To tweet or not to tweet
Posted 14th October 2011 in Articles, Commercial | 3 comments
Rob Walton
Wisper Public Affairs
The Twitter CEO, Dick Costello, announced in September that his social networking site had signed up a whopping 100 million active global users. With over 33 million unique visits paid by users during the month, Twitter is placed 3rd behind Facebook and YouTube on the league table of the world’s most popular websites.
With this many users, it is easy to imagine that businesses at the cutting edge of technology, like those in the pharmaceutical sector, would have figured out how to take advantage of the platform and the potential it presumably offers to those trying to get their message across. In reality this has not occurred and it is only in the last year or so that pharmaceutical marketing professionals have begun to seriously consider the inclusion of Twitter as part of the marketing and communications mix.
In my view, the reasons why the industry has been slow to adopt Twitter are simple and few. The relationship between investment and output remain unclear and this uncertainty is exacerbated by a mix of increasingly constricted promotional budgets, concerns around communicating to the public and a continued lack of understanding of Twitter’s users.
“The relationship between investment and output remain unclear…”
Twitter is referred to as a “micro-blogging” site, because users must “tweet” their communications in no-more than 140 characters to their “followers”. Anyone who is registered with Twitter can read another user’s tweets, but to really get the most from tweeting it’s crucial to follow and be followed by others.
In the five years since Twitter was set up it has become synonymous with the concept of virtual social networking. Last year, The Times reported on leaked documents from the site’s San Francisco headquarters which stated it aspired to become the “pulse of the planet”. By July of this year, these ambitions seemed a step closer to realisation when it hosted more visitors that month (32.8 million) than LinkedIn (32.5 million). Twitter was also widely being credited by the global media as having a direct effect on democracy through its role in galvanising protest during the Arab Spring.
But we should put these facts and figures into context. It’s fine to be second or even third in the league table, but it’s even better if being first is within reach. If you really want to take the pulse of the planet, then take a look at Facebook, which outshone both Twitter and LinkedIn last month with a mind-blowing 162 million hits.
Back in April the company said it had attracted 175 million registrations, and just last month Dick Costello reported 100 million active Twitter users . This sounds impressive, but what do these figures really mean?
According to statistics leaked by company insiders to media, before the summer there were 119 million Twitter accounts following one or more other users and there were 85 million accounts with one or more followers. Simple arithmetic can therefore show that, before the summer, there were around 56 million accounts holders who didn’t follow anyone at all and 90 million Twitter accounts remaining un-followed by other users. The leak also reported that only about half of Twitter users followed two or more people.
“Getting your message out in the virtual space does not guarantee its transmission to the target audience.”
Adding further complexity, collaborating researchers at Cornell University and Yahoo published a study this year on “Who says what to whom” on Twitter. The results are informative. First the researchers concluded that most of the activity generated on Twitter comes from a small “elite” of super-users. Indeed almost 50% of all tweets are generated by a mere 20,000 users. Second, Twitter is cliquish; within the population of elite users, celebrities congregate with other celebrities, bloggers with bloggers and so forth, which primarily serves to undermine the democratising essence of the social network. Third, almost half of the information accessed by users derives from traditional media sources simply repackaged through links by tweeting interlocutors. Finally, the lifespan of content tweeted on the site varies according to its nature, with music and video packages unceasingly rediscovered and re-tweeted and news items disappearing quickly into the ether.
In the current economic climate, it is no surprise that pharmaceutical marketers are being cautious in their adoption of Twitter. Overall, industry spend on promotion and advertising has tailed off in the United States and Europe. Last year the United States Congressional Budget Office reported that the growth of pharmaceutical manufacturers’ overall promotional spending had slowed from double-digits in 2003 and 2004 to almost zero in 2009. This was due to fewer new treatments being approved by regulators, an increase in patent expiry and increased macro-economic pressures on governments. Such pressures will inevitably lead to pharmaceutical marketing professionals to make very careful choices about their mix of investments. Those channels which are proven to be most effective will continue to flourish and the adoption of emerging communication channels will be faltering.
Though Twitter is free at the point of use, the limited evidence available indicates that the most frequently verbose users generate by far the most on-line activity. The lesson here is that results take time and effort and, quite simply, without an intensive investment of these factors, returns will be marginal at best.
