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Do you find yourself frustrated that you can’t take action when you see something bad said about your product on Facebook? Do you find yourself secretly logging in at home to see what bloggers are saying about you? Do you fret that bad things are being said about your brand on WebMD, but you can’t go and check? Do you have a passing interest in Twitter, but don’t want to spend hours figuring out how it works? Well, then social media monitoring is NOT for you!

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That’s right, for most pharma and healthcare marketers, you should just forget about social media monitoring. I know, I know. Didn’t I tell everyone that one of the principles of pharma and healthcare social media participation was “Monitor and Get Involved.” I did. I’ve had this in  presentations for a while, but now I’m wondering why. Why is it such a big deal to monitor social media?

I’m certainly not the first to suggest that monitoring is a good first step into social media. It’s included as the first step in so many lists, that I can’t include them all here. I know you’ve all heard it before in many different places, so it’s almost a rule. The first step to getting involved in social media is monitoring. Right?

Are you sure?

Of course, there are a lot of benefits to monitoring and the rationale for doing this as a first step appears pretty sound. While you’re trying to figure out how best to leverage a certain social media channel, say, Twitter, why not start just by seeing what others are saying? You can use this information to get a sense for how your brand is perceived in the market and what people are saying. Is it all good? Are they consistent? Are they actually saying anything or do they not care? Is there one thing that you didn’t know? Does it even really pertain to your brand or is incredibly general (e.g., just took my Lipitor)? You might find some informative information and you’ll get a little sense for what people say about you when they aren’t in a focus group saying what they think you want to hear. Great. At the same time, while your monitoring, you can also learn a bit of the etiquette of the channel. Using Twitter as an example, you’ll see how the @ works and what the # is and how to use it (and how not to).

There you go…two reasons to monitor just like that. So, why would I tell you to forget about monitoring? It’s simple really.

Since we’re talking about pharma and healthcare here, I thought I’d use this healthcare analogy. Doctors and other healthcare professionals have a pretty simple rule when it comes to ordering tests: do the test only if the results are capable of telling me to change my treatment decision. That is, if I’m thinking I should do surgery and I have one more test I could do, would the results of the test, no matter what they were, convince me not to do surgery? If the answer to that question is “no,” then why do the test? You already have done tests and some sort of examination that said surgery was the right choice, so why do another test if it’s not going to change your recommendation?

Social media monitoring in pharma is just like this last test. Is monitoring, namely what you find out, going to change what you do? Is it going to change your marketing approach? Is it going to spring you into action? Are you going to actively respond? The answer is probably “no.” So why subject your patient, I mean you, to an unnecessary (and potentially invasive) test?

“But wait,” you say, “we are going to do something different. This will give us some insights into our products and  it’ll give us a great marketing idea.” Really? Here’s how this could go wrong: you could actually do this this. Change your marketing plan based on something you see via your monitoring efforts. Let’s say for a moment that you notice time and time again that people are something as clear cut as, “I know they say that Drug X works really well, but I was shocked how inexpensive it was.” (I know, a stretch, but stay with me.) You notice this a few times in a few places. At what point do you see it enough to change your marketing message? At what point do you focus on the cost a bit more in your communications? 10 tweets? 100? 1,000? Maybe 50 Facebook updates? 15 blog posts? At what point do you know it’s something real and not some sort of anomaly?

You can’t. At least, you can’t by yourself. In order to actually use monitoring to inform you about marketing decisions such as brand messaging, you need something much more robust than you doing a Twitter search and making a few notes. It’s a big commitment. Still think you can do it alone? Great. Here’s what you need to collect:

• number of brand mentions and the content of each (make sure to include links from the mentions)
• the tone and sentiment of EVERY mention (positive, negative, or neutral)
• context of the mention (you’ve got to filter out everything irrelevant like spam mentions)

Okay, that’s a good start. There are a few more, but let’s go with that. There’s still more to do. Do you like Excel? You’d better. Love statistics? You’ll learn to. Because now you’ve got to take all the information you gathered and start to look for patterns, trends over time, and where changes occurred. You then need to correlate this with market events and your brand communications. I’d use about a year’s worth of data to get started. Go ahead…I’ll wait.

If you chose to actually do this by yourself and now are coming back to read the rest of this post, it’s probably October 2010. Most of what you figured out is probably outdated. Sorry about that.

