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Consumer survey about healthcare and social media reveals opportunity for pharma industry

Published by Whitney Poma on May 8, 2012.

The survey, released in April, from PwC and the Healthcare Research Institute titled “Social Media ‘likes’ Healthcare” reveals opportunities for pharma to engage with consumers through social channels. With the days of social media being just for Gen-Xers behind us, the use of social networking sites has increased from just 5% of all adults in 2005, to half of all adults in 2011. Specific to pharma, about one-third of consumers are now using social media as a go-to resource for health discussions.  The survey dissects consumer  usage of social media for health information and in the process, found some key opportunities for pharma to improve their social media strategies.

1. Be on-demand:

Consumer expectations for the ability to contact pharma companies via social media are increasing as the division between their everyday social interactions and digital interactions continues to fade. Research shows that 70% of consumers expect healthcare companies to reply to requests for information made via social media within a day of the inquiry being posted. Even more so, 40% of them expect a reply within a few hours. Efficiently responding to requests for information can be challenging for any pharma company, amid the requirements to protect consumer privacy and allow time for legal review before the reply can be sent.

Tips for success:

  • Set expectations: let consumers know that in order to keep their best interests in mind while operating in the regulated pharma industry, responses to their requests will require more time than they might experience from social interactions with other industries. Communicating this expectation can be achieved through a quick reply to someone’s tweet or Facebook post or prominently displaying your policy within your social profile
  • Proactively prepare: anticipate the requests that might be made through social media channels. Begin drafting potential responses and/or create the decision tree that will need to be activated upon the receipt of a request.   Reminder: make sure all of your replies are personal, both in tone and content.

2. Be valuable:

This is obvious, right? But when was the last time you asked your consumers how your company can provide value to them through social media? When asked which services offered by drug companies would be the most valuable, consumers said the top three items were:

  1. Discounts or coupons
  2. (tie)Voice complaints/seek customer service and Information to find the cheapest medication
  3. Treatment reminders

Two of the top three services relate to financial assistance. Pharma being lesser promotional industry relative to the retail industry makes it difficult to directly satisfy this request but that doesn’t prevent the consumer expectation that pharma should offer promotions and discounts through their social channels. The association between social media and customer service is, as mentioned in the first opportunity, very apparent.

Tips for success:

  • Highlight existing resources: Use social media profiles to direct people to your existing resources for financial assistance, insurance information, and any promotions that you may have.
  • Personalize reminders: create online tools or social applications that allow your consumers to create personalized and customizable treatment reminders.
  • Monitor profiles daily: Pay attention to your social media profiles for customer service requests. There are many community management tools such as Hootsuite that can alert you when a request has been received.
  • Conduct research: Don’t let this research be the determining factor. Ask your consumers via social media or traditional methods, what they think would be the most valuable.

3. Be trustworthy:

Although consumers are using social media to share their lives in a larger capacity, privacy and security issues still remain a top concern. When sharing health information online, consumers reported they’re most concerned that:

  1. Their personal health information will be shared in public
  2. Their information will be hacked or leaked

These concerns signal that consumers would be more open to engaging with pharma on social media if they had full transparency into how we’re planning to use the information they share with us in these engagements

Tips for success:

  • Use discretion: Ensure that your interactions with consumers via social media are made public only when applicable and private when necessary.
  • Communicate your privacy policy: Make your privacy policy easy to find, and read.
  • Be upfront: Be open and transparent about the data you’re collecting and how it will be used. Show the value to the customer that their participation is helping your brand serve them better.

As consumer usage of social media for health information continues to rise, so do their expectations for communicating with pharma. By monitoring the shift in these expectations for healthcare in social media you will find valuable insights that can inform the social strategy for your pharma brand.

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Digital and Social Media Goodness

Is Pinterest right for your brand?

Published by Digital and Social Media on April 26, 2012.

Written by Whitney Poma

By now, you’ve heard of the remarkable growth rates, the phenomenal engagement, and that even pharma has started pinning. Amid all of the excitement and growth, you’re probably asking

“Is Pinterest right for my brand?”

At first glance, Pinterest looks like it’s just a collection of pretty images. Upon deeper exploration, you’ll discover that it’s much more than that. There are 3 very important aspects of Pinterest that you should be aware of before your brand begins pinning.

