Digital KOLs For Digital Engagement
Partner Content
As the push towards Digital HCP engagement intensifies, we have seen an increase in the number of requests for identifying Digital KOLs to help author and lead Digital HCP engagement initiatives.
Here are some thoughts to help you navigate the Digital KOL identification journey:
- Digital KOLs don’t just mean those that are tweeting a lot! (Twitter is actually a fairly restricted universe). We mean anyone with the power to impact your work in the digital realm, whether they be a leading clinician, patient advocate, nurse practitioner, or even a health-focused YouTuber active in a rare disease.
- You should also include experts with a focus on technology e.g. HCPs who are getting involved in apps and wearables that help patients manage their chronic diseases. They are important opinion leaders in supporting the adoption of new technologies among patients and physicians.
- Segmenting your Digital KOLs into different buckets driven by their digital characteristics and propensity for online interaction will better help with engagement. For example, those that tend to create new content versus those that tend to propagate existing data - both these KOLs may have had high digital activity” but which one is most suitable for the initiative you have in mind?
- Consider use of different “impact” metrics when assessing Digital KOLs e.g. if 50% of a KOL’s HCP followers retweeted a data post, and 50% of their followers did the same, how many HCPs would your message reach within 24 hours – all by engaging that single original Digital KOL?
- The context against which you judge a “Digital KOL” is also important. What’s the digital equivalent of traditional context benchmarks such as “number of publications compared to others”, or “number of times this KOL has spoken compared to others” etc?
- Finally, regardless of whether you classify someone as Digital, Traditional, or a mix of both, the underlying principles that make a KOL – thought leadership and therapeutic expertise – should continue to apply.
Simply drop us a line if you would like help in identifying the right digital KOLs to support your digital engagement initiatives, or maybe you would like to quickly validate your existing Digital KOL list to make sure they are still the right people you should be working with.
Lisa Chandler
Managing Director
+44 (0) 7899 065111
