Healthy Conversations
Imagining & Creating New Value For Health Brands & Consumers

Companies are finding that blogs fill a specific niche that other forms of social media do not, says eMarketer senior analyst Paul Verna in this article appearing in CMO.com.

eMarketer forecasts continued growth in company use of blogs for marketing purposes. While just over one in three companies today have a public-facing blog used for marketing, that will rise to 43% by 2012. “Studies have shown that marketers perceive blogs to have the highest value of any social media in driving site traffic, brand awareness, lead generation and sales—as well as improving customer service,” said Verna.

At the recent Strategic Social Media For Healthcare Conference in NYC, I spoke about blog as the nucleus of a healthcare social media strategy. Beyond your core offering, your blog – through your content, insights, solving of problems – offers your organization a great opportunity to make a meaningful difference in the daily lives of your communities and patients.

I was proud to see this article from a couple weeks ago in HealthLeaders Media, because we are fortunate to be the agency working with the Orlando Health corporate marketing team on this “Family Is” campaign.

You can read about the specifics of this campaign by clicking on the above link. But here’s a summary of the characteristics that have made this effort successful:

1. grounded: in corporate brand strategic direction
2. relevant: starting with the theme of the effort itself, “Family Is”, to their primary female target audience
3. internal engagement: staff are proud of their Orlando Health brand, and this program reinforces their sense of pride and their distinguishing level of service
4. external engagement: Family is a compelling subject that people want to participate in through their scrapbook contributions
5. presence: the program surrounds audiences both offline and online
6. sharable: which reflects the universal importance of the theme itself
7. measurable: both quantitative (visitors, time spent, friends/followers, interactions) and qualitative (conversation, sharing, sentiment)

The future of marketing is about doing things and saying things with people. Building relationships that are collaborative, helpful, personal and honest. Requiring your healthcare organization to expose a lot more of its humanity, because customers trust each other/trust people more than they tend to trust your organization.

Blogging gives you that ability. The ability for a searcher to enter a keyword phrase, land on your post (written by a real person), which can lead to dialog, and a connection beyond what other social vehicles can provide.

Here are seven specific benefits of your blog to your healthcare organization:

1. Creating Attraction (starting with search)
2. Creating Value For Your Audiences (on their terms)
3. Building Trust (sorely lacking yet vital to building strong healthcare brands)
4. Creating and Strengthening Brand Relationships (between you and your audiences)
5. Energizing Employees (which leads to happier customers)
6. Building Transparency (a highly sought after characteristic)
7. Creating Separation Vs. Others (community building, access to customers, volume and revenue)

Are there other benefits that you’d add to this list?

How can you contribute to making a meaningful difference in the daily lives of your communities and patients? Your blog, through your content, your insights, your stories, your solving of problems, is a means to do this.

I had the pleasure of delivering this presentation – Entering The Blogosphere: The Nucleus Of Your Healthcare Social Media Strategy – at IQPC’s recent Strategic Social Media for Healthcare Summit in NYC. Given the feedback (fortunately very positive) and the follow-up conversations I’ve had, I thought it would be of value to socialize the presentation.

It covered why and how healthcare organizations should enter the blogosphere, the important strategic and tactical considerations it takes to get up and running; and offered tips to how organizations who are already participating might improve upon their current efforts.

I hope you find value in the presentation. Any questions, comments or suggestions to share with me and others?

Can you be the Apple of (fill-in your health segment here)?

There’s good learning here for marketers to take away from Fast Company’s July cover story – Invincible Apple: 10 Lessons From the Coolest Company Anywhere.

After speaking with former employees, current partners, and others who have watched Apple for many years, the article’s author states the answers to Apple’s phenomenal success center around discipline, focus, long-term thinking, and a willingness to flout the rules that govern everybody else’s business.

Here’s Fast Company’s excerpted report on the Apple playbook:

1. Go Into Your Cave: translated as set your own agenda.
2. It’s Okay To Be King: Jobs and his team know exactly what they want, so everyone knows what the plan is. And from the likes of it, it’s working.
3. Transcend Orthodoxy: Despite all the noise about Apple’s closed ideology, the company adopts positions based on two simple conditions – whether they make for good products and good business.
4. Just Say No: Jobs’s primary role at Apple is to turn things down. Every day, he’s presented with ideas for new products and new features within existing ones. The default answer is no. “I’m as proud of the products that we have not done as the ones we have done,” Jobs told an interviewer in 2004.
5. Serve Your Customer: When Apple devised its retail strategy a decade ago, the company had a single overriding goal: to launch stores (and associated service) that were unlike anything that customers associated with the computer industry.
6. Everything Is Marketing: Apple’s most effective marketing is built into its products, i.e. iPod’s white earbuds, the Mac’s startup sound, the shape of the MacBook’s back panel. Apple understands the lasting power of sensory cues, and it goes out of its way to infuse everything it makes with memorable ideas that scream its brand.
7. Kill The Past: No other company reimagines the fundamental parts of its business as frequently, and with as much gusto, as Apple does.
8. Turn Feedback Into Inspiration: Apple believes that people can’t really envision what they want. So he uses customer ideas as inspiration, not direction; as a means, not an end.
9. Don’t Invent, Reinvent: To use a musical analogy, Apple’s specialty is the remix. It curates the best ideas bubbling up around the tech world and makes them its own. It’s also a great fixer, improving on everything that’s wrong with other similar products on the shelves.
10. Play By Your Own Clock: Jobs knows he’ll never be fired, so he can devote years, if that’s what it takes, to attain Apple’s high standards. Of all the points covered here (according to this author), Apple’s willingness to go long is perhaps its greatest strength.

