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Thought leadership and innovation for the Pharmaceutical Industry

Hurdles abound for social media strategists as they work hard to achieve buy-in from executives and scientists accustomed to “hard data,” and operate within FDA regulations on social media.

By Julie Donnelly on Sep 23, 2014

Greg Cohen, Senior Manager of Social Media & Influence at UCB Pharma, believes the anecdotal nature of social learnings is a strength, not a weakness. Ahead of his presentation at the Multichannel Engagement USA summit, Cohen tells eyeforpharma how to harness the power of patient stories to achieve key business objectives. 

While some pharmaceutical companies are still wading into the waters of social media, UCB is fully immersed, running active communities on Facebook for patients with three serious chronic diseases: epilepsy, Crohn’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease. In addition to communities they’ve built themselves, UCB also manages a social listening program across various social media platforms, to gain an understanding of the patient journey and how to bring value to customers.

To date, UCB’s initiative has yielded strong results, including important market research insights. This allowed for augmented sales teams’ pitches, and led to a complete internal reorganization of UCB’s telephone customer-facing service functions.  By listening to patients’ stories on social media, UCB has found a way to address the individual needs of customers in a uniquely customized way.

To wit, Cohen pointed to a specific example he counts as particularly meaningful. Through social listening, UCB was able to identify a patient whose insurer had mistakenly cut off access to her medication.  Using social listening, the company was able to help her on an extremely individual level and provide access to the drug.

Stories like these, Cohen believes, are more powerful in convincing skeptics.  Rather than relying on aggregated social data, powerful individual stories can drive home the importance of using social media to improve your patients’ lives.  The stories help UCB ask the right questions about how to become a more patient-centric company.

One of Cohen’s top objectives is making sure the social media conversation is two-way dialogue, and occurs as close to real time as possible. Ensuring that pharma companies are getting the information they need, while simultaneously improving their engagement requires a deft hand at managing regulatory and legal hurdles.

Navigating regulations

Luckily for Cohen, recent guidance from the FDA on the use of social media to promote drugs would have little effect on UCB’s social media strategy under its current listening programs and online communities. This is in large part because UCB's Facebook communities forbid members from discussing specific drugs – whether those sold by UCB, or by its competitors. If members do try to give each other advice about which drugs to take, UCB’s monitoring tools step in and delete the posts.

A social media management tool provides a dashboard view of all three UCB Facebook communities simultaneously and can block specific, problematic keywords.  Additionally, UCB engages a third party moderation company to pay extra close attention to what’s said and ensure it fits within the FDA's guidelines.

“The technology will pick up 90 percent of instances, whereas the moderation team actually goes in and scrolls through and looks at the context of conversations, to add human eyes to the page,” explained Cohen.

According to Cohen, over the next few years, UCB, along with its competitors, may be moving towards real-time marketing, and that may mean the onset of social media programs that focus more on particular products than on disease areas. 

The new FDA guidance, issued earlier this summer, states that “if a firm chooses to make a product benefit claim” on social media platforms with character limits (like Twitter),“the firm should also incorporate risk information within the same character-space-limited communication.” This means including risks and benefits in a single 140-character tweet, which may be a tall order.

But Cohen doesn’t rule out future engagement efforts on Twitter. “Like any regulation, there are going to be some people who say, ‘Well, there goes that idea’,” Cohen said. “But I’ve met a number of social marketers who have said, 'Well at least we have some guidance.’ In the absence of information, people do nothing.  Now people can look at creative ways to use the platform. We are looking at some ideas about how to use the guidance to our advantage”.

Cohen says that the new guidance makes one thing clear: as long as companies don’t intend to trick people, they are going to be able to develop social programs that fit within the regulations while still meeting business objectives.

“Friending” the Medical-Legal-Regulatory team

One important thing Cohen learned from UCB’s three patient online communities is that speed is power.

“If I get to someone’s post in a couple of hours, that’s one thing. But if I can get to someone’s question within 20 minutes and I can write a response back, all of a sudden that person has a really great experience of posing this question to this big community and it was responded to really quickly”.

