Making the Case for a Social Media Strategy in Healthcare

But these social media outlets are more than another channel through which to deliver messages to the marketplace. Companies like Merck, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, and Kaiser Permanente have initiated social media and marketing strategies to understand and engage their audiences more deeply – with demonstrable business results.

Social media is making an impact on all aspects of business communications today. This paper will explore these examples and summarize what you need to build executive support for incorporating social media in your marketing plan.

Social Media Reaches the Mainstream

In 2006, social media formats like blogs, photo sites and video sites crossed the threshold from techno-curiosity to become a bona fide societal trend. Consumers by the millions have embraced these powerful communication tools to post an opinion, share an experience, and join the online conversation. These conversations affected many companies, some positively and some negatively, and raised the awareness of the power social media has to influence business results.

Social media’s importance received two important endorsements in 2006.

• Time Magazine’s editors named “You” as its Person of the Year, the annual honor given to someone who "for better or for worse, has done the most to influence the events of the year”. The magazine stated that “You” were selected: “for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game.” 1
• Advertising Age magazine named “You” its “Agency of the Year” for 2006. They acknowledged that this is a time of tremendous change in the way companies communicate with consumers. They stated that “marketing world leaders declared that it's time to give up control and accept that consumers now control their brands.” 2

Now we are in an era where companies must take action. The reach and influence of social media is only going to grow.

The Social Web’s New Communication Forms Draw More Users

Communications has always been the fundamental value of the internet to consumers. Back in the net’s early days, email was the “killer app” that made the Web a “must-have” and continues to be a mainstay of the online experience. Communication activities split the lion’s share of consumers’ online time with content, and far outstrip commerce and search according to the Online Publisher’s Association Internet Activity Index. 3

Early in the development of the Internet, discussion boards focusing on specific medical conditions sprang up. Patients valued the ability to connect with others suffering from the same disease, share research, discuss coping ideas, and provide support. A study by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council noted that consumers often give short attention to pharmaceutical marketer sites for sites that feature more personal communications. Study author Professor Pamela Briggs of Northumbria University notes, “The great strength of the internet is that you can find people who have had the same problem that you have and see how they have coped with it…to act as if that is not happening is missing the point.” 4

Technology-Powered Communications Accelerate Word of Mouth

From the earliest usenet groups to today’s hot video sharing and social network sites, each new innovation has increased consumers’ reach and influence. Email moved word of mouth beyond one-on-one water cooler chat. Consumer review sites empowered people to praise or pan products they use. Blogs freed consumers to publish their opinions into the entire Internet community. Digital photography and video sites freed people’s self-expression from the limitations of the written word.

Researching health information has been a mainstay online activity for years, and a 2006 Pew Internet report notes that 113 million American internet users have searched for information on at least one of seventeen health topics. 9 With the growing palette of social media tools, consumers are rapidly tapping into each other as an information source: a recent Jupiter Research report states that 20% of online users seek health information on blogs, discussion boards, and other social media sites. 10

Social Media Transform Communications into Content

These new tools blur the line between communications and content. Blogs are a natural example of how content and communications blend into a single experience. Each entry (or “post” as it is known) is a short article, essay, news item, etc. But bloggers mean to stimulate feedback and conversation, as readers add comments and links to other blogs to make a point.

Even traditional media companies are embracing this point. CNN has created a blog and podcasts titled “Paging Dr. Gupta”, hosted by their chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta. The medical reporting staff provides more depth and commentary about on-air features like the recent “Changing Life” special about new developments in longevity.

NPR has taken the next step, hosting the “My Cancer” blog on which former ABC News journalist Leroy Sievers documents his battle with cancer. This is an example where these new media forms stretch traditional journalistic approach from objectively reporting the news, to providing a very personal reaction to events.

This can have significant implications for public relations professionals. We already know from the 2004 Columbia University study that 51% of journalists rely on blogs for story ideas 11, but sites like CNN bring consumer opinions to the forefront and present it alongside or integrated with virtually any news story they cover. Influencing news coverage through press releases and media relations is far more difficult when stories are created and shaped hand-in-hand with the general public.

Social Components Support Key Business Strategies

Consumer behavior and media consumption changes alone are not enough to convince senior executives to adopt this new strategy. They need to see how it is going to drive new revenue, reduce costs, or otherwise help the company achieve its business goals. Even in these early days of social marketing, there are good examples of companies using social marketing strategies to their advantage.

• Merck offers a series of podcasts called YourHealthNow on their website. These programs feature candid interviews with patients dealing with medical conditions as well as discussions with medical professionals on treatment options and procedures.
• Pfizer Medical Humanities Initiative sponsors Healthpolitics.org, a site that “explores complicated topics at the intersection of health and policy.14 The creates blogs posts and podcasts on health topics ranging from “Why Energy Drinks are Bad News” to “Untangling the Web of Alzheimer’s Disease” to “Consumer-Directed Health Insurance: Will It Really Work?”. Among its successes, Pfizer counts over 1000 journalists and editors that regularly access the site’s content.
• Outside of the healthcare industry, Intuit demonstrates the vast potential to engage consumers in these emerging media. The financial software firm uses a range of strategies including blogs and discussion boards, to tap its customers to solicit new ideas, prioritize features in development, and even test new advertising messages. To respond to customer questions about their Quickbooks product, Intuit created a community with discussion boards on their site so customers can help each other with questions. Intuit participates in these discussions to understand customer needs so they can respond with product enhancements faster. According to Business Week, this community now has over 100,000 members discussing topics across 50 subject areas.16

In the company’s 2005 annual report, CEO Steve Bennett’s letter to shareholders states “…positive word of mouth creates a durable advantage for Intuit that translates into sustained revenue and profit growth.”

