Managing online reputation and new influencers in the pharmaceutical industry

April 1, 2011 by 3 Comments

In march 2011, Augure and consulting company BearingPoint held a joint event to present reputation challenges and solutions for the pharmaceutical industry. The slides are presented in French below, but further analysis and context follows:

 

What does corporate reputation mean?

First discussed is what the term reputation actually means. While the term has received more coverage in recent years, this has often been at the expense of exactitude.

A company’s reputation is the sum of perceptions of its stakeholders. Pragmatically, differences in reputations will create tangible differences in stakeholder reactions to a same event. Which is why identifying local stakeholder issues and mapping them into a global framework is so important to business success.

Since the global financial crisis, top reputation drivers have changed from financially ones to trust and other ethical considerations such as “High quality products, Transparent practises, Company that can be trusted, Company that treats employees well”. Profit has generally been replaced by Profit with a purpose.

Reputation in the pharmaceutical industry

Two specificities of the pharmaceutical industry make corporate reputation management complex:

  • First, global reputation is average but a very mixed bag. On a global scale, the pharmaceutical industry sits right in the middle of a list spearheaded by the technology and automotive industries and their promise of innovation and escape from the recession and ended by banks and financial services. But this averaged value sees strong variation across the globe:
    • In the US, according to Edelman’s 2011 Trust Barometer, the pharma industry has very low score and trails behind all other industries except banking & finance. And in a Harris survey of December 2010, US adults place it in the list of industry most in need of regulation, with only 11% of respondents truly trusting it.
    • In Asia, trust in institutions is very high in China, but lower in other markets. More than in any other continent, there is vast variation between individual markets. Trust in and use of media is also very different, with traditional media held in high esteem wherever free media has not yet emerged and very strongly distrusted in others. One major common aspect is very high trust in NGOs, making engagement essential and very local.
    • In Europe trust in pharma companies lies midway between the two previous continents but trust in NGOs is also very high.
  • As described in the slides, consumers can interact freely to exchange experiences but communications from pharmaceutical companies is heavily policed.

Monitoring and engagement to manage online reputation

A consequence of the above is that engagement with stakeholders must be performed on a very local level to understand the material issues of each community: tailored medication, market access, reimbursement and vaccination will not have the same resonance in all markets or communities.

Monitoring is equally essential to understand online opinion and segment it into markets, communities and media types. Health related topics are in the top three searches on Google. And even through traditional media are still the leading source of influence in China and Indonesia, search engines, online news and social media are catching up fast.
In spite of this, there is very little pharmaceutical presence on social network, through which to engage with the public. Hubspot research has shown that the vast majority of social media discussions about pharmaceutical companies are happening on Linkedin. But that is a professional network dedicated to B2B marketing and networking.

In Consumers Don’t Trust Pharma, So What Can We Do?, Eileen O’Brien writes:

pharmaceutical companies and brands will have to do the hard work of regaining the trust of consumers one by one

That task will necessarily be achieved through global stakeholder engagement and monitoring.

Filed under Augure News, Industry debate Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Is social search impacting your reputation?

January 21, 2011 by 2 Comments

It has often been written that your reputation is what Google says it is. A fact supported by search statistics showing that over 2/3 of all internet searches transit via the Mountain View giant’s servers. However, that would be missing one major point: conversations between internet users are one of the highest sources of influence on buying decisions and reputation factors.

Flickr image by Lee Haywood

Google may not always dominate search

Social consumer are using their networks more and more to ask for and share recommendations about companies and their products. Much as the more traditional internet goers, they use traditional search (read Google, and sprinkle a pinch of Bing, if you don’t live in China) to find information. But once initial awareness of a product has been gained, much word of mouth is exchanged on forums, Facebook and other social networks. Quora seems poised to become a crucial actor in this field, for instance.

Of course, Google has added many social features to its social search and integrated social presence to its social search results. But Facebook sees things differently and, as the Palo Alto rival approaches the demographic limits of new user acquisition, its strategy for future expansion seems to suck discussions about the world’s brands onto its own turf. “Like” buttons and Fan page serve exactly this purpose and while some Fan pages have rapidly become enormous, some (many?) have not grown fast enough to compensate for the corresponding decline in traffic of corporate websites. That alone can constitute a threat to your reputation management efforts. But if Facebook succeeds in attracting the world’s brand-centric conversations, its search may well dethrone Google’s as purveyor of image and reputation.

