Whether it be healthcare or any other industry, different companies have come up with and rely on different uses of social media to meet their brand objectives. After surveying a bunch of different social media programs (including the hundreds found on the Pharma and Healthcare Social Media Wiki), I figured out that for the nearly infinite number of final executions, there are really only seven distinct uses of social media in business. Seven might sound like a lot, but it’s nothing compared to the number of channels within social media from Facebook to Wordpress to Flickr to Foursquare and so on (see a hundred or so on Wikipedia). Whatever channel marketers ultimately decide to use to bring their social media idea to life and meet their brand objectives (I know, that last bit sounds almost crazy), they’re trying to do one of seven things with social media. Keep in mind that these seven things overlap a bit, but you’ll see how they are distinct.

If you think there’s one I’m missing, then let me know in the comments.

To make it easy to remember, the seven things all start with “C”, hence the sub-title of this post “The 7 ‘Cs”” [that's a punctuation nightmare]. I should note that these are actually in some order, as I tried to order them by the frequency of use by the healthcare industry. For each use, I’ve included what I see as the pros and cons of each. [Also, for those who are Facebook Fans of Dose of Digital, part of the benefit of being a Fan is that you get occasional exclusive content. This is one of those times. If you want a PowerPOINT version of this post to share with others, instructions for how to download it are now posted for Fans. Not a Fan? Go to Facebook and become one.]

The 7 Cs of Social Media Usage

• Communicating
• Cause Support/Sponsorship
• Contests
• Consumer Research
• Connecting Others
• Customer Service
• Community Building

Communicating

This is a fairly generous use of the term communicating, which to many people typically implies a two-way dialogue. However, the true meaning of communication is all about “conveying information.” And that’s what most marketers who use social media are doing. They are communicating. I suppose every one of the other Cs could also be characterized as communicating in some way, so for the purposes of this example, I’m talking about communicating a message in one direction: in other words, broadcasting. Many companies who have started using Twitter use it in this way: the one-way communication of information. Basically, it’s used as another channel to get out news about their company.

• Pro: Gets message out to the masses with potential to spread virally
• Con: No interaction with community, the opposite of “social”

Cause Support/Sponsorship

Helping out a cause such as a patient support society or other non-profit organization is another common use of social media for marketers especially in healthcare. It’s a smart approach if you think about it and its how several brands have managed to get as many “Fans” as they have. There are a bunch of good examples of this in healthcare including programs like EMD Serono/Pfizer’s use of MS Champions in Facebook.

The most impressive example to me is another use of Facebook and it’s Merck’s program for Gardasil. I’m not impressed with the page or content per se, but rather the very smart angle they’ve taken with their Fan page. Cleverly, Merck didn’t create a Gardasil brand page and ask people to become a fan of their brand. That would look a bit funny in someone’s news feed. Who wants to broadcast to the world that they’re friends with a “big pharma” product that also happens to be a vaccine. You can easily imagine that you wouldn’t have too many takers. So, Merck went in a different direction and created a “semi” unbranded page called Take a Step Against Cervical Cancer. Instead of asking people to be a fan of Gardasil, they ask you to be a fan of fighting cervical cancer. Who among us isn’t against cervical cancer? 108,000 fans later (an impressive amount for any brand, much less a pharma brand), the strategy seems to have worked.

• Pro: Low barrier for people to “Fan,” easier for people to share
• Con: Limited (if any) connection with the brand, platform often “owned” by third-parties

Contests

There are a number of these types of programs out there and they’re common in many industries. The typical idea is to have users submit a video or story about a specific topic, conduct some sort of judging process, and then announce the winners (and award some prizes). Interestingly enough, this category is one of the pharma industry’s first forays into social media, back in 2007. Way back then, before every pharma company was on YouTube, Novartis sponsored a contest called Flu Flix. The contest was designed to help raise awareness of the flu and why it’s important to get vaccinated. (Funny that we’re doing the same thing three years later, no?) This contest’s introduction video alone has had nearly 800,000 views. As best I can figure, this is the most popular pharma YouTube video ever by about a factor of about 40. Of all the entries they received, they picked 60 as finalists. Here’s the contest introduction video:

Other examples include AstraZeneca’s contest on YouTube for Symbicort (contest now over). These programs can be great if people actually participate. They participate in two ways. First, actually submitting content to the contest and, second, voting or commenting on other submissions. Many contests I see cut out the last part and the “winners” are picked by the company. This misses a huge opportunity. If voting helps determine the winners, then those who entered will encourage their friends to vote, which means that they’re doing your marketing for you. In addition, it’s important to connect the contest to the brand benefits. Don’t just have a contest for the sake of having one. Naturally, we think the Official Sponsor program does all of this pretty well.

