Nov

Insight for healthcare marketers – it's not about you that matters

People really don’t care about your products and services. This might be tough to accept, but it’s true.

What people do care a lot about, however, is how you make them feel about their decisions. How you help them improve their lives. How you help them achieve what they can’t on their own. And for healthcare marketers, these benefits translate into pretty important outcomes, from preserving life, to being able to live healthier and happier lives.

This is the incredible connecting power of your brand. By being about them, but having a strong vision about your place (what it is and what it can be) in their lives. This is the stuff that cements relationships, builds advocates, drives loyalty, gets people talking about you, creates communities and attracts others to you. This is the enormous power of your brand to help you achieve what your business alone can not.

So why do we keep talking about us? How caring we are. How celebrated we are. How trustworthy we are. How smart we are. How about turning the dial 180 degrees to the care they want. The recognition they deserve. The trust they desire. How smart they are. And how about paying this off with actions versus words (but more about this tomorrow).

Be more about your customers, and they’ll be all about you.

Any comments to share?

Nov

Ad Age's America's Hottest Brands – where are the healthcare marketers?

What’s the story here? Are there no healthcare brand upstarts or stalwarts setting the pace for innovation and getting results – right now? To that, I say….

The 11/16 Ad Age includes a feature on America’s Hottest Brands – “meet the upstarts and the stalwarts who have found the upside of the downturn; setting the pace for innovation – and getting results – right now.”

These brands run the gamet – from Jameson, to Jetblue, Digiorno, Panera, Subaru, Bing, Barnes & Noble, Diapers.com, Five Guys, Ped Egg and 30 others.

I went through each one of the stories and synthesized the magic behind the results (of course, the key criteria for inclusion on the list). Just some of these include:

• Managing to get consumers psyched about their category/their brand again
• Creating partnerships to help change the nature of conversations
• Using social media and customer service as marketing tools
• Recognizing that it’s not about your product, but about their lifestyle
• Knowing who we are and speaking of things relevant to customers
• Engaging the people within our community
• Creating mobile apps to generate new revenue streams and sales channels
• Engaging folks during a period of time where it can be mayhem; and building a whole mission around providing help during these times
• Having a connection and a closeness with customers that no one else can rival
• Not talking at our consumers, but rather challenging them and supporting them

I know healthcare brands (pharmaceuticals, healthcare systems, hospitals, home care, medical devices, etc.) are typically not included in Ad Age’s list. But I don’t care. I say it’s time to look beyond traditional consumer products boundaries.

Because in healthcare – from blogs to online communities to business models – there are many upstarts and stalwarts setting the pace for innovation and getting results. In fact, these results often translate to saving lives. And it doesn’t get much hotter than that!

So to Ad Age, I say, we’ll make our own list of America’s Hottest [Healthcare] Brands. The brands that save lives. The brands that contribute to healthier, stronger and happier lives. The brands that actually allow each of America’s hottest brands to have audiences healthy enough to participate in theirs.

Nov

Social media for health brand marketers – forget perfection

To strive for perfection is admirable. But when it comes to social media, it’s a waste of time.

While your efforts need to be grounded in goals, strategy and the social media practices of your health brand audiences, it’s pointless to strive for perfection. Because unlike developing an ad, putting it through focus group testing, and then tweaking to get your “sell and tell” story just right, truly open dialogue is hard to control. Nor do you want to try. Because this means you’re probably lecturing rather than having a conversation.

With social media, take the attitude that you’re always going to be learning, always growing, always adjusting. Follow the lead of your customers. They’ll let you know which content is relevant, and how best to engage them. And how best to facilitate conversations between them.

So, while you consider whether you have a firm enough grasp of the territory, are comfortable with your transparency, wonder whether you’re compelling enough for customers to care about your offerings, don’t contemplate too long. Because the advantages of participating in social media far outweigh the negatives of waiting for “perfection” or not participating at all.

Nov

Insight for health brand marketers – engage your influencers and decision-makers through social media

Women (your primary healthcare influencers and decision-makers) tend to be far more active in social media than men. This was the finding from BIGresearch’s 2009 survey of 22,000 consumers asked about their usage of text, blogs, twitter and social networks.

With the exception of business-focused LinkedIn, women are heavier users of the six other social media vehicles measured through this survey. Text leads the way at 61.7%, followed by Facebook 59.8%, blog readers 56.2%, blog posters 52.5%, MySpace 51.6%, and Twitter users 50.8%.

