Nov

Virgin Active: a health brand living its beliefs

Virgin Active Health Clubs just inked a three-year deal for the London Triathlon, to be renamed the Virgin Active London Triathlon.

Here are six brand and customer benefits that I appreciate (as Virgin Active members should) about the new relationship:

1. Brand Values. It reinforces Virgin Active’s values of challenging the norm, having fun, innovation.
2. Helping Members Do More. Virgin Active will help its members train and prepare for the event as part of its sponsorship by launching a range of classes especially tailored for the event –– alongside the clubs staging their own indoor triathlon next year.
3. Promoting Participation. Being the world’s largest event of its type, it encourages a wide range of people of all fitness levels, from beginner to elite, to get involved and try it for themselves.
4. A Different Triathlon Experience. Participants (and spectators) can expect a uniquely Virgin Active Triathlon experience and spirit beyond that of other triathlons.
5. Engagement In A Uniquely Virgin Way. Owning this event helps Virgin connect to its audiences in ways that other health clubs can’t. And it provides Virgin the opportunity to extend this engagement (in ways that are meaningful and compelling to members) for years to come.
6. Reflecting Positively on Virgin Active Members. Virgin’s sponsorship of the triathlon, while enhancing Virgin’s image, also reflects positively on Virgin Active members self-image.

Sep

The real power of social media in healthcare, and beyond

Scott Johnson, author of Scott’s Diabetes Journal and Scott’s Diabetes Blog, recently wrote a blog post titled A Patient’s Perspective On Social Media (see below). I read it on Mayo Clinic’s Center for Social Media site, and it referenced the importance of Mayo’s Center for Social Media.

It’s a very heartfelt post about the value of social media, in the context of living with type 1 diabetes. But more than that, it speaks to the real power of social media. The power to truly engage and inspire. To bring people together around their passions, concerns and causes. To motivate participation and collaboration. And in this case, the power to help heal.

Regardless of where you compete across the health continuum – whether healthcare, medical devices, life sciences or personal care – you have the ability to enrich the lives of your customers by being the conduit for their conversations. To create marketing platforms that provide value, not noise. That focus on their needs versus your messages. That build relationships where all parties benefit.

Here’s his post. Would appreciate you sharing your thoughts.

Social media gives me access to a world of people living with type 1 diabetes, just like me. Any hour of the day or night I can tune in to discussions on Twitter or Facebook, I can read thousands of blog posts written by people from all walks of life, all living with type 1 diabetes, and I can find YouTube videos that make me laugh and cry. I can find connections. I can find people who understand exactly what I’m going through. These people and their stories become an emotional lifeline. Suddenly I don’t feel so alone or isolated. In fact I often feel inspired and empowered by what I’ve seen.

Social media has helped me be a healthier person by showing me real-life examples of others living with diabetes. Unfiltered and unafraid, these people are sharing their stories. I hear first hand about situations they have experienced, and I can share in their successes and challenges.

…

The Mayo Clinic recently launched a Social Media Center to teach and train other health care organizations on using social media. Beyond just setting an example for organizations to follow, the Mayo Clinic is encouraging and teaching these organizations to jump in with both feet.

Instead of fearing and ignoring the Internet, the Mayo Clinic embraces the communication that social media enables. That is exactly what we want. We want communication, a chance to share our story, and a channel to provide feedback on what works and what doesn’t. We want to get to know the people behind the corporate curtain. We want to learn more about the dedicated people working to help us live better. We want to know that we are not alone out here.

As a patient living with chronic illness, social media has become a part of my health care regime, and something I’ve come to need as part of my survival toolkit.

I am excited to see that The Mayo Clinic has recognized the importance of social media as a means to connect with and provide additional support to patients. I believe the center will be wildly successful, and I hope to see other healthcare organizations make use of this resource to get involved with social media the right way.

Thanks Scott.

Sep

Insights for health brand marketers: IBM’s Global CEO Study

Here are two major findings and associated recommendations that are relevant to health brand marketers – based on 1500 face-to-face conversations with CEO’s, general managers, and senior public sector leaders worldwide – representing different sizes of organizations in 60 countries and 33 industries:

Creativity is the most important leadership quality. Leaders expect to make deeper business model changes to realize their strategies. To succeed, they take more calculated risks, encourage others to drop outdated approaches, invite disruptive innovation, find new ideas, and keep innovating in how they lead and communicate.

The most successful organizations co-create products and services with customers, and integrate customers into core processes. Globalization, combined with dramatic increases in the availability of information, has exponentially expanded customers’ options. CEOs said that ongoing engagement and co-creation with customers produce differentiation. They consider the information explosion to be their greatest opportunity in developing deep customer insights, and have made customer intimacy their number-one priority.