1. You don’t need an account to be on Pinterest:

Just as there is nothing preventing consumers from talking about your brand in other social media channels there is almost nothing preventing people from pinning your brand to their pin-boards. Users can do this 2 ways – by pinning an image from your website or other digital properties or by taking a photo of anything about your brand from your company’s buildings, to products, or even a photo of your website and then uploading it to Pinterest. Not all websites offer imagery that can be pinned directly from the internet to Pinterest. You can audit your brand’s website’s“pinability” by installing the Pin It Button into your browser’s tool bar and then attempting to pin an image from the website. The Button is going to pre-populate all of the items on the page that are pinable and then allow you to select your desired image/pin from there.  If the Button doesn’t populate anything then there is nothing on your brand’s site that can be pinned. You can increase your pinability by referencing Pinterest’s FAQ.

2. The images you share are just the beginning:

The content is the value. People  don’t pin things to their boards just because they like the way they look. They pin them because they link to something valuable that they want to revisit in the future. Pinterest is most popularly known for the plethora of recipes, housekeeping tips, and workout regimens that can be found all in one place. The image of the pin is important though – think of is as the cover of a book. We’ve all been told to not judge a book by its cover, but let’s face it – we all do it and it’s no different on Pinterest. Good imagery encourages Pinterest’s users to click on the image to find out what’s behind it.

3. You cannot control who sees, shares, or comments on your pins:

Pinterest thrives on the viral sharing of pins throughout the network, therefore the chances are greater on Pinterest than other networks that your pin will “go viral” and be seen by many people beyond your traditional target market. This possibility may be seen as a good or bad thing depending on your company’s social media guidelines.

On the surface, Pinterest appears to be Pharma friendly because it looks like another photo sharing site. Pharma or no pharma, the complexities of Pinterest are comparable to any other network so prepare to pin or be pinned. It’s only a matter of time before your brand appears on the newly dubbed “darling” of social media.

Categories: Social media marketing
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Digital and Social Media Goodness

Social Media and Self-Diagnosis:the Positives and Negatives

Published by Digital and Social Media on April 23, 2012.

Written by Patrick Richard

Social Media without question is integrated into the lives of many people today. Its popularity touches all types of age groups and social circles. The reach continues to expand each year with new channels, and better familiarity with the communication platform. With that in mind it’s not a surprise that people are taking to social media to try and self-diagnose their medical conditions. They use it to ask friends, or simply search to find out what people with similar conditions have to say.

Taking the social media route for diagnosis has a generally quick response time, and people feel supported by others who might be dealing with the same condition. Having this kind of resource at our fingertips can be very helpful, however it goes both ways. Physicians and patients specifically tend to disagree on the level of value and support it provides. It’s probably safe to say that neither physicians nor patients think it should go away, but that there should be some sort of guidelines. With all that being said what are the positives and negatives of using social media for self-diagnosis?

Positives:

  1. Access to medical information within seconds dependent on the awareness of a given condition.
  2. Easy to compare feedback from several sources to come to some reasonably intelligent answers.
  3. Moral support from friends and family that you’re connected to online.
  4. Provides a place to vent and get feelings on the table depending on a given individuals comfort level.
  5. Easily jump to additional resources online based on recommendations found via social channels.

Negatives:

  1. Patient education websites should be supplemental to physician consultation, but are sometimes used in isolation.
  2. The patient can end up with an overwhelming amount of irrelevant answers regarding their condition.
  3. There aren’t consistent reminders to go see your doctor presented with each piece of information online.
  4. The right physicians aren’t typically plugged in to a given community to correct incorrect answers.
  5. If a patient is new to this type of communication platform it could potentially be overwhelming.

One-thing patients can do to help make social patient education more relevant, and reliable is going to credible websites. Think of websites that not only have a strong presence in the medical space, but also have generally good reviews online. You then will get the best of both worlds from an emotional support perspective, and medical opinion perspective. Here are just a few to consider:

www.webmd.com

www.healthymagination.com

www.ehealthforum.com

www.mayoclinic.com

www.drugs.com

You’ll find that you not only get some very direct answers, but there is typically a large engaged community behind each. There is of course the non-medical social communities like Facebook as well, in those cases if the person you are asking isn’t a medical professional, you must be cautious. That being said overall this trend continues to be generally positive. It is making people more engaged in their own health, and more aware of health conditions. In the past some people may not have engaged at all without these socially tilted tools at their fingertips.

