PM360 March 2010

eMARKETING TRENDSETTERS

UP CLOSE With Ronnie McNeill, Senior Business Analyst at Cymfony
BY JON BRULLOTHS

Ronnie McNeill is Senior Business Analyst at Cymfony, a Kantar Media Company, which provides market influence analytics and specializes in social media and traditional media. The Kantar Media Group is a subsidiary of WPP.

As Senior Business Analyst, Ronnie McNeill specializes in Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals, was instrumental in the development of Cymfony’s social media analysis techniques, and has conducted analyses of social and traditional media for many of the world’s leading healthcare companies, including Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Novartis, Biogen Idec, GlaxoSmithKline, Wyeth, and Allergan.

PM360: You’ve said that it’s important for healthcare marketers to know that patients increasingly get health information through their peers and social media; how can marketers best respond to this trend?

Ronnie McNeill: It’s very important for marketers to realize that patients today are going online and talking to each other about all aspects of just about any disease or condition that you could imagine. The first step is to know what patients are saying online.

One of the advantages of social media is that it is different from traditional market research; focus groups and surveys are still important obviously, but there’s a psychological difference between participating in a focus group or answering a survey and participating in discussion online where there really are no rules; there are no preset questions asked. As a marketer, you now have a method of determining the topics that resonate on their own with no external stimulus. At the same time, you learn what patients are hearing and saying about your brand, about the condition, and that can help you in a variety of ways.

What’s the value proposition of social monitoring for pharma, biotech, and medical device brands?

Social media’s total value proposition is a combination of enabling outreach, directing your digital marketing efforts, and informing marketing efforts in non-digital realms—print ads, radio ads, TV ads. The immediate value proposition for marketers is acquiring the answers to core marketing questions that come out of social media discussion and then applying that information. But social media monitoring is much more than a tool for discovering general patient attitudes: there are specific market events where social media monitoring can be quite valuable, including new drug launches (by the client or by the client’s competitors), FDA safety warnings/approval, drugs moving from prescription to OTC, etc. We can tailor our research to give insights on each of these types of events. Other uses include measuring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns (both online and offline) and determining influential bloggers/forum members for outreach efforts.

Our clients find that just having access to patients’ verbatim language is also valuable. Knowledge of the language that patients use in their own discussions enables the marketer to talk to patients in ways that will resonate with them.

What are the best ways of measuring online word of mouth?

It’s very difficult to go onto Google, search for a condition, find something, and then make sense of it in a way that can be quantitatively measured. So our approach is to open the floodgates. We bring in over 20 million social media sources. We then apply sophisticated natural language processing software, which tags all the online posts about a condition, and the treatment options that are there. We can look for messages that might be important to the marketer whether they are messages that are part of marketing outreach, or whether they’re just topics about which the marketer is interested in gathering feedback. The key is using technology to filter through the vast volume of discussion that’s out there.

What’s the biggest surprise you’ve learned in your current position about marketing and social media?

The knowledge level of patients that are participating online in some cases is enormous. We often see informed, educated discussion about research, drugs in the pipeline, mechanism of action of particular treatments, about the biology behind treatments that patients face. Take multiple sclerosis, for example, a very complicated disease that the medical community doesn’t really have its hands around. But there are patients out there who are very in tune with the latest advances. Diabetes is another example. There are patients online who are very informed about it and who will actually challenge some of the treatments that general practitioners would prescribe.

The willingness of these knowledge leaders to educate others is also quite interesting. The dynamic of social media discussion in general is that someone comes online for the first time to talk about a treatment or condition, they’re very often somewhat in the dark, or they’ve just been diagnosed or they’ve just been given a list of treatments that they want to consider. Most of the time that patient will go online and immediately be met by one of these knowledge leaders. I am fascinated with this “teacher-student” dynamic, and it’s an example of the kind of unique discussion to which social media gives marketers access.

What are the most common misconceptions about social monitoring?

Marketers need to understand that social monitoring/media is unscripted. Some clients will have an expectation about the topics of discussion which they think are important—but maybe aren’t very prevalent in social media discussion. If we go online and determine that the topics that marketers believe are important aren’t that important to patients, that’s certainly valuable to a marketer in terms of prioritizing the messaging in their marketing.

What are the legal and regulatory issues affecting social monitoring in the
healthcare field?

Social media challenges traditional notions. It comes down to definition. Is a blogger a professional journalist, or not? If so, there are different rules in terms of engaging a blogger. Another big issue right now is adverse event reporting. Should the pharmaceutical company report something that they may find on a message forum or a blog, especially when the definition of “identification” is different for the offline and online worlds? We can segment out posts where patients are reporting adverse events for those clients who care about it, but because there are no clear guidelines each client will have a different approach.

What are the most common mistakes companies make when they embark on their first social monitoring project; how can they avoid them?

I think what’s important is to come into social media monitoring with an open mind, some knowledge about how social media differs from traditional market research, and hypotheses to prove or disprove. Clients who come to us with clearly defined hypotheses that they want to explore are ultimately the most pleased with the research results. Another important concept to remember is that blogs aren’t always the best place to look for insights. Blogs are more of a one-sided type of discussion where a patient can go out and share their thoughts, but they really don’t foster the back-and-forth conversations which we find to be most valuable to inform market research. That kind of discussion happens on message forums which have been around for far longer than blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc. We often start by educating the client on the differences between media types as well as the differences in the population of people who talk on social medium forums. It’s important for clients to understand the implications of these differences.

What’s your best advice to marketing professionals about designing a social monitoring strategy and its place in the total marketing picture?

The phrase “total marketing picture” is important. This is a completely new avenue, so when you design the social monitoring strategy, you really want to focus on questions that perhaps you’ve had a hard time getting answers to in traditional market research. The conclusions drawn from social monitoring can then be used to focus and improve traditional research.