Sr Comms Consultant,
AETNA
Most brands have faced questions about when and how to engage on social. In the healthcare sector, many brands and organizations still are considering if they should engage. That’s the setup of this case study.
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The Issue
The impression many of us have is that when it comes to social media marketing and communications, everyone is doing it, brands and nonprofit organizations included. Reality is different. In highly regulated industries, such as healthcare, many companies have yet to cross the social media threshold.
While every industry is held accountable to their typical regulatory requirements, healthcare companies, and specifically, pharma and biopharma companies, have even higher standards for using social media based on Food & Drug Administration (FDA) requirements. One of the most often-mentioned regulations deals with privacy constraints included in Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the 1996 act designed to protect patients’ medical data. To comply with HIPAA, clinical vignettes posted on social concerning patients must remove all personal identifying information, including insurance details.
This sounds straightforward, yet surveys of such posts show compliance with these regulations is incomplete. There also have been several well-known inadvertent breaches on social of HIPAA rules.
The onus is on healthcare companies to be HIPAA-compliant even when patients initiate contact with them on social. This issue is especially important for physicians, since patients attempt to friend them on social. Doctors may even cross HIPAA limits in instances where they gain potentially important information about patients on social, for example, that a patient is a serious runner or that she is blogging about attempting suicide.
In addition, there are concerns about the unintended promotion of products, per FDA regulation. One of the biggest concerns for healthcare companies is the requirement to track, collect and report in a timely fashion to the FDA potential adverse events when consumers post them on company social media channels.
Beyond all this, of course, when healthcare companies make the decision to try to reach customers where they live on social, the content they provide has to be compelling enough to engage users, an issue every brand faces.
Hurdles
Insurance provider AETNA entered this regulatory morass about one year ago. It hired former agency executive Sophia Lewis and others with the idea of engaging customers and influencers on Twitter and other platforms through thought leadership. AETNA’s president Karen Lynch was just getting started on Twitter when Lewis joined the company. The CMO David Edelman and chief medical officer Dr. Hal Paz were online, but AETNA’s social presence was not strategic.
AETNA hired communications people who could be “very strategic and not only work with top executives but also with their support teams, to really partner with them and gain their trust,” Lewis says. Trust was a key. It was “a hard sell” to get some senior AETNA execs on social and once there, to focus on approved messaging, she says. Many are “professorial…and didn’t feel Twitter was part of their brand.” Still AETNA felt it could engage influencers on social. It was correct. “We now know 25%-40% of those following our people are major influencers, editors of publications or consultants. That’s part of why we’re doing it.”
Once a few executives were chosen, the program got underway. “That doesn’t mean it was all smooth sailing,” she notes. Some executives took to Twitter easier than others; some barely had a presence. One of the keys was to show results. “Once we [showed results], people slowly started approaching us and asking whether they or someone on their team could get” involved.
Finding a balance between the voices of participating executives, deciding where AETNA should share curated content and what original content it should produce and why, were some of the issues.
While Lewis and her team had resources, they also faced a culture shift. For example, for years “90%” of what AETNA’s video team produced was internal facing. “LinkedIn and every [social] partner was giving us feedback” that we needed to produce video. Producing social videos “took time…we didn’t want to just put anything out there. We wanted to be strategic, so we worked to find where it made sense to put out videos.”
And then there were the regulatory hurdles. Particularly for larger pieces of content, AETNA goes through a “very rigorous approval system that includes legal and compliance. Depending on the subject matter, it may even have to go through a 3rd or 4th legal review.” A recent 3-part video series on an opioid alternative is an example.
Tactics
Again, being strategic was emphasized. “Everything is structured with an eye toward the appropriate people sharing the right content,” she says. Everyone participating in the program can share content; Lewis and 14 others are curating content. AETNA uses LinkedIn’s Elevate, an employee advocacy tool that allows brands to provide pre-approved content that can be shared directly to a person’s LinkedIn profile.
When the effort began, getting the executive leadership team on Twitter was the first step. The idea was you’d get more engagement when content came from people, as opposed to a faceless brand. After awhile communicators realized other company leaders should be involved in the effort of relaying AETNA’s narrative on social.
Lewis had an advantage in that AETNA’s message is particularly authentic, which stems from chairman/CEO Mark Bertolini, who wants to transform healthcare by meeting patient needs, but also by being honest about identifying what he believes are problems at his company and with the country’s healthcare system overall. This authenticity tracked with a key element of the social effort. “We wanted to show our enhanced products and customer service on social.” Lewis says, “but being very authentic was something everyone had to agree to out of the gate.”
Using the @AETNA News Channel, the effort tweets new material at least weekly and updates almost daily. “We share information around holistic health and wellbeing as well as initiatives…our local markets, such as campaigns and donations.” Recently the Channel tweeted Hurricane Florence-related resources. “You may see content we produced with USA Today, or a report from one of our folks at South by Southwest.” In addition, content includes thought leadership articles executives write for Forbes or Fortune. While AETNA hasn’t yet produced polls, there’s more than written content. “We recently put out a video series about opioids on our LinkedIn page that we’re excited about,” Lewis says, and promises “more video to come.” Lewis sees phone-shot videos coming. “The next frontier will be live video” that the communications staff shoots at conferences, she says. Lewis plans to shoot video at CES in January. “The executives haven’t taken [to live video] yet, but fingers crossed. A big part of the change in culture will be doing more live, casual video,” she says.
Measurement
Since AETNA is far ahead of many of its peers in social, it’s hard to compare itself with similar companies. Still, several AETNA executives have gained substantial numbers of followers and become prominent on social.
Early on it decided “to focus on engagement,” Lewis says. It uses a monthly scorecard to track engagement, including what topics are garnering the most engagement. “If we know there’s an important topic in the field and we don’t have enough content, we don’t simply throw more out there.” Again, being strategic is key. “We look inside the organization and see who is an expert and can speak to the subject.” Then Lewis and her team pitch. “We’re constantly calling and selling within the organization.” She assures us it’s “tailored selling…we’re not cyber-stalking them.” She does her homework so the target will be motivated to contribute content. A carrot she uses is offering to help employees with their LinkedIn profiles in a one-on-one session.
The Bottom Line
Does the social effort have bottom line implications? LinkedIn, its biggest social partner, “shows us on a quarterly basis what it calls Earned Media Value, which measures engagement and likes.” Lewis says by this measure the effort is providing value to AETNA. In addition the program has reached out to marketers in AETNA’s local markets and shared their events on social. Some of the results have included pickup by local TV news outlets.
And marketing and sales share some of the social thought-leadership the effort has produced in concert with AETNA reports and studies. An example is AETNA’s Health Trends Report. “Sales and marketing staff leveraged [social thought leadership] in a very targeted campaign…the unintended consequence is that we’ve become very close with sales and marketing.”
Lessons Learned
- Flexibility is Important: Getting senior executives and their teams to work with you to create a social effort means having to handle various personalities. “A lot flexibility is needed.” As noted above, selling your program internally is critical.
- Topics Can be a Challenge: “But we welcome the challenge,” Lewis says. “There are certain topics that we can have folks talking about,” and others that are verboten, owing to regulation. Innovation “is an area where we can do better and we’re working on it.”
- Leverage: Make use of high-priority campaigns done internally to produce social thought leadership material. “We plan to do this going forward,” she says.
- Provide Experiences: Lewis plans to offer landing pages geared to various health topics and geographic locations. This will help the brand not only push its narrative, but create an experience, she says.