MResult Healthcare Insights

We recently completed a workshop with one of our hospital clients on social networking and fund raising. The question was how to utilize social networks to help support fund raising for a new breast cancer center, and the purpose of the workshop was to help set up a structure for coordinating future activities. Social networking is just another communication channel and as you would expect efforts in this area need to be coordinated with efforts in other channels.

In this case the customer has already committed to a full calendar of promotional events, so a “1-2-3″ combination makes perfect sense; Prior to each event use social media channels to generate hype and drive traffic, after each event use the same social media channels to gather feedback and drive traffic to the website for online donations and other calls to action. A simple but very effective model that can be used elsewhere.

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.

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.

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.

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.