Comments on: Pharma Should Forget About Social Media Monitoring

By: eHealth - resources for the social healthcare revolution - happening now | Med7

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:37:04 +0000

[...] Pharma Should Forget About Social Media Monitoring [...]

By: Phrmageddon2012

Phrmageddon2012 — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:08:23 +0000

Good points and loads of analogies all around. Looks like the current state of mind on Social Media Monitoring (SMM) in the pharmaceutical and healthcare sector is to add a budget line below traditional market research and arrive in generally the same insight vicinity as you would before.

I’ve seen social media monitoring work in a few ways:

- Exposed a group of patients who were against a negative PR campaign. Company was able to empower this group to further quell the campaign.
- Low product awareness is always exposed within a few searches, but feel free to give your client that insight for free, it’s not a major value add for this service
- Dosing difficulty with a specific demographic was exposed and handled with traditional dosing education vehicles
- Developed new thought leaders previously unknown by company

These are just a few nuggets that came from a monitoring process. The same company preempted the social monitoring with a traditional market research setting, but they would tell you SMM was worth the money!

Hunter Young
Program Manager, S+R Medical Communications
(purveyor of Pharmageddon 2012 campaign)

By: Jonathan Richman

Jonathan Richman — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 17:25:25 +0000

I’m all for listening if you promise to use the information in some way whether it be as research or to actually respond. My problem with the former is that people often use it as a means to justify the major cost of monitoring in some cases. In reality, they have no market research plan with defined goals, hypotheses, or other measurable endpoints to determine if the “research” actually worked. If you’re going to invest so much in listening in the name of research, then take a little time and have a research plan too.

Thanks for the comment.

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 17:12:16 +0000

Great post on social media monitoring. A topic that will definitely be up for debates is how much do we monitor and what do we do? Sometimes just listening can really give you a lot of great insight and valuable market research if you’re not ready to join the conversation.

Great article!

Chris
http://www.listenlogic.com
ListenLogic – Social Media Monitoring

By: Jonathan Richman

Jonathan Richman — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 23:01:51 +0000

Tom, Thanks for the comment. Next time I’ll have you as a guest writer.

I think your comments actually sum up a few things really well. There are different kinds of monitoring, each with a different purpose and it’s important that you look at each the right way with the right expectations. I think your suggested title “Pharma should forget about SELF-DIRECTED social media monitoring” is right on. I don’t think there are many companies out there in any industry that could undertake this on their own and do it well. Sometimes you’ve got to bring in the experts.

By: Tom O'brien

Tom O'brien — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:45:32 +0000

@jonmrich

Wow, great post and lots of great comments. I might have titled the post “forget about self-directed SM monitoring” but that is because our firm – MotiveQuest is in the SM monitoring and analysis business.

There are at least three kinds of SM research. First is plain old brand monitoring – who said something about my brand and competitors, where did they say it, is it positive or negative. This I think is mostly useful for PR folks concerned with immediate response and brand reputation. I don’t think Pharma should be in the monitor and respond mode that is appropriate for many other industries.

Second is trended data over time on number of mentions for brand and competitors, sentiment, sources, topics. These are simply research decks. Can be useful when combined and analyzed with other research inputs.

Third (the kind we do) is essentially Online Anthropology. We gather all the conversations online in a give category and analyze then to try to understand what it means for our clients.

We just finished up brand positioning and communications project for a large healthcare system. We started our analysis with 23 million health & healthcare conversations taking place over the last year (yes that is de-duped and de-spammed) online.

We narrowed this down to how ppl make facility selection decisions, and built a model of what people want from their HC providers. This goes well beyond brand monitoring and is actually research that has aspects of both Quant (huge N) and Qual (deep insight) for making business decisions around branding, communications and product offerings.

So, I think SM is a GREAT resource for doing marketing research. It is just really hard to do it broadly and well.

Thanks for prompting the debate.

Tom O’Brien
MotiveQuest LLC
Tom O’brien´s last blog ..Healthcare debate analysis