Today’s trend shows that online communities run the virtual world. Electronic word of mouth happens to be the cheapest and most effective way of promoting and “advertising”. Places where people exchange their opinions and experiences and make their own content are the most powerful ones. In the pharma business, communities among physicians as well as among patients can play a very important role.

We can still feel that many marketers underestimate this aspect. Let’s look at it from the patient’s point of view. There are plenty of disease focused websites, providing information about various diseases, possible treatments supplemented with testimonials from patients. However, patients (represented by the web site’s visitors) are not always provided with enough space for sharing their experiences and knowledge about their particular problem.

However there are clear advantages of such a space not only for the patient, but also for the company. The patient gets to meet other people who have the same problems and they can support each other. But by making the contributions on such website public the pharma company can read the patients’ minds, learn about their concerns, worries and wishes and respond to these needs in their communication campaigns. Understanding the patients is crucial for the success of any patient oriented marketing communication and including the 5’Cs when crafting the marketing strategy should be a standard.

Analysis of online patient communities – three example

We have investigated three portals that offer platform for online patient communities’ communication. These were chosen based on their presence on Internet as shown by search tools findings (www.patientslikeme.com, www.steadyhealth.com ) or their referencing in some healthcare and pharma oriented news (www.imedix.com). It is important to note that Pears Health Cyber is neither linked to any of these portals nor wants to promote them with this article. Pears Health Cyber is open to analyze other topics of your interest upon a request.

Browsing through the online communities’ portals we identified some points that pharma companies could capitalize on when searching for patient related information, seeking insights in patient compliance & medication adherence issues, patients’ habits, questions, problems, etc.

1) The  www.patientslikeme.com portal has seen an increase in its number of registered users by 2 115 in the last month. In total, some 42 382 patients are registered there. Of these 71% are female and 29% male. The majority of the website users come from the USA as it is a US based portal. What PatientLikeMe offers is patients´ health profiles, function to find patients with similar or the same symptoms or diagnosis and learn from others. This online community is built to support information exchange between patients. The website provides customized disease specific visualization tools (charts, diagrams) to help patients understand their condition. The online community groups are divided by prevalent or rare diseases. Through this website patients share very private information: detailed personal health data with the other registered users. It makes you wonder about motives of the patients to be as open as they are. They share data that would normally be strictly confidential and locked in physician’s office. It is no exception, that an HIV positive patient, displaying a photo of his face, shares very intimate information in a forum with another one. Do these people feel that openness and familiarity with others, who suffer from the same illness, can help them live better life? Do they feel satisfaction over the fact that by sharing their own experience from treatment and life in general they can help someone else? Most likely yes, as they volunteer to do it with no request for remuneration for doing do. The registration on this portal is free and once you are registered you can engage in the forum. It also seems to be an interesting source of patients for clinical trials.

2) The second online community portal we studied is the www.imedix.com. It is a multi-specialty commercial platform that helps patients to find and share health information for free.  Members of the iMedix community share their experiences and rank medical content in order to make health information personal, organized and accessible to everyone. The iMedix platform is owned by an iMedix company – US/Israelian founders who capitalize on centralizing a large target audience of patients from all over the world in one online platform which they sell as an advertising space.  One reason why their strategy is successful is the fact that advertising through this portal can be targeted based on patients support groups segmentation. Some of the featured support groups are: Swine flu – new, Depression, Pregnancy, Diet, Alcoholism, Bipolar Disorder, Breast Cancer, ADHD. Other groups contain all topics from healthcare world e.g. Diabetes type 1&2, Alzheimer disease, Baby´y health, Breast cancer, Cervical cancer, Colon cancer, Cystic fibrosis, Endometriosis, Enlarged prostate, Epilepsy, Heart Failure, Hepatitis B, C, Heroin Addiction, HIV, Hypertension, Infertility, Insomnia and  much more when we go further in an alphabetical order. All support group contain community forum, questions and answers section, videos, articles, group members’ profiles and of course advertisements and sponsored links. Community members can belong to more support groups, based on their interests. Member profiles show truly international coverage having people not only from the USA (however US prevail) but also from Chile, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Lebanon, Philippines, Turkey etc.

3) The third portal we reviewed was www.steadyhealth.com, which is a US online patient community portal. The topics range from the US favourite Nutrition & Dieting and Weight Loss, over women’s health, pregnancy, children’s and Teens Health, Sexual Health, Men’s Health, to specialty medicine areas such as Gastrointestinal disorders, Mental Disorders, Automimmune Diseases, Nervous System Disorders and Diseases, Cancer, Skin& Hair Problems, Allergies, Addiction & Recovery. One separate section is dedicated to Drugs & Medications. The three most popular groups with the highest numbers of topics and posts in forums are: women’s health (22 846  topics, 55 089 posts, favourite topics birth control, menopause, breast health), pregnancy (22 483  topics, 53 834 posts, favourite topics women’s fertility, miscarriage, abortion), and sexual health (12 500 topics, 37 560  posts, favourite topics sexually transmitted diseases, sexual dysfunction). SteadyHealth goes beyond the discussions about various diseases and treatments. It enables patients to rank their favourite physicians (US states only), medical treatment and medicines. However, discussions and forums are the core of the portal. Other sections of the portal include: Articles, Videos, Encyclopaedia, Drugs info, Doctor search. Registration is again for free. Few advertisements and featured sponsored links and products are also visible. Nevertheless, their number is limited.

