tag archives / healthcare social media

Nov
03

A new healthcare movement saving lives and eliminating injuries

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SAFE IN COMMON is an online global community of healthcare workers, educators, patients, community leaders, industry and advocacy groups who’ve joined together to enhance and save lives by raising awareness about needlestick injuries, providing support to those affected and bringing about the safest and simplest injection practices to people around the world.

In tandem with our client Unilife, we officially launched SAFE IN COMMON today.

It’s an important initiative, as 1.3 million people die annually from unsafe injection practices, and another 600,000 suffer needlestick injuries. By joining SAFE IN COMMON, you can support its mission by contributing to blogs, participating in surveys, sharing needlestick stories, signing the Manifesto, and promoting injection safety. You will also receive e-news updates, and have unlimited access to its online resource library.

If you’re involved in healthcare — or if you know someone who has ever suffered a needlestick injury — visit SAFE IN COMMON. Consider joining the community. Share it with others. And help us save lives.

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Sep
30

The real power of social media in healthcare, and beyond

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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.

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Sep
28

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

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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.

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Sep
07

Would you let a blogger spend a month inside your healthcare organization?

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How transparent would your organization be willing to be?

The Museum of Science and Industry is sponsoring a contest where someone will be spending a full month at the museum – “living and breathing science 24/7 for 30 days” – and to write about their experiences along the way.

The winner’s mission will be to live in the 77-year-old institution and experience its fun and education while reporting their experience to the outside world via blog, Twitter and online video. More than 1,500 people from all 50 states as well as Antarctica and Australia sent in applications, according to a report in the Chicago Sun-Times.

Makes me wonder how many healthcare organizations would open themselves up to a blogger 24/7 for 30 days straight. Would you?

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Aug
22

The importance of your blog to your healthcare social media strategy

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Companies are finding that blogs fill a specific niche that other forms of social media do not, says eMarketer senior analyst Paul Verna in this article appearing in CMO.com.

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.

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Aug
16

Orlando Health: engaging patients through their own stories on Facebook

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I was proud to see this article from a couple weeks ago in HealthLeaders Media, because we are fortunate to be the agency working with the Orlando Health corporate marketing team on this “Family Is” campaign.

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)

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Aug
10

The benefits of your blog to your healthcare organization (and audiences)

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The future of marketing is about doing things and saying things with people. Building relationships that are collaborative, helpful, personal and honest. Requiring your healthcare organization to expose a lot more of its humanity, because customers trust each other/trust people more than they tend to trust your organization.

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?

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Aug
03

Entering the blogosphere: the nucleus of your healthcare social media strategy

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How can you contribute to making a meaningful difference in the daily lives of your communities and patients? Your blog, through your content, your insights, your stories, your solving of problems, is a means to do this.

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?

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