Active Social Media Listening - Pharma Marketing Network

Dec 2013 Vol. 12, No. 9

• Pharma Marketing Network® www.pharmamarketingnews.com

Active Social Media Listening UCB’s Approach for Achieving Better Patient Experiences Author: John Mack

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Pharma Marketing Network PO Box 760 Newtown, PA 18940 [email protected]

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Pharma Marketing News

Vol. 12, No. 9: December, 2013

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ocial media listening is a hot topic these days. But according to Alexandra Fulford, a ZS Business Consultant based in Zurich, Switzerland, “many people still do not fully understand the value it can bring.”

In a post to The Active Ingredient blog (“The Value of Social Media Listening”; http://bit.ly/pgdaily110713-2), Fulford advised pharma brand teams that “by only concentrating on the brand, a huge portion of the discussion, and potential value, is missed.” There is often more value in listening and Fulford recommended doing research to identify the following elements: 1. Who is involved in the conversation (e.g. around a disease area) • • • •

Who is taking part in the conversation Who is influencing the conversation Who is listening in Who amongst your competitors is taking part in the conversation

There is no doubt that collecting the sort of data Fulford recommends will help pharma companies "develop more impactful messaging and marketing tactics," as she points out. It will also help them "engage with stakeholders" and "improve Search Engine Optimisation," which are all benefits accruable to the listener, not the listenee; i.e., patient. Fulford closed with this statement: "But as with all things relating to social media, the focus needs to be not on the brand but the customer. It is this focus on the customer that will deliver the real value—both to pharma companies and their customers." UCB’s Approach But what exactly is the "real value" for the "customer"; i.e., the patient? This was a question explored in a Pharma Marketing Talk podcast interview of Trish Nettleship, Director, Social Media & Influence, UCB, Inc., about her company's approach to social media listening.

2. Where are conversations happening • •

Which platforms are stakeholders using (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, etc.) On which community or group pages are key conversations happening

3. When are conversations happening •

When are peak times during the day, week, year

4. What are people talking about • • • •

What are the keywords and key # What are leading topics of discussion What are trending topics What has changed over time

5. Why are conversations happening • • •

What events are driving conversations What issues and topics generate high engagement What sentiments are driving the conversation

6. How are people engaging • •

How do they find where conversations are happening How are they accessing the conversations (mobile, desktop, tablet)

The Value Proposition Most, if not all, of the value emphasized by Fulford was the value for the pharmaceutical company (listener), not for patients.

Trish Nettleship

According to Nettleship, "active social media listening" helps her company understand patient needs and issues—including adverse events—and how this results in better communications and patient experiences."

In 2010, UCB partnered with PatientsLikeMe to create an online, open epilepsy community that captured realworld experiences of people living with epilepsy in the U.S. Part of this partnership included a pharmacovigilance program to monitor the site for adverse events and report directly to the FDA adverse events associated with UCB products (see http://bit.ly/RwXyi). Continues… “One of the most frustrating things I’ve dealt with since I’ve been in this industry is how we use regulation as an excuse to not participating in social media. I’m not diminishing the fact that it’s more challenging in social media but we know the rules. We have to really quit using regulations as an excuse for not participating. Our patients are there, our healthcare providers are there, our customers are there. We have to be there. We can’t ignore that channel any longer.” -- Trish Nettleship

© 2013 Pharma Marketing Network (www.pharma-mkting.com). All rights reserved. Pharma Marketing News

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The following is an edited transcript of the Nettleship interview. You can listen to the entire audio podcast of the discussion here: http://bit.ly/17TU0QE John Mack: Can you define what you mean by “Active Social Media Listening”? Trish Nettleship: Broadly and simply, social media listening is just scanning social media properties and listening for conversations and topics that you are interested in. For me there are two variations: passive and active listening. The majority of folks in our industry listen passively, which is great. Through passive listening we can get a better understanding about what is happening with our customers, whether it would be patients or healthcare providers. But then there is the active side of social media or online listening, which is anywhere that someone can have a conversation online. So it could be within a forum, a social media platform or even a Wall Street Journal article. Folks can be having conversations there as well.

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help from a backend perspective. In paticular, we needed help monitoring adverse events. We did not have the expertise to really go into the social space alone and do this. We got some really great understandings of our patients, what they care about, what their concerns were, and how we might better meet their needs. So the listening part was very, very beneficial to us as a company. With regard to adverse events, the good news is we did not see the worst, although we saw more than we expected. The percentage I heard on the latest reports was somewhere around 5% of all product mentions were adverse events. A lot of those were not reportable adverse events but nevertheless we had to vet them through our pharmacovigilance organization. We probably over staffed getting prepared for that. Ready for the worst while hoping for the best was the model.

