Every patient has a pathway to treatment.  That path starts at the health and wellness phase of the journey and leads all the way through to treatment, patient adherence and managing an illness.  Most pharmaceutical companies have a firm grasp on the patient pathway as it relates to their drugs.

Along that path, the individual has very different needs that can guide the content creation of a pharmaceutical company engaging in social media.  Understanding those information gaps along the patient pathway is critical to healthcare social media success.  A person is more apt to trust the company that’s been there from the start rather than the company that showed up only in the patient’s time of need.  Social media relationships should be built to last and not transactional in nature.

But you understand this already.  The more pressing question is: what is it that people want along the patient pathway?  To begin to form an answer to that question, it’s helpful to understand the changing information consumption habits of today’s patient:

• 23% of individuals with a chronic disease go online for the purpose of finding others with similar health concerns
• 17% of cell phone users have used their phone to look up health and medical information
• 78% of home broadband users look online for health information
• 60% of people classify themselves as visual learners
• 67% of specialist physicians own smart phones and 75% of those doctors use their smart phone to view medical apps like Epocrates

All of this leads to an important point: social media strategy requires a robust content syndication network. Most content creation efforts focus on text-based efforts.   But all data around consumption habits points to the need for a mix of text-based content along with video, audio, Slidehare and interactive games.  And we are not just creating content for the oft-repeated “three screens”—we need to think about four screens (TV, computer, smartphone and tablet).

The patient pathway should map to the patient engagement span.  There is no single approach to achieve this goal.  By starting off with a listening program to understand the patient population and their needs along the patient pathway, you can begin to offer the right types of content at the right time.  Content creation in social media channels needs to evolve from text-based and at a single point-in-time (usually treatment or diagnosis) to multi-format, multi-device and at every point along the patient pathway.

Call it a scare tactic if you will.  A common refrain heard around pharmaceutical social media circles is that conversations are happening online about your brand or company whether you like it or not—you may as well join the chatter.  The logic goes like this: if you are marketing a new treatment for cancer, it is likely that patients, caregivers and healthcare providers are showing their interest in both the disease and brand online.  Shouldn’t you want to be a part of that conversation?

This is a commonly used method for describing the value proposition of social media.  By focusing on the lost opportunity of intercepting and shaping conversations, social media professionals hope to convince skeptical marketers that it’s time to engage.

By ignoring conversations happening online, a brand is absolutely missing out on an opportunity to connect with patients, offer engaging content and pinpoint an information gap.  Of course, there are two sides to the same coin and focusing on the lost opportunity is not always the best way to convert skeptics into believers.  It is worthwhile to think beyond the lost opportunity and consider the fact that you may lose your brand entirely.  That’s a whole lot more than an opportunity squandered (talk about scare tactic).

Here is the choice facing marketers: shape or be shaped by the conversation.  Social media enthusiasts would interject here with the tired cliché, “you can longer control your brand, the people control your brand!”  For the most part, I agree, but if there’s zero semblance of control, why are we spinning our wheels talking about strategy setting, issues management and authentic engagement?  A social media strategy is not close your eyes, plug your ears and see what happens.

By engaging, you are shaping the conversation and shaping the brand.  The very ACT of engagement is a brand attribute.  Social media engagement is not about control in terms of precise messages, but you are able to gain some control over your public image.  For a pharmaceutical company, social media allows the brand to commit to hearing feedback, to show its dedication to health, to demonstrate its ability to respond to patient issues and to show a human-side of a company in an industry that deals with deeply personal issues.  Sounds like worthwhile brand attributes huh?

If you choose to ignore reality, you will not only lose a patient, your brand image will be tarnished and perhaps irreparably damaged.   What will you do, shape or be shaped?

Economists have long used a combination of lagging and leading indicators to come up with an accurate picture of the economy.  As the name implies, a lagging indicator provides a quantitative measure over a period of time.  It is a great tool for looking back at a period of time and measuring an outcome.  A leading indicator is more of short-term measure of success that offers some predictive insight into future outcomes.

