Who Owns Your Social Media?

"Twitter just announced a complex, confusing, and developer-alienating system that restricts their once-open, always cherished but now apparently taken for granted API," complained Michael Spitz, SVP and Managing Director at Zemoga. "The new rules change the playing field for third party developers, establish caps on number of users, and shift guidelines to requirements across four categories of businesses that Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land humorously characterized in Star Trek terms." Spitz characterized this as #TWITTERFAIL and he thinks the new rules "ruin the spirit of social media" and are "bad for healthcare" (see here).

Spitz's "rant" raises a couple of interesting issues that I will discuss with him this afternoon in a live Pharma Marketing Talk podcast (listen here or use the playback widget below).

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First, the premise that changes to Twitter's API can be "bad" for healthcare is based upon the notion that Twitter has been or could be "good" for healthcare. I'm not sure what Spitz includes in his "healthcare" category. Since he works for an agency with pharmaceutical company clients, I am sure he includes the drug industry as part of what he means by healthcare. I'd like to focus at least part of today's discussion on how Twitter can be good (or bad) for the pharma industry's goals of selling more drugs.

I have written several articles about how pharma can use Twitter to help support patients (see "Supporting Patients via Twitter and Beyond" and "Use of Twitter for Patient Support") and criticized pharma for using Twitter (and blogs) to promote their products (ie, "market"; see "Novo Nordisk's Branded (Levemir) Tweet is Sleazy Twitter Spam!" and "AstraZeneca's Timely CRESTOR Branded Blog Post: Did It Violate Its Own Policy?"). My view is that Twitter has been good for pharma mainly in the public relations realm, which may or may not translate into increased drug sales.

Most tweets from pharmaceutical companies are about what they are doing in this therapeutic area or that therapeutic area (e.g., support for COPD, atrial fibrillation, diabetes innovation, etc.). Pharma tweets a lot about clinical study results (mostly the positive results) and news from medical conferences where they are exhibiting ("come to our booth"). They also tweet about investor presentations and other news about their company that Wall Street finds of interest.

None of those tweets do healthcare any good -- e.g., improve outcomes of drug treatment. They dn, however, provide benefit to pharma companies by getting them more attention by the media, which dutifully followup with articles based on these pharma "Tweet Releases."

Another issue related to the lament about the more and more restrictive Twitter API is the question "Who Owns your Social media?", which was brought to my attention by Phil Baumann of "Health is Social." Baumann is also a member of the Advisory Board at Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, so he has a healthcare perspective beyond pharma.

I invited Baumann to be a guest on this afternoon's podcast, but he was not available. He did, however, send me some thoughts, one of which is:

"Too much emphasis has been placed on social media in general - at the expense of focusing on the only thing Healthcare or Pharma can own on the web: their own domains. Social Media should not be seen as the center of a web presence - ever. It's a tempting thought, but the reality is the other way around. Healthcare and Pharma organizations should learn [from] these API changes that they don't own anything on these social media sites. Many experts have laughed off blogging and traditional websites, but I still maintain that if you can't build your own solid presence on your own domain, you won't do well on social media in the long-run."

You should also read "The Over-promising of Healthcare Social Media" written by Baumann.

Here are a few other thoughts from Baumann on the Twitter API issue:

• The first thing that Healthcare and Pharma need to realize is that social software is pliant and tenuous. With social software, the tiniest tweaks can produce huge ramifications throughout a digital ecosystem.
• If the industries are going to be involved in social media, they need people on staff who can keep up with the technical changes that happen - in fact, they need to anticipate them and have plans to turn to when those changes take place. 
• The average person probably only cares about Twitter clients - I suspect that Twitter will eventually whittle clients down to a very few. It already owns TweetDeck, but hasn't developed this asset much. 
• The larger Healthcare/Pharma Enterprise impacts of the API changes are likely to be more in the area of data-mining, monitoring, metrics, etc. For example, Twitter might rate-limit calls for certain kinds of data - let's say a Pharma company or its vendor monitors for mentions of a drug and or keywords related to possible Adverse Events. Depending on the API changes over time, there may be limits to the amount of data that can be captured in a timely manner. 
• None of what Twitter is doing with its API is at all unexpected - at least it shouldn't be. Ultimately, this is Twitter's product - albeit one that increasingly is becoming a virtual public utility.

Fake vs. Real Pharma Twitter Followers

Piotr Wrzosinski (@pwrzosin), IPM Digital Marketing at Roche and a member of my Pharma Twitter Pioneer Group (see here), recently posted this to Twitter today:

"0% of my followers are fake. How many fake followers do you have..? http://sttsp.pl/ahaf @StatusPeople #FollowerSpam"

Goodie! Another social media metric I can use to compare pharma Twitter accounts. I quickly followed the link to StatusPeople Web site where I was invited to "Find out how many fake followers your friends have."

