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Pharmaceutical companies aren’t currently taking full advantage of the wealth of patient-generated content on social media channels. Deloitte’s Becca Ramble and Katy Balatero outline how these companies can set up successful social listening programmes to uncover patient insights while managing and mitigating risk.  

Social networks and online communities play an important role in consumer health management, serving as hubs where patients and caregivers meet to ask questions, share information, and compare experiences with treatments and medications.

The Deloitte Center for Health Solutions 2015 Survey of US Health Care Consumers found that 52pc of consumers actively search online for health-related information.

Patient-generated content on social networks can highlight the needs, wants and decision considerations of patients and healthcare providers.

This data can be a valuable source of insights for pharmaceutical companies seeking to understand how best to reach, engage, and support patients and healthcare practitioners.

Companies across a variety of industries are engaging in formal social listening activities.

Social listening involves monitoring social media channels to devise a strategy to help you better influence consumers.

Companies are using insights gleaned from social data to identify market opportunities, inform product and service design, strengthen customer relationships, build engaging customer experiences, manage PR crises, and much more.

Multiple departments, including marketing, customer experience, human resources, corporate communications, sales, and others, are tapping into paid, owned, and earned social media.

These companies recognise that social media listening means tapping into the world’s largest focus group, providing access to current and potential customers and the information they share.

Many pharmaceutical companies have a social media presence. They manage owned social channels, including corporate branded Facebook pages, LinkedIn accounts, and Twitter handles, to share corporate communications, investor relations, event announcements, and press releases. These companies broadcast information and listen on their managed channels, but often their activities end there.

Most are not looking beyond their own channels to understand how, when, and why patients and caregivers are sharing experiences with specific drugs, therapies, diseases, and conditions. Many of these companies are interested in listening and engaging but, when faced with the regulatory risks and considerations, including the discovery and reporting of adverse events, feel that the risks may outweigh the benefits.

While these are real concerns, a thoughtfully-executed social media listening strategy can be used to inform many areas across the business while effectively managing the regulatory risks and considerations.

Pharmaceutical companies fear that opening up social listening around their products will expose them to posts where authors share an “undesirable experience associated with the use of a medical product in a patient”, and that they will need to invest heavily in resources to manage adverse event reporting.

In the US, the FDA outlines four criteria that must be present for an adverse event to require reporting:

An identifiable patient: The post contains sufficient information to lead the reviewer to believe that a patient is involved.

An identifiable reporter: The post contains sufficient contact information to allow follow-up by the reviewer, including an email address, telephone number, or mailing address.

A specific medication: The post must mention a specific medication by brand name, or the chemical name of a medication if the compound is unique to one specific pharmaceutical brand.

An adverse event: The post describes a reaction that a “reasonable person” would consider to be an adverse event, such as death, hospitalisation, vomiting, swelling, or any side effect that is either unknown or unexpected with the medication.

However, studies have shown that less than 2pc of all posts mentioning pharmaceutical products and brands contain indicators of potential adverse events.

The structure and nature of most social media posts do not include the level of detail required to meet all four of these criteria. For example, forum threads where participants discuss experiences with a drug but use anonymous usernames or do not provide contact information would not qualify as adverse events. While any pharmaceutical company that engages in brand monitoring should expect to see some adverse event content, Pharmaceutical Commerce wrote that “the volume of adverse events is not likely to exceed what can be handled through existing adverse event reporting channels established for traditional/offline reporting methods”.

By designing listening and monitoring efforts with their business goals in mind, pharmaceutical companies can develop and deploy strategic listening programmes while managing and mitigating risk. There are several approaches:

Using social media listening and monitoring technologies: Social media listening and monitoring tools allow companies to curate the social media content they need for their specific business goals. By using carefully-curated social media queries, the company can reduce their exposure to unintended content and minimise risk. Many of these tools include functionality to support tagging and reporting activities, if and when an adverse event is discovered, that can streamline the workflow and support the digital paper trail needed for compliance.

Developing visualisations and dashboards: Trend lines, pie charts, and other data visualisations aggregate social media content and organise it by subject matter, such as brand mentions, product groups or types, or patient journey segments. This approach serves up insights and analysis without requiring review of individual posts, thereby removing access and exposure to posts where adverse events may be present.

