Leverage your Digital Opinion Leaders to dramatically increase awareness and drive meaningful action

The Solution

[Anni] Firstly CREATION.co collected the data of public and anonymous PPE requests from HCPs as reported via the Frontline.Live platform. We then used CREATION Pinpoint to analyse the unprompted conversations of UK healthcare workers discussing PPE on public social media (generally, and when raising specific PPE needs) to supplement and validate these insights.

Common lexicon being used in HCP PPE discussion was identified to improve future engagement between Frontline.Live and healthcare workers in need. As well as this, HCP PPE needs were classified and compared by HCP role, type of PPE, location, and across the public and anonymous requests, to analyse trends within these.

3 HCP Digital Opinion Leaders and other influential HCP authors in the online PPE conversation were identified and profiled.

Before we share the key insights from this amazing work, I want to explain some thoughts very quickly around Digital Opinion Leaders or ‘DOLs’.

• We might define a DOL as an individual or organisation, who influences the view or behaviour of other health stakeholders through their digital activity.
• To identify those DOLs we are able to measure different indicators of peer-to-peer trust and engagement
• Only because somebody posts a lot of content, does not make them credible; simply because somebody claims to be a doctor, does not make them trusted.
• But when a physician shares in open dialogue with peers, the credibility of their voice is tested by the network. Influence is determined by the “crowd” of other experts, in a type of mass peer review. So those trusted by other physicians develop a strong network of influence among their peers.

When a physician is trusted by their peers online, they can make a significant impact on learning, on health systems, and through this on health outcomes, often all over the world.

This graph above shows HCPs from across the globe sharing health information from various sources at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s important to remember that DOLs are real people! Even with the word digital, it doesn’t make them any less human. Take Mark Lewis for example who is a pancreatic cancer survivor who is a real patient advocate and influences the pancreatic cancer online space.

The Insights

After we received all the data our team of analysts started to look through the conversation and pull out insights. Firstly, we saw that more senior HCPs felt comfortable to share their needs about PPE shortages online as junior HCPs felt less able to speak out. Doctors were most actively raising awareness of and talking about shortages on public forums. Nurses, carers, and allied health professionals were also vocal in the shortage space.

It was powerful and heart-breaking at times to see HCP posts sharing their specific needs like ‘we need face masks’ or ‘eye protection for surgeons’.

The HCPs’ online PPE conversations were analysed by topic and sentiment and we were able to pull out different concerns and experiences with emotions.

Influencers were identified who engaged in the conversation.

In the context of PPE, influential HCPs were identified as either ‘HCP influencers’ or ‘Active posters’. HCP influencers are likely to have a high Twitter following and the content they post is often shared a large number of times. They may post less frequently about PPE, but when they do, their content has the potential to reach a large audience. Active posters may have a reduced following compared to HCP influencers and their content is less widely shared, however they are actively involved in the PPE conversation and tend to post more original PPE content. 

Besides HCP influencers and active posters, we identified the key HCP Digital Opinion Leaders, which were a GP, a Palliative Care Physician and a Cardiologist. 

Asif Qasim ended up being key to this project. As we shared about this work online, he was also very happy to be a PPE Digital Opinion Leader in the UK as you can see in his post!

And one last interesting thing about Asif Qasim. He was part of an online cluster which centres on UK Doctors’ Associations. This was a very frontline-worker focused network which mostly included HCPs. The non-HCP accounts in the cluster are often medical organisations, for example, The BMA and PHE. 

The Key Learnings

This was an impactful project in so many ways, but there are principles that can be applied to other health and communication challenges

1. Listen to your customers in real time to understand their needs, in this case on PPE, and to understand their behaviours, in this case fewer senior roles where less likely to share their concerns.
2. Partner with influential stakeholders. Having identified Digital Opinion Leaders, establishing mutual goals will be essential to any successful collaboration, advocacy, or partnership. This will create a community which has power to change things!
3. It is not about creating more noise online but to add value to the HCP conversation by effectively communicating to in this case the frontline care workers.