• Pro: Good exposure to the brand, highly participatory, can spread among networks
• Con: Little opportunity for product messaging (especially clinical ones), potential lack of a connection with product benefits

Consumer Research

Nearly everything in social media can be monitored. I won’t get into the pros and cons of monitoring social media here, but feel free to read more about it in my post “Pharma Should Forget About Social Media Monitoring“. If you are monitoring and not planning on responding, that’s fine, but be sure to use the information you find while monitoring. Essentially, you have a giant market research study going on. You can see what people think about your brand and how they talk about and treat the conditions in which you’re most interested. UCB has gone one step further in partnering with Patients Like Me to create a new epilepsy community that they can monitor to find out how people treat epilepsy. As a maker of epilepsy treatments, they clearly have an interest in the information that a community like this can yield.

• Pro: A huge amount of information is available, “real-world” data
• Con: Adverse event reporting issues, can be expensive to set up and maintain

Connecting Others

There’s no question that, from a regulatory standpoint, it would be difficult for a pharma brand to set up a branded community centered around one of their products. What’s more, who is going to join this community? For example, why would anyone join the Lipitor community on the Lipitor.com website, when there are plenty of neutral third-party communities out there? Answer: they wouldn’t. However, it’s possible to connect people without having an on-site community. Consider how Epilepsy Empowerment works. This is a site created by Valient Pharmaceuticals (who makes an epilepsy treatment), but you don’t see any mention of the brands. Instead, they’ve created a service for those with epilepsy and those who care for them. Rather than have discussions on the site (which some people don’t like to do whether it is pharma owned or not), Epilepsy Empowerment basically matches people together with those who have a similar profile and allows them to share off-site contact information. It’s up to the participants to decide how to communicate after this. Maybe via email, maybe via phone or perhaps something else. Bayer’s Betaplus program operates under a similar model, but with trained moderators supplied by Bayer involved in the calls.

• Pro: Greater participation as people see this as a more independent from the brand, lower regulatory risk
• Con: Limited connection with the brand, brand typically has no participation, control, or exposure to the conversation, connections between users often random, some liability risk

Customer Service

While very common in other industries, the healthcare industry has only just started to supply some customer service via social media. Twitter seems to be a popular place for customer service since it also happens to be a place where people tend to complain and need customer service. Companies like Comcast and Best Buy have each gotten both great press and good results from the customer service they’re providing via Twitter. One pharma company who is doing this now is AstraZeneca. Basically, it’s a pilot now, but here’s how it works: AZ monitors Twitter for tweets that mention Nexium and refer to either an adverse event or the cost of the medication. When one is found (about one a week), AZ responds with the tweet seen above (yes, the same one for everyone). This tweet invites people to connect with folks in AZ’s call center who can handle these types of questions and supply solutions. Some argue that AZ should engage more by giving the answer on Twitter. I’m not so sure. It’s pretty hard to give all the relevant information about a product assistance program in 140 characters. This is a good start.

Remember: doing this type of customer service in social media doesn’t just affect the person who you respond to; others will see your response as well. In addition, if someone complained about you on Twitter, they’ll like tweet about the great service you provided if you do solve their problem.

• Pro: Can stop “firestorms” before they start, shows brand’s sophistication with the channel, low-cost of entry
• Con: Problems not solved publicly, action is required by customer

Community Building

The final way social media is used by companies is to create communities. Similar to “Connect Others” above, this one is about creating a community from scratch that is related to your brand or disease state. These communities can literally be created from scratch, meaning they don’t reside on third-part platform like Facebook or Ning, which can be leveraged to host the community (and handle the backend technology). The latter, of course, is more cost-effective, but offers less control. As I mentioned earlier, it’s difficult, if impossible, for a pharma company to create a community-related specifically to it’s brand. However, a few companies have shown it can be done for unbranded, disease-related communities.

The single best source of information about the rare disease PKU is on an unbranded community created by Biomarin called PKU.com. Biomarin makes Kuvan, a treatment for this disease. There’s a great community on this site and Biomarin made it happen. They don’t appear to be involved really in any way except for their company logo appearing on a few pages. Apparently, if you provide enough value, people will come. If you do it right and put patients first, they’ll come. And stay. You’ll have to resist the temptation to try to control the conversation.

• Pro: (if unbranded) Limited connection with the brand (a plus for regulatory), great research opportunities
• Con: Limited (if any) connection with the brand (a minus for marketers), expensive to set up custom community, recruitment

Those are the seven ways social media is being used. As I said before, if I’m missing something, just leave a comment. As a reminder, for those who are Facebook Fans of Dose of Digital, part of the benefit of being a Fan is that you get occasional exclusive content. This is one of those times. If you want a PowerPOINT version of this post to share with others, instructions for how to download it are now posted for Fans. Not a Fan? Go to Facebook and become one.

Possibly related posts (auto-generated):

1. Healthcare and Pharma Social Media: It’s All About E.V.E.
2. Why Your Regulatory Team Needs Social Media
3. 9 Simple Steps to Getting Started in Social Media