Presentation for sessions I ran at the IMID conference for patient groups. The event was sponsored by Abbott

1. Embracing technology for better outcomes
Ged Carroll – director digital strategies, Ruder Finn | RFI UK

2. In this presentation
• Understanding your audience
• Some thoughts about engagement
• Social media
• Mobile
• How to handle day-to-day practical challenges
• Practical exercise
• Technology surgery

3. Understanding your audience

5. Good desk research resources
• Government websites
• Intra government bodies: for example European
Commission Information Society – Digital Agenda for
Europe microsite
• GSMA
• Academic institutions: I particularly like LSE’s department
of media and communications
– Google Scholar
• Google Adplanner
• socialbakers
• Your web analytics
• Bank institutional research
• Sysomos MAP*

6. More research
• Surveys
• Blog and forum social listening campaign

7. Example of content from Sysomos MAP

9. What does all this do?
• Helps gauge the volume of discussion online
• Helps you develop audience personas
• Helps with messaging by mirroring the audience’s own
language
• Helps you understand where they have their
conversations
• Helps you to attune your programme closer to the
audiences interests

10. Some thoughts about engagement

11. What is engagement
• Beyond passive consumption
– Delivery of message
• Response
– Dialogue
– Doing a call to action
• It’s about us listening as much as delivering content
• Engagement just isn’t about publishing

12. Let’s do a viral video?
• It’s hard work
• It’s expensive:
– Making good content
• RA Lebanon have done it successfully with a shopping mall
flashmob take over
– Seeding the content
– Getting visibility
• You are competing against a tsunami of content: 24 hours
of video uploaded every minute to YouTube
• The odds are stacked against you

14. Factors for viral video success
• Brevity
• Don’t try too hard – the audience needs to get it
• Do provide people with an opportunity to remix your content – carrying on
the discussion
• Do you invest in great content
• Seeding – social network potential | super nodes – (people or websites that
are highly connected / influential)
• Support with advertising
• Don’t allow a creative idea to be watered down by too much internal
discussion
• Tactics that work
• Shock
• Fake headlines
• Entertain
• Incite a debate

15. Campaign versus continuing engagement
• Budgets work in fixed time periods, communities don’t
• It’s generally considered rude to walk away from
someone in mid-conversation…
• It’s less efficient to re-engage a new audience each time
rather than holding a community together

17. Factors that need to be considered
We could have a list here but it boils down to two principles:
• Putting yourself in the audience’s shoes rather than
thinking about what message to deliver
• Treat others as you would like to be treated yourself
So, what does this mean from a content point of view?

18. Social media

19. Social media benefits & misconceptions
• Social media takes advantage of word-of-mouth; builds
loyalty and advocacy
• Social media messages are considered to be more
trustworthy
• Social media helps other aspects of digital marketing
such as search engine optimisation
• Respond instantly to events
• Social media is cheap
– Social media costs in terms of resources: planning, content
creation, active listening
– Not doing it properly can damage the brand of your patient
group
• Social media is easy
– It is easy to post
• Social media is measurable
– True, but it’s often hard to quantify the return on investment

20. Social context
• It isn’t only about where your audience is, but where they
feel it’s appropriate to interact with you
– I may have a condition, but:
• I may not want to feel that the condition has a role in defining
who I am
• I may be a private person
• I may be concerned about what prospective employers may
think
• If I am younger, I may worry about the opinion of my peers
– Any more reasons?
• What you are talking about doesn’t relate to me

21. Context

23. Word of mouth campaigns

24. Social advertising
• Engage with consumers on social platforms (like
Facebook) when social media interaction is out of context
• Allow campaigns to break out across networks
• Generate brand awareness as support for a campaign
• Drive traffic to an off-platform resource

25. Mobile

26. Mobile is a baseline
• Careful marketing investment
– It’s the direction where consumers are
going
– It’s the most accessible form of access for
many people
– It’s personal
• It’s being increasingly used in treatment
• It’s not that expensive:
– 10,000 SMS for $150
• Building ‘mobile first’
– Responsive design
• Apps last
Source: GSMA

27. askapatient.com

28. Mobile applications
• Superior user experience
• Doesn’t require always on connectivity
• Expensive versus web
• Needs maintenance
• Platform diversity
• You can submit a mobile website as
an ‘applet’ to mobile

29. How to handle day-to-day practical challenges

30. Campaign plan
• Start at the finish and work back
– What do you want to achieve
– What will you do with the community that you’ve built?
– What do you have to offer?
– Why should the audience listen to you?
– What do the audience want?

31. Community management principles
• Be human
• Welcome & thank
• Have a clear moderation policy
• Active listening
• Co-create, co-solve & amplify
• Integration across channels
• Pull in the big hitters
• Use photos, videos – rich content
• Objective & a deadline

32. Daily tasks
• Welcome new community members
• Engage – Answer and ask questions. Cheerlead
• Promote new content to the community
• Invigorate or close dying discussion threads
• Moderation – Enforce community guidelines
• Engage top community members – boost egos
• Handle technical queries
• Outreach marketing
• Hunt for content and engagement ideas

33. Weekly tasks
• Weekly report– qualitative and quantitative
update
• Analyse weekly stats – esp. community health
• Brainstorming session – problems, content
themes
• Prepare a content calendar
• Prepare new content – blogs, tweets, updates,
polls, newsletter

34. Control
Control is an illusion and every situation context-dependent
• You can influence, you can ban – on certain platforms
– Give a clear sandpit
– Be aware of the platform’s terms of service
• Have a standardised proportionate response
• Have a team ready:
– Experts
– Responders who are credible to the online community
• Keep a record in case things require a legal solution

36. Monitoring
• Start with the basics:
– RSS reader for regular sites forums (I use Newsblur)
– Google Alerts
– SocialMention
– Hootsuite | Tweetdeck
• Getting over 50 mentions a day?
– RSS reader
– Google alerts
– Sysomos Heartbeat | Sprout Social – lots of others out
there, get a free trial and see what works for you
• Keep a record of any

37. Evaluation
• Evaluate the objectives
• Two types of measures:
– Reach
• Opportunities to see (how many fans does a page have, how
many visitors a site or blog, how many views a video)
• How widely has the content been syndicated
– Engagement
• What did people do?
– Comment or do an answer back on a YouTube
video
– Retweet or share a link on Twitter?
– Call to action

39. Your turn: practical exercise

40. Exercise
• Decide which of your organisations you are going to think
about.
– Your organisation will be launching an initiative to highlight
the economic and personal cost of X through a petition that
will be presented to policy makers
• How do you keep petition signatories engaged?
• Where will you seek to engage them? Why?
• What kind of future tactics would you use?
• Sketch out a content plan
– A scientific report that hasn’t been peer-reviewed has come
out alleging a tenuous link between treatments and the
occurence early onset Alzheimers and / or Creutzfeldt–
Jakob disease
• The current best scientific expertise is for people to keep up
their treatment
• But a small faction of patients are advocating at every
opportunity dropping their treatment and are likely to hijack this
initiative
• What’s your plan?

41. Surgery

42. Thank you for your participation:
gcarroll@ruderfinn.co.uk | @r_c | ruderfinn.co.uk

43. Links

44. Links
• Research resources
– LSE department of media and communications
– European Commission Information Society
– Morgan Stanley – The European Internet Report
– GSMA mYouth data sets
– FI3P
• Building ‘mobile first’
– Responsive design
• Measurement
– Sysomos