pharmaceutical companies are not yet a meaningful part of the conversation
TRANSCRIPT
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50 million Tweets per day
350 million Facebook Users (70% Outside the US)
Facebook Now Drives More Traffic to Web Sites than Google
11 million European Linkedin Users in Europe
70% of Bloggers are Organically Talking About Brands on their Blogs
Whenever someone logs on to a Computer, 60% of the Time it’s for Social Reasons
Pharmaceutical Companies Are Not Yet a Meaningful Part of the Conversation!
Should They Be?
April 10 Olivier LAURENT
www.Health2Europe.com
www.Coliganegroup.com
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Pharmaceutical Companies Are Not Yet a Meaningful Part of the Conversation! Should They Be?
Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................................. 3
What is social media? .................................................................................................................................. 3
Non Parma Involvement.............................................................................................................................. 8
Is there a Problem?...................................................................................................................................... 8
What is Being Said? ..................................................................................................................................... 8
So how is the Pharmaceutical Companies Participating?............................................................................ 9
Pharma and Twitter ................................................................................................................................... 11
What To Do................................................................................................................................................ 12
Social Media Listening Apps ...................................................................................................................... 12
Designing a Social Media Program That Makes Sense .............................................................................. 15
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................. 18
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Pharmaceutical Companies Are Not Yet a Meaningful Part of the Conversation!
Should They Be? by Olivier LAURENT (CEO Coligane group).
Introduction We live in a world where consumers are deeply engaged when it comes to their health. As consumers search online to educate themselves about disease states, cures, drug information and support, there’s one common truth: they trust discussions with other consumers when it comes to information on their health. This presents both a challenge and an opportunity for pharmaceutical companies to gain consumer trust and loyalty, especially in this age of multimedia. However, if pharmaceutical companies can join in the conversation – known as social media – then they have an opportunity to gain this trust. Yesterday, brands told stories. Today, consumers tell stories about your brands. Pharmaceutical companies that work to incorporate social media as part of their long-‐term marketing vision will start to create the foundations toward earning their seat at the table to participate and listen to these high-‐value conversations about their brands.
What is social media? Social media is collaborative communication that is fueled by technology. It empowers individuals, groups and institutions to actively participate in creating, finding, using, sharing and expanding content (opinions, experiences, insights and media) together. Social media let’s people have a conversation about the ideas we care about. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, not only do people use the Internet to seek information about healthcare options, but also people with chronic illnesses are more likely to access and act on information they get from the Internet. If people are moving to the web to get this information, and pharmaceutical companies don’t join in, then they are leaving their brand to be shaped almost entirely by outside forces with zero control of their message.
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Generally speaking, what someone suffering from an illness wants is information. Patients want information. Pharma holds much of the information. Pharma has a unique ability to educate patients as much as possible.
Social media includes what’s referred to as user generated content (UGC), which is produced by “ordinary people” as opposed to traditional media producers. Examples of UGC include blogs, podcasts, tagging, ratings, videos and photos. In fact, 75% of all online adult consumers and 92% of online youth use one or more forms of UGC content. Self-‐expression isn’t new, but technology has made it easier to reach wider audiences.Social
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media enables communities to more easily form and stay connected, which radically increases the speed and force of change. Social media is a broad cultural revolution -‐ not an exclusive domain of teenagers on a site like Myspace or Facebook. Because of this, consumers now expect (and almost demand) collaboration and participation in virtually every aspect of their lives. As an example, more people voted on the last American Idol finale than have ever voted in a presidential election. How is this possible? Through the ease of picking up a mobile device and sending a text message from any place at any time. In healthcare, adoption has been accelerated as consumers are fed by the inherent trust that social media provides. At this very moment, more than 500 groups on Yahoo! are dedicated to just speaking on the subject of diabetes with approximately 25,000 consumers participating; there are 33,112 photos on flickr, a photo sharing site, that have been tagged as “cancer” related; and 1,745 questions about asthma have been posted on Yahoo! Answers, a site where consumers can ask a question on any topic and get answers from real people. With this shift, consumers have gone from listening to you – Parma, to having conversations with others about you. To succeed in this new world, companies must leverage social media to have conversations with customers at scale.
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According to The Nielsen Company, global consumers spent more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82% increase from the same time last year when users were spending just over three hours on social networking sites. Social networks and blogs are the most popular online category when ranked by average time spent in December, followed by online games and instant messaging.
Facebook was the No. 1 global social networking destination in December 2009; 67% of global social media users visited the site during the month, spending nearly six hours per month on the site. Twitter.com continued as the fastest growing in December 2009 in terms of unique visitors, increasing 579% year-‐over-‐year, from 2.7 million unique visitors in December 2008 to 18.1 million in December 2009.
