Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Dan Hickey, SVP of Products at Alliance Health (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Is it the American audience you are catering to?

Dan Hickey: Yes. It is mostly the U.S. at this time.

SM: And how big is the company?

DH: We are a $30 million-plus business.

SM: Let’s talk about the business model. So you have the social sides – 17 apps and 50 social sites that are specific to conditions. What about business models across each of those categories?

DH: Our business model is multi-pronged as well. Through our engagements in our social channels, we are able to do both acquisition programs on behalf of pharmaceutical companies, healthcare services, and products providers. We also do awareness and brand building and social engagement on behalf of health brands. The awareness building is more traditional marketing with advertising, content integration, and social engagement on our site. The other side of the business is basically an acquisition data business. Pharmaceuticals, and healthcare more generally, are among the most tightly regulated industries in the U.S. As health becomes more social, drug companies continue to look for new ways to engage with consumers online, especially on sites like ours where consumers are reaching for advice and for resources. The problem is that drug companies can’t promote their brands alongside user-generated content, so we created solutions where we can turn the user-generated content on and off. We can take some of our most successful social engagement features like surveys, quizzes, polls, and other interactions and partner with pharmaceutical companies and brands to allow the brand to “piggyback” on the engagement that we have dealing with our highly social audience.

SM: Let’s say I am a drug company and I want to work with you. What do I have to pay to do something like this? Describe a use case – something that makes it visceral and descriptive.

DH: Pfizer, for example, might come to us and say, “We would really like to engage an audience in a specific category. Here are the goals of our program.” This is just like any other marketing program, where we try to understand what Pfizer is trying to accomplish. A lot of times with the pharmaceuticals, it is very much about adherence and compliance to treatment programs. Either they are in a mode of acquiring new customers or in the mode of saying, “Once they are on our drugs, let’s try to stay on them, because it is good for them as consumers, good for the whole healthcare industry because it reduces costs, etc.” One example would be where they say, “We want to be socially engaged with our consumers, helping to build a certain brand around one of our drugs. This is more of an acquisition effort and awareness building. Do you have a social program we could be involved in? One of the things we are trying to achieve is the concept of getting people more involved with their health and doing more self-management.”

Wat we will do is build a program, where our social members would be asked to pledge for health. They could make a pledge about weight loss, about eating right, etc. We would make it interactive, so that people are pledging, the pledges appear live on a map, and we create dashboards that show how many pledges there are. We could show different parts of the country. It is very engaging and easy to use, and it provides a great way for a brand like that to get involved. This is a general description of a program we did. It was basically taking the activities and features we do on our social networks, such as a pledge tool, and allowing and partnering with a company to be involved in that social experience.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Dan Hickey, SVP of Products at Alliance Health
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