Recommendations (partial list from study)

a. Creativity

Reach beyond silos. Pull creative elements of your organization out of compartments and integrate them into the mainstream. Proactively exchange knowledge and cooperate with internal and external stakeholders, eliminating every communication barrier to improve your ability to handle the unknown.

Exemplify breakthrough thinking. Practice and encourage experimentation at all levels of the business. Forge ahead with rule-breaking innovation that sets your organization apart from the crowd. Study and question what others do — scour technology and customer trends. Build scenarios to plan responses to a range of possible futures.

Act despite uncertainty. Fight the natural urge to wait for clarity and stability; taking calculated risks — while others hesitate — can pay off. Find a creative way to turn complexity into an advantage. Rely on deeply felt values and a well-defined vision to provide the confidence and conviction to exploit narrow windows of opportunity.

Borrow from other industries’ successes. Learn from and be inspired by creative achievements from outside your industry. Regularly discuss case examples from other industries in your management team meetings. Stay abreast of customer and technology trends that are transforming other sectors and consider how you could apply them.

Use a wide range of communication approaches. Supplement top-down organizational communication with less formal, more innovative channels. Accept that for customers and employees alike, blogs, Internet presence, instant messaging and social networking are more credible — and often faster — than traditional top-down communication.

b. Customer Value/Co-Creation

Establish an unprecedented level of focus. Starting with the CEO, every employee in the organization must be hyper-focused on customers. Make customer value your number one value. Ensure every employee is responsible for and assessed annually on a customer satisfaction or customer value metric.

Heighten customer exposure. Make it easy for customers to connect with the right person in your organization. Every employee must have the information needed to engage with customers appropriately and effectively. All employees must understand the link between the work they do and the value it brings to customers.

Measure what customers value. Genuinely know what motivates current and potential customers to choose your product or service. Surpass today’s standards to proactively verify that you are providing what customers want and delivering it in ways that matter to them. Understand your customers’ business goals and help them succeed.

Make customers part of your team. Enhance customer relationships by finding new ways to communicate, new roles they can play, new questions to ask them, new ways you can listen, new ways to evaluate their feedback and leverage what you learn. Make — and deliver on — customer commitments.

Solicit customer wants. Engender loyalty by directly involving customers in defining emerging needs. Constantly tune offerings to their rapidly changing preferences. Make sure you are providing what customers want tomorrow, instead of what they wanted yesterday.

Co-innovate and interact with customers in new ways. Collaborate across different channels to create new products and services. Maintain a running dialogue that includes face-to-face and social networking interaction. Involve customers before and beyond the sale, including care and service.

The full study can be found here.

Jul

Creating new value for health brand customers: 10 lessons from Apple

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?

Jun

Humana Games: a healthcare brand helping you play your way to better health

I’ve posted before about Humana – specifically, its CrumpleItup initiative, a dedicated group inside the company focused on coming up with creative ways to help people be healthy while having fun.

Now comes Humana Games For Health. Part of the Innovation Center within Humana, this team is driven by the belief that playing video games keeps your mind and body fit. So they’re helping people of all ages play their way to better health by getting them off their seat and on their feet.

Here’s some brand-building learning from Humana Games:

1. Actions speak louder than words: You can tell people all day long (as most benefits providers do) that they should live healthier lives. But provide them with an enjoyable and sharable experience, one that fits nicely into their daily lives, and their practices will start to change.

2. Experience alongside image: Advertising will always play a role in the marketing mix. But these messages are increasingly being rejected. So seek out the bigger role that your brand can play in customers lives. Be their advocate, and bring your marketing to life (as Humana Games has) with involving, interactive experiences that actually add value to their lives.

3. Build a community beyond the transaction: These games give participants the ability to become a member of the Humana Games universe. They also build valued interactions among game participants. Participants of different ages and stages of life (from kids to seniors).

4. From innovation silo to group think: Humana Games’ concepts (first developed by an inside/outside multidisciplinary team that includes a target audience and intended health outcome) are then taken to the prototype phase, where a working model of the idea is created and tested by consumers to get valuable feedback and determine efficacy.

5. Use of social media to build engagement: Participants can invite their friends to visit Humana Games. Get updates and meet other players on Facebook.

Any comments you’d like to share?

Apr

Does your health brand social media program create value for all your potential fans?