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While technology has been the enabler, it is ultimately people that are the driving force behind social media. As more people contribute, the content gets richer and the engagement becomes more powerful. For example, think about medications. Drugs could be rated, ranked, discussed and reviewed by millions online -‐ much like books on Amazon. But with this fundamental change in media comes the new challenges of marketing to this empowered online audience. Social media marketing is a compelling opportunity for pharmaceutical companies to reach their most influential audience. Recent research conducted by Manhattan-‐based Hall and Partners Healthcare found that online health consumers are hyper-‐engaged and leverage almost twice as many information sources to learn about disease states and prescriptions than the average consumer. Additionally, 75% of consumers that participate in UGC often share online health information with others. Even between “typical users,” interaction with the most passive of social media tools, online search -‐ which is driven in large part by consumers’ anonymous choice of the most popular results and destinations – shows that health searchers crave information and interaction. Additional information from the study showed the habits of consumers searching online for health information differ significantly from their non-‐searching counterparts. Online searchers are so engaged that they look for information on more than just one condition and seek to learn about multiple conditions and symptoms. They also spend more time on search engines (68%) and health sites (51%) than with family and friends (18%) to seek information about symptoms, diagnosis and prescriptions. With the interaction of UGC, search and personalization, global health communities are growing into powerful forces. These communities are built around people with a common purpose that want to participate, be heard and discover information that is relevant to their interests. For every creator of content – a physician writing a blog, for example – there are roughly 10 synthesizers actively commenting, sharing, rating and reacting. For each group of synthesizers, roughly 100 consumers read, watch, listen and enjoy while participating only occasionally. All three of these groups have a valid place within the community.
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Non Parma Involvement PR firm Burson-‐Marsteller studied the 100 largest companies in the Fortune 500 list and found that 79% of then use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or corporate blogs to communicate with customers and other stakeholders.
Twitter is the most popular platform that the companies use; two-‐thirds of the Fortune 100 has at least one Twitter account. Actually, they have an average of 4.2 Twitter accounts. Fifty-‐four percent have at least one Facebook fan page, 50% have at least one YouTube channel, and 33% have at least one corporate blog. Twenty percent of the companies use all four social media platforms.
Is there a Problem?
Researchers found that among more than 75,000 Massachusetts patients given drug prescriptions over one year, 22 percent of the prescriptions were never filled. The rate was even higher -‐-‐ 28 percent -‐-‐ when the researchers looked only at first-‐time prescriptions.
What is significant is that between 28% and 31% of new prescriptions for diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol, went unfilled, according to findings published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
What is Being Said?
A small fraction of the social media landscape is talking about pharmaceutical products (see data in appendix).
a. For example, the average # of Lipitor blog posts for the week of Feb 4, 2010 was 0.0025 percent of all posts.
b. The number of Lipitor tweets on March 2, 2010 was 381. Of these about ¼ related to purchasing Lipitor, ½ related to negative comments with the remainder having questions about use of the product.
Most of the “buzz” is one-‐way and not very supportive of Pharma brand and product objectives.
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So how is the Pharmaceutical Companies Participating? This emerging paradigm is challenging Pharmaceutical companies to stretch beyond their present cultural patterns. Pharmaceutical companies are cautiously moving into the communications equivalent of a black hole: social media (also known as Web/Health 2.0 or participatory medicine). Some companies (primarily in the United States) are dabbling in blogs, non-‐branded websites and Facebook pages; others are writing text messages on Twitter and posting videos to YouTube.
An example held out as a shining example – yet the numbers are still paltry:
J&J
This is why J&J’s digital footprint is unrivaled in the industry. The list of examples is impressive and, better still, most of the above brand properties link to one another, improving site traffic and the brand’s overall search performance. Here is a list of accomplishments:
• An influential corporate blog (JNJ BTW)
• 1,196 YouTube subscribers
• 1,743 Twitter followers @JNJComm
• Accuminder Facebook application
• Multiple Facebook pages targeting specific audiences, consumer products and conditions
• Camp Baby hosted 50 mommy bloggers for a 2-‐day conference
YET
If one thinks of the size of J&J and the number of people that use their products – those numbers are far from impressive – in fact they are shockingly low. So even though J & J is involved, the public still does not see them as a partner in the conversation.
Examples of pharma companies in the US using social media tools are many. Merck uses Facebook to promote Gardasil, its cervical cancer vaccine; Bayer Aspirin has a Facebook page for women; McNeil has an adults-‐with-‐ADHD awareness page; YouTube has hosted promotional videos such as GlaxoSmithKline's restless-‐legs awareness film and spots for
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AstraZeneca's asthma medicine Symbicort; Reckitt Benckiser has used MySpace to distribute advice on kicking the prescription painkiller habit and Pfizer has a Chantix Support Group on drug.com, for tobacco patch users who are trying to quit smoking.
