Medical Technology Blog

I have had many conversations with life science companies about social media/emerging media. The light has finally gone on in the room and I believe this is due to all the media attention. Many of my contacts in the medical technology and bioscience industry indicated that their products or services are not consumer facing and thus do not need to participate in social media marketing.

Now it is becoming clear within the life science community; whether you sell stents, heart monitoring software, medical tubing, the famous blue pill or products only in development; you will need to actively listen to what is being discussed online. Your customers, decision makers, influencers and investors are participating online. Discussing your products and service on blogs, videos, podcasts, news articles, and possibly talking to your parents about your company. While monitoring can help with most things we can’t really monitor what they say to your parents.

All joking aside, this article is to bring you up to speed on how to get involved in online monitoring and some top reasons and give you an understanding how Ubiquity may be able to help you. (Its my blog, I can self promote every 96 days.)

Online media is becoming more and more prevalent every day. With new information being discussed in blogs, social communities, news feeds and even online video conversation. Keeping up with online conversations can be a daunting task. But, interesting conversations are happening all over the web, making the resources worth the effort.

See Social Media Basics blog entry: The dog ate my social media: Social media basics.

Customers, prospects, and peers are discussing your business brand, your industry, and your competitors using social media, with or without you. Unfortunately, choosing not to listen doesn’t make those conversations go away. ‘Actively listening’ means protecting your business brand reputation, discovering opportunities, staying competitive, and avoiding a runaway crisis.
Why Actively Listen:
1. It will uncover potential new customers and partners at their point of need.
2. It provides real-time data as it is discovered.
3. Conversation dynamics are constantly tallied from every post/video/image in a topic profile so we can track the viral nature and allow for easy sorting. This enables us to quickly sort through the noise.

(Click on image for larger size: From Brian Solis)

Actively Listening to social media will also provide:
Multiple Languages - Online monitoring can support for multiple languages including English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Simple Chinese, Korean and Japanese.

Crisis Monitoring - Watch daily for words that could be potentially damaging to your brand.

Competitive Intelligence - Watch daily for competitors’ brands or partners to appear and investigate further.

Marketing Trends - New words and topics associated with your brand can provide an opportunity for the development of new business channels.

Online Communities and Influencers - Learn which online communities are important to your business.

Branding and Marketing - The findings will help you in determining proper messaging for your products, help you better target and also help improve your organic rankings on the web.

10 reasons to monitor the online world: This is a good list from David Alston at Radian6.

Check out his recent column yet 5 more reasons to listen.

1. The Complaint – Watch for posts complaining about your products or services, company, and staff. Catching something early means getting a chance to show how responsive you are.
2. The Compliment – Compliments can come in many forms. It could be a congratulations message about a recent award. It could be a customer raving about the experience they just had with a product or with customer service. Social media compliments are the online equivalent of those old school references or testimonials of days past.
3. The Expressed need – The best way to watch for expressed needs is to look for keywords often used to describe those needs. People shout out what they are doing and ask the general public for advice occasionally when they are about to make a purchase.
4. The Competitor – If you are watching your industry and the keywords used to describe it you will probably be the first to know when a new competitor appears on the scene. From a competitive intelligence perspective you may also wish to be alerted any time a competitor’s name is used.
5. The Crowd – Topics will often pop up online that draw huge crowds from a page visits or commenting perspective. There is a lot to be learned in discussion threads, especially when they have the potential to affect your brand. Following the swarms can give you a better understanding of current sentiment and thinking towards a certain topic and who the players are that have opinions on it.
6. The Influencer – Influencers within a space can carry a lot of weight. They gain there power either from the number of times they post on a topic, the number of people who link to their posts on a topic, the number of people gathering to comment and how engaged visitors to their posts become.
7. The Crisis – Discussions happening in social media can serve as an early warning system before an issue goes mainstream. By using advanced tools you can observe new words popping more frequently about your brands. If you were an airline, as an example, the sudden appearance of the word “cancellations” along with the words “bad” and “customer service” would immediate trigger a need to drill into the posts driving them. Tracking these “crisis” words over time on a go forward basis would also then help gauge the effectiveness of any outreach campaigns to address the underlying issues. A crisis could also be based on industry or legislative crisis within the life science community.
8. The ROI – There has been a lot of buzz lately on how to successful measure online marketing and outreach campaigns. Much of the focus has centered around the topic of engagement. While a universal engagement metric has yet to be agreed upon there are still a number of effective ways to measure engagement and ROI in general. Track the mentions of a brand in user-generated content before, during and after a campaign. Isolate positive words associated with a particular brand and gauge the number of times they were used over a period of time.
9. The Audit – A brand is the sum of all conversations and is no longer completely controlled by the corporation. By analyzing social media a corporation or agency can score a brand’s overall user sentiment, determine which words are commonly associated with it, understand which competitors rank closest in buzz or online mentions, uncover which sites are advocates, and rank which social media channels contain more discussion versus others.
10. The Thread – Following discussions using keywords associated with it can help bridge the thread across all types of social media. This thread would then appear as a connected conversation for easy analysis.

How to get started: A typical process

1. Discovery session to determine goals
2. Set-up initial online monitoring session and create snapshot of data
3. Review snapshot of data with team members and refine as needed
4. Develop key review dates of data as needed.
5. Create executive summaries with recommendations
6. Develop plan around findings

Why use Ubiquity for Life science Online Marketing:
Ubiquity specializes in generating demand for Life Science companies. We understand the medical technology and bioscience industry, your clients and the decision makers. We work in emerging media and know how to create actionable, measurable strategies from the information we find.

Ubiquity uses a number of tools to aggregate data which is supplied to our medical technology clients as an executive summary. Each summary may have charts, graphs and the links to each conversation and is customized to fit your needs.

Greg Olson :: Ubiquity
2406 West 32nd Ave., Suite B
Denver, Colorado 80211

tel: 303.962.8700
cell: 303.587.2847

www.ubiquitygroup.com
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