What is the Astellas C3 Prize; Changing Cancer Care challenge?
Astellas is holding its 3rd global contest called the C3 Prize; Changing Cancer Care. Their objective is to provide funding to somebody or to a group with an innovative non-treatment idea intended to improve the lives of cancer patients, caregivers, and their loved ones, especially in low- and middle-income countries.
The winners will receive grants and access to resources to make their life-changing ideas a reality.
This is such a fantastic idea! A win-win for patients and for the innovator! And yes, Astellas is gaining visibility as a results, and that’s perfectly fine. Many consumer products run similar programs (ie. think pink ribbon for breast cancer), and it’s OK for them to gain awareness as a result as well.
Astellas promotion of C3 Prize Challenge on Facebook:
Astellas is sponsoring Facebook ads to promote their C3 Prize challenge to a long list of countries. We can tell this now because Facebook recently changed the way that we can view ads of a particular Facebook page. You can now see which country the ad is being targeted to. The image below shows only a small fraction of the countries where the Astellas Facebook page is promoting the C3 Prize ads.
Here are the C3 Prize ads that one can find on the Astellas Facebook page (confirmed from July 10th to 15th). There is a mixture of still images and videos, and all have the button “Apply now”;
Unfortunately, these sponsored Facebook posts have not done as well as most of the other posts by Astellas from May 14 to July 14 2018, in terms of engagement (Source: Social Insider). This was probably expected though for the following reason. Astellas posts a lot of interesting information on their Facebook page. Their posts which are targeted to a larger, mainstream audience get more shares and more likes. It is difficult for posts, such as the C3 Prize challenge, which are targeted to a much narrower audience, to compete with the mainstream posts. With the C3 Prize challenge posts, Astellas is reaching out to a very narrow group of healthcare entrepreneurs who are looking to get their innovative cancer care idea off the ground. There are only a handful of those people around on Facebook.
Astellas promotion of C3 Prize Challenge on LinkedIn:
Despite the challenge in reaching entrepreneurs on Facebook, there is no shortage of business-minded, motivated entrepreneurs on LinkedIn. As such, it is not surprising to see that the Astellas C3 Prize challenge posts on Linked are resulting in substantial engagement.
Astellas promotion of C3 Prize Challenge on Twitter:
Several months ago, Twitter announced that we would be able to access a hub of some kind to find ads by particular accounts, but that has not happened yet. As such, I am unable to tell whether Astellas is sponsoring advertisements on Twitter or not. However, there are quite a few posts using the #C3Prize hashtag. Here are a couple of examples below.
Astellas #C3Prize Twitter chat statistics:
Astellas held a Twitter chat on July 12th, at 2pm E.S.T. This is a great way to create a live conversation between stakeholders to create more awareness and generate buzz around a particular hashtag.
Astellas cleverly created an image to attach to some of its first Twitter post during the Twitter chat itself, as it outlined the process and guidelines of the chat. They made certain that chat participants would know that their ideas were not going to be evaluated during the chat and that anybody seeking information about medical treatments should discuss with their physician.
Here are some data a little over 24 hours AFTER the Twitter chat:
Data from Keyhole:
As would be expected, there was a large increase in the usage of the #C3Prize hashtag during the Twitter chat, and the usage of the hashtag almost immediately went back to base level afterwards.
The majority of the hashtag users were male both before and after the Twitter chat.
Almost half of the tweets posted with the #C3Prize hashtag were initiated on desktop, with the rest on some kind of mobile app. This means that Astellas needs to prepare digital content that will be well viewed on both desktop and mobile devices.
Approximately 2/3 of the posts with the #C3Prize hashtag were retweets of other posts that contained the hashtag. Almost 1/3 of the posts were original posts. Original posts during a Twitter chat are key because these are the ones that will generate replies and retweets.
More than half of the tweets with the #C3Prize hashtag were positive in nature, and only around 10% were negative. The overall sentiment score is calculated based on positive ad negative data. One must be careful when looking at the negative data because it only takes one negative word in a tweet to label that tweet negative. For example, one tweet during the chat had the word “unhealthy”, but the content of the tweet was not negative at all. It was part of the discussion which was about cancer in less fortunate areas. Nonetheless, it is quite possible that the Keyhole algorithm just read that one word and then labeled it as a negative tweet as a result.
Here is some complimentary data about the Twitter chat from Socialert:
The majority of the tweets with the #C3Prize hashtag came from the US with a few countries, including Canada, showing up as secondary users.
The profile keywords give you an idea of the type of people who used the #C3Prize hashtag, as these are words that appear in the participants’ Twitter profile. Seeing the words “cancer”, “health”, “care” and “palliative” indicate that many of the participants describe themselves or their job with these words, therefore are vested in healthcare and may be influencers.
The top 3 hashtags used during and slightly after the Astellas #C3Prize Twitter chat were #C3Prize (naturally!!), #CancerCare and #Cancer.
The hashtag #CancerCare was also used by Astellas in their tweets about the C3 Prize. The #CancerCare hashtag appears to be more commonly used. Astellas must be pleased that their company name was one of the most prominent keywords in tweets containing the hashtag #CancerCare over the past 10 days (source Keyhole, July 4 to July 14 2018).
Based on this review, it seems as though the #C3Prize Twitter chat was fairly successful. Although the hashtag didn’t trend, one has to remember that this was not meant to be a mainstream Twitter chat. This was a Twitter chat targeted to a handful of people who are entrepreneurs in the healthcare field, and who are searching for funding to make their innovative idea come to fruition.
We can learn from Astellas about using social media to promote a challenge:
- Your target audience for the challenge will determine your success on various social media platforms. Entrepreneurs can be found more easily on LinkedIn compared to Facebook and Twitter.
- A Twitter chat which includes a few influential participants can generate a fair amount of noise during a peak period.
- Setting up clear Twitter chat guidelines and promoting them ahead of the chat can reduce confusion.
- Combining your customized hashtag with an associated, more commonly used hashtag to generate greater awareness to a larger audience.
Good luck to all the #C3Prize participants and best wishes to Astellas in choosing their winners amongst all the innovative ideas that they will certainly receive.