My point with all of this is to say that without a formal plan of what you’ll do with your monitoring efforts, it might just be a waste of time. There are a lot of companies out there that would be happy to help you with this. Some of these tools are free and some are very expensive. This is definitely a category where you get what you pay for. Most expensive isn’t necessarily best, but expect to pay big to do a robust analysis that is going to give you solutions and not just more mountains of data. You do have a budget for this, right?

One other reason why monitoring might not be for you…you’re not allowed. Your company may restrict the sites you can access at work and chances are these include some (if not all) social media sites. Why? I’m not sure, but two possible  reasons. First, they think that you’re going to waste your time all day playing with Facebook. They do this despite the fact that at least one study has shown an INCREASE in productivity when these sites aren’t blocked. Second, they don’t want to know. If you go out and look what other people are saying about your brand and uncover someone talking about an adverse event, you’ve got to report it to the FDA. If it’s not reported directly to you, then you’re not responsible for reporting it. That is, if someone posts an adverse event on WebMD, then you don’t have to regularly go through WebMD and report all of these. But if you see it, then that counts the same as if it were reported directly to you. I’m not implying that pharma companies are trying to sweep this information under the rug, but there’s a reason why more pharma companies aren’t using social media. Dealing with all these reports could be a major pain. For those adverse event mentions that don’t have all the criteria required for submission, you’ve got to try to find the other criteria. When you do have all the criteria, you’ve got to catalog, eliminate duplicates, prepare a submission, send it to the FDA, and prepare to answer their follow up questions (if they have any). There are processes already in place at companies to do this, but they’re not capable of handling this on a giant scale.

If your company doesn’t want you monitoring, then that’s a good indication that you shouldn’t. I’ve heard that a lot of pharma marketers simply log onto these sites at home where they have access to take a look. Of course, as an agent of the company, whether at home or not, they still have to report what they find. How much they’ll actually find is a matter of debate, but you’d should be prepared. Most adverse event mentions won’t have all four criteria (actually only 1 in 500 will), but each company has a different policy about whether they try to find the other two by attempting to contact the person who reported it or if they just gather it all and try to submit it as is. Either way, before you jump in, make sure you’re ready to handle what’s out there.

Just so you don’t feel alone, few companies actually permit social media monitoring according to a poll Len Starnes put together. The poll found that 29% of respondents said there was no internal policy. 7% said monitoring was strictly prohibited no matter what. The rest were shades of “yes” including “yes, but.” See the entire poll here.

The final reason why you shouldn’t monitor is because you might do more harm than good. You start a company Twitter account with the idea that you’re just going to see what people are saying, but you figured you may as well have an account too. Great. Now what happens when someone contacts you? They send you a DM or an @ and want an answer. Do you answer them? Are you allowed? What if you’re on WebMD looking through the forums and see a post that says something like: “If someone doesn’t tell me a way to get this drug for less, I can’t refill my prescription next month.” Now, you know from looking at the rest of the post that this person would be an ideal candidate for your assistance program and would probably get their drug for free. Do you say something? What if you do it anonymously?

If these are hard questions to answer, then you shouldn’t even be looking. When people discover that you’re online and available (and they will), they’re going to come to you looking for answers. If you ignore them, then you’ll do more harm than good, as people will only be annoyed with you.

Okay, so have I talked you out of monitoring yet? No? You’re still going forward. <Gulp> In that case, let’s set a few ground rules. You’ll have to agree to each of these in order to be allowed to monitor social media (on the honor system):

• I will develop a plan of what to do with what I find BEFORE I monitor.
• I won’t make any marketing decisions based on my own “analysis.” I’ll find an outside partner who will do this for me.
• I’ll figure out if my company has a social media participation policy. If so, I’ll follow it, so I don’t get fired and blame this blog. If not, I’ll see if we have any rules about adverse events I may uncover and I’ll help fight to get some formal rules set up.
• When I do participate, I’ll actually participate. I won’t just be a “lurker” on the sidelines, ignoring everyone that wants to talk with me.

Agree? Okay, good. Now go forth and monitor. Try the two below to get started…and be careful. There’s a lot you’ll find out there that will surprise, bewilder, delight, confuse, frustrate, and annoy you. That’s normal. No need for me to order another test. You’re just monitoring social media.