For example, in the world of economy, things like the average prime rate charged by banks and the length of unemployment are lagging indicators.  They are a clear sign on whether or not the economy is expanding or contracting.  For leading indicators, economists turn to metrics like stock market performance and building permits to get an early look at what might be on the horizon.

Combining leading and lagging indicators is not a perfect measurement equation, but it does provide a fairly complete picture.

However, when it comes to business, and particularly social media, most measurement equations tend to look only at lagging indicators.  Of course, the most obvious offender is the dreaded ROI.  ROI is the definition of a lagging indicator.  It measures the amount your investment returned over a specific period of time.  It measures campaigns.

ROI is a great measurement, and one that shouldn’t be discarded—but it also shouldn’t be the sole measure of performance.  If ROI is the only measure you are using to judge the performance of your social media efforts, how do you know mid-stream that something isn’t working?  How do you adjust your strategies and tactics when it becomes evident that something isn’t working?  The answer is simple—you can’t.  Measuring only ROI gives a good indication on success or failure.  But it doesn’t allow you to change course before a problem derails your entire social media effort.

Moving forward, you should look to augment ROI with leading indicators to provide a complete picture of your social media efforts.  Notice that I said ‘augment ‘in the previous sentence and not replace.   You may find some social media wingnuts out there suggesting you rid yourselves of ROI all together.  I am not that naïve.  However, I do realize that ROI is an imperfect measure and requires additional insight to provide the most complete picture possible.

What leading indicators are you using to measure social media success?

It’s no secret that I believe a strong pharmaceutical social media program centers on the patient.  Whether it is clinical operations, selling to physicians or dealing with insurance providers, a pharmaceutical company should be focused on better serving the needs of the patient.  This doesn’t imply physicians or other core audiences lack a place in social media (more on this in the coming days)—it simply means that the best pharmaceutical marketing efforts keep the core tenant of patient health front and center.

I’ve put forward the idea of Return on Health and highlighted the need to empower the empowered patient.  But this might fall on deaf ears without practical advice.  How can you ensure that the patient is at the center of your social media efforts?  What does this look like in practice as opposed to theory?

As a starting point, begin by asking how you made the determination that social media is a route worth considering.  If your motivation is that you are getting your lunch handed to you by a competitor, you are probably heading down the wrong path.  On the flip side, if you feel that treatment options for a specific disease state are being under or misrepresented by a competitor you are in a better position to engage in social media.  The point is this: the question you must consider is “how will this help better serve the needs of the patient?”

Now that you have committed to starting with the patient, how about involving the patient in the planning process?  Many companies talk about the need for patient engagement yet few involve them in the social media planning process.  A “patient advisory panel” can help direct the tactics of a social media engagement for pharmaceutical companies.  Rather than making educated guesses on what they want—make informed decisions.

With a better gauge of what patients actually want, you can start to direct your efforts to the appropriate platform.  Perhaps through patient communication and your own research you uncover the fact there is a glaring lack of information around a particular disease state.  This would indicate that the pharmaceutical company may need to create the hub for interaction.  However, you may also uncover that there are vibrant and active communities already existing that are only in need of a little direction or additional information.  If your focus is on the patient, it will be clear where the area of need is—as opposed to the area to exploit (which often guides marketing strategy).

These are just a few simple examples of what it looks like to put patients first in a social media engagement.  Of course, this only scratches the surface but serves to illustrate the need for patient involvement starts from the very outset of a social media program.

Click Here to download a pharmaceutical social media eBook

The list of reasons why you can’t or shouldn’t engage in pharmaceutical social media is long.  Regulatory concerns. Fair balance.  Adverse event reporting.  The FDA.  Off-label usage.  HIPAA.  Lack of adequate resources.   All of these are legitimate issues when considering a social media program.