Categories: Social media marketing
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wpoma

Social Shareworthy: From social strategy to action

Published by Whitney Poma on February 16, 2012.

This post is part of our celebration of social media week!

The thought of managing the day-to-day communication that will be required with a social media strategy can seem daunting. Common questions:

  1. How will we know what to say and when to say it?
  2. Who’s responsible for publishing content to the profiles?
  3. How do we measure our success?

It will be essential for your team to identify someone, or a couple of people, to serve as the community managers of your social profiles. They will be responsible for tackling the above three questions but there are some tools that can make these tasks easier than you think.

1st: Create a content calendar:

The goal of the content calendar is to force the community manager and the brand team to plan a week or a month’s worth of content in advance. This calendar can be as simple or complex as you like. The process of creating a content calendar is to round off your brand team including a copywriter or two and sit down with a calendar. Discuss the month ahead and identify potential shareworthy events that will be happening:

  • Your brand: Is your brand launching a new indication or releasing new information?
  • Your industry: Is anything happening in the industry (an awareness month, a congress, etc. . .) that affects your brand?
  • The public: Are there any holiday’s or current events that relate to your brand?

Make a list of all of these things, choose which of them are the most valuable to address and write content to compliment them. Next assign the content to corresponding dates on the calendar.

Tips for content planning:

  1. Stick to your strategy: ask yourself “does this help us accomplish our social media goals?”
  2. Be consistent: consistency in tone of voice, vocabulary, emotion and timing all create a better experience for your community
  3. Have a call to action: make sure all of your content includes a call to action or the answer to “So what?”

2nd: Use a community management service

There are several free services available that help you manage your accounts all from one place. My personal favorite is Tweetdeck, but HootSuite is also good –

These services help you:

  • Schedule your content publishing down to the minute
  • Alert you when someone talks to you or mentions you online
  • Manage multiple social profiles in one dashboard

Hootsuite and SproutSocial offer premium accounts that are affordable and include metrics and analysis of your social engagement.

These services are easy to learn and simple to use. The first step beyond setup is to grab your content calendar and schedule the posts that you created with your team. Once they’re scheduled, the tool does the rest of the publishing work for you. It’s up to you to monitor the consumer response to your post and craft a reply to the requests from your community.

3rd: Measure success and optimize for the future

Your content has been planned, and executed. Now it’s time to take a look back and see how you did. Key things to measure:

  1. Conversion: the number of comments per post
  2. Amplification: the number of re-tweets or shares per post
  3. Applause: the number of likes, favorites, etc. . . per post

Simply measuring the ratio of the above items is not enough. A deeper dive into the posts that generated the most return and the posts that generated the least return will identify patterns of success and failure. These patterns can be used to optimize the content you share in the future. Ideally, you’ll look at these metrics on a weekly or monthly basis, but no matter what – be sure to have the insights from these metrics on hand while planning your next wave of content so that you’re optimizing the level of community engagement.

Categories: Social media marketing
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wpoma

Social Shareworthy: How to play cupid with your company’s medical, legal and regulatory (MLR) committee and social media

Published by Whitney Poma on February 14, 2012.

This post is part of our celebration of social media week!

It’s easy to dismiss the suggestion of a social media strategy by saying “our MLR committee would never allow that” or worse yet, you’ve invested in building a strategy, are nearing the launch date, and your MLR committee identifies an issue that derails the entire strategy. A few common reasons are the root cause for an MLR review gone wrong:

  1. The length of time for their review and approval renders the content outdated
  2. Your MLR committee is unsure of the risks and benefits associated with each type of social media
  3. General anxiety about the adverse events appearing on the proposed social media channels

These are all valid concerns that need to be addressed before engaging in social media but they’re all able to managed – all you need is a little collaboration.

