360DigitalInfluence

It is often said in the world of healthcare that nurses are the underappreciated heroes. They are the ones that often spend the most time with patients, have a huge direct influence on the care that a patient gets, and sit at the center of the health care world influencing both the physicians and the patients.

To underscore this importance, Manhattan Research recently released a report about nurses online noting that approximately three out of four U.S. nurses recommend health websites to patients. The study notes that the average nurse spends eight hours per week online for professional purposes, which is just as much time as physicians, and almost all of them use the Internet in between patient consultations. Nurses are also proactive in researching medical product information specifically online - over eighty percent have visited a pharma, biotech, or device company website in the past year.

In addition to the prevalence of the Internet as a research and patient communication tool, nurses are continuing to find their unique voices online through a growing number of prominent nursing blogs such as Codeblog and Emergiblog which both share powerful stories of healthcare from the nurses’ point of view. These nursing blogs are very popular in the nursing community and are humanizing the profession (and healthcare in general) to a much wider audience of patients.   The rapid growth of online nursing communities such as AllNurses and NurseConnect is yet another sign of the growing use of the web.

Why Does It Matter For Marketers?
Nurses are clearly online and actively pointing patients toward online resources. When combining this fact with the knowledge that they are actively sharing stories with one another to create their own communities and embracing social media tools, it is clear that social media offers a strong opportunity to provide information to nurses that can help them do their job.

Summary & Implications
The first step is to build a strong listening program to understand what nurses are blogging and writing online about. If the thought of starting to monitor nursing blogs causes the “adverse event reporting alarm bell” to ring in your mind … don’t worry. Due to HIPAA regulations in the US, most nurses will never mention an identifiable patient in any story, and most often will build their stories based on a “composite” of many different people or speak about patients anonymously.

Once you start listening, you can begin to understand how these influencers are using the Internet and build a strategy to reach them. This could include creating content to involve them, or starting to build relationships directly. Events such as the BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas which will include a “MedBlogger Track” (which I will be attending) offers a real life opportunity to meet and engage with many of these influencers.

Nurses may be the forgotten link in the influencer based models for marketing that many pharma brands pursue. They are online and are actively creating content and sharing opinions. Are you doing enough to listen and involve them?

Resources & Links:
List of nursing blogs from AllTop
NurseConnect - A nursing community
CodeBlog - Highly popular nursing blog featuring stories contributed by nurses
NurseRatchedsPlace & Emergiblog - Two more popular nursing blogs
List of the Top 50 Nursing Blogs

NOTE: This post is part of a continuing “Pharma Spotlight” Series on this blog. To see more posts like this, visit http://blog.ogilvypr.com/tag/pharma.