By Stuart Hehir – as featured in  The Digital Pharma Guide, Spring 2011

Type ‘short definition of social media?’ into Quora – the LinkedIn, Yahoo Answers and Twitter love child and, issues around regulatory frameworks aside, you’ll get a sense of why so many people are still trying to get to grips with it all. The first ‘short answer’ is 165 words long and the remaining definitions go off on every conceivable tangent. The confusion lies in the fact that most are valid in some way. On one level, social media is a business philosophy and a bigger commitment to listen, understand and respond. On another, it’s a series of tools and platforms through which people can simply share information. Either way, it’s all wrapped up in communication and that’s why it interests me.

In an ideal world, all businesses would have social media champions guiding colleagues, bosses and boardrooms towards the shining light of best practice, but the reality is that many companies don’t. In fact, many are still in a state of flux. Recognising the world has changed and they need to move with it, but not having the people, the know-how or the internal buy-in to make it happen. Striking the balance between social programmes that seek to build trust, relationships and reputations – things that naturally take time – and the shorter-term pressure of delivering tangible impact through marketing and communications activity, is not easy. But is there a way to find activity that does both?

Activity that supports the smaller goals of individual teams, and cumulatively builds the reputation for the whole organisation?

We now produce many social media listening reports for clients alongside our traditional media analysis and horizon-scanning. It’s a critical first part of the process which helps people to start to understand the social media landscape, where they fit in and how they might start to form a strategy (and yes, it is possible to do this without causing the Pharmacovigilance department to grind to a halt due to the influx of adverse event reporting, though it does help to agree the process with them before you start). After all, you would never cross the road without looking out for traffic first; and as an individual I am willing to bet that if you fancied getting involved in a community group, whether on or offline, you might hang back for a bit, listening to others until you felt comfortable enough to get involved. And you would certainly never launch a product without first undertaking some decent market research.  In some cases, you will have a firm view of what you want to use social media for and will be looking out for very specific information, but in others you may have a more open approach, and listening posts might just inspire some creative thinking or identify unmet needs that your business could address.

But for those wanting to take a small practical next step – as opposed to a leap – alongside ongoing listening, where to start? Well simply seeing how you might integrate social elements into traditional communications campaigns is not a bad place to start.

To give some food for thought, I thought I would share three examples of where this has worked to good effect for three different health organisations:-

• Public sector

• Health insurer

• Pharmaceutical company (animal health)

Yes, they aren’t related to prescription medicines, and so the ABPI code was not brought into play, but let’s not get too caught up with the limitations. We know that prescription medicines should not be promoted to the general public; and we know that when we talk to healthcare professionals there are rules we need to follow when we are discussing product information. In fact, social media isn’t really the place for any companies to be peddling their brands regardless of the product category. That’s not what communities want. If we keep these principles in mind at all times, there really is little difference to the approach that can be taken – and I aim to prove that in the next few paragraphs.

One of the things that makes social media so powerful is the ability to identify communities of interest – whether that’s a group of people sharing the same health condition or simply people going through the same experience, such as pregnancy. On one very basic level, this means social networks can potentially help us quickly and easily find people willing to share their experiences with others.

We were asked to communicate the different types of maternity choices available to women in England – particularly those women considered hard to reach. Boasting around a million unique visitors per month and over 25,000+ forum posts per day, we knew online parenting networks were the key to making any real headway. We asked members of a high profile network what information they wanted and how they wanted to receive it. As you might expect in a network built on mums talking to other mums, hearing first hand stories and accounts was paramount, which led to us kick-starting a search for the ‘faces of choice’ – mums that had experienced each of the maternity choices and had a story to tell.

Within five days, over 250 women had stepped forward to say they would be willing to share their stories through a mix of video, Q&A and webchats, as well as through the more traditional print media.

By taking this approach, we not only achieved our objective but we did so by involving some of the very people we wanted to reach in the process. There is a huge desire amongst the public to seek out and connect with other people that are living with the same conditions, so it stands to reason that an education campaign built on real stories could be a highly effective route.

In the case of video, and at the risk of upsetting the social media purists out there, you can still be social with pre-approved content – which may help medical and legal teams feel more comfortable about such educational campaigns and would certainly comply with the recent PMCPA informal guidance on digital communications.

In another example – grounded in participation and recruitment – we were able to show that with the right approach, social media allows you to quickly generate interest and mobilise people in a way other channels just simply can’t. In a short timeframe, we set out to create a high impact event on behalf of a health insurer to celebrate the launch of a London health show. We challenged ourselves to find 150 women to volunteer to take part in a mass fitball workout in Trafalgar Square and raise £15,000 for charity in the process. We started by talking to various groups of people within relevant communities and word of the challenge quickly spread. Within eight days, we had in excess of the 150 women signed up and raring to go. The spectacle itself had enough news value to attract the mainstream print and broadcast media, which in turn generated more conversations and interest in the very networks we had recruited through – completing the circle and creating greater impact.

In terms of an application for Pharma campaigns, it might simply be looking at ways of using social networks to drive attendance to corporate events or HCP meetings, but this could even extend into creating additional networks tied to those events themselves. Many conferences, seminars and events do this by creating groups through platforms such as LinkedIn, allowing people to discuss and share information and thoughts either in advance or post event. Often these groups can remain closed to the public and, again, if moderation of content to ensure code compliance is required by sign-off teams then that too can be arranged.

And so we come to the final and probably best example of integration in action. We wanted to talk to pet owners about the importance of worming. Not the most glamorous of subjects and not a subject that normally dominates the online forums and pet networks. We realised that we needed to create a campaign away from the stigma attached to worming to appeal to large numbers of pet owners, but one that still allowed us to turn the conversation back to the more serious message later on, after we had people’s attention. Our thought process was simple enough: worming is good practice amongst good owners and good owners celebrate their pets – often by posting them on the Internet. So we set out to create a place where owners could openly celebrate their pets together and encourage friends, family and the wider pet community to join in. Drontal’s My Pet Superstar – a competition where owners could enter their pets under a range of categories, from the entertaining and inspirational through to the cute and funny was born.

As well as having a community element around the site, the competition uncovered some incredible stories, each of which we shared back into the national mainstream media – from Jack the blind sheepdog, through to Dave the rottweiler – a surrogate dad to many a chick and rabbit. 116 items of coverage on the likes of Daybreak and in the Daily Mail generated online chatter and drove 2,021,536 page views as greater numbers of people were drawn to the site.

The interest spilled onto other sites, with thousands campaigning for pet votes through Facebook and Twitter, resulting in over 250,000 votes. In terms of bringing people back to the core subject of worming, post campaign research showed that two thirds of pet owners would now worm their dog or cat more frequently.

To conclude – yes, we still have barriers to being true facilitators or participants of social media, due to the very sensitive nature of the pharmaceuticals and healthcare business. Lack of control is the issue we will continue to struggle with in order to avoid getting into hot water with the current regulatory framework. But where there is a genuine need for better information and engagement to improve the health of the nation (which does NOT include inappropriate brand promotion – no-one is asking for that), a social media approach has proved that it can play a valuable role, as long as it has relevance to the target audience. Indeed, there are some great examples of initiatives being undertaken by pharma companies as well as the ones I have outlined here. As key players in keeping the world as healthy as possible, I would argue that all pharmaceutical companies have a duty of responsibility to stay the course and find a way to appropriately contribute to the health-related discussions that are happening, where-ever those discussions are happening.

For further infomation contact us on findoutmore@pegasuspr.co.uk or see www.pegasuspr.co.uk