One of the best ways to conquer these hurdles is to involve your MLR committee in social planning from the start. Here at GSW, we conduct on-site bootcamps and workshops with our clients when they’re beginning to pursue a social strategy.

BOOTCAMPS:

Our bootcamp session is themed “social media for pharma 101” and is used to quickly build alignment and understanding of social media’s definition, what can and can’t be done, and how it is being used by pharma. The bootcamps are a chance for your brand team, agencies, and MLR committee to come together and focus on three key topics:

WORKSHOPS:

Now that everyone is on the same page about what social media is and how it can be used, it’s time to begin putting this knowledge to work for your brand. Our planning workshops focus on the social media opportunity that is to be found at the intersection of your marketplace’s values and brand goals:

We work to identify at least 4-5 social media tactics that warrant further research and thought. The best part of this workshop is that all stakeholders have had a say in crafting these ideas and thereby, are already in support of them.  We leave this session with the action steps of applying more thought about how these ideas will be implemented, measured, optimized, and of course – work within the MLR committee’s guidelines

BUSINESS CASE PRESENTATION

The last step of our process is to re-group after having the chances to work through some of the aforementioned tasks. We present the ideas again, make any last comments and then decide which of the ideas we want to implement.

In closing, the beauty of this process is that MLR has been included from ideation to conceptualization. There shouldn’t be any surprises during the formal review of your program since they’ve had the opportunity to voice their concerns during the planning phases.  Collaborating in this manner helps all stakeholders of the social media strategy to have confidence that its tactics and content are valuable yet reside within the existing regulatory environment of our industry.

Categories: Social media marketing
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wpoma

Social Shareworthy: Is your product ready for social media?

Published by Whitney Poma on February 14, 2012.

This post is part of our celebration of social media week!

There is a common misperception that social media marketing is easy and free. While creating accounts on the world’s largest social networks is free and relatively easy, this is just one step of a social media strategy and can be likened to the wedding that marks the beginning of a marriage. In reality, there are a lot of questions to consider when evaluating the opportunity of investing in social media for your product. Taking the time to discuss these questions before engaging in social channels can lay the foundation for a rewarding venture:

Does your company have social media guidelines in place?
Your company’s social media guidelines serve as a great foundation for building a social media strategy. Good guidelines are built to serve as the rules of engagement and should include everything from their definition of social media to how to handle negative comments. They help protect your team, your product, and most importantly, your consumers and as such, it’s very important that your company enact guidelines before you begin engaging with consumers in these channels.

Have you established a social media workflow?
Before engaging in social media it’s important to establish an appropriate workflow to handle any of the various requests that may be asked by consumers engaging with your social profiles. It’s questions like these that require your team to have a workflow that:
a. Provides an accurate and appropriate response to the request
b. Responds to the request in a timely manner
Not having these workflows in place will create an experience for your consumers that is frustrating and thereby damaging to your relationship with them.

Do you have a clear reason for being in social media?
Before entering social media, it’s important to know the answer to one very important question:
What do you want to accomplish?
If the answer to this question cannot be achieved through a social strategy, then social media marketing is not right for your product at this time. Avoid being too quick to conclude that social media cannot assist in reaching brand goals though, an integrated social media strategy can accomplish much more than someone who is unfamiliar with social media channels beyond just Facebook and Twitter might expect. Participating in social media without a defined target accomplishment will result in your social media efforts lacking a call-to-action and thereby be of little value for your target audience. Likewise, having a target accomplishment will give your social strategy a purpose that will serve as a guiding principle for all of your content and actions within the social space.

Are people talking about your product online?
The answer to this question is undoubtedly “Yes!”. The underlying question is how much or how little, and just what are they saying? A quick search for your product on Google or any of the popular social networks will quickly direct you to conversations that can be eye opening. It’s important to understand this existing online conversation before entering the discussion. You can determine the current environment by conducting or contracting a social media listening report that will provide insights about social environment surrounding your brand.

Are these social conversations translating to real-life decisions?
The presence of people making decisions about your product or marketplace based on their social interactions is a positive indicator that you should be involved in social media. How do you know if this is happening? Observe the conversations already happening online – are people taking each other up on their advice? Do you see mentions of action having been taken? Things like “So, I asked my doctor about what you told me….” or “Do you know where I can buy the product you mentioned?” These actions speak to the degree of value your target audience finds from their social discussions; they’re taking suggestions from their online peers and acting on them in their daily lives.

