Businesses ask this question all the time, “How can my business survive in this new technological age?” The answer lies in understanding their ‘own’ and ‘their competitors’ customers. A highly effective way of doing this is to leverage the power and pervasiveness of social media and to utilize the information available from these sources to bring the collective voice of customers and competitor’s customers to a business. How social media has changed the art of marketing is there for everyone to see. Today, each business in every industry understands the importance of social media in developing business strategies or brand campaigns. When a person goes on the internet and talks about a brand or a company through Facebook/Twitter or blogs, that information gets stored on the web and is freely available. The topics people are discussing and the sentiment for each of discussed topics can be monitored and analyzed. Is it positive, negative or neutral? It may seem to be an overwhelming task to aggregate and quantify the data in a meaningful way. But with the availability of current tools and technology, it can be aggregated and quantified and when put to good use, the resulting insights are very beneficial to an organization.
There has been an upsurge of social media usage by the industry as a whole. Manufacturing, Retail, Media & Entertainment, Travel and Hospitality—all these industries have leveraged social media in unique ways, with spectacular results. For example, Retail industry has been leveraging insights from social media to find a correlation between product sales, support and customer voice to understand issues impacting consumer satisfaction. Companies today compare their product and services against key competitors that help them refine product positioning and develop data-driven campaigns targeted towards the right audience. Pharmaceutical industry has refrained from participating in social media forums due to a lack of clarity on what they can do while still remaining compliant with existing FDA guidelines. We believe that like all other industries, pharmaceutical industry should also listen to social media for numerous benefits that it can derive across the pharmaceutical value chain—drug development, procurement, sales & marketing and post market launch etc.
