by John Bell
Listening (and Engaging) in the Age of Personal Media

With more than 52 million blogs, over 800,000 posts daily, and trust in peer recommendations higher than most other channels, the value of putting the corporate ear to the ground grows every day. Patients blog about battling their disease. Doctors document the trials and tribulations of the ER. Patient advocacy groups create wikis as condition-specific knowledge bases. If there was ever a great time for pharmaceutical and healthcare companies to learn more about consumers and stakeholders, it is the new age of personal media. And once you have listened, there are exciting new ways to talk directly with consumers. And why would you do that? To build trust. To make better treatments. Plain and simple. But I am getting ahead of myself, nothing around DTC communications is simple, is it.

The best way to get smart about engaging with personal media is to start reading blogs, listening to podcasts, watching video podcasts, and searching wikis.

Listening Can pharmaceutical companies listen to what is being said about their products and the conditions they are designed to treat? Chances are that if you work for a pharmaceutical company you have a knee-jerk reaction that goes something like this: "If we monitor blogs and detect something related to the efficacy or safety of our product, we are required to report this observation." And what if you have your communications agency listen in and report back to you? "No difference," you might say. "They are acting as my agent."

Okay now ask five of your peers, including those helpful folks in legal. Soon you'll find a difference of opinion. Some folks will say that you can monitor and report just as you do with traditional media, some suggest you can report on the general polarity of discussions (positive vs. negative) or report findings in the aggregate. Some will say don't listen at all.

Pharmaceutical companies have to be careful to not shoot themselves in the foot in a simple attempt to understand the patients and doctors they serve. But you should be able to listen. So, can you monitor blogs (or message boards, or listen to podcasts) without the onus of reporting what you learn? The simple answer is not in the same way another brand or company might.

A package goods company or an electronics brand wants to know as much as possible about what customers are saying about their product, their competitors and related issues, as do you. The closer they can come to quantitative data with a nice sampling of verbatims, the better. Services like Cymfony and Umbria offer complete dashboard views of large collections (millions) of blogs and other personal media. You can report "share of voice," most recent mentions, and, in Umbria's case, core demographic information about bloggers mentioning your product. That comprehensive approach is a problem for the pharmaceutical company. What if patients or doctors are sharing a common problem with a drug that only comes to light through this type of blog monitoring? Who wants to be the pharmaceutical executive to detect a potential problem with their product?