This is the one overriding lesson for health brand marketers to take away from David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan’s book “Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn From the Most Iconic Band In History.”

Early on in their careers, The Grateful Dead decided the best way to grow a religion-like following and legacy was to jettison the traditional rock band business model. While others focused on selling albums, they made their money from concerts. This led to a cascade of business-model breaking/money-making decisions: unique concerts each night, fans wanting to experience this uniqueness on consecutive nights, approval to make tapes of the concerts and freely share them (and more concerts equaled more tapes, more people exposed to the music and more people paying for concert tickets).

According to David, The Grateful Dead let their audience define the Grateful Dead experience. Concerts were a happening, where all 20,000 or more audience members were actually part of the experience. Making fans an equal partner in a mutual journey, The Dead teaches us that our community defines who we are. By studying the competition and doing the exact opposite, they created a brand that has stood the test of time and has outlived the competition.

It seems the Grateful Dead saw the value in “community and co-creation” long before the rest of us, along with the importance of zigging (meaningfully) while others zag.

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.

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)

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?

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?

Brian wrote a post last week titled New Brand Glossary: update 4. It’s worth holding on to this glossary. Because it doesn’t resemble much of the current (old) thinking about brands and their holds on customers.

Here’s a snippet of his introduction:

Traditional brand glossaries usually assume a passive customer “audience” for brand messaging campaigns, where the brand aspires to be a “belief system” that serves the company’s interests. In this view, brands aim to be timeless (static) “icons” worshiped by “consumers,” who are positioned as little more than sheep with credit. Traditional brand glossaries are therefore largely glossaries of control. The brands they describe really don’t do much for customers—except to keep them in place.

In contrast, this is a glossary of value-based brands and of brand innovation. It contains concepts, terms and definitions for a new era of brands designed to foment new business by creating new customer opportunities. The essence of these brands is collaboration, not control. These brands create proactive new customers who leave old brands—and old companies—far behind.

How do you find most health brands stack up against these new definitions? How about most health brand marketing?

Value that is defined on your customers terms and reflects their agenda. Value that transcends your messaging and your one-way communication about your organization and your offerings.

Ask yourself these three questions:

1. Is your marketing really adding value to your customers lives?
2. Are you helping them do something they want to do, or solve something that helps them achieve more than they could on their own?
3. If you were your customer, would you find you indispensable?

Make your customer agenda your agenda. You’ll create greater value for both of you.

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.

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?