While Pharma is still wondering how to harness Social Media, without opening the “pandora box” of adverse events, a number of specialized applications dedicated to the life sciences industry have recently emerged. In this post, I would like to discuss some projects where, by listening to social media conversations, we were able to measure the impact of publication of clinical trials on the medical population, business community and media.

INTRODUCING THE “OOL”

A first example would be in oncology. When monitoring specific “hot” subjects such as Biomarkers or PD-1, peaks of social media conversations were clearly observed around major conferences such as ASCO or ESMO where results of major clinical trials are published. Social Media tracking allows not only to identify who the supporters or the detractors of the trials results are, but also what are the publications at the source of these influences. This includes analyzing the sentiments linked to the publication: determining whether the reception of the medical community is positive, neutral or negative; and picking out the principal themes that are discussed. In many cases, names of top blog authors or specific postings are taken and rated for frequency of posting and influence, and often can be matched up with the name of a specific KOL.
Graph 1: Peak of discussion about clinical trial results around Medical conferences
It is interesting to note that some of these Opinion Leaders are not generally vocal in conferences or offline venues. Their turf is the Internet, and with thousands of followers on twitter or facebook, they can be quite influential there! We call them “Online Opinion Leaders” aka OOLs.

A CASE STUDY

In a recent project, we tracked for one of our clients, a vaccine manufacturer, the impact of various Phase 2 and Phase 3 clinical trials results publications. After every publication we were able to analyze the “burst” in details. Results were then presented in a cloud-based, real-time dashboard with drill down capabilities. As soon as “OOLs” posts were published, we could gauge how the messages were perceived, correct any misunderstanding or misconception, and understand what resonated well or poorly with the public or sometimes more specifically with a KOL segment. In this instance the client’s subsequent releases took into account the findings from the initial ones, amendments were made to the formulation of the messages, and the results re-analyzed.
Graph 2: Main themes being discussed
The real key to any social media monitoring is to read between the lines, and more than listening to actually understand and analyze. In our case, experience showed that a deep expertise combining social media and medico-marketing skills was necessary to more closely explain the buzz as if through the eyes of the company, carefully selecting relevant terminology, key threads and creating company/product specific word clouds. Big Data is any source of information, and data from other sources were combined with the company’s own data to draw conclusions

THE HUMAN TOUCH

By using highly detailed cloud based dashboards, we could look at more than 100,000 conversations first by country, then language, source of the information, and finally by sentiment and themes. But to dig further, more than 10,000 individual posts had to be analyzed by humans with medical training (not machines), who have a finer sense of the nuances of a language, how humor or sarcasm is expressed, and how to categorize posts according their tone and credibility:whether it is scientific, has valuable medical content, or on the contrary is perhaps not even relevant.
Based on these findings, we were able to get a clear picture of the actual impact of these clinical trial publications, first of all on the medical community, but more widely on the industry, the financial community and the general public.
Over the past five years, we have conducted several similar projects in immunology, diabetes, oncology, rheumatoid arthritis, vision impairment, etc…
Feel free to contact me directly if you are interested to learn more