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Social Media Week: Navigating Social Media & New Technology in the Healthcare and Pharmaceutical Industries

admin — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 15:14:22 +0000

At long last, we have reached our final Social Media Week 2010 post. This one comes from Affect Strategies Assistant Account Executive, Antoniette Pemberton, who has already put some of the healthcare social networking sites mentioned in her post to use.

Social media is continuously changing the way we receive information and interact with each other. Like many, I turn to my friends and colleagues when considering a purchase, looking for a new restaurant and especially when searching for a good doctor. (As a matter of fact, all of my physicians were recommended through colleagues!) Armed with this information, I then turn to search engines and social networks for further reviews and recommendations.

The healthcare and pharmaceutical industries are attuned to these new consumer behaviors and have begun experimenting with social media platforms in order to build stronger relationships between doctors and patients.

Last Thursday night, I had the pleasure of attending the Navigating Social Media & New Technology in Healthcare and Pharmaceutical Industries event. The panelists were:

The panel participants were passionate about improving healthcare through technology. They provided insightful tips on how patients and physicians can use social media to create better relationships. In addition, they discussed new platforms that have been recently created that provide a better experience in finding doctors, getting appointments, and even receiving post-appointment follow-ups.

According to Dr. Oliver Kharraz, “the average wait for a primary care doctor is 24 days.” Is 24 days too long for you? Want to find a doctor in or out of your network? And book an appointment online? Dr. Kharraz’s website, Zoc Doc, the OpenTable of healthcare allows you to do just that.

Now that you have your appointment, you may want to find out what other patients have the same concerns. If so, The Health Tweeder is there for you. Dr. Jay Parkinson and Dr. Oliver Kharraz stressed that physicians need to become better listeners, provide customer service and remove the burden of following-up with physicians and pharmacies from patients.

Although the cost to start a social platform is expensive, the reward is great. Unfortunately, doctors have to finance these initiatives themselves and are not monetarily compensated for their time.

The most interesting platform for me was, Hello Health, a site where doctors and patients can build relationships through a direct pay model, where patients can pay a nominal fee to speak and interact directly with a doctor. Event-goers excited about these networks had tons of questions.

How do you get doctors to engage?
What legalities do you face?
What do you do with the data?

Even though the panelists could only respond on behalf of their respective companies, they all agreed that doctors need to get paid for their time (whether responding to an email or interacting face-to-face) and the biggest challenge they face with social networks is providing content in real-time, due to legal barriers.

The panel’s consensus was that people don’t need more content. Instead, brands (including individual doctors as well as pharmaceutical companies) need to create meaningful relationships with their patients and customers.

–Antoniette Pemberton

Social Media Week: Social Media and the Disaster in Haiti

Katie Safrey — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 19:19:19 +0000

Can Twitter save lives? Danielle Modzelewski, assistant account executive at Affect, offers an interesting perspective on the usefulness of Twitter after attending last night’s Social Media Week event titled “Social Media and the Disaster in Haiti.” Read the full post on
the Johnson King blog!

Social Media Week 2010: NYC, Meet London

Leslie Campisi — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:52:51 +0000

Wish you were celebrating Social Media Week in London? Me too. We’re bridging the divide by bringing you fresh social media week-themed posts from our partner, Johnson King, a European technology PR agency headquartered in London. We plan to include coverage of Social Media Week events in London and other relevant thoughts.

Today’s installment comes from Tom Kirkham, account manager, who tells the story of his social media revelation (complete with Biblical references). Tom manages Johnson King’s Twitter handle, @johnsonkingpr, and posts frequently to the Johnson King blog.

Enjoy, and look for more updates from our friends in the UK later this week.

Social Media Week 2010: Has social media come of age?
Tom Kirkham, account manager at Johnson King

Johnson King is excited, and with good reason. You see today marks the start of Social Media Week, a five day annual conference taking place simultaneously across three continents. Twelve months ago I doubt I’d have been as excited, for while I appreciated the need for companies to investigate new media channels, I personally felt underwhelmed with Twitter and the whole social media experience. However, over the past year and the events I’ve witnessed, I’ve undergone a road-to-Damascus conversion (except without the temporary blinding (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_of_Paul#On_the_road_to_Damascus)).

Most of these events have taken place on Twitter – surely the online phenomenon of 2009. We’ve had Haiti and Iran and Michael Jackson and many other fascinating global trending topics, but the events that have influenced me the most have been UK-specific. For example, in October 2009 The Guardian newspaper received a court gagging order, preventing it from reporting on a parliamentary debate over Trafigura (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/oct/12/guardian-gagged-from-reporting-parliament), a company implicated in a toxic waste dumping scandal. In obtaining the gagging order, Trafigura did not consider the Twitter-effect. Twitter users and bloggers pieced together the various elements of the puzzle, and within 24 hours the whole story had spread across the UK – including to other national newspapers – rendering the gagging order meaningless.

At the time, we asked whether this was the moment at which Twitter came of age (http://johnsonking.typepad.co.uk/johnson_king_blog/2009/10/has-twitter-come-of-age-with-latest-media-gagging-incident.html), and just a week later further evidence suggested that indeed it had, when Jan Moir at the Daily Mail wrote a hugely controversial article on the recently departed Boyzone singer Stephen Gately (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1220756/A-strange-lonely-troubling-death–.html). Twitter users didn’t like this, and within hours Jan Moir’s name was social media mud; indeed, users submitted so many complaints to the Press Complaints Commission that its website crashed, forcing the commission to create a special page specifically for Jan Moir complaints.

The final part of my conversion occurred on Facebook. In December 2009 we witnessed Joe McElderry, winner of the X Factor television series, going head-to-head with iconic rap-metal outfit Rage Against The Machine, in a music chart battle started by disgruntled music fans fed up with X Factor’s monopoly of the Christmas number one spot. Jon and Tracy Morter launched a Facebook group and set about creating social media noise, through their efforts gaining thousands of group members, attracting significant media interest, and even getting the band themselves involved (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/dec/17/rage-agains-machine-singer-swears). RATM’s eventual triumph marked the first ever download-only UK number one, with a song from 1992 that never would have re-charted without the power of social media.

Unprecedented? Well, social media’s impact in general is pretty unprecedented. Sure, there’s an element of the ‘angry mob’ about all this, but in each of the above cases, Twitter has been used to liberate and to enforce change, which bodes well for the forthcoming UK general election. The main political parties will all be plotting their social media election strategies, and it remains to be seen whether they’ll successfully compete with the efforts of the general public (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=40556497527&ref=ts).

But can social media channels really be exploited for business gain? For giant multinational companies the answer may be obvious, but what about everyone else? At Johnson King we’re regularly asked by small-to-medium-sized tech companies what they should be doing on LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook etc. and there’s not always a straightforward answer.

Earlier I mentioned Twitter coming of age, yet at the time of writing, the trending topics are ‘#HugATree’, ‘#desperatehousewives’, ‘#Ugly Betty’ and worryingly, ‘#itampon’. Similarly, on Facebook this morning I was invited to become a fan of ‘Picking leaves off trees and bushes and ripping them up whilst walking’. Managing social media outreach can be unbelievably time-consuming, and with so much pointless ‘noise’ out there, your company risks being completely drowned out unless you can plot an effective and viable strategy that ties into your existing marketing and PR activities

It will be interesting to see how the various presentations during Social Media Week tackle this issue, because one thing’s for sure – social media isn’t going away anytime soon.

–Tom Kirkham, Johnson King