How to make friends and engage digital opinion influencers

In a prior blog, we identified the role digital opinion influencers (DOIs) can play in advancing strategy in healthcare marketing and medical education. Social media savvy, DOIs are healthcare providers (HCPs) at all levels providing physicians with relevant insight into trends and new studies and therapies. Now let’s see how we identify and engage these emerging opinion leaders.

Focus on the Community

Unlike traditional key opinion leaders (KOLs), many of whom serve in research and more academic roles with fewer patient interactions, DOIs with large online followings can give insight into how a patient community is responding to a given therapy or even current challenges or misconceptions with a health condition. Many DOIs are active in therapeutic areas/disease carrying a social stigma. It’s important to begin DOI identification by evaluating and understanding the disease community in which you’re interested.

Take oncology, for example. How many oncologists and patients engage in various social media platforms specifically focused on oncology? How many post actively vs viewing passively? How many followers do the active posters have? What are the hot topics? The preferred channels? Answering these questions will help us create topical segments before digging deeper in our quest to identify DOIs.

Taking the oncology example one step further, let’s say we want to identify a solid metastatic breast cancer DOI. We might find him or her by generating profiles with channels, topics of interest, follower count, geographic location, and other criteria. From these robust profiles, we can create network maps that identify connections between DOIs and their followers. The network maps also provide a foundation to examine the strength of relationship between a DOI and their colleagues. In other words, we can quantify a DOI’s sphere of influence and determine connections in an otherwise diffuse network.