The list of reasons why you should use social media is not only longer, but also more compelling.  Humanizing the brand.  Creating brand advocates.  Enabling better patient outcomes.  Increasing Return on Health (ROH).  Establishing a relationship with the patient.  Better insights into the patient community. Greater access to information for the patients.  A quick response platform during crisis communications.

There’s no doubt, social media in the pharmaceutical industry is a difficult and complex task.  It takes careful planning, spot-on strategic guidance and flawless execution.  Sounds simple right?

To help navigate the murky waters of pharmaceutical social media, SHIFT Communications (my agency) today released an eBook aimed at offering practical advice on social media programs in the healthcare space.  The book outlines many of the issues that are unique to social media in the pharmaceutical space and offers tips on how to best mitigate those challenges.

To download the book, all we ask is that you do one of the following:

• Head on over to our site, leave us your email, and the eBook will be automatically sent.
• Follow @shiftcomm on Twitter and tweet something along the lines of, “Looking forward to reading @shiftcomm’s Pharma Social Media eBook, via @prforpharma” and we’ll get in touch with the link
• Join SHIFT’s Facebook Page and send us a message there

When you stack up the reasons for not being engaged on social media with the benefits of creating sustained engagement the question becomes: what’s the price of being absent altogether? When done effectively, social media has the ability to create a relationship with the patient that was never before possible with traditional marketing platforms.

With this eBook, we hope to provide a healthy dose of both strategic and tactical advice to help move social media programs in the right direction.  And of course, as always, I would love to hear any and all feedback you may have.

One of the initial steps of formulating a pharmaceutical social media strategy is considering what resources will be required and forming an internal social media team.  My original thinking on this topic (which you can find by following the above link) is that an internal social media team should originally start in a “command and control” model and evolve to the more sophisticated hub and spoke model.

When you arrive at the hub and spoke, the ideal scenario is to have all departments involved that have customer touchpoints.  That means the patient call center, the sales reps, the marketing team, etc…In social media, it’s important to operate under the assumption that any employee with access to the company ultimately serves as an ambassador to your brand.  I think this still holds true.  However, there is an important piece missing from the social media team—the patient.

This isn’t a concept that should be foreign to a pharmaceutical company.  They routinely work with patient advocates, form support groups and interact with the patient during the clinical trial period.  Even in other parts of the business, pharmaceutical companies are accustomed to representing interests other than their own.  For example, in alliance management, it is important that a member of the organization is continually looking out for the interest of the alliance partner.  That person always has a seat at the table.

Following the same logic, shouldn’t the patient always have a seat at the social media table?

If we buy into the concept that a healthcare company involved in social media should do so with the objective of improving health outcomes and informing better health decisions, than a patient should be involved in the planning process.  Sure, we can get some of this information ourselves by conducting our due diligence, listening to social media chatter and evaluating the current needs of patients.  But there is no substitute for actually speaking with the patient.

Are there some legal barriers to this approach?  Of course.  But it’s nothing a legal team couldn’t figure out.  The FDA is concerned with how pharmaceutical companies push messages to patients, what better way to improve that process than by bringing them into the fold.

Consider it a focus group for social media.

Marketing professionals are big on positioning statements.  We love talking about value propositions and key differentiators.  Give us a pen and paper and we can churn out SWOT analyses all day long.  But when it comes to pharmaceutical social media, discipline is all too often abandoned in favor of a shoot-from-the-hip attitude.

Just like any form of communications, social media requires discipline, patience and strategy.  Despite its seemingly spontaneous nature, there should be a clear strategy and stated objective.  Rather than approaching social media efforts as an opportunity to “increase brand awareness by reaching more consumers,” let’s start at an even more basic level.  In pharmaceutical social media: what is your mission statement?

It might seem like a return to that Marketing Communications 101 class you took back in college, but I can assure you that your pharmaceutical social media efforts will benefit from a “mission statement.”  I have long stated that a healthcare company’s involvement in social media should focus on the patient. The rules of communication on social media platforms render the old rules of marketing irrelevant.  It’s not about pushing a message to the masses but about connecting with a key set of individuals.  This is a radical shift in thinking that requires pharmaceutical companies to start from square one and consider what they learned in that Marketing 101 class.

