Using social listening to uncover a rich new source of expert opinion
GOALS
A medical affairs team wanted to gather insights from a major medical congress. Their objectives included the following:
- Identify key opinion leaders posting about the congress
- Monitor disease community chatter related to the congress
- Monitor congress chatter around 30+ keywords related to both the company and its competitors
SOLUTION
The medical affairs team wanted to conduct social monitoring activities at the congress and, if successful, roll them out across future conferences. The team used Within3’s social listening tools to monitor expert chatter pre- and post-congress – focusing on critical stakeholders. Despite providing a list of around 50 experts, the team had experienced difficulties gathering KOL insights in the past and wanted to test how social listening could help. Previous efforts to determine how many KOLs had social media handles had proved fruitless.
RESULTS
The congress monitoring pilot successfully identified new expert voices and captured real-time insights. Far from having zero presence on social media – as previous efforts had indicated – many of these KOLs were highly active online and frequently engaged with congress-related topics. The platform collected:
- Nearly 15,000 posts
- Content generated by 3,000 unique global authors
Because social listening includes more than just Twitter, the client previously found it challenging to monitor blogs, forums, and other major platforms simultaneously while making sense of the multiple information streams. Using Within3’s congress monitor streamlined this process and allowed the medical affairs team to identify which topics, trials, and sessions garnered the most online attention during the event. The team’s social listening program monitored conversations about:
- More than 30 client-requested keywords
- 17 trials
- Six specific organizations
- Three key competitors
Based on the congress-related conversations, the medical affairs team was able to:
- Discover four new expert voices
- Identify trending topics during the event and gauge which trials and sessions generated
the most buzz - Determine how online conversations differed from what was happening on the conference floor
- Understand overall sentiment around data releases from their own organization and a competitor
- Learn how HCPs were discussing the impact of a specific trial on the disease community, providing unscripted and unbiased expert opinions
The team could read tweets and other posts and then incorporate that information into their conversations during the congress. This allowed the team to be more agile and informed in their discussions with experts at the event.
CONCLUSION
Because the conference monitoring tool helped identify new opinion leaders, the team decided to roll the social media monitor tool out to global teams and agreed the Within3 insights management platform should be a primary part of any congress activity. Team leadership also recommended that Within3 be considered for use throughout the year and not solely for congresses. This approach would capture real-time insights as the scientific landscape changes with new therapy filings and data releases, allowing the team to understand how trends change over time and provide added value to our existing insight-gathering activities.
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