After reading this article, I begin to think about innovative, game-changing health organizations like Mayo Clinic, PatientsLikeMe, Sermo, Walgreens (Take Care Clinics), Intuitive Surgical (da Vinci robotic system), 23andme…

What others would you add to this list?

Orlando Health is one of Florida’s most comprehensive private, not-for-profit healthcare networks, caring for nearly two million Central Florida residents and 4,500 international visitors annually.

They’re also a health system that understands that social media really should be social (seemingly obvious, but not always put into practice). Case in point is their Family Is e-Scrapbook, which can be accessed from the home page of their website, and their Family Is Facebook page.

They reached out to the community to ask “tell us what family is to you.” This effort dovetailed with their “Family Is” multi-media campaign. Hundreds of responses were submitted and included in the e-scrapbook, many with personal and heartfelt reflections of what family means in their lives.

What I like about this effort is that it invites participation from people in ways that are really meaningful and genuine. In turn, it reinforces Orlando Health’s promise from its “family” members of caring for its communities like family. A win-win effort all around.

KeepBritainBiking.com is a service of UK-based Devitt Insurance Services Ltd (“Devitt”). The website helps bikers exchange views and useful information about biking, to help new and experienced bikers get the most out of biking.

Here are some lessons for health marketers to take away KeepBritianBiking.com:

1. It creates a meaningful difference in the lives of its customers – beyond the initial transaction and the occasional call about a claim or a rate adjustment.

2. It allows Devitt to build an emotional connection with their customers – above and beyond the functionality of its (and all others) insurance products.

3. It allows biking customers to connect with each other – a group that places great importance on sharing.

4. It maintains Devitt’s relevance and increases its odds of success – through a different offering, delivery of unique benefits, and the opportunity to extend its customer base.

5. This “social community” promotes word-of-mouth – and gets friends talking about biking (through its biking forums, biking blog and biking gallery) and Devitt.

6. Ultimately, it stretches Devitt brand meaning – delivering more emotional and self-expressive punch to customers beyond a traditional insurance company.

What are your thoughts about this effort?

We’ve had a number of similar client conversations over the past few months. They begin something like this: We feel like we have far too many brands in our portfolio. More than we can probably support. Every time someone introduces a new service, it becomes another “brand” with another logo.

The truth is, not all programs and services are created equal. Not all are “brand/logo worthy.” Particularly in this economic environment, energy and resources must be focused on supporting those health services that best align with vision and business strategy, build strategic and financial value back to the organization, and meet customer/stakeholder current and future needs.

Here are our seven portfolio “P”s that you can begin to use to evaluate and strengthen your healthcare portfolio:

Purpose. Do each of your brands reflect your strategic vision, business goals and strategies
Perspective. What story is the portfolio telling from a customer perspective
Place. Do each of the brands in the portfolio have a clearly defined role; are relationships clear; is there sufficient separation between them
Potential. How do your different brands contribute to building strategic advantage, and to current and future growth and profitability
Performance. Do you sufficiently cover the market given the needs of your priority audiences
Potency. Does market attractiveness (size and potential growth) merit investment
Pink Slips. For those brands that don’t meet this criteria, what is our plan for phasing them out

Have I missed any “P”s?

Do something meaningfully different that adds value to people’s lives.

This is the main message in the article I came across this morning – Ball of Brand Confusion – from Tom Asacker. He’s an author, speaker, and strategic advisor, and has been teaching and inspiring organizations and entrepreneurs for over 20 years on how to shake up their people, fill them with ideas and charge them with inspiration.

As this blog is dedicated to providing insights, tips and tools for helping health brand marketers to “imagine and create new value”, I’m glad to share this article. Thanks Tom.

Please have a read. And then pass it on to others. Because the opening sentence of this post is really what it’s all about – creating win/wins that help customers and companies grow stronger.

Would love to hear your thoughts.

Quebec-based Technowait gets that our time is valuable. So they’ve developed a new service that creates new value for patients – freeing them from having to wait for long periods of time in hospital and clinic waiting rooms.

Their service allows patients (after checking-in and taking a number) to leave the waiting room and go somewhere else until they’re ready to be seen. Calling in to an interactive system, they can find out via an automated message how how much waiting time still remains. As their turn approaches, they can then return in just-in-time fashion. Eventually, TechnowaiT aims to add phone alerts so that patients can get notified half an hour before it’s their turn.

Here are a few things we should appreciate about (and learn from) Technowait:

1. They’re advocates for us patients. More so than the hospitals or clinics we’re often captive to, they understand that nothing about a “waiting room” (beginning with the name) is a pleasant experience. Their service is helpful and acts on our behalf.

2. Their demonstrating respect. Someone from Technowait initially walked in our shoes. They’ve been the customer. Or they listened, acknowledged and responded to others. Either way, it’s nice to be treated like a person beyond a patient.

3. They’re also building value for their hospital and clinic clients . Beyond the time and identity value they create for patients, they’re creating relationship value for the hospitals and clinics that use their service. Everyone benefits. Everyone wins.

4. When ready, they might possibly play a bigger role in our lives. By thinking more expansively about what they ultimately provide (similar to Zappos whose real mission is customer happiness), Technowait has a lot of room to expand beyond the waiting room to other venues.

Any thoughts or ideas to share?