Key lessons from Astra Zeneca’s Twitter event

Astra Zeneca recently held a Twitter chat with the objective to raise awareness of its prescription assistance program, which helps needy patients afford their medications and to additionally interact with patients, healthcare professionals and industry advocates about the best ways to promote AZ&Me. It was a bold first step and there are lessons pharma marketers can learn from their social media pioneering.

Key Learnings

(1) Have clear objectives for your event and promote it before hand, especially to influencers. During the time allotted to the live chat, there were nearly 400 tweets using the #rxSave hashtag. Even after the close of the event, tweeters continued to use the hashtag. And four days later, there were more than 1,000 tweets from more than 200 different people that used the hashtag. AstraZeneca also gained 73 Twitter followers the day of the chat—and this number has steadily increased.

(2) Beware because there are potentially going to be pharma haters who are going to try and steal the conversation. AstraZeneca did face backlash from one persistent tweeter. The individual, making use of the #rxSave hashtag, posted tweets critical of AstraZeneca’s past legal affairs. Despite the individual’s unrelenting negativity, the conversation continued about #rxSave, with both the @AstraZenecaUS moderator and participants largely ignoring the person’s trolling. Have a plan against these trolls and monitor your social media posts to ensure they don’t take over the conversation.

(3) Say up front who you are and what department you work for. Social media is about keeping it real so put a face on who is talking for the brand and what your role is.

(4) Be ready to say what you cannot talk about. Make sure that you let people know that you aren’t there to give medical advice you’re there for…… Don’t just say “we can’t talk about that”, provide links of where people can go for the information don’t just say “ask your doctor”. Remember less people are going to their doctor today.

(5) Finally ask “what did we learn” and quickly get the company on board with what you did, why you did it and the results to get others thinking “what if….”

Kudos to AZ for taking this bold first step. Somewhere in their organization are some people that had to have a lot of meeting to get this done and probably had a lot of people who were waiting to jump on them if things went wrong. This is a great first step and everyone can learn from their bold exploration into new media.