KOL Digital Listening for Medical Affairs | Acceleration Point | Resources

In recent years, the amount of scientific discussion moving online has accelerated. Digital platforms including social media, websites, blogs, news, and video are used across the medical community to share new data, discuss treatment approaches, and educate about diseases in every therapeutic area. Medical Affairs has turned to these enriched sources to identify digital thought leaders who are influential in their therapeutic areas. That is a useful start, but the value of digital listening goes beyond identifying new experts. KOL digital listening is the systematic monitoring and analysis of the scientific content that key opinion leaders produce or influence across digital channels, used to generate insights and prepare for more informed engagement.

Key Takeaways

In an Acceleration Point study of more than 50,000 key opinion leaders, 54% had online content relevant to a disease or treatment.
Depending on the therapeutic area, between 18% and 40% of KOLs were active on Twitter, where the average active KOL had 2,200 followers, a quarter of them other health care providers.
True digital opinion leaders are rare: typically only 20 to 30 exist globally for any given disease, and they produce roughly four times the scientific content of the average KOL.
Most KOL influence online is earned content published by others rather than owned content; including both increased the volume of content found by 500% in Acceleration Point's study.
Effective KOL digital listening rests on three practices: looking beyond social media, capturing earned as well as owned content, and using medical-trained artificial intelligence to filter and analyze at scale.

What Can Medical Affairs Learn From KOLs Who Are Active Online?

Often more important than identifying new digital opinion leaders is the ability to generate insights and prepare for better engagements with your existing key opinion leaders. In a recent study of over 50,000 key opinion leaders, Acceleration Point found that 54% have online content relevant to a disease or treatment. Looking at Twitter as one example, depending on the therapeutic area between 18% and 40% of KOLs were active on this one specific network. The average KOL who is active on Twitter has 2,200 followers with a quarter of them identified as other health care providers.

The broader context supports the shift. In a peer-reviewed survey of practicing physicians published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, 24% of physicians used social media daily to scan or explore medical information, rising to 61% on a weekly basis. A separate survey of 4,033 clinicians found that 65% used social media for professional purposes. Scientific conversation now happens in the open, and Medical Affairs can observe it.

Finding true digital thought leaders is also important. In fact, across the data in the study the average digital thought leader will have four times the amount of scientific content than the average key opinion leader. However, there are typically only 20-30 true digital opinion leaders globally for any disease. These are often credentialed experts, producing scientific content, distributed through their own channels, with a significant reach. While each expert has a larger number of contributions, digital thought leaders only contribute a small percentage of scientific contributions online.

What Are the Three Keys to Effective KOL Digital Listening?

Finding and analyzing this content can be challenging. Many teams start with individuals searching through Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other digital sources to find relevant content. As the importance of these digital conversations increases, more sophisticated methods for gathering and analyzing digital insights become more important. There are three keys to effective KOL digital listening.

Look Beyond Social Media

There are millions of digital sources worldwide. Social media is certainly an important source, which may include Twitter, Facebook, QQ, and more. To capture a more complete view it is also important to capture other sources. One of the largest sources is news. News may be therapeutic-area-specific like Oncology Today or may be consumer-based like CNN. Others include video sites such as YouTube and Vimeo, which are used in education. Podcasts hosted by digital thought leaders, industry partners, or third parties provide a place to share thoughts on key scientific topics. Finally, blogs can be found on a variety of personal, company, and organization websites.

When monitoring across such a broad array of sources, it is important to use a tool to pull this data into a single view and filter it down to relevant scientific content. In Acceleration Point's study, 60% of any given KOL's contributions are about a disease or treatment. This is a lot, but it will save your team time by ensuring that your tools remove irrelevant content before it is presented to you. This is the same principle behind mapping stakeholder conversations through social listening: the signal is only useful once the noise is filtered out.

Earned vs. Owned Content

Most key opinion leaders do not post content themselves. They do not always have Twitter accounts, YouTube channels, or their own blogs. The thoughts of most key opinion leaders are found on sources owned by others. When someone's digital influence comes from sources owned by others, it is called earned content.

Some examples of earned content include when a KOL is interviewed in the news. The thoughts expressed are those of the KOL, but the owner of the content is the news outlet. Another example is when a KOL writes an article, but their institution posts it on the company blog. One last example is if the KOL's talk is recorded and posted on YouTube. The KOL's talk is listed on YouTube, but the video is posted by a society instead of by the expert. Acceleration Point's study found a 500% increase in content when both owned and earned content are included.

Use Artificial Intelligence

Scanning through thousands of individual posts, articles, and videos is not practical. A good artificial intelligence engine, trained specifically for medical content, can help save time and make it easier to find trends in the data.

Artificial intelligence can help find discussions about specific diseases, mentions of related treatments, and identify relevant medical topics. It can reveal new topics that have been mentioned, show how these topics have changed over time, and enable you to quickly identify which experts have been talking about each of the topics. For a closer look at where this is heading, see how Medical Affairs teams can use generative AI.

We all listen to what key opinion leaders are saying in publications and in congress abstracts. Now, with modern tools built specifically for Medical Affairs, we can listen to what those key opinion leaders are saying in the digital space. With these sources you can discover new insights and prepare to engage with KOLs more effectively.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is KOL digital listening?
KOL digital listening is the systematic monitoring and analysis of the scientific content that key opinion leaders produce or influence across digital channels, including news, social media, video, podcasts, and blogs. Medical Affairs teams use it to generate insights and prepare for more informed engagement with both existing key opinion leaders and emerging digital opinion leaders.

How is a digital opinion leader different from a key opinion leader?
A digital opinion leader is a credentialed expert who produces scientific content and distributes it through their own channels with significant reach. In Acceleration Point's study, the average digital thought leader produced four times as much scientific content as the average key opinion leader, and true digital opinion leaders are rare, with typically only 20 to 30 globally for any given disease. Many key opinion leaders are influential online without posting themselves, because their views appear in content owned by others.

What is the difference between earned and owned content in KOL digital listening?
Owned content is published by the key opinion leader on their own channels, such as a personal blog, Twitter account, or YouTube channel. Earned content is when a key opinion leader's views appear on channels owned by others, such as a news interview, an institution's blog, or a recorded talk posted by a society. Most key opinion leaders do not post content themselves, so much of their digital influence is earned. Acceleration Point's study found a 500% increase in content when both owned and earned content are included.

Why should KOL digital listening look beyond social media?
There are millions of digital sources worldwide, and social media is only one of them. News outlets, both therapeutic-area publications and consumer press, video sites such as YouTube and Vimeo, podcasts, and blogs all carry scientific discussion. Capturing this broader set of sources gives a more complete view of what key opinion leaders are saying. In Acceleration Point's study, 60% of a given KOL's contributions were about a disease or treatment, so filtering tools help surface relevant scientific content.

How does artificial intelligence support KOL digital listening?
Scanning thousands of individual posts, articles, and videos by hand is not practical. An artificial intelligence engine trained specifically for medical content can identify discussions about specific diseases, mentions of related treatments, and relevant medical topics. It can also reveal how those topics change over time and identify which experts are discussing them, which helps Medical Affairs teams find trends and prepare for engagement.

KOL Digital Listening: Going Beyond the Search for Digital Opinion Leaders