Since the advent of what we would recognize as social media in the mid-2000's, discussions over business use of social platforms have mostly focused on social's value as a communications and marketing tool. But by focusing so narrowly on talking to customers, have we neglected the other half of the conversation - listening?
Don't get me wrong - social gives businesses an enormous opportunity to change the way they talk to customers, and as technologies advance, marketers should be on the forefront of developing new ways of reaching the people that matter. And marketers do talk a pretty big game about listening, but that usually takes the form of fixing individual consumer complaints, monitoring levels of negative sentiment, and pulling verbatim quotes to provide color to larger consumer-focused initiatives.
But a new effort from Johns Hopkins gives some clues as to how health marketers, especially, can take advantage of consumer sharing habits to inform key decisions - particularly around media spend, shelf placement, and other choices whose optimal resolution can vary significantly between - and even within - local markets. Researchers at that JHU's School of Public Health analyzed 2 billion public tweets, from May 2009 to October 2010, to determine whether semantic analysis could unearth meaningful information about public health trends.
The results were remarkable: plotting the overall Twitter chatter around the word "flu" and the actual reported flu rate for a given week according to the Centers for Disease Control indicated that the two metrics are highly correlated:
(image via the Pharma Marketing Blog)
So, for influenza, at least, the self-reported flu rate as indicated by social sharing closely mirrors the flu rate as measured by more typical epidemiological methods. I could imagine that, for other familiar ailments (think colds, stomach viruses, and headaches) the chart might look the same.
These data could be tremendously useful to pharma marketers looking for ways to segment their marketing mix by hyperlocal criteria. For instance: here in Washington, DC, sessions of Congress often lead to longer hours and higher levels of stress, not only for congressional staffers but also for the lobbyists, public relations folks, policy experts, and bureaucrats that support and influence them. I could imagine that mentions of the word "headache" might spike during these times - and marketers who have that knowledge can move headache relief to the top of the local marketing mix for a few weeks, rework in-store displays, and, to the extent they can, move those products to higher-traffic areas of the store.
It mirrors Walmart's new social shopping initiative, profiled here by FastCompany. This program aims to detect subtle shifts in language and sentiment across geographical areas - for instance, if chatter about "bicycles" increases in Silicon Valley, stock can be shifted around local stores, additional inventory can be ordered, and in-store marketing materials can be placed to guide shoppers towards what they're looking for. If Walmart can tell who wants bikes, surely pharma companies can tell when certain ailments are spiking in different places around the country.
More broadly, though, the judicious use of data is one key part of marketing agility - the function's ability to quickly take advantage of subtle shifts in the landscape. We might not yet have the ability to accurately predict demand and capitalize on it, but we're getting there, and the marketing departments of the future will need to be able to use tools like these.
MLC members, for more cutting-edge uses of social media data, check out our appropriately-title webinar replay from last year, as well as our social media tactics topic center.