Active listening is really taking that information about online conversations, doing something with it and potentially actively engaging those customers in conversations in our area of expertise. Dealing with Adverse Events Mack: Speaking about “doing something” with the information, I am reminded about the UCB sponsorship of an epilepsy forum on PatientsLikeMe. I often cite this as an example how pharmaceutical companies can actually participate or engage or listen in on social media conversations in patient forums without being scared away because of adverse event being mentioned. I know this was a bit before your time at UCB, but can you can give us a little bit more background on that active listening campaign? Nettleship: It has been a couple of years now since we have been actively participating with PatientsLikeMe in the epilepsy space. PatientsLikeMe is a patient community where folks with conditions, diseases, get together, support each other, discuss various topics in their disease area. So it’s great platform for patients to engage with each other, help and support each other. The industry is fearful of what the potential consequences would be in getting really involved in social media. We saw that in 2011, when Facebook changed the rules and everybody kind of jumped ship. So we saw the opportunities but were not really sure on how to move forward. We were in the same boat as everybody else—definitely fearful on what we might get into. Since UCB is very much a leader in the epilepsy space, we saw PatientsLikeMe as an opportunity to engage patients with a partner to help us manage that and to

Figure 1. The Elephant in the Social Media Room. Deal with it!

Become a Social Organization Mack: That was two years ago. Can you tell us what you are doing these days? Nettleship: We are staying really busy these days. The good news is UCB as a company has embraced social media as a new way to reach our audiences, from healthcare providers to patients. Social media is something that needs to be centralized long term. It becomes a part of how we do business whether it be from a customer care perspective, messaging to our patients, disease awareness, etc. Social media will be pat of every aspect of the business at some point. We will become a social organization.


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My job is to build best practices across the organization. The online listening space was one of the first things I wanted to really focus on because I saw that as the biggest opportunity in the beginning. We started with a global approach to passive listening to get an understanding of what our patients care about, what’s important to them, what are their unmet needs, and how we can potentially help them. When you talk about all brand mentions for our company, as many as 5% to 7% of all mentions can be adverse event related. Having a strong partnership with my pharmacovigilance team helps prepare for that. But we embrace these conversations, because we want to know what is happening with our patients. Mack: So basically you’re saying that the benefits outweigh the risks of listening and actively engaging with patients online. Why don’t you talk a little bit more about what you see as the benefits? I mean there are benefits that probably accrue to you the company, and at the same time you are talking about benefits to patients. Can you talk a little bit about that? Nettleship: It’s enormous what we’re able to understand our patients and what’s happening in real time. We’re seeing trends as they are happening, which we did not have access to before. Our agencies did a really good job in giving us information, but it was every quarter or every six months. Now that we are actively participating, we see things in real time. Current UCB Patient Communities We have a couple of very engaged patient communities on Facebook that we sponsor, facilitate, or run. Parkinson’s is one of them. It’s called More Than Motion and the idea is really to drive the conversation outside of just the motor symptoms because there is much more to Parkinson’s than that. Many Parkinson’s Disease patients are homebound and use online communities to achieve much-needed connections with the outside world. Having that feeling of being connected with what is happening outside their four walls is pretty significant for them. We were able to bring real world events to them within their community and it drove enormous conversation and engagement with that community. This is one example where we were able to uncover something of value to patients by our active listening. We also have an epilepsy advocacy patient community and the Crohn’s and Me community. In the epilepsy and the Parkinson’s community, we have about 45,000 engaged members—so it’s a pretty active community. Each one is a little different.

We have a pretty robust group of patients across all of our communities. If we ask them a question, they’re going to let us know what is important to them and how we might be able to help them. Each of our communities has a community manager who participates in the online listening and has a sense of what’s important in the community. The community manager posts content that means something to the members. It’s a win-win for us and the patients. We are delivering content and conversation that’s important to them based on what their needs are. But also from a company perspective, we’re better understanding what the patient needs are so we can deliver better products and services to meet their needs. Obviously at the end of the day if I can’t take what’s important to the patient and match that back to a business objective then I am not going to be successful. We can do all the disease state things we want and that is a priority for us, but we have to be able match that to the business objective so we can keep the lights on. Social Listening v. Focus Groups Mack: So active listening is probably better than the old method of having patient focus groups occasionally come in to the company and asking them their opinions. Is that true? Nettleship: It’s funny you say that because my market research counterpart was worried when I first started my work. But no, I don’t think one is better than the other. We need all different ways to get feedback from our patients. So online is a great way to get instant feedback but it is not near as detailed as you can get from a one-on-one or even a broader focus group in person. It’s different. It’s a great supplemental method. That being said, we can drive down some of our research cost by doing some quick polls of the community on what’s important and understanding their needs. That is, we don’t have to do full-blown primary research to understand some issues that we can get via social media whether it be just listening or asking directly. Mack: Can you describe a little bit about the technology versus the boots on the ground needed to really manage these types of communities that you are running. Nettleship: Absolutely. Technology is key. I mean we can’t staff the number of people required to look at every single mention of our brand or in all our disease