The above described were only three examples of multi-specialty and third party owned online patient communities portals. However, a pharma company can start thinking of creating its own patient community dedicated to a topic related to the company’s product portfolio since a successful community portal can deliver the answers to many questions pharmaceutical companies ask themselves every day.

Five rules for pharma company that wants to start online patient community

Most of the communities are naturally born around some interest of the users. Facebook doesn’t need any promotion and it’s one of the most frequently visited portals. But the question is how to drive such traffic on your own website.
There are several requirements:

a) Relevant topic
b) Useful and functional tools (forum, comments etc.)
c) Awareness
d) Contributors
e) Objectivity

First you need to find a relevant topic. It is impossible to make people talk about something they don’t feel comfortable about, for example overactive bladder. A small trick: start a forum on a topic that is more acceptable and interesting for the users (for example hormonal contraception) and then insert some posts about the topic you’re interested in. Communicating tools are essential. If something doesn’t work, people will be reluctant to use it. Luckily, there are many predefined communication tools that have been tested by the users and are available for anyone. Then come the “second level requirements” that don’t depend on you only. You can make artificial awareness about your site by using PR campaign, banners etc, but if you push too hard people may feel it’s too commercial and thus bias and will ignore it. Our recommendation would be to use partner websites, infomercials and write about the new site in other relevant discussions you find online.

Still, if you have a good and functional website about interesting topics and people know about it and even visit it, how will you make them to contribute? You can appeal to them by involving a famous person or a physician in a chat with them, you can motivate them by offering the first few contributors some remuneration but this is only temporary and should not become a general practice. You need to hook them to the web by the quality and attractiveness of content (information service) and by community functions. Once someone responds to someone else’s post, the original creator should be informed about that and asked to write a reply. You can let the users to send each other messages or share some files. That’s the point of creating communities, you involve people in something they like and let them make it grow. That way, you provide them the space and you receive the answers for your questions (or at least you boost your CSR activities portfolio). And last but not least; you must be objective. Once patients find any sign of bias within such community website, you can pronounce it dead because the electronic word of mouth we mentioned at the beginning can work for you just as well as against you.

Our readers preferences and needs:

Let us know what areas or topics would you company be interested in. We will conduct an internet analysis and research of patients´ discussions, forums and online communities for you FOR FREE.

By Iveta Kulhankova and Vendula Machackova

Sure there are many situations that speak for the centralization. The costs of marketing campaign can be spread across several localizing countries and the company as a whole can safe a fair amount of money. On the other hand the organizational structure can at times become quite unclear  and non-transparent. Less marketing services providing companies get the chance to compete for a project pitch which may keep the costs of marketing activities quite high. Local operating units may feel neglected and then don’t cooperate during the localization process.

It is clear that the current process of centralizing marketing activities is based on some sound reasoning. At the same time though, the cons of such a trend need to be foreseen and avoided if the pharmaceutical companies want to enjoy the pros to the full extent.

Have you seen the videos on YouTube by AstraZeneca, GSK or J&J? Are you interacting in any of the Pharma oriented LinkedIn groups like Pharmaceutical Discussion Group, Pharma Connections Worldwide, Professionals in Pharmaceutical and Biotech Industry and others? What are the main benefits for you from these? Can you measure them? Or can you just measure the time they are stealing from your work or even more often private time? Do you think that communication in these media will ever be more attractive for you than going out with your peer from the industry or alumni for a chat over a beer or dinner?

 
In the next issue: Videos as parts of Marketing Campaigns and Pharma Companies

They provide positive or negative testimonials, and share with other online community members or internet users and website readers their life experience with a certain disease and a given drug or drugs, side effects, change in life etc. They do not debate just one drug. The more people participate, the more opinions. The more opinions, the more comments, that’s how community and online forum discussions work.

And of course if you are a pharma company, you can’t monitor and comment on every single mentioning of your product on the web. But you can drive discussions if you decide to lead them and give your patients and communities your own online platform to do so. Some pharma companies have done a few projects in this field already, some present videos on You Tube, some have their own YouTube channels, some have Facebook profiles, some use Twitter.

 
Do you do anything to participate in online social media already? Or are you just planning to start? Do you think it is just a bubble but basically can not bring anything to you? Or do you believe the web 2.0 tools can create a positive impression of your brand once you go to internet public and address and solve customers’ questions and problems through online media. Do you believe this can even improve brand loyalty?

 
In the next issue: How to use Social Media to Communicate More Effectively in Pharma Industry? Measuring online social media success in pharma.