Social media listening is an important step on the path to online engagement. This is a process that is crucial for all brands but even more pivotal for pharmaceutical companies. Most listening exercises are set up with an eye toward devising a social media engagement strategy. Naturally, the information gleaned from social media listening will identify any exiting content gaps a brand might be able to fill.
Embarking on an online listening project solely as a means to create a full-scale engagement strategy is an adequate approach. But as I’ve touched on time and time again here, when we put social media in a vacuum we run the risk of becoming irrelevant. So where else can the intelligence of social listening support brand marketing efforts? Extending that even further, where can social listening break outside of the marketing department and provide value across the brand?
It doesn’t take a huge leap of faith to see obvious opportunities for social media listening to help inform marketing efforts beyond just creating an engagement strategy. Despite this, social media listening as a mechanism to augment market research is overlooked. When you are dealing with large pharmaceutical brands there is likely a dedicated market research team. If you are not careful, social media listening can feel like a competitive threat to their function and role inside the brand. Of course, it’s not a threat and as social media marketers we should work hand-in-hand to determine what market research needs from us and how we can augment their process—not supplant it. Through your online listening, you might find that people talk about the symptoms associated with a brand differently than you imagined. The conversation online might in fact be more colloquial than clinical. This type of simple intelligence can have big implications for your brand marketing strategy.
This is just one simple, easy example of extending social media listening beyond serving as a bridge to engagement. Social media is a strategic function of an organization’s engagement strategy. However, marketers too often think about social media in a silo. Market research is an easy connection point to demonstrate and extend the value of social media beyond just engagement.
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?
each person? Because each and every time you interact with these online properties, you are getting something different. Not only are you getting something different, you are getting exactly what YOU want. If you perform a search on Google, it spits back information designed for YOUR consumption, if you sign up for Twitter, YOU choose who to follow and what you are interested in seeing. Consumers now demand an individual experience.
I recently participated in a brainstorm where a story was relayed about an executive that was desperate to come up with a mobile app. The exec set a goal for the marketing team: “launch a mobile app by the end of this quarter.” The executive didn’t specify what purpose the app should serve, or the underlying business purpose that drove the need for an app—just that one should be available quickly.
For example, Maslow’s “Theory of Human Motivation” may be even more relevant now than Maslow could have ever imagined. When has it ever been more important than now to understand human motivation? Psychological needs, safety, love and belonging, esteem and self actualization are all innate functions of any relationship. Maslow was even more of a visionary than anyone realized.
Yesterday I was fortunate enough to attend the 
