Content is king, but valuable to whom?
Jinfo Blog

27th October 2010

By Joanna Ptolomey

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OK, eyes down for bingo: In the last couple of weeks have you used these words: engagement, relationships, social media, or communities? Good chance that you have either in relation to your own work or have read about it in industry magazines. I hold up my hand to this year probably using those words either in articles or in my projects more times than I care to remember, and to boot there is probably some analytics tool to tell me exactly how many times. I suspect that many of you have used these words too, especially if you have been to a conference this year where social media is generally one of the main topics. At DigiPharm recently many healthcare stakeholders gathered together recently to hear about engaging in relationships and building communities. It left me with a nagging question. Who are they aimed at and is this valuable for them? Alex Butler, Janssen comms manager, quite rightly questions the old website portal venture as useless 'build it and they will come is a nonsense'. Two way relationships with stakeholders, mainly patients, is the future for drug companies. However we must understand the community and communicate in a dynamic and flexible way. He continues that the curation of data will be important -- and quite right, analytics give you some insight, but no richness. This content issue re-emerged with Daniel Ghinn (a FUMSI contributor http://web.fumsi.com/go/article/use/4436) and Paul Grant. 'Data is not exciting but how it affects decisions is.' This perked me no end because this is the nub of why people want information in the first place -- questions need answering, risk reduced, decisions taken and outcomes measured. Their research reveals by following conversations you can have an 'evidence based engagement strategy in healthcare' - specifically the reporting of adverse drug reactions. It was surprising to note that not all patients are likely to officially report incidents around their drug therapies. In social media land the crux is that individual tweets are in themselves not valuable, but a series of tweets (the real conversation) is the desired information. To 'curate' this type of information needs a tailored tool -- and it is this curation that makes content valuable. To get a measure of the real problem in curating this type of valuable information Paul and Daniel created a study week around 10 therapy areas. With spam in social media a real issue, especially around drug information -- no doubt you have at some point been sent spam emails about getting prescription drugs at low cost? And in some countries it is endemic such as the Czech Republic and Brazil where Daniel and Paul estimate that nearly 100% of drug information coming through social media channels is spam. Being able to curate information about adverse effects in drug therapies from non-official sources is very valuable and 'other evidence avenue'. As well as useful for clinical professionals in drug development, doctors and patients would also benefit. Although much of what I have been reporting about in the last couple of LiveWire posts have been taken from the healthcare sector the important strands are as useful to any industry -- curating content for evidence (risk, decision making, measuring outcomes), sharing content and crowdsourcing, social media guidelines, and gaining support/changing culture for your organisation.

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