Before looking at my "friends" data, however, I looked at my own and found out that 73% of my nearly 12,000 Twitter followers were neither "fake" ("spam" accounts that "tend to have few or no followers and few or no tweets, but [which] tend to follow a lot of other accounts.") nor "inactive." This was quite better than most pharma Twitter accounts as can be seen in the following chart (click for an enlarged view):

I do not have 0% fakes like Piotr; six percent (6%) of my followers may be fakes. This is the lowest percentage among the 16 pharma Twitter accounts I measured. @Abbottnews had the highest percent of "fake" followers: 18%. Fouteen percent (14%) of followers of Roche, Novartis, Pfizer GSK(U.S.) are "fakes" or suspected spam accounts.

Why is it important to know how many fake and inactive followers a Twitter account has?

"There are two reasons," says StatusPeople. "First it's important for you to be sure when you communicate on Twitter that you are communicating with real and active followers. Because the more active your follower base the more likely they are to share your content.
The second reason is there are a growing number of Fakers out there. People who buy followers in a vain attempt to build legitimacy. "'Look at me I have 20,000 followers, I must know my...' They are essentially trying to game the system and it's important for you to be able to spot them, and steer clear of them. Becatse ultimately if you're willing to lie about how many friends you have you are not a very trustworthy individual."

Well, Pfizer has over 31,000 followers. Way back in 2010, I asked "How Did Pfizer Get So Many Twitter Followers?" (see here). I suggested that Pfizer sent out a memo to all their more than 100,000 employees worldwide telling them to follow @pfizer_news. I was kidding, of course. But I suspected something was up because Pfizer_news somehow attracted about 3-4,000 NEW Twitter followers in just a few days (see chart below)!

Source: pharmamkting.blogspot.com via Pharma on Pinterest

Did Pfizer "attempt to build legitimacy" by "gaming the system?"

One caveat: StatusPeople contends that its tool provides "very accurate insight into how many inactive and fake" followers a Twitter account has, but ONLY if there are fewer than 10,000 followers. "If you're very 'popular' the tool will still provide good insight but may better reflect your current follower activity rather than your whole follower base."

Only 6 out of my sample of 16 pharma Twitter accounts have fewer than 10,000 followers (Phrma, SanofiUS, Diabetes_Sanofi, BoehringerUS, BMSnews, and Abbottnews).

If you want to learn how many fake followers you have, go here.

How Johnson & Johnson Uses Twitter for Patient Support: A-plus for Effort, D-minus for Sharing

Every day, I get a synopsis of tweets and newsfeeds from selected pharma companies that I am following (see "News Direct from the Pharma Industry"). Lately, I've been noticing a number of tweets from Johnson and Johnson (@JNJComm) that are direct responses to complaints from consumers about its products. In some cases, complainants have had an extended conversation with JNJ.

However, you won't find these conversations if you look at the @JNJComm Twitter timeline here but you can find them in the PMN Forum archives here. More on this later. Right now I'd like to focus on one of these conversations.

@hiltmon (Hilton Lipschitz) complained about an Acuvue contact lens problem in a tweet posted to @JNJComm. @hiltmon said: "@JNJComm, could you please fwd this to Acuvue team: See the hole in the lens (top right), happened twice now. Thanks. pic.twitter.com/50ML8IrT" The link leads to this photo:

Whether or not this could be classified as a legitimate "adverse event," is a matter for debate, but JNJ responded as if it were: "thanks for alerting use. Please call us at 800-843-2020. It's important that we fully understand what occurred. Thanks! ^DE" Here's a screen shot of the full exchange:

I am not sure what "^DE" means. It appears that JNJComm uses it only at the end of responses to these sorts of complaints. I assume it allows some kind of tracking or followup. [Actually, it indicates the author - in this case Devon Eyer; see UPDATE at the end of this post.] In any case, the end result was one happy (I assume) customer.

I cannot find a legitimate Acuvue Twitter account, although the brand does have a Facebook page. After a quick scan through the Acuvue FB page, I can find no consumer complaints or conversations like the above. It's all good brand "conversations" over there on the Acuvue FB page :-)

The above Twitter conversation might be considered a "brand conversation," which is what brand marketers would like to see (although they would like positive rather than negative conversations about their products). So, JNJ corporate communications people are having these brand support conversations via Twitter, but the brand people -- who presumably manage the FB page -- do not. That's telling in respect to the question I asked in a previous post: "Who's Your Social Media Daddy?"

This conversation is somewhat hidden from most of the nearly 20,000 @JNJComm followers. As I mentioned above, it does not appear in @JNJComm's Twitter timeline because each tweet begins with "@". That makes it a personal conversation in Twitter. Unless you access @JNJComm's Twitter RSS feed as I do, you won't see these tweets. That's unfortunate, IMHO, because it means that the power of social media (e.g., sharing content with followers) is sidestepped. In this case, other consumers may not learn about important safety and other information about Acuvue lenses. Public health would be better served if everyone could learn from the conversation (e.g., the batch number of the faulty lenses).

Of course, it also means that these conversations may not be picked up by the media -- presumably the main audience for @JNJComm and other pharma corporate Twitter accounts -- or by regulators who may like more information about faulty medical products.

UPDATE: ^DE indicates that the @JNJComm posts were written by Devon Eyer, Director, Corporate Communications, Social Media at Johnson & Johnson (see her LinkedIn profile here).

I have included Devon in my list of contenders for the 3rd Annual Pharmaguy Social Media Award. You can learn more about this award here and/or vote for your favorite here.