#eHealthPromotion, #SaluteSocial

Il Dossier completo su "la Salute umana" 
CULTURA E SALUTE EDITORE PERUGIA

In Western Europe, public views of the news media are divided by populist leanings – more than left-right political positions – according to a new Pew Research Center public opinion survey conducted in Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

Across all eight countries, those who hold populist views value and trust the news media less, and they also give the media lower marks for coverage of major issues, such as immigration, the economy and crime.1

Trust in the news media dips lowest in Spain, France, the UK and Italy, with roughly a quarter of people with populist views in each country expressing confidence in the news media. By contrast, those without populist leanings are 8 to 31 percentage points more likely to at least somewhat trust the news media across the countries surveyed.

In Spain, Germany and Sweden, public trust in the media also divides along the left-right ideological spectrum, but the magnitude of difference pales in comparison to the divides between those with and without populist leanings.

When it comes to how the news media perform on key functions, broad majorities of the publics rate the news media highly for generally covering the most important issues of the day. This includes majorities of both those who do and do not hold populist views, though there are still significant differences in the magnitude of those ratings. More substantial divides between those two groups occur around how the news media do in covering three specific issues asked about here: the economy, immigration and crime. (See detailed tables for more information.)

Many pharmaceutical companies have been cautious about their social media presence. However, that’s no surprise given the advertising restrictions and potential minefields of discussing prescription medicine in an uncontrolled environment. This report looks at how 16 companies have embraced social media and the trends that have emerged in the industry over the last five years.

Due to the restrictions imposed upon the industry by the FDA, we found that pharmaceutical companies have split their social media presence into four independent silos (see image).

On Facebook, pharmaceutical companies saw growth from both Corporate pages and Career pages. The high growth of the Careers pages is perhaps an indicator of the low number of total Fans these pages have. As for the Corporate pages, the high growth rate suggests that this silo was a very important channel for pharma brands in 2016.

On Twitter, pharmaceutical companies struggled to increase Follower growth throughout 2016. The Branded portals’ handles were the biggest drivers of Follower growth mostly due to the comparatively low number of Followers. Just like on Facebook, the OTC Brand handles didn’t register any significant growth. This could be due to companies refocusing their efforts in other silos.

Further Reading:

• “PharmaGuy's Social Media Compendium ”; http://bit.ly/pgsoccat

A WebMD survey finds that patients are more engaged when they share their own health with their doctors.

The future of pharma is going to involve some major culture shifts for a business that has long been focused on slow development cycles, proprietary molecules, and close-held secrets. That’s the word from representatives from Bayer, Boehringer Ingelheim, Healthware International and BTG, a group that ran the gamut from small to big pharma at Pharma Roundtable onsite at Health 2.0 in Santa Clara.

The first culture shift for pharma is one that’s often discussed: the industry needs to find ways to innovate in an iterative, lean startup way to figure out what works in the new world of digital.

“Certainly what I’ve learned in the last three months is there’s tons of ideas, tons of projects, but that oomph of actually landing them is where the challenges lie,” said Eugene Borukhovich, who recently started working at Bayer in the role of global head of digital health incubation and innovation. “Experimentation is core to R&D, but for some reason a lot of my colleagues can’t bring that into the digital world.”

The second culture shift was outlined by Amanda Goltz, the director of digital innovation at BTG, the smallest pharma company on the panel. Goltz outlined the need for pharma to be open to creating digital interventions that are drug-agnostic, potentially helping out their competitors.

"Competing with each other isn’t going to get us anywhere, that’s not where the market is going,” she said. “To a certain degree drugs and devices are being commoditized in the value-based reimbursement world. A smart member of the pharma company focuses not on selling more than the guy next to him, but on improving the value in terms of measurable health outcomes.”

Improving medication adherence, for instance, should help everyone sell more drugs because patients will refill their prescriptions more, and apps have the potential to improve adherence. But patients who take multiple drugs from multiple pharma companies don’t want an adherence app for each pill they take.

Finally, Larry Brooks, director of business innovation at Boehringer Ingelheim, laid out a third culture change: pharma needs to think more about the patient, their end user, than they have in the past.

“I know it’s a buzzword to say we’re patient-centric or person-centric, but I think we’ve really lived it,” Brooks said. “We’ve spent a lot of time learning how a person with COPD or schizophrenia lives their life and how their caregiver supports them and their providers are approaching their care. And from that, we learn the associated challenges, and we then put forward solution concepts that would solve for them; a typical lean design approach. But it’s really come to life for me because when you get feedback from people explaining how what we’re doing can really genuinely help them, it’s really magnificent.”

