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.

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?

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.

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.        

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.

Congrats!  You’ve decided to embark on a pharmaceutical social media odyssey.  It will be a rewarding endeavor.  You’ve done everything right up until this point: focused on the Return on Health of the patient, set your pharma social media strategy, outlined a crisis communications plan and hired a pharma social media agency.  You are ready to go.

For the first few weeks everything is humming along like a well-oiled machine.  You engage regularly via Twitter, have quickly cultivated a base of patients on Facebook and have managed to churn out several blog posts.  Everything was going swimmingly as enthusiasm ran high.  But slowly, something changed.  The pace of followers decreased, posts don’t seem to come to life as readily and your Twitter engagement gets pushed to the backburner as that budget meeting looms.

What happened?

Your pharma social media strategy met the fate of many that have gone before it—a lack of content creation.  What started out well-intentioned and maybe even well-planned met its match.  Content creation: where pharma social media goes to die.

Social media programs often start out with the best intentions.  But what many people fail to realize is that social media is difficult.  It takes dedication.  It takes time and it takes internal resources.  It’s not as simple as simple as throwing up a couple of random 140 character thoughts every once in a while.

Content creation is a long slog.  Before you make the commitment to social media, survey the content you already have in house.  If you have a vault of videos that have gone untouched, that might be a good place to start.  Do you have an internal newsletter that might transition well to an external blog?  Think about using that as part of your content creation strategy.  And as rudimentary as it sounds, consider creating an editorial calendar to outline predefined topics for blog posts and assign authors.  This will create some accountability at the outset.  Eventually, you won’t need the calendar as a set of people will become engaged and motivated to post on their own.  But that won’t happen overnight and creating some urgency through a set timeline of posts will keep momentum moving forward.

Content creation is in many respects the linchpin of social media engagement.  It is a wonder then that it often spells the demise of many efforts.

A couple of weeks back I had the opportunity to have dinner with a bevy of social media powerhouses including: Marc Monseau of Johnson and Johnson, Laurie Edwards, Jack Barrette from WEGO Health, Shwen Gwee from Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Paul Levy from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, e-Patient Dave deBronkart and Alicia Staley.  As you can see, this was the type of conversation that does not happen frequently enough—a melting pot of patients, pharma people, hospital executives and agency wonks.  The conversation ranged from new babies, to babies on the way, to social media strategy, to the challenges of searching for information on rare diseases.  But what stood out to me the most during the course of the conversation resulted in both satisfaction and frustration.  The Holy Grail for pharma social media remains empowering the patient.

That was a satisfying piece of information in the sense that I’ve long trumpeted the need for social media strategies focused on the Return on Health of the patient.  It’s always nice to affirm that you are not crazy.  It was frustrating because what I heard from the table was it was a need mostly going unmet. What became apparent to me during our dinner was that this is not a problem that can be solved by pharmaceutical companies in isolation.  Just like pharmaceutical social media engagement should not take place in a vacuum, creating a healthcare system where the patient is empowered to play a larger role in the decision-making process requires systems thinking.

Pharmaceutical companies can lead the charge in part because of their unique access to information but also because of their substantial sphere of influence.  Pharmaceutical companies have access to the best information available on treatment options, dealing with side effects and current research.  Like it or not, they also have pull on capital hill, with insurance providers, in the doctor’s office and with the patient.  Pharmaceutical companies must serve as the catalyst to empowering the patient.

But the process can’t stop there.  As agency people, we tend to focus our energies on swaying the folks that write the checks.  In order to truly empower the patient, we need to broaden our field of vision.  How can we expect the empowered patient to achieve a good outcome when doctors are incentivized to see more patients and not spend more time with patients?  What good is an empowered patient if she can’t find information on the latest clinical trials on her rare disease because search algorithms do not lend themselves to uncovering that information?  What’s the use of an empowered patient if doctors are not trained to take input?