Pfizer, GSK, Merck, Bayer, J&J, AstraZeneca etc are also now joining these communities to initiate a meaningful dialogue with important stakeholders. Some of these companies have already created un-‐branded sites like, silenceyourrooster.com or iwalkbecause.org, to foster relationship with patients' group through online activity, the contents of which have been generated by the users themselves of the respective social medium. With the help of click-‐through links these sites lead to the branded sites of the concerned companies.
For pharmaceutical marketers, it is crucial to engage the creators and synthesizers, known as consumer opinion leaders (COLs) in the communities important to your customers. Like physician key opinion leaders, they have a voice, which is multiplied by their community influence. For example, on Yahoo! Answers, “Nurse Annie” is a 21+-‐year registered nurse that has answered over 3,000 questions correctly from curious consumers. Although she is involved in the medical community, Nurse Annie has now become a COL for many everyday folks that are looking for more information and the human touch that can’t be found from typing keywords into a search box. Pharmaceutical marketers don’t need to retreat from social media and hide behind a wall of adverse event forms. Just as we have built communities of physicians who speak openly with each other about our products, we have an opportunity to nurture and learn from consumer communities as well. First, Pharma must listen with intent. Yes, Pharma may have to use the same cumbersome AE reporting mechanisms, but the benefits of understanding the meaning of your brand to communities will outweigh the hassle. Analyzing what you hear can reveal a gap in consumer awareness. What’s more, a number of tools have emerged to help consolidate the vast array of social media input, from free online evaluators like Intelliseek, to sophisticated and customized tracking services like Cymfony. Once marketers have a firm grasp on the language, attitudes, brand perceptions and key COLs in their consumer community, pharmaceutical company participation can range from targeted media placement to integration and empowerment. The days when pharmaceutical companies would insist on filling their pipelines with blockbuster drugs have come and gone. . But more than that, medicine has changed from chasing mass-‐market conditions to disease categories that impact a fewer subset of people. This requires a more personalized approach to treatment. How does this impact marketing? Marketing has been forced to respond to the shifting pharma landscape and match its efforts. In a world of personalized medicine, mass marketing efforts now seem to make less and less sense. Hitting as many eyeballs as possible does little to move the
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needle on drug sales of an orphan drug targeted at specific disease states. The same can’t be said for social media. Social media marketing programs are designed to engage with the patient at a personal level. By its nature, social media is best suited for a specific audience with similar interests. The beauty is this is a two-‐way street. Patients are far more likely to be engaged in Pharma marketing efforts if it strikes a personal chord. Personalized medicine necessitates personalized marketing.
Pharma and Twitter
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What To Do Listen!
The first step is to finds ways to listen to consumers – your present, past and future customers. The goal is to learn what they are saying about your brand or products, the competition and the general landscape that your products fit into.
Social Media Listening Apps 1. Google Alerts Google Alerts is the steady rock in the sometimes white-‐water world of monitoring. You can easily target keywords that are important to your brand and receive streaming or batched reports…. I use this regularly to find out the latest noise on a topic or brand 2. Technorati Billing itself as “the leading blog search engine,” Technorati has been helping bloggers and those with their fingers on the blog pulse stay informed for years. 3. Jodange Tracking your brand or a product is one thing, but turning that tracking into a measure of consumer sentiment about your brand or product is something completely different. For that, Jodange has TOM (Top of Mind), which tracks consumer sentiment about your brand or product across the Web. 4. Trendrr Want to know how your brand or product is trending compared with others? Trendrr uses comparison graphing to show relationships and discover trends in real time. Use the free account, or bump it up to the Enterprise level for more functionality. 5. Lexicon What are people talking about on Facebook? Lexicon searches Facebook walls for keywords and provides a snapshot of the chatter volume around those terms. 6. Monitter everyone is talking about Twitter, but what are people talking about on Twitter? Beyond the integrated search of Twitter apps like Twhirl and TweetDeck, Monitter provides real-‐time monitoring of the Twittersphere. 7. Tweetburner In the world of Twitter, URL shortening is the Obi-‐Wan (it’s your only hope) for effectively connecting with the public. Tweetburner also lets you track the clicks on those magically shortened links, giving you some hard numbers. 8. Twendz Public relations shop Waggener Edstrom recently launched its Twitter-‐monitoring tool, Twendz. The tool piggybacks off Twitter Search to monitor and provide user sentiment for the real-‐time Twitterstream—70 tweets at a time. Paid Apps 9. TruCast TruCast by Visible Technologies provides in-‐depth, keyword-‐based monitoring of the social Web with an emphasis on blogs and forums. Its dashboard applications provide visual representations of sentiment and trends for your brands online. 10. Radian6 Radian6 pulls information from the social Web, and analyzes and provides consumer sentiment ratings for your brand 11. Cision When Radian 6 is paired with Cisionpoint from Cision, Radian 6’s dashboard can provide a wealth of information
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12. Techrigy Techrigy’s SM2 is a social-‐media monitoring and analysis solution for PR and marketing folks. With a focus on complete analysis and comparison, the SM2 experience draws information from all major social-‐media channels. 13. Collective Intellect Collective Intellect (CI) is a real-‐time intelligence platform, based on advanced artificial intelligence. Its solution provides automatic categorization of conversations based on CI’s proprietary filtering technology. According to CI, its technologies provide credible groupings and reduce the “noise” seen in other keyword-‐based searches.
