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June 2014
Vol. 13, No. 6
•
Pharma Marketing Network®
www.pharmamarketingnews.com
How to Host a Successful Pharma TweetChat
Tips from Boehringer Ingelheim
Author: John Mack
Published by:
Pharma Marketing Network
publisher@pharma-mkting.com
PMN1306-03
Pharma Marketing News
Vol. 13, No. 6: June 2014
I
n September, 2013, months before the FDA
published its long-awaited guidance for the U.S.
pharma industry’s use of Twitter and other
Internet/social media platforms (e.g., Google
search ads) with character space limitations (see
“FDA Sets Up Roadblock for Branded Rx Promotional Tweets”; http://bit.ly/pmn1306-01), Boehringer
Ingelheim (BI) hosted an “online Twitter conference”—i.e., TweetChat—focused on atrial fibrillation
(see the Pharmaguy Social Media Timeline;
http://bit.ly/PG-SM-Timeline).
Since then, BI has hosted other disease-specific
TweetChats focused on atrial fibrillation, chronic
obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD) and lung
cancer. Despite the regulatory challenges posed by
such activities, these were all successful, both in
terms of delivering value to stakeholders and BI,
while remaining compliant with existing laws and
regulations.
In the May, 2014, issue of Pharma Marketing News,
Boehringer’s use of TweetChats as harbingers of the
Emerging Medical Conference was reviewed (see
http://bit.ly/pmn1305-02).
This article reviews “How pharma TweetChats can
drive healthcare innova-tion,” a tweetchat “playbook”
published by PharmaPhorum (http://bit.ly/pptcpb),
which provides detailed insights into how BI plans
and delivers successful pharma TweetChats. The
authors of the playbook—Patricia Alves, Social
Media Community Manager, and Jaclyn Fonteyne,
Social Media Specialist, at BI—were also interviewed
for this article.
Sharing Lessons
"TweetChats have gained increasing publicity within
healthcare recently as a number of pharmaceutical
companies, including Boehringer Ingelheim, have
taken their first steps into this new form of social
media engagement,” say Alves and Fonteyne. “As
more companies explore this activity, we felt it was
important to share some of the lessons we have
learned around why and how pharmaceutical companies should run TweetChats.”
Firstly, for those who are unfamiliar with the concept
of a TweetChat, think of it as a conference call using
Twitter. “The beauty of Twitter is that these messages can then be broadcast to all of one’s followers,
rather than just linear correspondence between two
people,” say Alves and Fonteyne.
“By using a unifying hashtag such as ChatAFib or
COPDChat, which are two of our past tweet chats,
we make sure that everyone is discussing a specific
disease-related topic for the length of the tweet chat,”
said Fonteyne.
© 2014 Pharma Marketing Network. All rights reserved.
Pharma Marketing News
Page 1
One of the benefits of hosting a TweetChat is gaining
new Twitter followers. Typically, BI gains between 200
and 400 new followers after
each TweetChat. That may
be a lot for you, but at the
time of this writing,
@boehringer has nearly
35,000 followers. Adding
Patricia Alves
400 more is only a 1%
increase. Considering,
however, that BI believes a productive TweetChat
does not need hundreds of participants—in fact that
would prove slightly overwhelming—and only 20-30
active participants are needed for a successful chat,
gaining 400 new followers is impressive.
Of greater benefit to BI are the insights into the
challenges of AFib and other subjects of the hosted
chats as well as forging relationships with stakeholders who also benefit. Here’s how BI sees the
benefits:
• Patient advocacy groups have the opportunity
to share their first-hand experience of working
with patients and providers with organizations
that can act to improve disease management,
but who may not fully understand the
challenges being faced on the front line.
• Healthcare providers in turn, can respond to the
feedback procured from patient advocacy
groups and patients around their challenges
beyond the clinic and also escalate areas of
unmet need to pharmaceutical companies and
other providers of health solutions.
• Pharmaceutical companies procure real-life
insight from both groups around the key areas
of unmet need and how medicines, diagnostics
and broader support services need to address
these. In addition, through facilitating these
TweetChats, closer relationships are forged
which can lead to further discussion and
partnership beyond the confines of Twitter.
“Remember, it’s important for us to not only discuss
specific topics around disease that these are to raise
awareness, but it’s also important for us as a pharma
company to understand and listen to the opinions
and experiences of others in the field,” said Alves.
Planning a TweetChat
The first TweetChat hosted by BI was a pilot study
that didn’t benefit from much organization beforeContinues…
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Vol. 13, No. 6: June 2014
Page 2
Figure 1. Healthcare providers, patient advocacy groups and the pharmaceutical industry
can discuss multiple areas of common interest via TweetChats. Source: PharmaPhorum (http://bit.ly/pptcpb)
hand. After that experience, BI decided that planning
is “very essential” to any tweet chat, especially for
the drug industry.