But until a year ago, every response by Cohen or his team members would have to be cleared by a review committee, slowing the process and watering down the impact. Now the social media team has review committee guardrails so that as long as UCB’s response avoids certain topics, keywords, etc., posts can be published quickly with no sign off.

Cohen gives a hypothetical example of a young Crohn’s disease patient who has just been diagnosed, is heading to college, and posts on the Facebook page looking for advice.

“Instead of having to get approval, we have something on our website that addresses Crohn’s in the college years, so I can actually write up a custom response and say, ‘Hey John, it sounds like you have a lot on your plate right now and this resource may be of help’, and addresses him as a person, as long as we are using approved resources to form the response.“

Turning patient insights into programs with impact

If there is one thing chronically ill patients hate to do, it is wait on hold on the phone. Cohen’s team has used insights gleaned from social listening to help re-engineer three customer facing departments at UCB – customer service, drug safety and medical information.

The three departments now sit together, and are called “UCBCares™”. The idea was born partly from the desire to respond to patient issues on social media which would have necessitated engaging multiple internal departments.

"They might have a question about a product, and they might get sent over to customer service, then they may have a question about aplication of the drug, and need medical information, or they might have an adverse event and need to be sent over to the drug safety team", Cohen said.

The result was a lot of hold time, and the company knew it could do better. Now workers in the new collocated UCBCares group can lean over to a colleague with different expertise to help answer follow-up questions, rather than transferring the patient to a new department. Cohen said the new combined team received new training about how to answer the phone and dig for the root of customer problems. The goal is to deliver a new level of “caring service for customers,” Cohen said.

Measuring Success

Cohen's favourite example of how social media has improved the way UCB does business involves just one patient. She posted on a disease-specific forum (not run by UCB) that her insurer would no longer cover UCB's drug, forcing her to instead go back to a drug that hadn't worked for her.

UCB’s social listening program picked up on the post later the same day, and Cohen’s team sent a note to the market access team, which contacted the insurer named in her post. They also alerted the sales team. It turned out to be a simple error on the part of the insurer.

We do a lot of work tying our social activity to patient insights and market research objectives. We are able to use our information to augment traditional market research activities in ways we’d never thought of before".

“Twenty-four hours later she posted again, saying her doctor had been in touch with our rep as well as the local insurance office who then quickly corrected the issue and she was able to get back on the drug with no interruption,” Cohen said.

Cohen collects these types of stories, and uses them in presentations to drive home the value of the social media program to other constituencies within the company.

Cohen says he can’t always tie his work to ROI, and that’s OK.

“We do a lot of work tying our social activity to patient insights and market research objectives. We are able to use our information to augment traditional market research activities in ways we’d never thought of before. Also we are finding whole new ways to derive new insight that helps to empower our marketing team and our field sales team with new business information they can show to clients, they can use it when working with patients. It’s not about sneaking in a sale, the whole point is to bring value to the system".

What’s next ?

While UCB has a well-developed social media program, Cohen says there are still miles to go. He said the functions the company has gotten right include really listening to patients and developing core content based on what they say they want to hear. One takeaway is that beyond discussions about symptoms or disease progression, patients really want content around social issues. For instance, the company has created content that addresses dating and relationships for patients with Crohn’s disease.

Cohen hopes the next chapter of UCB’s social media evolution will include more real-time marketing – a big challenge in such a regulated industry.

“People want interactivity . They want more information, more real time, more real content,” Cohen said. “So how can we have a base of content that’s good that people can learn from, but also have content we can develop on the fly, develop based on what’s happening right now, or even bringing people in and having them talk to us ".

Cohen said UCB and its rivals will have to walk a tightrope. On the one hand, the demand is growing for real, candid, real-time content – both from patients and from health care providers. But companies will need to first carefully develop guidelines to stay on the right side of regulations which continue to evolve.

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Greg Cohen will be presenting at Multichannel Engagement USA, November 18-19th in Philadelphia. For more information, click here.