Being patient-centered and being drug-agnostic are two sides of the same coin, really. Brooks talked about how those two culture changes have already started to play out at Boehringer, in how they evaluate pilots.

“We used to really focus on how the technology can drive alignment to the core business,” he said. “And the measurement was simple: if we could run a pilot to the point where we’ve proven the business case to an internal group, they would take it on. But now the validation of the investment is much more customer-centric. If we can really drive value for a person with a particular chronic disease, developing things like engagement with that person, developing a data asset, those are much more valuable and longer term investments.”

The last panelist, Healthware International CEO Roberto Ascione, brought it home with a comment about what it would take to facilitate these kinds of changes.

“If i need to go to the bone of it in my opinion, leadership is really important,” he said. “Not just the vision, because the vision is easy. You can give a great talk and say ‘That’s the future we’re going to go to and that’s it’. But I think the pull-through leadership is very important. When there are budget cuts, something I think everyone has gone through, years ago digital projects, digital marketing were the first things that were cut. At the end of the day, leadership that says ‘No, we’re here, we’re going to do this, we might sacrifice other aspects which are already kind of charted to take a risk on this, which is clearly a big part of the future’ is the single factor that I think can make a big difference.”

Ogilvy CommonHealth Worldwide evaluated  how  14 major pharma companies  were  performing  across  six  key  categories:  

1. Social presence: How  many  social  networks  was  the  company  on?   
2. Activity: Was  the  content  kept  fresh  with  regular  updates?
3. Engagement: Were  the  companies    engaging  their  users  and  generating interest?    
4. Social network: How  simple  and  intuitive  was  the   connection  between  social  networks?    
5. Virality: Was  the  content  spread  around   the  social  sphere?
6. Sommunity Size: How  big  was  the  community?

Pharma has been accused of being on the dark side, but now one agency is encouraging it to go there. The dark social side, that is.

While the name “dark social” sounds sinister, it’s actually just a growing way that people share content on social media, according to Andrew Grojean, social media manager at Intouch Solutions: “Dark social is effectively word-of-mouth sharing. It’s when a user does things like copy and paste a URL and drop it into a messaging app, or copies a link on a website and send it in an email where referrals aren’t always passed.”

Dark social also includes other shared activity that can’t be tracked or analyzed, such as links or content sent in instant messages, texts, Snapchats, mobile apps or even emails.

The problem for marketers is that dark social activity accounts for up to 75% of all sharing on social channels, and that figure has been growing over the past few years. That’s quite a bit of unknown activity when it comes to a brand and its content.

Dark social is also likely a valuable share, Grojean said. People sending content links in private messages are likely to be sending to a close circle of family, friends and acquaintances. Studies have repeatedly shown that people trust those kinds of word-of-mouth endorsements from family and friends more than they do advertisements.

So how can a pharma marketer tell if they’re getting a lot of dark social traffic? Marketers in general can usually tell the difference between direct traffic from people who type a simple url into a browser and the pasted-in link that still shows up as direct traffic in analysis but seems unlikely to have been hand-typed because of a long and unwieldy URL.

The good news is that pharma can take some steps to track and improve dark social sharing information, and Grojean offered some suggestions.

First, companies can start tracking everything. They can add tracking URLs to sites, emails, and Facebook and other social posts by creating a unique URL for each so that when someone copies the URL into a private message or chat and the receiver opens it, marketers using analytics will be able to tell how the user got to them.

New communications technology has the potential to both disrupt and enhance the pharmaceutical industry, but research shows that pharma often needs to up its game when it comes to the adoption of new technologies.

Mobile devices have transformed how we access and consume content, and are poised to make similarly huge changes to the way consider our health (read “The mHealth App Market is at the Saturation Point”; http://sco.lt/5thWGv). mHealth revenue is projected to reach 26 billion by 2017, and the number of health apps has doubled in just the past two years. Social is also likely to have a major impact in the way that pharma communicates in the coming years. 52% of physician’s surveyed by Deloitte in this research expressed interest in communicating with pharma companies via social media.

However, pharma currently lags behind other verticals for using social media. Pharma spending on digital advertising is far below that of other industries, and it still conducts most of it’s communications with physicians via traditional channels. There is big potential for new communications technology to make the pharmaceutical industry more efficient and more engaged with it’s customers. This infographic from Deloitte shows the potential for new digital technology to allow pharma to market itself more effectively.