Social Media and Healthcare
Social media is a phenomenon that can no longer be ignored by today’s competitive companies. Last year, 73% of advertising and media executives surveyed said up to 20% of their marketing budgets are allocated to using and experimenting with new media platforms such as blogs. In 2008 pharmaceutical marketing professionals are looking for creative ways to tap into online media to gain a competitive edge in the marketplace. One of the most effective ways of engaging physicians and consumers is through Web 2.0 social networking tools. In this month’s issue, Catalyst Search Marketing Project Manager Dan Ouellette discusses these tools.
Q: What is “social media?”
Dan: Social media, also called social networking, involves all of the shared aspects of being online, including blogs, forums, message boards, newsgroups, news feeds, bookmarking sites and sites like Facebook, MySpace and YouTube.
Q: Why is Social Media important?
Dan: Consumers – including physicians — are spending more and more time online and less and less time reading, listening to the radio, or watching TV. Media spending by all advertisers – not just pharma – needs to shift to new channels that consumers are using.
Social tools can improve multiple types of relationships for pharmaceutical companies. Patient-based social networks can help companies understand and react to patients; opinion leader blogs and forums can allow interactions with healthcare providers; and internal blogs can help leverage in-house knowledge to improve best practices.
For example, one of our clients is using a non-branded site with many social networking tools to engage consumers and help patients manage their high blood pressure. Companies can also brand a forum with advertising or become a member to raise awareness or share success stories.
Q: What are the benefits of social media?
Dan: Social media engages consumers on their terms and adds a new dimension to pharmaceutical advertising: engagement. Reach and frequency are the traditional factors used to measure marketing effectiveness and ROI. Social media can build brand awareness and strengthen connections with patients, physicians and healthcare providers. These tools can be used to create vertical communities around specific conditions. Linking to or from a blog can sometimes improve search rankings and increase web traffic. A blog that is updated frequently, with high quality content, will also boost site authority and rankings.
Q: What are the unique challenges for the healthcare industry?
Dan: Regulation and a need to control what is said about a product are two specific concerns. Because companies are restricted by law from saying certain things on a branded site, many social media tools are best used on non-branded sites which allow greater flexibility. Because of the nature of social media, you can’t control what others say about your company online – the social aspect takes over.
Conservative companies are afraid of not being able to control their message and what others may have to say, so they turn “comments” off on their blogs, believing this is a better approach to test social networking.
Unfortunately, the backlash that can occur when ‘comments’ are turned off can be fierce. Turning off comments goes against the spirit of social networking and free flow communication between parties. Folks will take this conversation to other outlets and may lash out at the company’s attempt to control the conversation.
The best approach is to stay within vertical forums targeted to a specific condition rather than enormous search engine forums, like Yahoo! Health and Google Health, that attract a more general audience. You will get better visibility and engage with more informed consumers by becoming part of a forum as a member or paid advertiser.
Q: What is a good way to start?
Dan: An easy way to learn about the world of social media is to do some research online. Track down the blogs, forums and message boards that are relevant to you. Read what the market is saying about your company, its products, people, competitors and industry issues. This way you’ll become familiar with how social media works and who the influencers are.
Consider using search engines to search for blogs and forums within your vertical. To find relevant sites you can use one of the blog search engines such as Technorati (www.technorati.com) or Google Blog Search (blogs.google.com). You can also monitor Usenet newsgroups with Google Groups (groups.google.com) and message boards with BoardReader (www.boardreader.com). Once you’ve done your research and familiarized yourself with social media, implementing an educated plan becomes that much easier.
About Dan Ouellette
Dan Ouellette is a Catalyst Search Marketing Project Manager dedicated to Novartis, Iron Mountain, and Pfizer. He has eight years of experience in web technologies, four of which has been devoted to Search Engine Optimization. Before joining Catalyst he worked as an Algorithm Search Analyst and Project Manager handling search campaigns for Fortune 1000 companies. He also ran his own web design and development firm.
One Comment
Web/Health 2.0 has huge implications for healthcare organizations in the areas of new patients, employees and business in general…patients asking for the doctors they see in videos, read about in blogs, etc., to say nothing of the disease-specific online support groups. As publishers for healthcare executives, the Healthcare Intelligence Network has just waded into the Web 2.0 space ourselves. After talking to Mayo Clinic, UAB Health System and others about the great feedback from social networking sites, we decided to test the waters ourselves and made our own video on the subject. No DreamWorks here, but a kind of Web 2.0 in healthcare primer that we produced in-house…you can see it at http://blog.hin.com/?p=251. We are interested in feedback.