Businesses write mission statements, why shouldn’t your internal social media team?  When penning your mission statement for social media dispense of marketing lingo.  Don’t use this as an opportunity to put benchmarks for success and outline metrics.  That’s not the purpose of a mission statement.

The mission statement should serve as an opportunity to answer the elusive question: “why am I here?”  In some industries this is a less critical question, but when you are dealing with health, it’s an imperative question to answer.  In writing your social media mission statement, consider how you became involved in the project, what the motivating factors were and how that will determine the strategy you outline.  The mission statement that you come up with should serve as a guide book.  It can be a document that is circulated at a  minimum to the individuals that are part of the company-sanctioned social media efforts and at a maximum company-wide as part of establishing social media guidelines.  The goal of honing in on a social media mission statement is to determine the key values your company will uphold and your reason for participating.   Thinking about it in this way will help to ensure you stay on track and always engage transparently and ethically.  Consider this your code of conduct.

So why are you here?  What is your mission statement for pharmaceutical social media?

The talk about pharmaceutical social media has virtually drowned out any other discussion in the world of pharma marketing.  A look at my past 10 blog posts reveals that I am one of primary culprits.  Much of this buzz is warranted; social media has the potential to dramatically change communications across all industries—including the pharmaceutical business.  But in the rush to come up with our next grand idea, we often overlook the basics.

Here are five basic marketing tactics that should not be abandoned just because a social media strategy is in place.

1.) Focus on the Customer: In almost every marketing strategy the objective is to reach the customer.  There are some cases where you seek to influence partners or lobby lawmakers, but even then it is with an eye toward the customer.  Social media is no different.  Don’t lose sight of the customer simply because the medium has changed.  In the case of pharmaceutical companies, always focus on the Return on Health of the patient.

2.) Optimization Still Matters: Whether you want to call it Search Engine Optimization or Social Media Optimization—it’s still important.  Here’s a simple example to illustrate the point.  Suppose you are working with a pharmaceutical company to promote awareness of the early warning signs of Melanoma.  You might decide that as part of this program you would like to establish a Facebook presence to help spread the word.  Facebook has established “community pages” around certain topic areas such as Melanoma.  These are essentially wikis that combine information with related global posts from Facebook users.  These global posts are compiled using—you guessed it—keyword recognition.  If you are not using the word melanoma on a frequent basis in your wall posts you won’t appear on the community page.  The same holds true on all social media platforms, don’t forget to incorporate optimization techniques to increase findability.

3.) Content is King: This phrase has been beat to death to the point that it has quickly become a cliché.  Even still, it bears repeating.  Creating content on a regular basis is a grueling and sometimes thankless task.  It is both one of the most important aspects of marketing (note: not just social media) success.  In much of my agency, SHIFT Communications’ traditional PR efforts, the focus is on creating a consistent flow of content in the form of a compelling story line, press releases and speaking abstracts.  Social media is no different.  Content creation is too often where social media goes to die.

4.) Integrate Across Marketing Disciplines: There is not a single marketing function that should take place in isolation.  It limits its effectiveness and potential.  PR people should be talking to the ad folks, the engineers and the sales team.  How can you hope to communicate a unified brand image if your marketing department is isolated from your company?  This dynamic becomes magnified in social media.  Because social media often bears the brunt of business failures—related to social media or not—it is even more critical to be tuned in to the overarching strategy of the business.  I’m fond of saying: “social media does not sweep problems under the rug; it rips the rug clean off the floor.”  You better be prepared.

5.) Evaluate Effectiveness: No other marketing function has escaped measurement more adeptly than social media.  But failing to measure social media is failing altogether.  We can debate the merits of measurements like ROI, Facebook likes, Twitter followers, engagement scores, etc…That’s another post for another day.  The point is you can’t hope to improve your efforts and better reach the patient if you are not constantly evaluating your success.