Exploring unbranded content for insights: Many patients post online about diseases, conditions, or therapy experiences without necessarily mentioning a specific drug or brand. Listening at this level can provide pharmaceutical companies firsthand access to trends, perception shifts, sentiment, and more, while minimising exposure to conversations of brand-related adverse events.

Regardless of the approach, the representatives of the pharmaceutical company who will be accessing and reading individual posts should be trained on adverse event identification. If they are exposed to a post where a potential adverse event is surfaced, it will help them perform due diligence to research the presence of the four FDA criteria.

As brands seek to differentiate themselves through their marketing, products, or communication, a deep understanding of their audiences can play an integral role in meeting those objectives. Social media listening and analysis can inform strategies with actionable information about what people need and want, the language they use, and where they are gathering.

There are many benefits that make social media efforts worthwhile, especially if these programmes are approached with a clear understanding of and management strategy for the risks and regulations involved.

Social listening has become a common tool for many pharma marketers. But it's not enough, says a new white paper co-authored by IMS Health and UCB Pharma.

Pharma typically uses social listening only for one-off projects to answer a specific question. But that kind of tactical thinking isn't broad enough to tap the bigger benefits of social listening, said Greg Cohen, associate director in global strategic marketing at UCB.

"Many of those companies think it's some sort of Big Brother-NSA kind of thing, listening in to all your conversations," he said in an interview. "But it's no different than a lot of other market research applications, except that it's so much more--it's a way for marketers to find out what patients are really saying and how they're saying it."

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He and paper co-author Siva Nadarajah, IMS Health's general manager of social media, maintain that pharma companies that aren't using social listening strategically are squandering competitive advantages and the opportunity to do better-targeted--and therefore more efficient and effective--marketing.

Their white paper cites a Best Practices study that found while 85% of healthcare and pharma companies surveyed are engaged in some type of social listening, only one-third use it as a source of competitive intelligence.

And for pharma still using the regulatory "excuse" of having to report adverse events they run across on social media, both authors agree the problem is highly overestimated. In a case of the fear being much larger than the reality, Nadarajah said, 2% or fewer of social media posts are accountable to adverse effects reporting.

They advise pharma companies to do continuous monitoring of social media, which not only results in current patient insights, but when advanced analytics are applied, can help predict future patient behavior.

The value of social listening is a theme IMS Health has been beating regularly over the past few years, but Nadarajah and Cohen said the paper was written now to continue pushing the message to pharma to act more strategically. IMS Health offers cloud-based social monitoring through its Nexxus Social platform.

"Rather than dismissing this dialogue as empty chatter or worrying about the implications of hearing something that might be more trouble than it is worth, industry needs to adopt practices from more consumer-oriented sectors and embrace social media intelligence on a continuous-listening basis," the authors wrote in the paper.

Pharmaceutical companies are missing out a major opportunity to grow their brands: social media. That’s according to a newly published e-book from McKinsey & Co., Google and The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

“Historic mixes of advertising in traditional media combined with heavy salesforce coverage and ‘push’ messaging are insufficient,” the publication said. “While each of those tactics remains relevant, today’s commercial mix should reflect the fact that people are now viewing digital channels close to 50 percent of the time, and, even more importantly, that those people seek real engagement in regards to their care.”

From the e-book:

The most innovative marketers today are finding ways to solve a problem, delight, inspire, or empathize with patients right in the flow of what they are doing (instead of interrupting to push a message to them). Similarly, more and more HCPs use digital tools and media to confirm facts and as a way to connect with others for clinical advice as well as emotional support.

Indeed, according to the report, one of every 20 Google searches today is for health information, the book said. That’s grown 15 percent a year since 2011.

“As a result, pharma companies need to make a mindset shift from ‘telling’ to ‘listening’ and then (eventually) ‘engaging’ because patients are no longer passive recipients of care. Rather, they are active shapers of their care,” the McKinsey-Google-Wharton team wrote in the e-book, entitled, “Pharma 3D: Rewriting the script for marketing in the digital age.”

“Pharma 3D” stands for discover, design and deliver. “The 3D approach has helped scores of organizations across industries innovate their approaches to digital engagement,” said the lengthy document, which includes numerous case studies. (The authors promised to update the e-book with additional case studies in the future.)

They said that companies with a high “digital quotient” experience twice the rate of revenue growth as those that do not. “The investment in this considerable change is worth it,” the book said.

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