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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

That’s creativity—not operational effectiveness, influence, or even dedication. Coming out of the worst economic downturn in their professional lifetimes, when managerial discipline and rigor ruled the day, this indicates a remarkable shift in attitude. Until now, creativity has generally been viewed as fuel for the engines of research or product development, not the essential leadership asset that must permeate an enterprise.

As they step back and reassess, CEOs have seized upon creativity as the necessary element for enterprises that must reinvent their customer relationships and achieve greater operational dexterity. In face-to-face interviews with IBM consultants, they said creative leaders do the following:

• Disrupt the status quo. Every company has legacy products that are both cash—and sacred—cows. Often the need to perpetuate the success of these products restricts innovation within the enterprise, creating a window for competitors to advance competing innovations. As CEOs tell us that fully one-fifth of revenues will have to come from new sources, they are recognizing the requirement to break with existing assumptions, methods, and best practices.

• Disrupt existing business models. CEOs who select creativity as a leading competency are far more likely to pursue innovation through business model change. In keeping with their view of accelerating complexity, they are breaking with traditional strategy-planning cycles in favor of continuous, rapid-fire shifts and adjustments to their business models.

• Disrupt organizational paralysis. Creative leaders fight the institutional urge to wait for completeness, clarity, and stability before making decisions. To do this takes a combination of deeply held values, vision, and conviction—combined with the application of such tools as analytics to the historic explosion of information. These drive decisionmaking that is faster, more precise, and even more predictable.

Taken together, these recommendations describe a shift toward corporate cultures that are far more transparent and entrepreneurial. They are cultures imbued with the belief that complexity poses an opportunity, rather than a threat. They hold that risk is to be managed, not avoided, and that leaders will be rewarded for their ability to build creative enterprises with fluid business models, not absolute ones.

1. Advocates Trump Followers. Strength isn’t always in numbers. While Dunkin’ Donuts has 80% fewer Facebook and Twitter followers than Starbucks, Dunkin’ fans are 35% more likely to recommend the brand given its social media practices. Dunkin has shown that interesting initiatives that help fans engage, with your brand and with each other through your brand, build brand advocates. I think P&G’s BeingGirl.com is a good example of this.

2. Context Matters. Using the example of beer drinkers, the study found that “product and packaging innovations do not help create relevance in this consumer’s daily life.” What’s important is the bonding or “social context” during consumption. I relate this back to blasting out one-way messages touting latest technologies or chest-pounding statistics versus posting (for instance) a video on YouTube featuring an elderly couple playing the piano in the atrium of Mayo Clinic. Real people. Real story. Real relevant.

3. Not Every Brand Should Be Social. Mass-market brands positioned based on functional superiority, such as Gillette (with 96% of study respondents touting good quality and reliability), aren’t likely to see much upside in social currency. I don’t agree with this statement for the reason they cite, as social media programs should always be built around achieving specific objectives – whether building awareness, cultivating relationships, promoting new products, or targeting new markets.

4. Social Tools Are A Means, Not An End. In reviewing Axe and Clinique, the study concludes that Axe’s social-media efforts don’t translate as strongly into meaningful talk or an ardent defense when compared with a brand such as Clinique, because the Axe audience knows that it’s all a goof. By contrast, Clinique’s more instructive approach –- for example, YouTube how-to tutorials — has earned it stronger social currency. Certainly, the inherent benefits that your health brands provide give you a leg up in creating this social currency.

5. Gimmicks Marginalize Trust. Last year, Wendy’s “You Know When It’s Real” campaign featured commercial spots, online games, and contests highlighting how its never-frozen patties are cooked to order. Burger King created the Whopper Sacrifice, asking fans to drop 10 friends on Facebook to get a free hamburger, the latest in a string of Internet-sensation stunts. Today, BK’s fickle fans have moved on, but customers trust Wendy’s products much more, according to the Vivaldi-Lightspeed study. The ability of your health brands to help improve lives –– and the different ways to demonstrate this through social tools — lend themselves to building this trust.