Those considering investing in Twitter should also take the time to develop a clear picture of what they perceive Twitter will deliver for them. In this respect it is important not to confuse activity with delivery. Getting your message out in the virtual space does not guarantee its transmission to the target audience. More importantly, even if it does secure the right message at the right time, it doesn’t mean that behavioural change will follow. Finally, gaining a sense of how to accurately measure success is a critical challenge. While leading a “Trending” on Twitter might give executives a warm and fuzzy feeling, it may deliver nothing beyond a smile and a line in the monthly management report.
Emergent technologies like Twitter are increasingly important in our globalised world, but times are tough. The burden of evidence rests with Twitter to demonstrate the effectiveness of the site as a tool of global business communication. Increasing transparency on how this tool is being used, and by whom, will help to expedite uptake by the pharmaceutical sector, but until that time, quite rightly, the jury is out.
About the author:
Rob Walton is Managing Partner at Wisper Public Affairs, a member of the iS Health Group of companies.
Why do you think pharma is slow to adopt Twitter?
14th October 2011, 15:51
The true value of Twitter is definitely hard to quantify, especially in light of all of the inflated (read: misleading) numbers out there about users and content. And while I understand the imperative to evaluate the potential for a company's return on its investment in Twitter or any other distribution channel, I think this point of view is emblematic of a posture that is precisely at issue right now in pharma: companies (and consultants) are internally oriented to seek reasons *not* to do anything in social media. This predisposition makes it very, very difficult for those companies to catch up once the tipping point is reached (the "singularity," right Michael Spitz?!) and it becomes apparent that in order to compete, companies need to develop real estate in the dominant social networks. Refusing to learn one platform only makes it harder for a company to understand how to leverage others, and the longer a company sits on the sideline, the longer it takes for it to get in game shape. What I would like to see is conservative action over conservative inaction, lest companies realize they have been inactive so long they stand little chance of catching up. This analogy has been made before, but I think it’s apropos: it’s the early 20th century, and telephones are appearing in homes and businesses across the industrialized world. How would you regard the company that held out, waiting for the phone company to convince them they needed phone service? Is that shrewd, or is it shortsighted?
The irony, of course, is that digital channels are the great levelers of the playing field, amplifying the distance between the active and inactive. Andrew Spong wrote recently, "progress within social environments cannot be bought: it must be earned through connection and endeavour." I agree that developing social properties is not as comparatively simple as an ad buy.
I'd like to offer a counterpoint to Mr. Walton's assertion that the burden of evidence rests with Twitter: the real burden rests on companies to choose (or not choose) to engage in two-way communication with their stakeholders where their stakeholders are having conversations about health and their products. If influential pharma bloggers, for example, are on Twitter in large numbers (which they are), a company can choose to develop a presence on Twitter to engage with those people( to the degree that they compliantly can), or they can choose to not participate in that conversation. The burden of evidence is not, as it were, on Twitter to demonstrate that those bloggers are there. They are, and that is self-evident. The subsequent action is a choice that falls on individual companies to make. Is it worth engaging on Twitter with those bloggers to add the company's voice to the mix and help shape brand perception? If not, so be it. If so, good luck. Either choice is valid. But to argue that the channel itself is responsible for making that choice for pharma is problematic, and seemingly endemic in the digital space. I would like to see pharma reclaim control of its own digital destiny.
-Casey
15th October 2011, 13:17
We first experimented with the use of Twitter in late 2009.
At the time, I was working as Senior Marketing Director at Wyeth and we had planned a standalone meeting in Dubai, for Africa, Middle East region in April of 2010. We were expecting to have an audience of approximately 150 clinicians at this meeting and I wanted to find a way to transmit content from that meeting to a wider community of clinicians beyond those attending the actual event.
Working with the in-house e-marketing team at Wyeth and in collaboration with Complete Digital we felt there was an opportunity to use Twitter to help us achieve this. The idea was to set up a hash-tag for the meeting, ahead of the meeting and publicise this, before, during and after the meeting, to generate tweets.
One of the first thing I did was to try and find out who had done something similar before, so that we could learn from that. At the time, no-one in Wyeth, or Pfizer (the company that was our new parent) had taken this approach. So, it was breaking new ground.
