Marketing

John Pugh, corporate communications director at Boehringer Ingelheim, on why pharma should be taking Twitter more seriously.

John Pugh, corporate communications director at Boehringer Ingelheim, on why pharma should be taking Twitter more seriously.

John Pugh, corporate communications director at Boehringer Ingelheim, reports that the number of messages (`tweets') on Twitter approaches three million per day. He asks whether Twitter might become a valid channel for pharma, and refers to a recent paper that suggests that it might fulfil a psychological need to be included in a group or community. Indeed, ordinary people are now integrated into news channels by using Twitter to report events. More relevant to healthcare are the surgeons who tweeted stage-by-stage the removal of a tumor.

Pugh reports that it is now possible for individuals to compete with and beat major news channels. It is common for people to have a million followers receiving their tweets. However, he also points out that although many well known brands are on Twitter, there are no pharmaceutical tweets in the top 100.

Getting attention

Yet Twitter is capturing the public imagination, with custom applications numbering over 600. TweetBuzzer tracks the activity of brands; mashups sweep up tweet data that fit various criteria; Sickcity collects health and position data to provide a listing of the ten sickest cities in the world. More specifically, some mashups home in on diseases; FluTweet collates keywords on flu symptoms over time and geographically, enabling the tracking of epidemics.

Despite this potential, Pugh finds from his own (admittedly biased) survey that half of pharma employees haven't really heard of Twitter, and less than a quarter use it and like it. There are several objections raised, principally that there will be a deluge of unstructured adverse event reports that someone will have to deal with. He doesn't see this as a problem if there is a well thought out plan for it. There is always the fear of litigation, but care with the messages will alleviate this. Perhaps a real practical issue is lack of time, when people have conventional marketing to do.

Why should we tweet?

So why should we tweet? asks Pugh. Social media allow us to give our version of the truth, he answers. We no longer need to rely on media third parties to interpret, reshape and distort our messages. But he reminds us that Twitter is not just for broadcasting messages, it is for understanding people and for uniting them.

This is how Boehringer Ingelheim is beginning to use Twitter particularly to listen to stakeholders, which Pugh thinks will become increasingly important over time. Principal among stakeholders are, of course, patients.

Then there are journalists, whose expectations have changed massively over recent years, Pugh explains. Journalists now need a richer range of material, including videos, graphics, sound bites. At present, journalists pretty much mirror other professionals, with only 23% committed tweeters, but Pugh is not worried about this low figure, as Twitter is very new.

More human, less corporate

Boehringer Ingelheim sends out links to relevant digital resources and articles, and engages people in dialogue. This has the benefit of presenting a more human and less corporate image of the company. An example is the announcement of the company's annual press conference, which was repeatedly tweeted and reached over 10,000 people. Pugh admits that this was somewhat overdone, but the learning was extremely valuable. Press coverage afterwards was very favourable.

Fish where the fishes are, quotes Pugh. We know where the conversations that interest us are going on, and it's no longer adequate to expect a corporate website alone to do what we need. There is a huge supply of information out there, which can be used to customize messages. Twitter is a tactic not a strategy, Pugh asserts, and needs to be integrated into the corporate communications strategy.