Social listening is powerful – but not a cure-all. Without the correct strategy and a knowledgeable partner to support your social monitoring activities, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information or miss the insights you need entirely. The most important thing to remember is that the right vendor won’t present social monitoring as a catch-all solution but as part of a holistic approach to insights management. Here are four other tips for choosing a social listening solution.
Focus on the destination, not the journey
Social monitoring should be seen as a means to an end: not as an end in itself. Look for a vendor who works closely with you to understand the specific problems you want to solve and the goals you want to achieve. Effective social monitoring requires a narrow focus – a vendor that works with you to create a targeted social monitoring strategy will help you avoid analysis paralysis by going too broad.
Social monitoring is just one part of the story
It’s important to recognize that you won’t get all the answers you need from social alone. Social monitoring is just one piece of the insights-gathering puzzle. It should be used to support a multichannel insight-gathering strategy that includes activities such as in-person and asynchronous engagement and MSL reporting. Look for a vendor that provides social monitoring as part of a broader insights-gathering strategy to support your specific needs and goals.
“The information lives out there. It doesn’t mean that it’s the whole truth. It’s messy and it’s big, and you need to know what you want to look for, how to find it, and who you want to partner with to help you find that information.” – Caroline Schaffrath Demarco, Director of Insights Strategy & Innovation, Within3
Look for the experience to offer guidance
Many pharma teams will be entirely new to social monitoring. Not only will they need a vendor with the expertise to guide them through the process, but one with a robust, highly available customer support network to help them get the results they need.
Find a solution that provides the “so what”
Dashboards can be useful when it comes to identifying how many and how much. But you’ll still spend time analyzing and reporting on that data. Look for a solution that can help you integrate the results of your social monitoring with other data sources and give you actionable next steps.
Pharma can be risk-averse, and adopting new technology comes with many questions: Will it provide a quick ROI? Is it going to take a long time to integrate? Will my team use it? Will it work with my current systems and processes? And if the answer to any of those questions is wrong, will I carry the responsibility?
Medical affairs teams must overcome these fears to extract the full value from tools like social monitoring. Resistance to change in pharma isn’t uncommon, and trying something new or different can have legal or regulatory consequences. Often, not making a decision or pausing new initiatives indefinitely feels like the safer option.
For this reason, pharma teams should partner with a trusted and experienced vendor to begin a social listening journey. The vendor’s job is to reduce risk and help you make an achievable and effective adoption plan.
Download our e-book to learn about choosing the right social monitoring solution for pharma insights.