There were concerns, naturally, about how we would "control" the communications to ensure we remained within regulations. This was probably the main barrier to overcome, internally. Fortunately we had support from our legal counsel who appreciated that Twitter and other forms of social media were already invented and that, whether we initiated the conversation or not, we could not prevent the conversation from happening if individuals so wished. In some ways, it was seen as being preferable to be part of the conversation than not. The hash-tag followed by the title of the meeting would only likely be sourced by people who knew about the meeting - and those people were the one's we had communicated with about the meeting - i.e. a clinician audience only. So, the chances of the general public stumbling across this and the conversation getting out of hand was not felt to be a risk.
The question about Return On Investment (ROI) always presents a challenge to anything we do - and rightly so. But sometimes it isn't possible to demonstrate clear ROI - especially when you are undertaking innovative activities that haven't been tried before. The quest to prove ROI should not be allowed to kill innovation and fortunately we had the support of some forward-thinking colleagues who appreciated this.
It was interesting that we sought the opinions of the speaker Faculty on the use of social media at the meeting and there was very little enthusiasm for it. This, for some, was an area of concern and we had to invest time with the Faculty to explain how the process would work and how it would benefit them and not put them at risk.
And so we proceeded to test the use of Twitter as a method to communicate some of the highlights of the meeting to a wider audience.
The pre-meeting notifications carried details of the hash-tag so participants, could if they wished, begin to talk about the meeting before the event. We had planned to run a tutorial at the beginning of the meeting, a sort of "Twitter clinic" because we anticipated that not everyone would be familiar perhaps with how they could contribute during the meeting by social media.
I would now love to tell you that this was a roaring success, but unfortunately I can't claim that. The main barrier that got in the way was an act of God! A volcanic ash cloud eruption that grounded some of the technical support team and limited the success of this, our first attempt, to use Twitter in this way. However, it didn't disrupt things altogether and we did proceed to use Twitter at this meeting as planned. The kind of tweets that went out were informative and non-contentious, short summaries of some of the key points made by the speakers.
Regrettably, I personally never got the opportunity to repeat that experiment and develop the use of Twitter further during the remaining months of my employment. However, I remain convinced that this is a valuable tool and that companies can use it, in a responsible way, to boost their communications.
I would add though that the objective is not to make a noise amongst the general population, but to create your own digital community first - and then use social media to communicate within that population. It's something I've continued to be engaged with and I hope I may have further examples of this to provide in the not too distant future.
7th November 2011, 13:14
Dear Rob,
as you might have gathered from the @replies that you received on twitter in reaction to your post (even though we never got any response from you), your post quite upset the #hcsmeu community and beyond which features some true social media and twitter experts in the health care and pharma industry.
Your point of view illustrates perfectly some of the reactive thinking I have to battle at my clients internal regulatory meetings. Because regulators often are still new to social media they simply dismiss the entire platform rather than try to learn to work with this it. Regardless of this pharma has embraced twitter as a communications tool since 2008. Neither lagging nor leading, compared to other industries, but on its own terms.
Such a reactive and dismissive point of view on twitter's opportunities for pharma coming from a supposed thought leader on the topic like yourselve thus greatly disappointed me! We have to caution each other against across-the-board, discouraging affirmations of the industry’s current state of social media adoption or the lack thereof, if we want to help our clients realize the true potential of this game shift in pharma communications and marketing.
In your post, I could not find any link to any source that supported your affirmation or was able to relate to the pharma environment. In my opinion, this, if anything, slows the progress of social media adoption as it completely confuses clients. I wrote this post http://bit.ly/s9DhDs with your point of view in mind. It helped me address the high level of ignorance some of us still have about social media. See thus my post as a response to counter just about any affirmation you are making above with hard data. I based my post on an extensive benchmarking of 15 pharma twitter accounts and their 50k + followers, as well as on a couple of excellent reports by Sysomos on twitter usage in general http://bit.ly/sK0GG9. This allowed me to systematically and strategically analyze and compare how pharma is performing on twitter! I truly hope you can use these insights and future posts of mine as a learning opportunities that will help you embrace social media in your work in the future.
Post Comment
Comments are moderated, and will not appear until approved by a member of the pharmaphorum team.
You must be logged in to post a comment.