The list above is by no means all encompassing.  But it’s a starting point of many of the basics that tend to be overlooked when companies engage in social media.  Basics are the building blocks of success.  If you can’t master the basics, you can’t master social media.        

When marketers espouse virtues of brand loyalty, you rarely hear its application to pharmaceutical brands.  Why?  Buying a medication isn’t like browsing for diapers at your local grocery store.  Most people hope they don’t need to display loyalty to a pharmaceutical company.  Loyalty is often generated around a purchase of desire, not when a prescription is a necessity.

In addition, pharmaceutical companies have a harder time developing patient loyalty because the purchasing process is vastly different.  Sticking with the above example, when you make the decision to purchase diapers, you go to the store, browse the aisle, perhaps assess the prices and packaging and then decide to purchase.  With the exception of OTC medications, this process is quite different for a patient.  Patients are told they need a prescription.  There is no real decision-making process.  This dynamic is certainly changing as patients are playing a larger role in health decisions, but the prescription still starts in the doctor’s office.

Of course, there are additional elements that make earning patient loyalty an albatross.  For example, long standing distrust of the pharmaceutical industry and high drug prices do not help create patient loyalty.  Throw all of these dynamics into the same pot and it’s a bit like oil and water—they don’t mix.  Given this seemingly impossible set of circumstances, pharmaceutical marketers are left to ask themselves whether or not pursuing patient loyalty is a worthwhile endeavor.

The simple answer is it’s not only a worthwhile pursuit, it’s a realistic goal.  Last week I wrote about an article from the Boston Globe that highlights the loyalty patients feel toward Genzyme.  The company has cultivated this loyalty by developing a relationship with patients.  What a novel concept—developing a relationship with your end customer!

Unlike some social media wingnuts, I’m not here to suggest that social media is the  sole answer to creating patient loyalty.  What I am suggesting is that if pharmaceutical companies focus on the patients it will inevitably enhance loyalty.  Train your call center employees to display compassion.  Assign case managers for serious illnesses that develop a relationship with the patient.  Provide educational resources that help patients make informed decisions.  Spend time with doctors to educate them on new treatment options.  Help patients figure out insurance issues associated with your treatments.

And yes, social media can play a role in a pharmaceutical company’s ability to cultivate patient loyalty.  The company that engages with a patient, provides helpful resources online and improves access to information will develop a more loyal base of patients.  If there is a central tenant of social media it would be relationships.  Isn’t that what loyalty is all about?

Raise your right hand and repeat after me:

I (Insert name here of pharmaceutical marketing executive) do solemnly swear to focus on the patient first in all my social media efforts.

I will ignore the desire to chase shiny objects, will not refer to Facebook as a strategy and will focus on setting a clear social media strategy before putting a finger to a keyboard.

All key stakeholders across the company regardless of department will be involved from the onset of a social media engagement (yes this means legal, regulatory and IT).

I promise to spend time listening to the social media communities I intend to engage with before I make assumptions on what they want.  I will commit to always representing myself and my company in an ethical, authentic and honest manner.

When offering content or having discussions on social media platforms, I will not resort to promotional messages and will instead aim to offer educational and helpful resources.  I will not merely use social media as a megaphone to shout messages to the masses.  Rather, I will seek to engage in a dialogue on a one-to-one basis whenever possible.

I will expect a crisis to occur and when it does, I will avoid knee-jerk reactions such as shutting down all social media channels.  There will be a crisis communications plan in place even when regulations limit what I can say.  I will let patients know that they have been heard and offer alternative ways to get information.

When I receive criticism via social media they will not be discarded as some rogue, disgruntled individual.  They will be considered carefully and remediation will be taken when warranted.

I will insist on social media measurement but not blindly demand ROI without a true understanding of what ROI is—a lagging indicator.  When I measure social media, it will be with a more sophisticated set of metrics tied directly back to my original strategy (see sentence two).

Above all else, I will make helping the patient my central goal  and will walk away entirely if that ever changes.