Given that this survey was conducted in June, the rankings might well have shifted a bit. But the more important news for health brand marketers is that these social media vehicles are effective in engaging your primary female audiences in more meaningful and trusted dialogue.

Nov

Lee Aase, Mayo Clinic: the future of health brands and social media

As part of our “Insider Insights” series, I feature the personal perspective of a health brand CEO, senior marketer, digital or social media expert. I’m pleased to have Lee Aase, manager of Syndication and Social Media for Mayo Clinic, as this month’s participant.

Here’s what Lee has to say about the future of health brands and social media:

1. The organizations and brands that will thrive in the future are those that…

Are trustworthy and transparent with key stakeholders, whether they be employees or customers or patients. In this regard, social media will be a force for good because it enables open communication. When organizations don’t treat people well, word will get around even faster than in the past. In the broadcast era, companies could buy gross tonnage of advertising to try to buy a consumer perception, and if they managed media relations skillfully they could pitch positive stories about their organizations to journalists.

There’s still some place for that in the conversational era, but it will be decreasingly effective.

On the positive side, if organizations provide a fantastic, remarkable experience to most customers, social media will enable that word to spread more quickly, too.

2. Specific to social media, how has it impacted the way your organization conducts business?

Social media enable Mayo Clinic to provide in-depth information to patients and consumers, with little production cost and virtually no distribution cost. We can talk in depth about relatively obscure medical conditions, for example, without worrying about turning off the mass audience. The new market has now been called “a mass of niches” and through social media tools we can provide the specialized information people crave, particularly when they’re facing a major medical issue.

We also are much more able to listen, both internally to employees and externally to patients and consumers, and to have discussions with them. This gives us great opportunities to learn and improve.

3. What are the key challenges your organization is grappling with as it considers participation?

We’re pretty well along the road to participation, so now we’re into the phase of seeing how we can incorporate social media into everything we do, and making all of our communications more conversational. It’s really an exciting time now. Early on, we had some understandable organizational trepidation about these tools, but as we understood that social media are just the way word of mouth happens in the 21st century, and that word of mouth has been the most important factor in building Mayo Clinic’s reputation for more than 100 years, we knew we needed to engage. And as we have had positive feedback we’ve been able to extend our social media presence even further.

4. What are your top lessons learned for implementing a social media strategy?

Don’t let strategy become an excuse for inaction. Often organizations wait to become involved in social media until they have thought through every imaginable scenario, and that’s fine, to a point. But too frequently they go way beyond due diligence to a social media form of hypochondria or paranoia.

Realize that if your organization is worth talking about, people are already discussing you online, so it would behoove you to join the conversation. And if you’re not being discussed online, that’s actually worse: it means you’re irrelevant, not worth talking about. That’s all the more reason to get engaged.

Social media are just another way of communicating, and are cheaper and more cost-effective than traditional means. In a twist on the defense department supercomputer’s line in the Matthew Broderick movie, “War Games,” I would say the only way to lose is not to play. It’s great to think about strategy in using social media, just as it’s appropriate to have a strategy for use of the telephone. For example, you may ask whether you will have a voice mail system or whether every call will be answered by a real person, or whether you will have a toll-free number for incoming calls. But it would be extremely odd for a company to decide it wasn’t going to install phones until it had its complete strategy decided.

So by all means, give a little thought to creating a potential growth path for social media in your organization, but don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The sales trainer Zig Ziglar used to say that if you wait until all the lights are on green before you leave the house, you’ll never get out of the driveway. If you spend any money to communicate with employees or customers, why wouldn’t you take advantage of free tools that help you do it better?

Nov

The importance of "story" to health brand marketers and their customers

I wrote a post yesterday providing ten tips to get your health brand engines going. One of the tips was “What’s Your Story.”

This presentation from Kevin Dugan – What’s Your Story? Storytelling’s Link to Social Marketing Sucess – provides great insight into the power of story for health brand marketers.

What's Your Story?

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I think the most important takeaways from his presentation about the power of stories is that they:

• are easier to remember than facts
• are contagious
• bring people together and build loyalty
• can be used to start the conversation, change the conversation, humanize brands, create brands and communities
• have a beginning (a problem or antagonist), middle (solution or hero/awareness) and end (results, transformation)
• online, are told through social media channels, and contributed to by participants, who then share/discuss, comment/link, friend/follow, connect live, support, provide feedback to, reply/rt

All great brands are built on great stories. Stories that have no boundaries. Stories that you know well and stories that will grow in importance over time – Virgin, Apple, Southwest Airlines, St. Jude, Jones Soda, Mayo Clinic, Life Is Good, (RED), Pret Manger, Womenheart, Zara, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Nike, Cirque du Soleil, One Laptop Per Child, 23AndMe.

