Pharma’s Social Media Influence Measures Faulted

Andrew Spong, author of STweM blog across the pond in the UK, doesn't like the way pharmaceutical companies and their agencies measure social media "influence." At least that's how I interpret the following:"Hankering after a means of measuring the solid reassurance of an ‘influence’ expressed through proclamatory, monological, univocal press release-style may have allowed third parties hundreds of opportunities to sell in dashboards, listening posts and bamboozling number-crunching interfaces, but unfortunately this isn’t the way influence works."According to Spong, "Rather than being exerted in this muscular, familiar, corporate-friendly manner, influence on the Social Web is received by means of ongoing observation of a user’s manners and habits, daily dialogues, impromptu conversations, helpful interventions, and just plain shooting the breeze."I have to agree that pharma may be allowing third parties to "bamboozle" them with "number-crunching interfaces." During the recent West Coast Digital Pharma conference, which I attended remotely via Twitter, I noticed a lot of noise about such third parties. At the time, I tweeted "You can't swing a dead cat at #digpharm w/o hitting a tech company willing & able to monitor social media convos 4 #pharma!"However, in terms of actionable measures to address questions pertaining to return on investment, which is a major obstacle for pharma adoption of social media (see the 2013 Digital Barometer data here), pharma marketer...
Source: Pharma Marketing Blog - Category: Pharma Commentators Tags: Awards ROI social media marketing Source Type: blogs