The Other Side of Influence

Sometimes the discussions can be positive about your products and the experiences consumers have had with you, but often they can be very negative. On the one hand, this increases the number of potential critics and they don’t need to have impressive qualifications or credentials to be influential.

On the other hand, all of these negative opinions are public and searchable, allowing companies to prepare a response before a story gets wide coverage. Bloggers at top companies agree that learning about and dealing with negative stories as they emerge is smarter than waiting until they hit the newspapers or evening news shows.

Author of the book “Naked Conversations” and former Microsoft technology evangelist, Robert Scoble, told Communications World he stays on top of consumer discussions so he can immediately respond to incorrect information. Scoble states that listening to blogs is key to preparing for reporters who call asking about a story they found emerging online. “If you say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that,’ you look stupid because you don’t have an answer. If you were prepared, you could tell the reporter ‘I’ve already heard that, I’ve been watching, I’ve already got the facts, here is what we are doing.’ Now have a much better story to tell, and now you have two or three paragraphs on the story.” 18

There have been a number of examples which are instructive of the power of social media:

• Comments promoting aggressive sales tactics from AstraZeneca regional sales director Michael Zubillaga made on an internal company newsletter were picked up by industry blogger Dr Peter Rost. Criticism of AstraZeneca spread rapidly across the web and Mr Zubillaga was promptly fired. In a company statement, AstraZeneca said he was fired for violating the "robust compliance program that calls for responsible sales and marketing practices and conduct." 19
• Potential criticisms aren’t limited to a company’s online activities but may expose inadequacies in a company’s call center, as AOL learned. Vincent Ferrari decided to cancel his rarely used AOL account, but he heard rumors about poor AOL customer service so he decided to record his phone call to AOL. After 15 minutes on hold, he reached a customer service rep who refused to cancel Vincent’s account, even after he repeated “cancel the account” over and over again. Vincent then posted the recording on YouTube where it became and instant hit and a magnet for others sharing the same frustration with AOL.

This caught the attention of the Today Show which broadcast an interview with Vincent. AOL apologized, fired the rep and promised to make changes.

Developing Your Strategy

The knowledge and data points gained from social media analysis can help companies improve their levels of engagement with customers. By employing new communications tactics to participate in the conversations that are occurring around them, companies can work with customers to build and expand the brand together. This collaboration enables companies to harness the new influence that is driving the way healthcare decisions are being made today.

As your company develops a social media strategy, keep in mind the three ways companies can use social media to drive business results:

1. Monitoring. By monitoring social media, companies can track how their products are being interpreted in the marketplace to understand how the company is perceived and to learn how any responses or message changes should be approached.
2. Measurement. Acquiring quantitative reporting data on the specific issues and buzz driving online discussions makes it easy to demonstrate the impact of your communications efforts.
3. Discovery. Companies can explore the world of social media to learn what influences are driving healthcare decisions, track the growth of emerging trends and identify ideas to improve products.
   

About TNS Media Intelligence / Cymfony

TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony tells brands and companies what people are saying about them whether the people are bloggers, traditional journalists or even influential consumers. By sifting and interpreting the millions of voices at the intersection of traditional and social media, Cymfony delivers consumer insights that help companies identify the people, keep on top of the issues and respond to the trends impacting their business - at the speed of the market. We call this approach to harnessing this new dynamic “market influence analytics”.
Cymfony pioneered the innovative technology to extract meaning from high volumes and diverse sources of text. U.S. intelligence agencies have been relying on our technology for more than 9 years. We are an innovator in the integration of consumer-generated and traditional media, offering access to the greatest breadth of content sources and analytical expertise.

Contact Cymfony at 617-673-6000 (x2) or visit cymfony.com to learn what your customers and prospects are saying about your company.

1. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html
2. http://adage.com/abstract.php?article_id=114132
3. Online Publishers Association Internet Activity Index www.online-publishers.org
4. http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=64712
5. Jupiter Research – “Retail Marketing: Driving Sales Through Consumer-Created Content”
6. Technorati “State of the Live Web” http://technorati.com/weblog/2007/04/328.html
7. Comscore http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=1193
8. Compete, Inc. “S-Commerce: Beyond MySpace and YouTube”
9. Pew Internet & American Life Project “Online Health Search 2006”
   
10. Jupiter Research “Empowered Online Health Consumers”
11. Columbia University – Euro RSCG Magnet Study of the Media “Rebuilding Trust: Credibility in the Newsroom and the Boardroom”
12. Compete “Embracing Consumer Buzz Creates Measurement challenges for Marketers”
13. Compete “Embracing Consumer Buzz Creates Measurement challenges for Marketers”
14. http://www.healthpolitics.org/about_hp.asp
15. Intuit 2005 Annual Report http://web.intuit.com/about_intuit/investors/annuals/
16. Business Week “Blogspotting” June 22, 2006
    
17. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_21/b3985098.htm
18. Communications World May-June 2006
19. http://www.philly.com/inquirer/business/20070407_Sales_manager_is_fired_after_comments_hit_Web.html