In closing, there’s no denying that some products lend better to social media than others but even the most introverted of products can conduct a successful social media campaign if the proper questions have been answered thereby laying the foundation for a social media strategy that resides at the intersection of bringing value to the brand and bringing value to the consumers.

Editor’s Note (2/14/2012): In late December, the FDA released it’s first-ever social media guidance for pharma brands that would like to respond to unsolicited requests for off-label information via social networks. We researched, analyzed and consulted with our digital and social strategists to develop the following perspective: Inside The FDA’s Social Media Guidance.
Categories: Social media marketing
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dmarinacci

Social Media Week 2012

Published by Dawn Marinacci on February 13, 2012.

It’s social media week and we are celebrating at GSW Worldwide. All week long we will have content, contests and answers to your burning social media questions. As healthcare marketers, we know that engaging in social media amid Pharma’s regulated environment can be a challenge. We hope the activities we have planned will encourage you to interact with GSW on social media, and equally as important, we hope it helps you, as marketers, to be more knowledgeable on the topic. We encourage everyone to join in the conversation.

You can interact with us on Facebook, Twitter, iQ’s Twitter, Brand Liberator’s blog, iQ’s blog, iQ’s Youtube Channel, and  iQ’s Slideshare.

Here is a rundown of our week’s agenda:

Monday:

  • Check out our hashtag #GSWsocial to keep up with all we are doing.
  • Social Shareworthy: How to know if your product is ready for social media.

Tuesday:

  • Why our employees <3 GSW! Check out our FB page to see why our employees love working at the world’s most award winning healthcare advertising agency.
  • Social Shareworthy: How to address your promotional review committee’s concerns about social media.

Wednesday:

  • Ask a question. Tweet/Facebook us a burning social media question that you have. We will have a panel answer it on Friday and will live-tweet the answers.
  • Social Shareworthy: What does a social media campaign really look like?

Thursday:

  • Guess the Heartrate. One of our employees will test out an app that claims it can test your heartrate. Play the guessing game to see if you can beat the app!
  • Social Shareworthy: How many brands are turning health and wellness technology into a social experience?

Friday:

  • Live-tweeted panel: get your social media questions answered from 3PM-4PM.
  • FDA Guidance: Get an in-depth look at the newly released social media guidelines from the FDA and what it means for you.

So join us in celebrating social media week!

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chill

Me, Myself and My Brands

Published by Chris Hill on July 27, 2011.

Each summer weekend stock cars loop the nation’s oval tracks, awash in corporate identity. These branding elements, and the spaces they occupy, have been carefully defined for those sponsors fortunate enough to secure logo placement on the sheet metal—or better yet, the racing team uniforms.

There's a little Kyle in all of us.

In the third-millennium world of social media, we have become the digital equivalent of NASCAR drivers. A typical Facebook profile bears the fruits of countless corporate marketing efforts. Where coupons, direct response marketing and other cost-intensive strategies were once seen as essential components for determining the quantifiable effect of a particular product, measuring brand approval today is as effortless as getting people to click a “like” button.

Marketers (now referred to as anything from brand leaders to “conversation specialists”) use successful social media campaigns to hook consumers by the thousands. Modern merchandising has transcended Budweiser T-shirts and Coca-Cola stemware; in fact it’s even transcended merchandising, as companies effectively brand their brands right onto the souls of their customers. Inviting consumers to pre-qualify themselves is the name of the game. And once they like, they’re yours forever.

Celebrities have Twitter and MySpace followings far more interactive than those of the traditional fan club. Smart-phone technology now allows devotees and casual fans alike to follow them on tour, on location and even in the supermarket. In exchange, these public figures gain an instantly available market, eager to accompany them in future endeavors. See Sheen, Charlie.

Even seemingly innocuous forms of commucation like text messaging present opportunities to reel in the unsuspecting. Reality shows let viewers text in their votes. Trivia contests on stadium jumbotrons encourage spectators to “text and win”. The result is a loyal, highly active and tech-savvy target audience for such sales tactics as retail store discount alerts and ticket e-mailings from their favorite sports teams.

