Making the subjective objective via sentiment-ality

President of 81QD, Aafia Chaudhry made the second presentation of the second day by outlining a methodology that attempts to put the personal into a form of practice.

Describing 'sentiment analysis' as one approach to justify the 'expenditure of the pharmaceutical industry on physicians's which can be a relationship spanning more than 14 years as a brand evolves, Chaudhry purported that some physicians are more important than others and that circumspect literature searches or clinical trial database foraging simply wouldn't deliver the KOLS that the industry needs to effectively communicate brand needs.

Aafia explained that the concept of opinion leadership is not a new pheneomenon, but that its origins lie in the works of Elihu Katz, Paul Lazarsfeld and and Everett Rogers - whose work included the definition of opinion leadership as 'intervening factors between the stimuli of the media and resultant opinions, decisions and actions'. Today, Chaudhry believes that an Opinion Leader is a meld of knowledge about a particular domain and an intent to communicate.

It was unclear as to whether these type of OLs (several delegates questioned whether such OL communities are quite so autocratic in their make-up) felt comfortable about being subjected to such level of scrutiny about their communications in medical journals, letters, presentations; certainly are they even aware that their every communication move will be reviewed for 'entailment, synonomy, ambiguity, discourse, inference and co-reference'? There was a ripple of concern through the audience that such a brutal examination of communication would possible reinforce the negative perceptions of influence and control over OLs that industry needs to change. Nonetheless, Chaudhry asserted that these novel technologies play a critical role to optimize efforts at all stages of 'Life Cycle Management Planning' and that objective metrics can provide metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of KOL interactions. Stern - probably. Valuable for number-crunching - definitely.