Our social listening product ‘Lifelines Social Landscapes’ is designed to capture and interpret social media and other data to support initiatives that drive value for our clients.
USE CASE EXAMPLES
Segmentation
We used 6 months of social listening content related to a rare disease to develop 4 attitudinal patient segments. These segments were built to enable the client to target specific communication, which could improve patient awareness of general facts around their condition, as well as address particular issues of concern for individual segments, such as early symptom detection at diagnosis. We pinpointed influential blogs and websites that were visited by patients from each segment, and how patients defined and described successful outcomes.
Patient support initiatives
Following a formal literature review of research describing therapy experience of severe asthma patients, we used social listening to surface themes of unmet need, as defined by patients in self-authored social media posts or blogposts. Our findings highlighted a number of needs not identified in the academic literature, largely due to the methodologies used (largely interviews and focus groups). Unlike such guided discussions, social listening content is totally unprompted. It is therefore led by what people want to share about their lives with a condition, rather than centred on a condition that they have been asked to speak about.
As a result, our social landscapes were able to illustrate particular “catch-22” situations that asthma patients described which they felt limited their ability and/or understanding e.g. food was seen as a potential solution/prevention technique (clean eating, vitamins), but also as a trigger (allergies), as well as a side-effect impact (appetite increased due to steroids) which then acts as an emotional weakness (lowered self-esteem due to weight gain). Our insights enabled the design of specific patient support initiatives to explain how food and nutrition could be managed positively and improve their relationship with asthma HCPs.
Attitudinal Modelling
Our brief was to identify, through desktop research, the current range of patient sentiment and attitude relating to type II diabetes, including its treatment via existing regimes. We tuned our Social Landscapes listening to explore content from Facebook, Twitter, personal blogs, online forums, patient-authored books & articles, as well as patient comments posted in response to news, media and arts-related coverage.
From the data, we were able to build a model, developed from two emerging variables - one based on how easy/hard patients found their control of diabetes to be, and the other on their ability to self manage vs. require external support. Our model included the impact of risk-related factors, such has ethnicity, lifestyle and demographics.
This patient-centred model provided the client with the blueprint for a future research study, helping them to more closely define particular needs of patient profiles, and how such needs could be supported either with self-management tools or combined with educational materials.