The old adage of “build it and they will come” should
certainly not be applied to TweetChats, says the BI
TweetChat playbook. “Instead, the live TweetChat
itself should be viewed as the tip of the iceberg, with
90% of the underlying effort taking place before the
TweetChat even begins.”
Jaclyn Fonteyne
One important underlying
effort that must be made is
to get regulatory/legal
approval. “Because of the
highly-regulated nature of
pharmaceutical industry,”
said Alves, “it’s very important for us to have
every aspect of the TweetChat approved beforehand, which makes preparation very, very important.”
The social media team at
BI is within the PR—public relations or corporate
communications—department. As such, it’s important to work together as a team with marketing,
medical, and legal to plan and have all the aspects of
the tweet chat reviewed. “Even during the tweet chat
itself, we work closely with our relevant medical and
legal colleagues,” said Alves. “We also work with
them directly to define the boundaries within which
we can tweet by the minute, so they’re always
present in the room to support us during these tweet
chats.”
According to BI, the following planning stages are
critical to ensure success:
1. Define the theme, audience and alignment
with associated groups / events
“Just in the same way that a real-life event needs to
define what topic it is going to cover, who this topic is
relevant to and identify an appropriate time to take
place, a TweetChat must do exactly the same.”
2. Secure internal support and participation
There are inherent risks involved in conducting open,
real-time online discussion associated with that fact
that pharma is a highly regulated industry. As Judith
von Gordon, Head of Media and PR at Boehringer
Ingelheim, succinctly puts it, “senior management is
supportive of all our initiatives in social media
provided we are aware of potential risks and
benefits.”
3. Questions to ask (and answer) early on in
the process:
• What happens if someone mentions a specific
product?
• What happens if someone mentions a side
effect?
Continues…
© 2014 Pharma Marketing Network. All rights reserved.
Pharma Marketing News
PMN1306-03
Pharma Marketing News
Vol. 13, No. 6: June 2014
• What happens if misleading medical information
is presented?
• What happens if off-topic discussion is initiated
about a company or its products?
4. Proactively reach out to participants
ahead of the TweetChat
Page 3
Note that the analytics—number of tweets, number
of participants, and “impressions” —are available
afterward for all to see, which may not be something
every pharmaceutical company would be comfortable sharing with the world. See Figure 3 on page 4,
for an example.
BI believes that involving a small number of relevant
people in the TweetChat is much more important
than big numbers. “Even with a highly relevant topic
and internal support to proceed, raising sufficient
awareness of the TweetChat ahead of time is vital for
achieving strong participation.”
“We start the promotion of the TweetChat a minimum
of 2 weeks beforehand, sharing information, reaching
out to our audiences, external experts, online experts, inviting them, and sharing with them the information that we are developing,” said Alves. “We also
try to use other social media channels to promote the
TweetChat.”
To achieve this quickly, BI recommends setting up
an online “hub page’ for the TweetChat which
includes details on the theme, appropriate audience
and date / time (see Figure 2, below, for an
example).
“This promotional activity is relatively late in the
game,” said Fonteyne. “By then we have really
planned thoroughly as a team and proactively
reached out to potential participants or potential
influencers behind the scenes as it were.”
BI also recommends registering the TweetChat
hashtag with Healthcare Hashtag Project (Symplur).
This makes it easier for users to find the chat and
access a transcript afterward. Even if people don’t
follow @Boehringer on Twitter, they can follow the
conversation using the hashtag.
BI also advertised the TweetChat via Twitter, which
can target specific followers by interest. “It helps us
is to reach the right people with our message, which
stands out from all the noise,” said Alves.
Continues…
Figure 2. “Hub Page” for #COPDChat
© 2014 Pharma Marketing Network. All rights reserved.
Pharma Marketing News
PMN1306-03
Pharma Marketing News
Vol. 13, No. 6: June 2014
The following is an edited transcript of a podcast
discussion between PharmaGuy and the BI social
media team. You can listen to the full podcast here:
http://bit.ly/PMT221
Moderator or No Moderator?
Pharmaguy: In a recent TweetChat I noticed you had
somebody who was not part of BI act as a moderator
and you planned out in advance what topics would
be discussed. The moderator kept the discussion
focused on those topics rather than just allowing a
free flow discussion. Can you explain why you did it
that way?
Patricia Alves: Sure. We actually tried both ways –
with and without a moderator. We want to host the
chats to raise awareness and sometimes we like to
have someone, an expert from the outside, who has
an interest in the topic and a strong, relevant network
themselves. This not only stimulates greater
participation, but also positions the TweetChat as
more of an open and impartial discussion.
PG: The other issue that came up was about
regulations. Although you obviously can’t control who
participates in the TweetChat, BI has specifically
indicated that these chats are NOT intended for
physicians in the UK or the US. Can you tell us a
little bit about the regulations that required you to do
that?
