Listen and learn

Listening is fundamental to engaging customers in a social media world. But in the pharma industry, our marketing and PR channels still often sound more like monologues than dialogues. When we learn to really listen to customers – in the sense of seeking out what they are saying, giving them forums to communicate, and making their voice part of our enterprise – we will be more ready to compete in today’s connected marketplace.

We all like to think that we listen carefully to consumers. Listening is one of those apple-pie-and-motherhood values that no one could possibly be against. But what is your company doing to really connect with customers – or better yet, to help consumers connect with each other? How do you respond to people who post about your company on Twitter or Facebook? And what is it like for consumers to deal with your company when they have problems or questions? Actually hearing customers and building a community around them goes a lot deeper than tweeting about your latest product.

With so much chatter between traditional and digital media, there are lots of folks monitoring and benchmarking and analysing, but truly listening has become a lost art. And that represents a strategic opportunity for you. 

From PR to dialogue
Listening is the core of everything – relationship to engagement to customer behavior. If we are truly not listening, how can we adjust our messages, tweak our initiatives or drive engagement?

Today there are more customer touch-points than ever as we become more virtually connected. But, in general, pharma has been slow to the social media party. Barely a year ago, many big pharma companies were not even on Facebook or Twitter, and according to a comment made last year on the widely read healthcare blog KevinMD.com, at least one unnamed pharma firm had a policy of requiring approval two weeks in advance to post a tweet.

Of course, listening is not just virtual. Every channel between pharma and its customers has the potential to become part of a dialogue. In his book The Chaos Principle,  columnist Bob Garfield of Advertising Age lists his top three principles of word-of-mouth as 1) listen to the conversation, 2) better yet, host the conversation, and 3) offer that community a stake in your enterprise. Let’s look at each of these to explore what it really means to listen to consumers.

Listen to the conversation
Of course, you have customer relationship management systems. And you solicit and measure feedback from people who contact you. (You do, don’t you?) You probably have the ability to mine and analyse your own specific customer interactions. But listening goes deeper than that.

Your customers inhabit a big world – all of them, ranging from prescribers to industry partners to patients – and they are leaving footprints everywhere they go. They join online support groups for their health issues. They gather around virtual fireplaces for things they share in common, from motherhood to managed care. They tweet about things that matter to them. And they gather in places in the real world, ranging from medical conferences to healthcare rallies, where you can meet and talk with them. Are you listening to these conversations and learning from the people you serve?

Better yet, host the conversation
‘We talk with our customers. After all, we have a blog and allow people to post comments to it.’ Nope. That’s a monologue with a suggestion box attached to it. Hosting the conversation is about building dialogue – how you can connect with your customers, and how they can connect with each other. People often talk about the net promoter score for those who recommend their products to others. Take this a big step further and think about attracting and engaging a community.

Consumer-level healthcare has started to get this earlier than most, with corporate-sponsored communities for everything ranging from weight-loss to urinary incontinence. One of our clients, the American Cancer Society, has a site linked prominently to its main page that lets people do everything from sharing their cancer stories to finding resources – or even having a little fun, such as emailing a link to have Devo or Justin Bieber sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to celebrate another year of survival. Here, listening means attracting people with things that matter, and then giving them a voice.

Pharma is a little late to this party – for some firms, their online presence is still at the level of glorified package inserts – but others are now starting to dip their toes into the water. It’s time to look at the best practices of customer engagement and start jumping into the pool.

Offer a stake in your enterprise
Now we get to the hard part – building stakeholders. Sure, you have focus groups and advisory boards. But do you have a living, breathing community that drives the future direction of your company? Bob Garfield talks about how the LEGO company leverages the wisdom of customer crowds to design new LEGO products, and compensates these customers with both recognition equity and real cash.

Switching back to pharma, you probably aren’t going to have heartburn sufferers do the microbiology for your next proton pump inhibitor drug. But what are your patients, your prescribers and your partners telling you about what is most important to them moving forward? Listening means asking yourself whether your market simply purchases things you produce or is an engaged voice that feels heard and felt.

Are you listening?
We throw around words like ‘viral’ and ‘connected’ all the time nowadays, but in reality, the ‘social’ part is often missing from social media. Too often, we see customer touch-points like these turn into just another one-way marketing channel, where no one is really listening.

There is a much better way. Advertising agency CEO Chuck Brymer talks about engaging the swarm, where the quality of your one-to-one interactions leads people to flock both to you and to each other. This is where listening and PR start to intersect with each other. When you move from talking about how great your product is to how you listen to and engage people, you gain the greatest promotional tool of all – an engaged community that gathers around your brand.

The Author
Marian Cutler, Senior Vice President at Brodeur Partners, can be reached at mcutler@brodeur.com or (212) 336-7520.