Digital Marketing Commentary (Now With 15% More Snark!)

I wish it was. You can automate bells and whistles; you can’t automate the kind of loving, hand-tagged work that I do on a social media report.

I spent hours today slaving over a hot Radian6 report, reviewing the past six weeks of social media posts for a pharma client. I’m trying to find patterns in the social media evidence for the FDASM movement, as opposed to the scattershot anecdotal evidence that many agencies have relied on to date. So I went through over four hundred posts, eliminating all the spam, foreign language, and unrelated posts. Then I tagged each post as a post type by category, assigned keywords based on the actual content, and analyzed the sentiment. This required actual reading of the vast majority of the posts, and an intuitive adult to tag and report on it. That meant, well, me.

At the end of the day though, I have a series of neat pie charts and bar graphs that illustrate and analyze the chatter surrounding my client’s brand over the last forty-five days. Now we can go to the FDA in February and say, hey, did you know that the most frequent posts we see regarding our client’s product are questions that the pharma company themselves are best suited to answer? Now, I have numbers. I just needed a full workday to really review the evidence.

Bonus for the media buyers: Combine frequency of posts with TV and search volume, and we may see some dovetailing worth mentioning. It will tell us whether the TV media drives social media chatter when it comes to pharma, or if its the docs and the referrals/recommendations who drive the demand. If its the latter, social media is more important than we thought, and we should let the FDA know that too.