What to ask vendors who sell pharma social listening

Category marketing will claim everything: AE detection, KOL maps, sentiment AI, GDPR-ready, board-ready dashboards. Use these questions to separate monitoring products from insight-delivery products — and to surface privacy and review gaps early.

Scope and output

1. Can you show a sample deliverable for one indication with named unmet needs, frequencies, and linked verbatims?
2. Is the unit of work a brand campaign, or an indication/project?
3. How do patient/caregiver surfaces differ from HCP professional visibility?
4. What does a human reviewer do before export — and can we see that workflow?

Sources and compliance

1. Which sources are public-only by default? How do you handle closed communities?
2. How are exports anonymised by default? How is any opt-out audited?
3. How do you honour erasure requests by URL, post ID, or handle?
4. What remains after archive and raw-evidence purge — aggregates only, or identifiable text?

Safety vs insight

1. Are you positioning as a PV/AE system, an insight system, or both?
2. If AE language appears in collected posts, what happens — and who is responsible for reporting?
3. Does your contract and UI make clear that medical/legal/regulatory review stays with the controller?

Operations

1. How long from indication setup to a reviewed first cut?
2. Who owns keyword maintenance when language drifts?
3. Can agencies run client-separated projects without cross-indication person profiles?