How social is your social media program? Beyond your current and prospective customers, consider whether you’re creating something of value for:

1. Employees: such that they are more/fully engaged; proud of your/their collective contributions; are more aware of the world around them; and seeing new and different opportunities to help make lives better
2. Shareholders: are you engaging the ones who care not only about financial return, but about the long-term (sustainable) impact of that return; and who increasingly are investing in companies that are balancing purpose with profits and making a difference in the world
3. Society: are you creating value for society at large at the same time that you’re helping customers move forward; hopefully, melding these two (increasingly compatible) concepts together
4. Company: beyond your financial worth to creating value such that the whole of your contribution exceeds the sum of your individual parts

Challenge yourself to think more expansively about your social media program. You have the opportunity to create new value for audiences you might not otherwise be able to engage through traditional channels.

Mar

Age Of Conversation 3: a new crowdsourced social media book

There’s a new book just released called Age Of Conversation 3, and it’s the third book in the Age of Conversation series.

A crowdsourced publication, it brings together 150+ authors from around the world, leading marketers, writers, thinkers and creative innovators contributing individual chapters, investigating the roles that community, conversation, experimentation, engagement, and collaboration play in shaping the 21st century’s economy of ideas. I’m proud to be a contributing chapter author.

The book helps readers use social media. Teaches them how to use it smarter, better, more efficiently. Shares stories, ideas, strategies and observations. And in the spirit of community, all profits from the sale of the book are donated to the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

The book is broken down into these sections:

At the Coalface
There is much to be said for good strategy, but what happens when the strategy is done? This section is about working at the coalface of social media. It’s about the real world lessons that come hard and fast – case studies and the stories and events that are much better in the re-telling than in the moment.

Conversational Branding
What happens when a brand ventures into online conversation. What does it mean to participate in these conversations? Is this earned media? Is it paid for? Or is there an in-between space? How important is brand in the social media space? How does the conversation shape or change the brand?

Influence
Much is made of influence, but what does “influence” mean in social media? Who has it, and who creates it? Does influence mean different things to different people? Is it hype or can it make the cash register ring? Is influence one of the new currencies?

Getting to work
They say that the best approach to social media is dive in. But getting to work can be harder than it first appears. What have you done to quickly get to work? Or perhaps this section is about how you use social media to get to work — literally. Is it a viable tool for networking and job hunting? Or maybe this section is about how social media is changing the face of work.

Corporate Conversations
There’s plenty of coverage of social media when the focus is on marketing or advertising. But what is happening in other parts of your business? Or if you’re a consultant or agency, how do you introduce social media to the C-level at your client’s business? How do you make social media more relevant to the bottom line?

Measurement
Can you measure social media? Many claim you can and many claim you can’t. But if you can, should you? And how do you measure it? In terms of ROI? Or influence? Or ability to do good? What are the metrics that matter and how do you get to them?

In the boardroom
Is social media a fad dreamed up by the marketing department to get the attention of executives? What are the hard questions and firm answers that get thrown around the boardroom. And who, if anyone, is best placed to answer? What role should the C-level executives play in a company’s social media strategy?

Pitching social media
The work has been done and the late nights are weighing heavily on your shoulders. But it’s time to buck up – to pull it all together and wow your client. What do you do to impress? Is there a new art to pitching social media? Or, if you’re from the PR side of the table, how are you pitching your client’s stories to social media’s influentials?

Innovation and Execution
People make great claims for social media. Is it the long dreamed of silver bullet? Can the tools and techniques be harnessed to drive innovation? How can you take an idea or a strategy and make it work for your brand or your business? How do you move from idea to actual execution?

Identities, friends and trusted strangers
Many people are now living much of their lives online. Who do you call friend? How do you set boundaries or decide who to let into your circle of influence? How do you know who to trust when you can’t look them in the eyes? What tools, techniques and sites do you find most useful in creating your online brand?

The book can be purchased from Channel V Books, a company that works with business thought leaders who need to publish books in order to promote themselves and their businesses, enhance their credibility and attract new opportunities.

Mar

Creating greater value through your health brand social media program

Where’s the value through your social media program? What’s in it for your audiences? How do you align your social efforts with your strategic goals, and the goals of your customers?

Here’s a quick presentation that contains ten questions that must be answered (along with some additional thoughts to get you underway), if you’re going to deliver real value for your customers and your organization.

Mar

A healthcare marketers guide to navigating the social media landscape

On CMO.com, there’s a handy guide created by SEO and social media firm 97th Floor which analyzes which tools (across the social channels) are best for Customer Communication (add engagement here), Brand Exposure, Traffic To Your Site and SEO. Here’s the link, where a downloadable pdf is also available.

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