Posting with a Purpose: Using social media to reach your audience: Part 1 The Nuts and Bolts
Social media has its own set of opportunities, challenges, and solutions - and even more so when used in medical communications. This episode will examine development of a social media plan, who should create content, understanding compliance, researching your audience, defining your purpose, and more. This episode will also explore where the field is heading next and what may be possible in the future of social media as a communication avenue.
Jennifer Ghith, Global Scientific Publications and Innovations Director at Pfizer. Her areas of focus include artificial intelligence, advancing digital dissemination through social media and closed platforms, and programs aimed at achieving true patient-centricity.
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Rob Matheis:
Hello, and welcome to InformED, a podcast series where you'll hear industry experts share their thought-provoking insights and lessons in the field of medical communications. This series is brought to you by ISMPP, and is generously sponsored by MedThink SciCom. I'm Rob Matheis, President and CEO of ISMPP. With us today, we have Jenny Ghith, Global Scientific Publications and Innovations Director at Pfizer. Her areas of focus include artificial intelligence, advancing digital dissemination through social media and closed platforms, as well as programs aimed at achieving true patient centricity. Jenny is a certified medical publication professional, author on several high-tiered peer-reviewed publications, and has presented at national and local meetings. Today I'll be spending some time with Jenny talking about social media and medical publishing, which is one of the hottest topics facing our profession. Welcome, Jenny.
Jennifer Ghith:
Thank you for having me, Rob.
Rob Matheis:
It's great to have you, Jenny. So, when I first started with medical publishing, there wasn't such thing as social media, and any considerations around that we just published in peer-reviewed journals. Let's start off by you telling us why it's so important.
Jennifer Ghith:
Well Rob, I don't think you're alone. I think many of us are in the same boat that you are. I think when I got started in this, I was new to the publishing world, and my son actually knew more about social media than I did. I still look to him for advice, quite frankly, but I think this is an important time for us as publications professionals, as folks who are working in medical affairs. We have, for a long time been thinking about the time it takes for us to release information and really what happens to that information once we send it out.
Social media really gives us a unique way to facilitate transparency, to communicate data accurately in the face of what can be misinformation, and also to do so in ways that reach folks exponentially, beyond what we have been able to do in the past. So, it's a very interesting time. We also are seeing the expansion of digital overall, and people are spending more time with their screens, and more time on those platforms than they have in the past. So, it's really just an exciting time to be a part of scientific communications, and an exciting opportunity to be able to use this medium.
Rob Matheis:
Yeah, great response. As you know, we're going to be chatting about this across two different sessions, and this first part is really to talk about some of the nuts and bolts for those who maybe haven't stepped into social media before. Do you have any general advice for a company or an organization that may be trying to get into social media, and what can they do right off the bat?
Jennifer Ghith:
Well, I think at first you want to educate yourself to what's out there. Begin exploring, ask your colleagues, ask your friends. Look outside of our own industry too, quite frankly, at what's being done. Register on some of these platforms if you feel comfortable enough to do so. Do your research, but really, I think it all goes back to the basics of what we do as well, if that's reassuring at all to people. Think about what you want to achieve, what your objectives are with the pieces that you're writing and putting out there, and that should really guide you in terms of the choices that you make. Think about your purpose. Also think about your audience. Are you looking to reach people who are on a particular platform? Should you use a different platform? Do you understand their behaviors as much as you can? Even beyond that, do you understand the problems that they may be having?
It helps to think about not just the professions themselves. In oncology, we think about oncologists and neurologists, but to actually think about the persona or the profile more broadly, how are they consuming information? What does their day look like? When might they go to social media? What are they doing when they read journal articles? Are they seeing them as duplicative? Are they having trouble finding the right articles? Who are they connected to? Learn as much as you can, and learn about the channels, and that'll help guide your decisions. So, you can really kind of fall back on some of the basic principles that we have. Who are we trying to reach? Why are we trying to reach them, and then how do we reach them?
Rob Matheis:
Yeah, so I get it. We have to take into account the audience. That makes a lot of sense, and publication professionals are used to doing that. In terms of developing the content itself though, is that different? Are you working with the authors to do it? Or does a publication professional write it? Does the journal do it? Talk to us a little bit about that.
