One of the most contentious posts ever on Dose of Digital was my post about social media monitoring for pharma and healthcare. The title alone was enough to set some people off: Pharma Should Forget About Social Media Monitoring. The point of that post was not that everyone should truly forget about monitoring, but that they should forget about it if they don’t plan on doing anything with what they find. In other words, if you’re not going to respond to discussions or don’t have a FORMAL plan to use what you find in some research setting (presumably to inform some brand strategy), then you’re wasting your money. Monitoring for the sake of monitoring or to “see what people are saying about your brand” (my favorite consultant quote) is useless. It’s a bit like getting punched in the face to see if it hurts. I’ll save you the time…it does. On the other hand, if you’re going to punch back (i.e., respond to discussions) or are taking some punches so you can win in the later rounds (i.e., informing future strategy), like Rocky fighting Clubber Lang, then go for it. Monitor all you want.

I only hope you don’t end up as bloodied as this. It ain’t pretty out there.

To save you from another beating in the ring, today’s post is going  to try to dissuade you once again from “monitoring” until you’re ready. I’ll take a different angle today though. The title of this post should give you some idea: “Monitor This, Forget That.” What I’m not going to give you is a list of social media sites that are more important than others. You won’t see: “Twitter is more important than Facebook” or “iGuard is more significant than WebMD” (even if they are). Instead, I want to tell you where you should be looking FOR FREE before you spend your time and (a lot) your company’s hard-earned money on a “traditional” monitoring solution.

Before I go forward, one caveat: I think social media monitoring is an extremely valuable tool that ANY brand can benefit from. I also think that the vast majority of of monitoring solutions and tools that are available are well worth their cost. True, some are better than others and some are easier to use or more comprehensive than others. I’m not discussing what the best monitoring solution is today (in a rare showing of restraint and common sense). What I am doing is telling you to forget about these social media monitoring solutions until you do everything else that I spell out below. After you check all of these boxes AND have a plan for what you’re going to do with all your findings from your monitoring effort then go forth and monitor. Until then, start there…er…here.

The inspiration for this post was PostRank. You’ll notice a little widget in the right column of this blog from PostRank, which shows posts ranked by “engagement.” I won’t get into a ton of detail on how they figure out “engagement,” but it’s common sense when you strip it down. Essentially, what they are measuring is if people are engaging with your posts and to what degree. Rather than simply counting clicks or tweets and giving everything the same value, PostRank does something different. They assign each different engagement type a different value based on how much effort it takes. For example, clicking a link in that widget over there doesn’t take much work compared to writing a rebuttal blog post about a similar topic (but do feel free to click away). A tweet about a new post doesn’t require nearly the effort as leaving a comment about that post. Each engagement, or activity gets assigned points based on how much effort it takes. What you end up with is a list of the posts in which other people invested the most time. Those should be the best posts.

So, from that I got to thinking, what if you only monitored those discussions from customers that took the most effort to create? Wouldn’t you get the most insight from these people? Wouldn’t they be your most passionate customers who care the most about your brand (positive or negative)? Wouldn’t their level of effort be an indicator for how important their insight might be? In other words, is there a “Monitoring Continuum” that you should pay close attention to so that you can find those highly engaged customers who give you very key pieces of information that cannot be ignored? Looking back on my brand experience, I think there is.

For healthcare, here’s how I see the Monitoring Continuum:

The activities at the top are those that I consider to require the most amount of effort and, therefore, engagement. Those towards the bottom require less effort and amount to less engagement. A few clarifying points to explain the logic of where I put things on this chart.

• In general, electronic activities require less effort.
• Creating something from scratch requires more effort.
• Anything directly addressed to you requires more effort than simply sending out a “rant” or praise. For example, to create a tweet addressed to your Twitter name (and “@”) requires that the customer first figure out what the company’s Twitter name is.

One critical observation is that you don’t need a complex social media monitoring solution to keep track of the activities that require the most engagement. In fact, all but the three lowest can be done simply and easily and are likely already monitored. For example, when someone writes, calls or emails you, I’m assuming that someone at your company monitors all of that. To see if someone publishes something about your brand, you’ll cover 95% of what’s out there with a simple Google Alert and you can check MedWatch periodically to see which new events have been reported.

So, my question is not “Is your company monitoring all of these sources?” it’s “Are YOU monitoring all of these sources?” That is, do you see every letter that comes into your company about your brand? Do you get a regular report of the feedback that people give about your brand to your call center? Do you check your Google Alerts everyday for new information (don’t even tell me you don’t have this set up)? Feedback that we get from customers in the “old fashioned” way can be extremely valuable because it comes from passionate customers who have a very strong point of view and, likely, interesting observations about how to improve your brand. Yet most marketers I know simply ignore these sources.

Why? Three reasons. First, it’s simply not as “sexy” as a complex “dashboard” system that monitors brand mentions in real-time with some fancy visualizations. Second, many marketers aren’t on the “distribution list” for feedback from these other sources. That is, the call center doesn’t think to call or email you with updates about your brand at most companies. And finally, third, these sources of feedback are dismissed as coming from people who aren’t brand targets or are not influential.

Allow me to start with the last one and work backwards. Surprise! Your “target” customer probably isn’t who you think it is (or who you want it to be). Chances are if you’re selling a pharma brand (especially one for a chronic condition), your customer isn’t on Twitter, but they do write letters. Anyone who can publish something about your brand is influential. Period. They themselves might not be, but they need only reach one person who is and that counts about the same (ever read a letter to the editor?). To the second reason, if you’re not getting updates from your call center (including physical mail, email, phone calls, and online contact forms), get them now. You might have to agree to have the customer’s actual name removed from the correspondence for privacy reasons (that’s fine, it doesn’t matter), but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have access to this information. And when it comes to “sexy,” in case you haven’t noticed, a lot of what we do isn’t sexy. It’s “in the trenches” and not particularly glamorous on most days, but that’s what it takes to get things done as a marketer in a big company…so, get over yourself. What’s more sexy? Hitting your numbers or having a really cool monitoring application to show to people?

If you’re truly interested in monitoring what people are saying about your brand, start with the sources you already have at your disposal. Many of these sources are likely to include feedback from some of your most engaged, passionate customers. Pay attention to what they have to say. A tweet in the dark is nothing compared to the heart that goes into a good, old-fashioned letter. When was the last time you read one?

Possibly related posts (auto-generated):

1. Pharma Should Forget About Social Media Monitoring
2. 9 Simple Steps to Getting Started in Social Media
3. Monitoring Adverse Events in Social Media for Pharma’s Biggest Brands: Hopeless Task or Simple Project?