Misinformation, powered by the latest technology, spreads like wildfire. Since almost all big media houses maintain social media pages which are followed by millions of people, they can easily convince innocent minds with corrupt or unchecked news. Apart from lay readers, the organisations which provide healthcare services and solutions are often the biggest victims of such misleading and false information. For such organisations, negative news can be a huge problem, and they are often forced to resort to high-risk reputation management exercises. It is in this context that technologies and tools that monitor and manage people’s perceptions and emotions on social media gain significance. While this trend is common to several industries, what makes its use by the pharma and medical industry unique is the rather complicated structure of the healthcare industry itself. For this reason, the technology used to analyze market responses for healthcare products is different from that used to analyze the response to a fashion brand or a home appliance. This is because capturing the pulse of the healthcare market involves taking into account the feedback and reactions from various stakeholders, including doctors, patients, trade channels, the media and the general public. Despite such challenges, pharma and healthcare companies can ill afford to ignore social media chatter chatter, particularly during a global pandemic, avers DR RENJIT NAIR, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Germin8 Solutions Pvt Ltd (Germin8) —a Big Data analytics company focused on AI-based social media research and analysis, in this month’s Straight Talk with Editor C H UNNIKRISHNAN. Edited excerpts:
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