Improve Your Social Media Listening Skills The Tools You Need & What You’ll Learn
Pharmaguy interviews Leigh Fazzina, Principal, Fazzina & Co. Communications Consulting, Inc. (see Bio), who talks about her passion for social media listening for pharma and who within the organization is best suited for leveraging the learnings from social media listening.
Air date: 11 December 2014
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Background
Social media listening is intelligence gathering. Social media analyzing is crucial for strategic marketing/communications planning. While social posts are being directed towards every brand out there today (and can seem infinite), locating them, gathering them, understanding them, and taking them into consideration when planning your marketing and PR is ever important.
Fazzina believes that both the FDA and pharmaceutical companies cannot go without a formal social media listening and analytics program in place. Once in place and working well, it has the power to help you put a more tailored marketing/communications strategy in place.
“I find it a real problem that the FDA doesn’t see Twitter any differently than traditional communications vehicles,” says Leigh Fazzina, a healthcare PR and social media communications strategist and former president of the PRSA Health Academy. “I am hopeful, however, that once the FDA starts carefully listening to, monitoring and analyzing social communications through social media listening and analytics programs, it will become more understanding of what the social communications sphere is truly like.”
Questions/Topics of Discussion
- Define for us what you mean by social media “listening?” Are we talking about just Twitter or other social media platforms as well? Which are most important for pharma marketers and corporate communications professionals?
- What tools do you use for social media listening? Why?
- How do you recommend a pharma company start their social listening? Do they need a formal social listening program? How do they decide among the 20 or so that exist?
- Can you give us a “real-life” example of what pharma marketers/corporate communications professionals can learn from using the social media listening tools you recommend? How can these learnings be applied to solving specific marketing/communications problems and/or improve health outcomes?
- You have alluded to FDA’s social media listening. Is FDA actively listening to social media? What about pharma companies?
- You seem to believe that communications professionals – create the most effective social media communications. Why do you believe that’s true? What is a marketer’s role?
Guest Bio
Leigh Fazzina is an award-wining healthcare public relations professional and principal of Fazzina & Co. Communications Consulting, Inc. a healthcare PR and communications consultancy in Philadelphia. With 20+ years experience, Fazzina has been developing and implementing integrated internal and external PR and social media communications program in healthcare from pharmaceuticals, to clinical trials and patient recruitment, to medical devices to advocacy groups over the years.
Fazzina’s work in the communications arena naturally segued into the social media sphere in 2006, and she was one of the first to put a national healthcare social media communications program in place. She is now developing and managing such programs for pharma, biotech and medical device companies (and/or their agencies) that work in tandem with comprehensive marketing, PR, communications, and media relations programs.
Fazzina has been an active member of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) for many years, contributing greatly. From 2003 to 2012 she served a 9-year board member position on the PRSA Health Academy and was known as a driving force within the PRSA Health Academy and in 2012 Fazzina served as President of the PRSA Health Academy. She is currently serving a Director-At-Large, Board of Directors, position for the PRSA Philadelphia chapter.