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markets. I’m not sure any company can do that much. You have to have technology to enhance what you bring from a people perspective. We use technology in a couple of different ways. We use a technology platform to monitor online conversations based on key words. So if our brand is mentioned we get that information. Depending on how many mentions you have of your brand, you may have to have some further technology tools on top of that to help you filter that down. Limits of Technology Technology can get to you where your brand is mentioned and discover potential side effect language. At that point, however, human beings must intervene. So we can’t assume technology is going to be able to filter it all and just feed it into an automated system. If you do that, you will see some pretty significant fails and we’ve seen it before with automated engagement online. I won’t name any names but there are some folks out there who automate their engagement. That’s not a positive interaction. So we have to be careful to avoid that. In the end, you have to have people to look at the filtered information and determine if there is an engagement opportunity, or an adverse event that needs to be reported, or a product complaint, or something that we can help with. If we can’t help, we typically stay out of the conversation. We’re not going to force our way in and promote our brand. We just listen and take note of what we’re learning. Mack: Can you tell us a little bit about your policies regarding how you respond to direct inquiries from the people in your communities? Policies that promise response times and that define what kinds of conversations you allow, don’t allow, etc. Can you talk a little bit about that? Nettleship: My first day at UCB I was in a meeting and we were discussing responding to inquiries within our patient communities on Facebook and I was floored that we didn’t respond immediately. We had to go through review committees for every single response that we made. So changing that and hiring community managers were my top priorities. The expectation today is if you don’t respond to me the same day, then I’m assuming you’re blowing me off as a customer, or a potential customer. So we really had to change that model pretty quickly but I learned also just as quickly how difficult it is to change that model within pharma. It took me about six months working with our legal, medical and regulatory people to figure out how we could start to respond in real time, by which I mean the same day.

The minute one of our community managers sees an inquiry, he either already has a response that he can send or from experience knows what he needs to say or he gets the approved response the same day. Sometimes we still have to go through medical or legal, but we get expedited reviews. It’s been nice to see that evolution from responding in two weeks to responding the same day and sometimes you know within minutes based on our community manager’s activity. A benefit of that is our organic reach in our communities has grown significantly as folks are talking more often with us. Having more conversations with our community and driving up engagement is a benefit for the community as well as it is for us. Mack: With regard to listening, are you just listening for brand mentions or do you also listen for any other relevant types of discussions and seeing how that may help you help patients? Branded v. Disease Conversations Nettleship: I will tell you the biggest learnings we get are not in the branded conversations. It’s great to know how people feel about our brands but where I learn the most is really on the disease side. Many of the conversations in our patient communities don’t mention brands. Less than 35% of all conversations in the epilepsy space, for example, actually mention any brand at all. So if we only looked at the branded conversations we would be missing the bulk of the conversation. So we really look at the whole disease state and what’s important to patients beyond the brand. Quality of life discussions are becoming more and more of a huge chunk of the conversations in the severe disease space. For Crohn’s we serve up recipes and we talk about food quite a bit with that community because that’s something that’s very important to patients and has an impact on their disease. Budgetary Impact and ROI Mack: How do brand managers at UCB like what you’re doing or not doing in social media? Nettleship: I’ll be real honest, when the budget is constrained they don’t like what I’m doing near as much as they do when the budget is not as constrained. So when budgets are tight or being cutback, obviously the things that don’t show a direct ROI are always the first thing they’re looking at and saying maybe we don’t need to continue to do this. So we have to prove the value that social delivers back into the organization.


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Obviously, from a regulatory perspective, unbranded is much easier for us to deliver. We can do a lot more in the unbranded space than we can do in the branded space so we typically want to go there first. But how do we do more to solve people’s problems in a branded environment? I’ll give you a really good example. One of our brands is a patch and some of our patients were having issues on how to get the patch to stick. We have a solution that tells them exactly how to fix that problem. We can deliver that solution on YouTube and point folks to that. Mack: I know some pharmaceutical companies through online listening are seeking people who are influential in their online communities. Wego Health, for example, specializes in bringing those kinds of people to pharmaceutical companies. These people have their own blogs and so on and so forth. How does this fit in with what you’re doing online in terms of seeking out the most influential people? After all your title is social media and influence, so can you speak a little bit about that? Online Patient Influencers Nettleship: Social media is all about the opportunity to influence your peers. So we do look at ways to do that. But we have to be careful about how we do that. I would much rather reach the individual patients and help them than focus on one influential person. But again it’s part of what social media is about. So we have to look at who is influential and provide them with resources that they can get to many, many more people who read their blogs or posts.

We don’t have a formal program in place. That was one of the things I did quite exhaustively when I was at AT&T so it’s an area that I’m very well versed in and there’s lots of opportunities there but I want to very thoughtful about how we go about reaching key digital influencers. Mack: We talked about the people you’re working with outside your organization who have the technology you need. Where do you see this going in the future? Nettleship: I think for us outside partners are always going to be important. Again we can never be the experts on everything but we need to understand what’s important for us to own. Relationships with our customers are important for us to own. So one of the first things I did was bring community management inside. I don’t have data analysts on my team so we have folks from partners that help us do that. But we have someone who’s on the dashboard every other day looking at trends and conversations. That person can come to us at any point in time and tell us what’s happening, what everybody is talking about. So that I think the key is really understanding what’s important for the company to own, the core competencies you want to build. We have to figure out what’s important for us to own and what’s the okay for us to outsource. It’s a balancing act.


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