Profiling healthcare influencers
As part of my Social Media Week presentation on what social media means for charities, I talked about the need to identify and profile key influencers within online communities relevant to your organisation.
Last March we undertook an in-depth influencer research project for the Department of Health to help them gain a deeper understanding of the online healthcare landscape.
I presented this as a case study during Dell and Viadeo’s Social Media Week London event, Public Sector Social Innovation Huddle, and thought I’d share it with a wider audience as the project featured a number of innovations around our thinking on influencer profiling:
Our brief was to gain a deeper understanding of the online landscape around a range of key healthcare communities in order to help the Department of Health plan online engagement activity more effectively.
The scope of the project also meant we had to sit down and develop a robust, verifiable and replicable process for researching and analysing online influencers.
Given the significance of the end product we worked hard to devise an evaluative framework allowing us to gauge an individual or community’s influence across a number of different online and social media metrics. Most significantly, we used these measurements to create a universal influencer score to help our client within the Department of Health assess influence quickly and easily.
Not only that, the project also meant we needed to collate and analyse a range of data across a high volume of potential influencers. To enable us to manage and ultimately present this information we devised a suite of internal tools that allowed us generate the report we were to finally deliver to the Department of Health.