Jennifer Ghith:
I think that's a great question. So I think the answer is, it depends. So, what we're seeing is journals are also having their own social media handles. Journals may reach out through the publication process and may suggest tweets. The authors may be writing tweets. So, the authors may be digital opinion leaders, but then you also may be a part of a company that has their own social media handle, and you may be working with a team, or working to develop the content for social media yourself. I know that's kind of a broad answer. It makes it hard to figure out, well, what do I do in these individual situations? I think that if you break it down, and what I would suggest is start by understanding the social media policies where you work and of your company, and understand what you are able to do compliantly, versus not.
In some cases, if the journals are writing it, for example, the journals may do that independently, or the digital opinion leaders may also do that independently. In those cases, what you just want to make sure that you are doing is that you have done your due diligence in providing accurate information to them so that they can then take that and write that. Conversely, if you're doing this on your own and learning how to write it, you probably have cross-functional teams, or expertise amongst yourselves and other medical writers at your company who can help you develop short content. 280 characters or less is a tall order, but I think it's a really good challenge, because we've all been talking about bite-sized content a lot, and how difficult it is to distill down information. So, think of it as an opportunity to write and to really summarize in a way that's impactful all the work that you've been doing.
Rob Matheis:
Makes sense. Makes a lot of sense. Some of our listeners may be thinking, well, that all sounds good. Are there compliance aspects that we have to think about in the nuts and bolts parts of this conversation? If I'm developing some content or working with the author, do I have to have that content reviewed by my compliance, my legal teams, for example?
Jennifer Ghith:
Yeah. I think it's really important that we engage our colleagues and that we partner with them. They're learning too at times, and they can advise us. So, if you're unsure, ask. Involve them upfront. Let them know what you're planning to do, what you're facing. If you do get an inquiry, I would encourage you to have a conversation with them. Oftentimes, you will have a social media policy in place at your company, and you should familiarize yourself with that. Again, ask the social media policy owner if you have questions. You may want to bring in your publication team for a lunch and learn, or a brief discussion. I would definitely suggest thinking about that, and then another thing you want to think about is monitoring of the handles. That often comes up when we're thinking about compliance.
So, when we turn these things on, you're opening up a conversation. Social media is about a two-way dialogue. In some ways, we're learning about that, and we're not quite there yet, at least in the world that I've been working at, and responding as quickly as we'd like, and figuring out how we want to do that over the course of time. But the first thing you want to do is make sure you have monitoring in place for what you are putting out there, so that you can understand if people are responding to your tweets, if they're raising issues, if they're flagging an adverse event that needs to be reported, for example. All those things have to be considered before you flip the switch, if you will, and begin starting your own social media tweets and work.
Rob Matheis:
You brought up an interesting point around adverse events, and I know that's something that a lot of our listeners are grappling with. Is there, in your opinion, a responsibility to monitor for adverse events, and to follow the usual channels to report them? How does that work in your estimation?
Jennifer Ghith:
Yeah, so I think it is definitely something that comes to people's minds. We definitely have a responsibility to report that out. What you'll want to consider, again before you turn your handle on, is that you have report monitoring in place if you are planning on starting up your own handle through a corporation. If you're tweeting on things independently, you may have a different guidance on that with respect to your social media policy, and I would encourage you to take a look at those. If a journal is approaching you and opening up a tweet that is about a publication that you have, and you've never done it before, again, talk with your legal and regulatory colleagues on whether you need to do any additional due diligence on your side.
Some of these things are also independent, so if you are not necessarily taking a part in the draft of the content, the rules may be slightly different. So again, it's really just important to educate yourself, and to understand what's out there in terms of guidelines that are already in place. Admittedly, there may be some gray areas in those guidelines. Your teams are evolving with you, and I think the best advice is really to establish a strong partnership as you embark on this world that we're all living in today.
Rob Matheis:
Yeah, great response. I think it really gets us into an area that typical publication medical communication professionals don't grow up learning how to do necessarily. So, it's all an exploration as they get more into it. I want to take you back for just a second. You'd mentioned a term DOL, digital opinion leaders. Could you tell us a little bit more about who they are, what they do? We grew up learning about KOL, so what's this all about?