If the response generated by our energized population tells us anything, it’s that the benefit is clearly mutual. For now at least, we free thinkers can’t get enough of this power over the stuff we buy, no matter how mundane and utilitarian the stuff may be. Consider the following brand names and the volume of true followers their Facebook pages have generated (as of 6/2011):

  • Glade: 72,587
  • Mrs. Fields cookies: 15,236
  • Dr. Scholl’s: 3,253  (Dr. Scholls For Her: 40,556)
  • Aquafresh toothpaste: 48,728
  • Playtex: 112, 787
  • Skippy Peanut Butter: 16,962

Of course, most are persuaded by clever promotions and exclusive offers. (As if the mere presence of a public forum weren’t incentive enough for one to profess his love for odor-eating shoe inserts.) This is where tried-and-true, old-school marketing comes in. As evidenced by the insanely large amount of love shown below, the more successful the sweepstakes, sponsorship or celebrity spokesperson, the more dramatically a brand’s digits can grow:

  • Armor All: 50, 573 (Tony Stewart endorsement)
  • Hanes: 1,590,000 (multiple contests and promotions)
  • Tide: 1,397,000 (NASCAR sponsorship)
  • Gillette: 511,026 (numerous sports affiliations)
  • Lysol: 378,300 (numerous sweepstakes)

Again, these are thousands of people who took it upon themselves, with little or no prompting, to voluntarily become targetted consumers. Country Time Lemonade has 54,770 fans—and they require permission to use your personal information before they will accept your “like”!

This spike in consumer involvement is evident in the pharmaceutical industry as well, though in a slightly different context. Whereas packaged OTC names like Bayer, Tylenol, Prevacid and Dramamine can take advantage of the aforementioned consumer channels, awareness for prescription brands is more commonly generated through word of mouth, in groups and pages focused on the conditions or symptoms they treat. The largest Wellbutrin page on Facebook has just over 500 fans. However, there are dozens of pages with five-figure followings for those suffering from depression and their families/friends/loved ones.

Using social media to understand the effect of brands on those who use them is territory not yet fully plowed. But one look at the numbers from Facebook alone suggests that it’s already harvest time. Still in its toddler years, Mark Zuckerberg’s creation has over 500 million current users, by his own spit-balled estimate. A half billion whistle-blowers, ready to roll over on the very essence of their purchasing behavior.

We’re here if you want us, corporate America. Act fast, before we expect compensation.

Categories: Social media marketing

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jtown

Have You Heard of This Thing Called Facebook?

Published by Jennifer Town on April 25, 2011.

So, it turns out social media and marketing go together like milk and cookies. Surprised? Me neither. But in an interesting article put out by Mashable.com, 70% of marketers are increasing their social media budgets by more than 10% in the upcoming year.  The primary goal of this increase? Get more “likes” on Facebook.

This article happened to coincide with the first birthday of Facebook’s Like button. No pictures of the Like button with chocolate cake all over its face have been posted to Facebook (yet), but it’s pretty adorable nevertheless.  And look how much you’ve grown, Like button! And are still growing—10,000+ websites add the Like button every day.  Here’s another fun fact: websites that use the Like button average a greater than 300% increase in referral traffic from Facebook (according to www.insidefacebook.com). This is important since nowadays many people are using Facebook as their portal to the rest of the Internet. No wonder Google read the writing on the wall (so to speak) and launched their +1 button at the end of March.

Clearly agencies are hard at work figuring out how to get more Likes for their clients’ brands—and just last week Facebook itself launched Facebook Studio, a separate site that allows marketers to share best practices and social media innovations with each other.  I “liked” The Altoids Curiously Strong Awards in particular and its portrayal of some well-known Facebook archetypes.

The Skittles “Mob the Rainbow” campaign allows users to decide what the next real-life event tied to the brand would be. And that’s what these campaigns get right: once you have your likes, you can’t stop there. You have to be “in a relationship” with the fans who like you—the real marketing challenge.

And, please, check out Juicy Fruit’s campaign—they had me at “serenading unicorn.”

Categories: Marketing trends and best practices and Social media marketing

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