With all the noise around coronavirus, professionals in the life sciences industry may have trouble finding information relevant to their work.
To help streamline that experience, W2O and the California Life Sciences Association created a regularly updating communications dashboard for coronavirus information.
The platform breaks its information into five segments: HCPs, life sciences, media, scientific community and California. For each of those groups, the dashboard breaks out top news stories, top voices, top hashtags and top tweets. It also allows users to filter by time frame, for instance, the top HCP news stories from the past 30 minutes, and users can filter by their own search terms.
“We wanted to find a way for us to provide some value in this time of pandemic and the crisis we’re facing and provide some insight and value,” said Paulo Simas, chief creative officer at W2O. “The idea was to create a common communication center aggregating and filtering the most relevant stories around COVID-19. The dashboards allow communications and marketing folks alike to have a finger on the pulse of what’s trending in newsflow, content and influencers around the pandemic.”
Simas said the W2O team and CLSA decided to create this tool early last week and rolled it out in a matter of days, with a soft launch over the weekend.
The tool pulls from W2O’s proprietary tools and databases. For the HCP segment, the dashboard pulled about 10,000 vetted HCP accounts from a W2O database of more than one million individuals, Simas said. The life sciences segment is curated in a similar way, pulling content and individuals from a database of about 450 life sciences companies.
To determine what content makes the list, each piece of information is vetted by three metrics: reach, relevance and resonance, Simas said. He also notes that W2O staff does not curate the dashboard, it is done entirely by the data and algorithms on the back end.
Going forward, W2O and CLSA plan to expand the tool with new segments. The team is already starting on a segment for research, discovery and clinical trials and is beginning to look at building a segment for policymakers.
The challenge there, Simas said, is to determine which policymakers to focus on, local and state leaders compared to members of Congress and federal leaders.
“The platform is meant for the community at large,” Simas said. “I have it on all day. I find this 100 times more relevant than going onto CNN or another news website because it’s just focusing on the conversations specific to the life science community. That’s an important lens. We’re not looking at general conversations from consumers; it’s very much driven through HCPs, life sciences companies and the scientific community.”