I admit I am raising a problem far too complex for me to solve—something that requires brains far smarter than mine.  But I am smart enough to realize that pharmaceutical companies engaging in social media alone will not empower the patient—we need the collaboration of lawmakers, insurance providers, hospitals, doctors and patients.

Even with this complexity, it all centers on the patient.

I’ve long subscribed to the notion that the most important role for pharmaceutical companies in social media was as an information depot.  With access to an abundance of data, research and emerging trends, healthcare companies are in a unique position to broadly distribute medical information.

Of course, this level of content creation takes a commitment to social media that many companies might not yet be willing to make.  Who can blame them?  In addition to appointing some individual to monitor and respond to social media conversations, you now need to create engaging content within the boundaries of FDA regulations.  A significant time sink indeed, but one well worth the investment if done properly.

But in thinking about the topic, it occurred to me that this outlook on the involvement of pharma companies in social media is far too narrow.  Sure, it is easy for a pharmaceutical company to serve as an information broker.  But what about their role as a creator or energizer of patient support groups?  Is it even appropriate for healthcare companies to step into this area?

I realize this is not an entirely new concept.  Some companies have already done a solid job of connecting patients around  disease states.  But by and large, this is an area that pharmaceutical companies tend to steer clear of for a variety of reasons.  For starters, there is often an active and engaging online support group established.  Why disrupt the status quo?  In addition, pharmaceutical marketers have long had trouble defining their customer.  Ultimately, the patient is overlooked in favor of efforts directed at doctors, insurance providers, etc…

That needs to change.  For pharmaceutical companies to have any measure of success in social media it needs to focus on Return on Health and the patient.  This patient-centric view leads me to believe that a large part of pharmaceutical social media efforts in the past will be about creating and energizing patient support groups online.

Right now, healthcare companies are best suited to dispense information. In the future, they would have a better grasp on their patients and be best suited to provide a platform for support.

Forget about extending your brand, getting more prescriptions and enhancing your reputation (all of which will come by the way).  This is about providing a much-needed outlet to an often underserviced community.

Where does the patient fall in your social media thinking?

Few people would disagree that strategy is an integral part of any social media engagement.  Despite what many people might assume, social media is not something marketers should engage in without a clear purpose or goal in mind.  But how to arrive at the strategy is less clear.

Traditional marketing metrics become less quantifiable in social media.  You can’t measure the success of a campaign because campaign thinking fails in social media.  You can’t focus solely on bottom-line impact or your efforts will come across as blatant attempts to promote.  This leaves many marketers in a pickle—without a point to work backwards from; forming a coherent strategy is a difficult task.

But it doesn’t have to be.  Too many marketers walk into social media engagement planning focused on how to get the most eyeballs.  If that were the only measure that guided social media strategy it would quickly become extinct.  There are much more efficient ways to simply hitting eyeballs than using social media.

The better approach is to focus on Return on Health (ROH) and consider the behavior of your patient.  Thinking first about the behavior of your patient will guide you to the right platforms.  For example, if you are dealing with an ailment that generally impacts children, what is the first thing a parent will likely do upon learning their child is inflicted with this ailment?  Most parents search for answers and will head to Google to find them.  The trick is to ask yourself, what type of information are they looking for in this search?  If they are searching for insight on treatment options, severity and past experiences, you can gear your social media efforts to reflect that.  You should also survey what online sources of information already exist.  Have you considered Google Health as a source of information for patients?  Better still, have you tracked down the sources of information that feed into Google Health and ensured its accuracy?  If you are not proactively addressing these questions you are leaving your online presence to chance.  What about a platform such as Yahoo! Answers?  Have you scanned the discussion taking place there to get a sense for the sentiment about either your brand or the common concerns of dealing with a particular ailment?

The bottom is this: social media strategy too often focuses on superficial measures as its guide.  Metrics like unique visitors per month, pages viewed per visitor and bounce rate should not inform our course of action.  These are only surface observations and are weak when used as guiding lights.  Social media strategy should start with the patient.