Jennifer Ghith:
Yes. So we have our KOLs, and those are key opinion leaders, and they're helping us oftentimes to write many of our publications, or they're speaking in public forums, and at congresses and meetings. What we've seen, and I think the pandemic has only accelerated all of this, are the emergence of digital opinion leaders. These are the folks who are on social media, who are tweeting out information and who have broad ranges of followers, who are respected amongst the digital community, who are weighing in heavily. They may be, for example, emerging physicians, or allied health professionals even perhaps, who are not necessarily as well known in at least the traditional aspects that we think. So, they may be someone who's attending a congress and what they're developing really resonates with the folks who are in the Twitterverse, for example. So, I think we're just beginning to understand them, but it is helpful to work with your colleagues across medical affairs, for example, to really understand the landscape of who is speaking out there on social media.
You can do things like social media listening if you don't know who those folks are yet. You can actually monitor the space to understand whose opinions are really rising to the top, and I would also just add that I think it's important to always remember as well that sometimes with Twitter and with other social media, everything can be amplified. Something that is not necessarily the practice-changing, phase III study that you would traditionally think of can also get an enormous amount of attention on Twitter, and we think of that as popularity bias. So, sometimes the tweets that are the most viral, who are getting the most reach, if you will, are for studies that are not typically thought of as what we would expect. I think social media listening helps to understand that, to help you understand when that's occurring, if that's occurring, whether or not you're able to, or even want to respond to that sort of information.
Rob Matheis:
Interesting. It sounds like there's a lot of new inputs that we can get from social listening, if you will, and trying to understand what's happening in that environment. Let me ask you a broader question. Do you think when we do traditional publication planning, we should be including aspects of social media listening, as well as social media in general as part of traditional publication planning?
Jennifer Ghith:
I would say absolutely, and I know that might be challenging for people, and I'm not saying that you have to do everything all at once. Social media listening is a way to understand the challenges that people are experiencing, or maybe the misunderstandings that they have around a certain space to help you plan for what you may want to communicate within your articles, and to help you understand very quickly the reach that your publications are having, and what follow-up information may be needed. Do I need to issue a paper on subgroups, for example? Because there's a big conversation on that on Twitter. These are all things that you can understand through social media, and that can help you develop a more impactful publication plan.
Rob Matheis:
Yeah, I agree. It's interesting, because there's different aspects that we now include in publication planning that we never thought of before. I guess having a more proactive approach is probably the best way to go, in terms of thinking it through.
Jennifer Ghith:
I agree. Again, I think Rob, we're all trying to work through this together, and we're all learning. I think maybe start small, if that's helpful at all as well. Think about perhaps what some of your major priorities are. Try to, again, monitor what you see with respect to that. It can be daunting, because there is a lot out there. We're all suffering from a bit of information overload, and I think that there's an art to finding the signal from the noise, and really trying to make some choices about what you need to prioritize in the context of the rest of what you're planning for. But conversely, think of the social media space as a way to help with knowledge democratization, that you can reach audiences that you haven't necessarily been able to reach, and you can understand the impact of the work that you're doing, and really be able to build better reactions to that as well.
Rob Matheis:
That's great. The one word that I want to really capture is purposeful. I think that you really hit the nail on the head, and when we think about what we should be doing, trying to make sure that the communications that we put out there actually have a purpose and intent. You mentioned metrics and KPIs. We're going to get into that the next session that we have together, so we'll talk a little bit about the future of social media, and how we can measure some of these things we're going next. So for today, Jenny, thank you so much for joining us. I look forward to part two of our InformED series where we're going to cover more of this content.
Jennifer Ghith:
Thank you, Rob. Go forward purposefully.
Rob Matheis:
Thanks for listening to InformED for Medical Communication Professionals. Please take a minute to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app, inform your colleagues, and rate our show highly if you liked what you heard today. We hope you'll also join us at an upcoming ISMPP University webinar, or even consider becoming a member of our association. Just go to ISMPP.org. That's I-S-M-P-P.org to learn more. I'm Rob Matheis. Content from this presentation reflects the collective experience and opinions of the presenters, and is not intended to represent the past or current views of Pfizer.
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