Influencer engagement and social CRM

This interesting post discusses whether you should embark on the much hyped real-time route and, since social has gained so much momentum, the question is certainly valid for reputation management. The author argues that influencer engagement is a selective PR exercise, at the risk of seeming biased, while the latter requires a more profound transformation of the company, particularly if you wish to engage in interactions, not simply provide asynchronous responses to questions and issues.

For reputation management purposes, it makes sense to focus on influential stakeholders and on answering the most representative issues rather than engage in systematic real-time interactions (marketing and crisis management are different, of course).

So how do you manage your reputation in a social world?

First, integrate offline, online and social in your monitoring plan. Social may be the new buzz-king, leading surveys (see for instance Edelman’s 2010 Trust Barometer) indicate that top influencers are industry experts, who do not express their views through a “XXX sucks” Facebook update.

Second, use engagement best practises to identify stakeholder groups and their respective issues.

Third, feed your social CRM with reports of your interactions to enrich it as you go and create a priceless engagement repository that will let your plan campaigns with far greater accuracy and confidence.

SO, is social search impacting your reputation, and how are you addressing that? Please describe your experience in comments.

Filed under Industry debate Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Augure Monitors 2 Billion Blogs

June 9, 2010 by Leave a comment

Link networkActually, we don’t. That’s a terrible marketing joke and there’s a special place in hell for people like me. The truth is we couldn’t if we wanted to and, perhaps more importantly, we certainly wouldn’t if we could.

Why we can’t is simple: there simply aren’t 2 billion blogs out there. Furthermore, in depth study shows that out of the 100-200M blogs in existence in 2010, only a tiny fraction are spam free and have – more or less – recent content: around 500 000 in total. This shows in the offerings of most data providers monitoring blogs, who provide the option of following subsets of a few hundred thousand clean blogs out of the many millions they crawl.

Why we wouldn’t want to calls for a little bit more explanation. But first, let’s be open about this. How many do we monitor? That depends on the industry, but, roughly speaking, a few hundred. Hundred thousand? Nope. A few hundred, well targeted blogs. So the real discussion boils down to the advantages and drawbacks of such tightly wound reading-lists over the more traditional digital mass-anschluss.

Small is beautiful

It is useful, in some circumstances, to identify all sources of conversation mentioning a brand. But, in the context of stakeholder engagement, the focus on exclusively industry-related sources drastically reduces the number of crawling targets: 50K on average, per industry, fewer than 500 with real thought leadership and following.

This allows for a high quality and deep extraction of the source’s content rather than the one size fits all RSS download of multi-million blog platforms. And while 90% of blogs share most of their content in their RSS feed, the remaining 10% that do not tend to be some of the most influent ones that need to draw you to their digital property to sell eBooks, seminars or other high-value content.

It also simplifies benchmarking. Intensive crawling algorithms are constantly updating the number of sources being monitored and make the task of creating actionable time series very tricky. Reading-lists maintain an constant perimeter for comparisons.

Semantic/sentiment analysis is also made easier and much more accurate by confining the semantic field of your monitoring to a very specific area of interpretation. Noise reduction is greatly simplified.

Link Network with influent nodesIn a word, dealing with a well thought out, consistent list of sources optimises many of the analysis steps expected from any decisional tool. And whereas quality analysis usually comes at the expense of processing lag (counted in hours or days) in mass-crawling platforms, it doesn’t in a low volume approach.

What about missing something important?

The obvious worry is to miss out on some important news happening outside your monitoring perimeter. This is easily dispelled by examining the networks formed by blogs citing one another : it is easy to target a few central nodes in the graph through which all information flows. By monitoring these centers of influence, all important discussion and information is systematically intercepted.

So in terms of monitoring, less can be more and we will not be following 2 billion blogs anytime soon.

Filed under Engagement Tagged with , , , , ,

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