Jaclyn Fonteyne: Each country has a unique set of
guidelines. For example, there’s the APBI in the
United Kingdom, and there’s also the guidelines from
Page 4
the FDA in the US. As a pharmaceutical company we
have to abide by these regulations even though there
are a lot of gray areas applying those guidelines to
social media discussion. So we like to make sure
that we have all of our bases covered and we work
very closely with our legal team to better understand
what we can and cannot do.
Although our intention is not to discuss treatment,
there might still be some content presented by
participants during the TweetChat related to specific
devices (therefore, potentially treatments) despite
our guidance. As a pharma company, we need to
comply with the regulations and not interact directly
in discussions relating to any specific treatment with
patients. We don’t want to encourage treatment
discussion and therefore we want to be clear on the
intended audience.
Measuring Success
PG: Let’s talk about the measures of success or as
some people might call it return on investment.
JF: One of the main objectives is to raise awareness
surrounding a specific disease area, such as COPD,
lung cancer, atrial fibrillation and stroke.
Another objective is to drive the social media conversation about treatment goals in the specific
disease area and engage in conversation with key
digital opinion leaders within the specific treatment
area to better understand the sentiment of our online
Continues…
Figure 3. Analytics for #ChatAFib via Symplur. Symplur computes total impressions by taking the number of tweets per
participant and multiplying it with the number of followers that participant currently has. This is done for all participants
in this time period and then finally the numbers are added up.
© 2014 Pharma Marketing Network. All rights reserved.
Pharma Marketing News
PMN1306-03
Pharma Marketing News
Vol. 13, No. 6: June 2014
community. This basically means that our measures
of success will revolve around the engagement in the
online conversations that we generate with our
TweetChat. So we measure how many active
contributors we get to see if it exceeds the goals that
we have set for ourselves. Perhaps our goal is 30
active participants during the TweetChat. In that
case, if we see 50 participants in the hourly
TweetChats, we know we were successful.
Page 5
these activities become less siloed and more
integrated. “Rather than having specialist teams lead
on TweetChats, which are managed outside other
communication activities, they will become integrated
into broader medical communications departments.”
In addition, we also measure how many Twitter
accounts we reach with our tweet chat or with our
hashtag. We look to see if we have reached media
people, HCPs, or patient advocacy groups, health
bloggers like yourself.
The Future of Pharma TweetChats
BI sees three factors driving the evolution of
TweetChats:
1. Regular ‘series’ TweetChats aligned with
particular disease areas
BI plans for more regular use of TweetChats to keep
in touch with external stakeholders.
While a one-off TweetChat on a particular disease
area is valuable, even further value is achieved by
conducting regular chats, allowing ongoing engagement with all those with a vested interest in finding
health solutions. Used in this way, TweetChats can
mimic the kind of valuable interaction that has
historically been confined less frequent physical
activities, such as large disease congresses or
advisory board meetings, both of which present
logistical challenges that Twitter can help to circumvent.
2. More collaborative TweetChats
Rather than being sponsored and run solely by a
pharmaceutical company, BI suggests that perhaps
there is value in having collaboratively run
TweetChats that involve disease associations,
patient advocacy groups and pharmaceutical
companies.
Disease associations and patient advocacy groups
may lack the resources and expertise to manage
TweetChats on their own. Collaboration with pharma
companies can be beneficial to both parties and to
lead to other collaborative efforts.
3. Integration of TweetChats with other
communications
As the pharmaceutical industry becomes more
comfortable with TweetChats—and other social
media engagement activities—BI expects to see
© 2014 Pharma Marketing Network. All rights reserved.
Pharma Marketing News
Figure 4. Over time, pharmaceutical company hosted
TweetChats will become more frequent, collaborative and
tightly integrated with broader corporate and disease area
communications. Source: PharmaPhorum
(http://bit.ly/pptcpb)
According to BI, the following are the most important
points for the pharmaceutical industry to bear in mind
with respect to TweetChats:
• Other healthcare organizations and individuals
are already using Twitter, and TweetChats, as a
way of regularly communicating. If the
pharmaceutical industry does not also join in it
risks being less informed by being left out of the
conversation.
• Successful TweetChats, as with any
engagement, require extensive planning and
communication, both internally and externally, to
ensure they deliver value while managing risk.
• The way in which the success of TweetChats is
measured cannot be in simple financial
• ROI metrics, but instead on the level of
engagement, which can lead to closer
collaboration and downstream health solutions
that are of value to pharmaceutical companies,
providers and patients.
• TweetChats should not be seen as standalone
activities, but instead need to be integrated with
the way the pharmaceutical industry
communicates via other channels, both at a
corporate and disease area level.
Pharma Marketing News
PMN1306-03