Case Study: The Social Studies Group achieves actionable patient-community insights and real-time monitoring with Brandwatch

The Social Studies Group Leverages Social Analytics to Better Engage with Online Communities

The Social Studies Group (SSG), a Washington, DC–based social media research firm, was hired by a PR agency representing a major pharmaceutical client to map and monitor the online community around a genetic disorder. The brief was complicated by heavy spam and marketing noise, strict FDA reporting requirements for adverse events, and the need to identify genuine patient, caregiver and clinician conversations so the client could engage appropriately and detect attitude or sentiment shifts immediately.

SSG used Brandwatch to build a baseline, run broad but precise queries, and apply excludes, tags and manual review to cleanse and categorize results in real time. The work revealed that most conversations were personal (parents, patient experiences, fundraising and contact recommendations), informed a targeted PR engagement strategy, and delivered early alerts on adverse-effect mentions and pipeline changes—improving the client’s community insights and readiness for regulatory scrutiny.

The Social Studies Group

Wendy Scherer

Managing Partner