Avandia
The impact of social media on a brand
Patient Social Intelligence Report: Series 1, Issue 1
August 24, 2010
The sentiment and conversation topics about Avandia over the last seven years have shown a dramatic change. We found a strong pattern in the timeline of conversations, sentiment, and topics.
There were signals as early as 2005 that patients needed acknowledgement and more information on what they were experiencing. Negative sentiment rose exponentiallty from 2004 to 2005 and has grown since as patients stop discussing the benefits they enjoyed from Avandia and start to discuss concerns.
From 2006 until the present, conversation intensity and sentiment degrade as patient anger increases over concerns of heart problems and a lack of understandable information from doctors, GSK, or the FDA.
There were signals of sentiment and tonality change in social media. And it would be easy for just about any product to follow the same path in social media as Avandia. But now that there are methods to find the patterns and trends, both retrospective and predictive, so that brands can become more aware. They expect someone to listen, take them seriously, and act.
The purpose of this study was to understand how patients speak about Avandia in open conversations publicly available on the Internet and the opportunity it presents for pharmaceutical brands and the FDA to listen and to learn. Our goal for each study within our Patient Social Intelligence series is to provide insight into what patients and consumers are freely and openly sharing about their experiences on a wide and varying array of current healthcare topics.
This study was conducted by Wool Lab on its own and was not sponsored or paid for in any way. GSK is not a client. Wool Labs does not publish client-sponsored studies.
Wool Labs used our social cognition business intelligence system, WebDig, amplified by our industry expert analysis, to develop this report.
WebDig uses the entire Internet to find conversations on any subject - industries, companies, brands and/or specific topics. The combined use of our natural language processor and human intervention eliminates all off-topic comments and spam to isolate the most meaningful conversations about a subject. And since we scour the entire Internet, we retrieve everything regardless of where and when it was posted-even in places that go undetected by the major search engines and other commercial tools.
For this Dig, we analyzed 2,111 conversations on Avandia that were posted from August 3, 2003 to August 15, 2010 across all blogs, user forums, and message boards on the Internet.