.
In such cases, taking a “discovery” approach is more useful. Under this approach, we listen broadly and carefully, observe important issues, determine trends, identify conversation triggers among patients, establish social essence, and deduce further action plan.
Better yet, a hybrid approach has better chances of success.
For strategic actionable insights to come from social media, the activities of monitoring and analysis should be performed on a long-term basis, not just with preset objectives, but also with an open mind i.e.an approach that blend the “objective orientation” and the “discovery orientation” in equal measure.
8) Regulatory concerns
Last but by no means least, while monitoring social media data, there is always a concern for pharma/healthcare companies about discovering any adverse events (AEs) or patient complains (PCs). In large part of the western world for pharma/healthcare companies monitoring social networking websites, such information is expected to be reported to the regulatory authorities for review, even if it is not found on company-sponsored websites. If the AEs/PCs are not intentionally reported on the company’s websites, it is only a matter of time before someone brings it to the company’s notice.
Such concerns shouldn’t discourage the pharma/healthcare companies from using social media monitoring to their strategic advantage, as it will only help them to improve the drug or way of treatment. Proactively taking up social media engagement will surely go a long way in winning consumer’s trust and establishing a reliable brand.
In our next blog post on this subject, we will cover how social media monitoring and analysis can be used by pharma companies for competitive intelligence and throw light on associated challenges.
August 25th, 2011 by Tanmay Saraykar