This is the changing social media landscape:
• Facebook claims that 50% of active users log into the site each day. This would mean at least 175m users every 24 hours… A considerable increase from the previous 120m.
• Twitter now has 75m user accounts, but only around 15m are active users on a regular basis. It’s still a fair increase from the estimated 6-‐10m global users from a few months ago.
• LinkedIn has over 50m members worldwide. This means an increase of around 1m members month-‐on-‐month since July/August last year.
• Facebook currently has in excess of 350 million active users on global basis. Six months ago, this was 250m… meaning around a 40% increase of users in less than half a year.
• Flickr now hosts more than 4bn images. A massive jump from the previous 3.6bn I wrote about.
• More than 35m Facebook users update their status each day. This is 5m more than towards the end of July 2009.
• Wikipedia currently has in excess of 14m articles, meaning that its 85,000 contributors have written nearly a million new posts in six months.
• Photo uploads to Facebook have increased by more than 100%. Currently, there are around 2.5bn uploads to the site each month – this was around a billion last time I covered this.
• There are more than 70 translations available on Facebook. Last time around, this was only 50.
• Back in 2009, the average user had 120 friends within Facebook. This is now around 130.
• Mobile is even bigger than before for Facebook, with more than 65m users accessing the site through mobile-‐based devices. In six months, this is over 100% increase.
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(Previously 30m). As before, it’s no secret that users who access Facebook through mobile devices are almost 50% more active than those who don’t.
• There are more than 3.5bn pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, etc.) shared each week on Facebook.
• There are now 11m LinkedIn users across Europe.
• Towards the end of last year, the average number of tweets per day was over 27.3 million.
• The average number of tweets per hour was around 1.3m.
• More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook.
• Purpose-‐built Facebook pages have created more than 5.3bn fans.
• 15% of bloggers spend 10 or more hours each week blogging, according to Technorati's new State of the Blogosphere.
• At the current rate, Twitter will process almost 10bn tweets in a single year.
• About 70% of Facebook users are outside the USA.
• India is currently the fastest-‐growing country to use LinkedIn, with around 3m total users.
• More than 250 Facebook applications have over a million combined users each month.
• 70% of bloggers are organically talking about brands on their blog.
• 38% of bloggers post brand or product reviews.
• More than 80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since December 2008 and more than 60m Facebook users engage with it across these external sites each month.
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Designing a Social Media Program That Makes Sense It is important to take into consideration the social demographics of the various patient audiences. Campaigns can be designed to reach different groups in different ways. It is through an intimate understanding of the audience’s social media engagement and their relationship to their medical condition.
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The technographics ladder can be used to map segmented personas of your customer base.
It will provide a quick snapshot that can help you determine if your customer base is high content creators (those who love to post pictures and tell stories), or if they are spectators (people who prefer to watch passively from the sidelines). In either case, each marketing vertical has specific considerations and anomalies, and this is especially true in Pharma.
Interestingly the social media demographics vary by patient types who use different drugs as shown below:
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And vary by medical condition as well:
To understand the best approach, Pharma marketers must understand their particular audience’s engagement and plot that against the outcome investment. Those with low outcome investment can be considered “indifferent”, as the impact of their condition is relatively limited. Those who are “influenced” have their conditions affect them, but do not define them. Those with high outcome investment can be considered “invested” – the impact is so deeply felt that they are willing to find resolution or a community of like-‐minded sufferers.
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Conclusion
Pharma can’t afford to not listen and pay attention. It does not make sense to ignore what is being said.
There is intelligence to be gained. There are opportunities for influence and ways to be part of the conversation – understand it and help shape it. Be an advocate, an educator and a resource. Social media is a tool to be utilized.