Their stories engage us in ways that facts and figures can’t. They help create emotional connections that transcend the pervasive and often ignorable messaging around functionality and quality. They reflect who we are or want to be, and help inspire and guide us to do more and achieve more than we could on our own. In turn, they help you stand out from the crowd.

Importantly, every brand has a story. Sometimes it’s right there ready to be told. Other times, you need to search it out. But it’s worth the hard work. Because ultimately, your story is a powerful means to creating enduring customer connections and sustainable competitive advantage.

What other brands would you add to the list of those who tell a great story?

Nov

Insights for health brand marketers: borrow on the idea of Communities of Practice

Are you leveraging your opportunity to become one community of practice?

This video highlights the benefits of using collaborative tools to share best practices and expertise across the Rio Tinto group. According to Mark Bennett, principal advisor, a community of practice is a group of people who share a passion for something they know how to do, and who want to interact regularly to learn how to do that thing better.

These collaborative forums are changing the way the company works. People aren’t scared to ask questions. A lot of people are willing to give answers. The end result is a significant shift to become more interdependent. To being one Rio Tinto.

Sounds a lot like the opportunity we have through social media. And isn’t this its ultimate benefit? To create a community of practice. Community collaboration that creates greater value for both customers and companies. Extracting the knowledge, insights and imagination that we each possess, and unlocking it through collaboration.

I just came back from the e-patient connections conference last week. The power of this concept of communities of practice was reinforced through many important and powerful examples. Just a few of these included:

• Mayo Clinic’s Patient Stories, told by those who are honored to share their stories and who understand the power they have to help others
• Kerry Sparling, from sixuntilme.com, who said that for diabetes patients, finding emotional support online is everything
• Lisa Tate (CEO Womenheart) and Robert Schumm (Marketing Director Bayer Healthcare) who talked about their Facebook Strong@Heart initiative

So, how are you helping to create, for your customer and for your company, your “community of practice.” Please share your story.

Oct

Tips for health brand marketers – from the world's best project managers

Most leaders agree that great execution, actually getting things done, is the key to success.

Here’s some hindsight (“presight” for you) from the world’s best project managers, complements of Lindsay Blakely from BNET. Her article, Lessons From The World’s Best Project Managers, provides the most important lesson managers working on change initiatives at GM, Nokia, Facebook and Method learned from launching projects with maximum success. But don’t limit yourself to thinking that these lessons only apply to game-changing initiatives. Because for much of the work that you do day in and day out, these lessons still ring true.

Summarizing each of the contributors:

• From Bill Wallace, engineering group manager for GM’s Volt battery: perfect is the enemy of the deadline.

• From Lisa Waits, Nokia director of corporate business development: know whose problem you’re solving by knowing your customer.

• From Josh Handy, head of industrial design at Method: make sure the right people are talking to each other.

• From Peter Deng, product manager at Facebook: is this additional feature really necessary?

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

Sep

Aligning the real-world health brand experience with social media

How do we align the customer experience with social media?

This was the main topic of discussion in our client meeting the other day. With so much emphasis being placed on integrating social media into the marketing mix, this was a conversation about its impact on the total customer experience.

Given this perspective, many conversations about social media start too far downstream. First, even those that begin with objectives, audiences and strategies often bypass the fact that effective brand management is an organization-wide endeavor.

What this means is that all internal stakeholders across business functions need to play together on the same team, as audiences who are tweeting, posting, updating and uploading don’t care much about individual silo practices. And this means that an effective social media program must be “socialized” across the organization, as all disciplines must work together to deliver the brand promise. And delivering this promise depends on having the processes and systems in place to enable this to happen.

So how will your organization align the real-world customer experience with social media:

• how should you/will you respond to customer’s real-time questions, comments or concerns?
• which conversations are more important to business and relationships, and how do you know?
• how will you empower your customers so that they become an extension of your marketing and your sales force, and add value back to your brand?

These are a few of the questions we discussed in our meeting the other day. If you have any thoughts about this subject, please share.