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?

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.

Clinton Booner answers this question as the author of this guest post Crowdsourcing: Beyond the Basics, over at Jay Baer’s Convince and Convert Blog.

Clinton offers his 3c’s of next generation crowdsourcing: Co-Creation, Constant and Control:

1. Co-Creation. Allowing consumers to contribute in a number of ways to product and service enhancements.
2. Constant. Multiple initiatives happening in parallel and offering the user a constant stream of new involvement opportunities.
3. Control. Brands viewing open innovation strategies as not ‘giving up creative control’ but rather understanding what this really is – co-created market research that is more accurate – ultimately offering remarkable ways to help deliver happy, impassioned, and loyal consumers.

Would you add any C’s to this list?

While “image” used to sell, and ads used to be at the center of the marketing universe, today’s playbook is driven by the idea of actions speaking louder than words. The most important question to ask of your brand is what can be its place in people’s lives?

The challenge ahead for brands is to maintain their relevancy in a world in which marketing is no longer a spectator sport, but rather one that is involving, dynamic, authentic and interactive. Where the brand-customer relationship is one that increasingly resembles two close friends growing together, looking out for each other and helping each other succeed.

Here are six strategies important for growing healthier and more prosperous brands (and customers). The common denominator is that each of these practices add value to the lives of their audiences (as you’ll note from my health brand examples). In turn, audiences add their own value back to the brand. And both grow healthier and more prosperous.

1. From assembling followers to growing participants (PatientsLikeMe)
2. From capturing customers to liberating them (Teavana)
3. From making claims to creating experiences (Walgreens Take Care Clinics)
4. From generating transactions to growing communities (P&G’s BeingGirl.com)
5. From innovation silo to group think (Sermo online physician community)
6. From hiding behind the curtain to transparency (Marty Bonick, CEO Jewish Hospital, Kentucky)

Do you have comments you’d like to share? Other brand examples you can share?

Here’s what Nick 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…
….take pride in serving people. The web, and technology in general have afforded us an amazing amount of connivence of choice. We can compare the price of flights across multiple carriers, check the best rating on a dishwasher and buy music for pennies, all before getting out of bed. When selection and price make things commodities, service is the one thing that becomes a differentiator. However, if I have a choice between two providers and the quality of care is equal, I am going to pick the one that treats me the best. I often think about The Experience Economy by Pine and Gilmore and the Cluetrain Manifesto by Loc, Searls, Wineberger and Levine as both ahead of their time. They are prophetic works that suggest that when organizations value their relationship with customers and provide excellent service, the reputation of the organization markets itself. At Bon Secours, we have seen a clear path from employee engagement to world-class service to market share.

2. Specific to social media, how has it impacted the way your organization conducts business?
We are becoming better listeners. I do not think we are unique in that regard; savvy companies are moving away from information push and embracing pull. We will continue to do what we do well, and rather than simply tell people about it, we are asking them. What do you think about this facility, this new procedure, this doctor? We also spend a lot of time online just listening. What are people saying about doctors in our service areas or about healthcare in general? What can we learn from those conversations that we may not know, or which may validate our assumptions? An additional note, which is great news, is we are revenue-positive in our efforts.

3. What are the key challenges your organization is grappling with as it considers participation?
There are two distinct challenges. The first is spreading the word. Ironically, the best social media still seams to be a face-to-face conversation. We are working from both ends of the organization to spread the word about what we can do with these tools. For senior leadership it is about building their comfort level with participating as individuals; (a welcome change from where many organizations were a year ago in developing a comfort level about even using social media.) We are doing the same thing with individual employees by encouraging them to think about our social media efforts as having an unlimited bandwidth to tell any story. When we hear about team members or departments doing neat things, we approach them about a blog post, or video.

The second challenge is in fostering the creativity and encouraging participation. Many people have singular exposures to these tools. Facebook is for sharing baby pictures with friends, twitter is about what you had for breakfast and Youtube has cats playing piano. Others perceive a time requirement as a barrier to entry. I try and encourage people to think about the conversation, not the medium. There are online spaces for any way someone feels comfortable telling their story; it is our job to support that.

4. What are your top lessons learned for implementing a social media strategy?
The biggest lesson was one of cohesion. Our organization believed in our work, but was unclear on our direction. Our communications team was together on the vision. Crafting a formal strategy helped us learn how to present our successes and sell our services to our leadership and throughout the rest of the organization. It was a cathartic experience to whittle our plan town to three simple goals: service, advocacy, and market share.

Your market is changing all around you.

Traditional competitors are evolving. New ones are forming. Market forces are redefining customer expectations and challenging your traditional definition of “value.”

So how are you responding? What’s the idea that drives your brand and gives you permission to imagine and create new value for your healthcare customers and your organization?  Success, today and in the future, requires you to take this idea and translate it into adding more value to people’s lives beyond your core products and services.

Virgin takes its passengers to and from the airport. Cirque du Soleil gives its audiences theatre with (and redefines) their circus. Mayo Clinic is creating lifestyle products and mobile apps for its patients and expanded customer base. Fairmont gives its guests a BMW with their hotel stay.

How about you. What do you do to surprise, delight, and add more value to your customer’s lives?

Your health brand customers can buy reliability, efficiency and convenience just about anywhere.

But what they’re increasingly looking for is the ability to buy from brands that have a healthy heart. Brands that provide other reasons to buy – and create greater value for themselves and others – beyond price and quality.

Signs of a healthy brand heart include appealing to higher values of community, causes and advocacy. Helping people reinforce their own meaning and purpose and helping them achieve what they can’t on their own. When customers align with these brands, they become a statement for what they themselves believe.

Here are four key characteristics of heart brands, along with some examples:

1. Be true to who you are. Your actions must resonate as sincere with your customers. Which means they must already be reflected in your brands’ story and ambition and backed up by your organization’s actions. Luxottica Group’s OneSight Foundation, is a family of charitable vision care programs dedicated to improving vision through outreach, research and education – which grows out of the company’s values of “protecting the eyes of men and women all over the world…to maximize their well-being and satisfaction.”

2. Help customers themselves do more. Help them be proactive, through their purchases, in ways they otherwise wouldn’t be able to do so. Purchasing from The Body Shop allows customers to affirm their commitment and support to the values that guide the company and their everyday lives – Activate Self-Esteem, Against Animal Testing, Support Community Trade, Protect Our Planet, Defend Human Rights.

3. Be selective in your stand. The legitimacy of your brand territory can only extend so far. So better to go deep and make a significant difference through your efforts than try to be everything to everybody. Humana’s CrumpleItUp innovation initiative, exists to come up with creative ways to help people be healthy while having fun.

4. Don’t fake it.  Today’s info-empowered consumers will not tolerate lip service. At some point, too, you always get caught. Unless you’re willing to demonstrate real commitment, transparency and accountability – take a pass. Rather than out one of these brands, I’ll focus on a positive role model. Since 1997, L’Oreal has raised more than $18M to fight ovarian cancer, the deadliest of all gynecologic cancers – thanks in part to sales of charitable products such as those in its Color of Hope cosmetics collection.

Give your customers something to believe in. Everyone wins.

Here is a link to my article Stop Campaigning, Start Connecting, which just ran in the December issue of Healthcare Marketing Report.

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.