MResult Healthcare Insights

From Business Week, Steve McKee writes that Social Media Marketing is nothing new, just a digital form of “word of mouth marketing”. I particularly appreciate his likening Twitter to “a giant online cocktail party”, with the attendant rules of engagement.

Social Media Is Nothing New – by way of BusinessWeek.com.

Having a domain name that lines up with your online campaigns can be a major factor in increasing your campaign’s success, according to this article from the MediaPost. Many users use URLs almost like search engines – so called “direct navigation”, where people open a browser, type in a name and expect to find the correct Web site and content, remains the No. 1 Web navigation technique.

We’ve talked about the importance of key word research to aid in pay per click and search engine optimization. Add domain-name selection to the list. At the end of the day you need to know what words your customers use when they are looking for your services.

How Much Are Domain Names For Campaigns Worth?

Here’s an interesting interview with Steve Garske – vice president and CIO Children’s Hospital Los Angeles – on Social Media. His hospital has seen a positive return on investment with the social media work they’ve done, particularly in fund raising and recruiting.

Establishing a social media presence enabled one CIO to expand his organization’s reach and realize a healthy ROI, from healthcare-informatics.com.

HHC Diabetes Micro Site

The New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation has recently launched a microsite aimed at it’s 58,000 diabetic patients. The goal of the site is to make users more active and informed participants in their own care. For the most part it is well designed and informative and worth taking a look at. But we feel it misses a big opportunity to be a “hyper local” resource.

For general health information any hospital is going to have a tough time competing with general purpose sites like WebMD. Where hospitals shine is in the opportunity to present local residents with things they can do in their own community. The HHC site does provide information for local Diabetes Programs and Care Center contact information, although you need to click around for it. But the content under the sections for Eating Right, Staying Active and Controlling Stress are as generic as can be. This would be the perfect opportunity to list truly localized content – such as a list of “heart-healthy” restaurants or  neighborhood jogging paths. Let users browse these resources by location (most cell phones ship with GPS capabilities!) and you have an incredibly useful, incredibly relevant resource for your patients.

HHC Diabetes Wellness Center by way of HealthLeadersMedia.com.

This article from BusinessWeek makes the case for taking a considered approach to Social Networking – Beware Social Media Snake Oil. As we’ve written before, there are pros and cons to social networking as a platform. Defining your approach to the medium should be part of your overall marketing content strategy.

Very interesting article on strategizing key words for search. Key word research is the foundation for either Search Engine Optimization or Pay Per Click The author’s point is that companies should not focus just on services or attributes for which they are well known, but should also focus on the attribtes they wish to educate customers on.

Keyword Campaigns Must Grow Longer Tails »

We’re talking with a client about search optimization, and the question came up on the differences between SEO (Search Engine Optimization) vs. PPC (Pay Per Click).

In Pay Per Click you purchase keyword phrases. When users search against those phrases, your ads are displayed as content links along side the actual search results. The more you pay, the higher your ad is on the page. In Search Engine Optimization you place your key words in the contents of specific pages on your site. When users search against these phrases your pages (hopefully) appear within the actual search results. How high up you appear depends on how relevant the search engine thinks your page is to that search phrase. How relevancy is determined is something of a black box, and each search engine has their own slightly different formula for determining it.

Pay Per Click is best done in the context of a campaign of some sort, and is particularly well suited for supporting offline marketing. So if you were running radio spots promoting your wellness center it might pay to purchase phrases that echo copy from the radio ad. This can also be done ‘in attack’. In a famous case study from the 2006 Superbowl, Ford produced a touching ad featuring Kermit the Frog. GM, however, purchased the keyword “Kermit” and routed traffic to their own microsite!

Search Engine Optimization is not so much a campaign as it is an ongoing process of refinement. It’s about understanding if you have the right content on your site to match what people are searching for, and that you are using the same words to describe your services that your patients are using to search for them. It sounds obvious but is worth repeating. If your patients are searching for “cancer” and you only use “oncology” you’re not going to be found. Along those same lines, hospitals are most likely to benefit from localizing their content. Go to Google and compare the results you get from “Diabetes Care” to those you get from “New Haven Diabetes Care” to see how well Yale is doing at localizing their content.

Continuing the discussion on social media in Healthcare, this article in BusinessWeek discusses a recent FDA hearing on regulating social media use by drug manufacturers – Why Drug Makers Don’t Twitter. According to the article “Some 60% of Americans say that when they need medical information, they turn to the Internet. At least half the group uses social networks to consult one another on symptoms, diagnoses, and treatments, according to surveys on Web behavior.”

Clearly, if you want to engage your patients in a conversation you need to be doing so online, but many organizations are understandably cautious about liability. We recommend a measured approach;

• Identify an existing community in your hospital (such as a community outreach program, popular class).
• Identify one or more “experts” who can offer insights or commentary in this area (localized content is best!)
• Create a place on your site for your expert to publish. If you’re using a content management system like DotNetNuke you’ll be able to use “out of the box” functionality. If you’re not using a content management system you should be!
• Create a simple approval and review process to ensure the accuracy of any content you produce.

At a recent consumer website kickoff meeting we held there was a brief, but spirited conversation between a representative of the senior management team and a representative from marketing. The topic was social media – the relative value of vs. the potential risks. There are valid points on both sides, of course. In our opinion, social media is here to stay, and hospitals are uniquely situated to take advantage of this. Hospitals are places where natural “real life” communities can form – around shared illnesses, around classes and community outreach programs, the list goes on. A social media strategy provides the opportunity to extend these communities in the offline space, and ensure that you keep a communication channel open with current and potential patients.

This article from BNET.com does a good job of summing the position up from an organizational standpoint – Eight Ways to Ruin Your Social-Media Strategy.  Is your hospital doing anything with social media, or do you have plans in the works?