MedTouch Social Media Survey

#1: Turn Traffic Into Appointments
Why Search Matters

With 80% of the American population performing healthcare research online, web marketing has gone mainstream. Search engines offer an unprecedented opportunity to reach people looking for services your healthcare organizations provides. By analyzing and increasing your search traffic, you can improve your organization’s profile online while driving transactions. This forty-five minute webinar is perfect for anyone struggle to keep up with their changes in search traffic and results.

Register: Wed, Jul 8 2pm EST | 1pm CST | Noon MST | 11am PST
Register: Thurs, Jul 9 Noon EST | 11am CST | 10am MST | 9am PST

#2: Best Practices in Social Media
A Research Update
As of June, 250 hospitals in the US are using social media.  But to what purpose?  And how are they measuring results?  This presentation – based on careful research rather than opinion – will highlight the best tool for healthcare organizations to generate traffic, what media children’s hospitals can exploit better than anyone else, and why crisis communications is a 24×7 job in a completely new way.   You’ll also learn why senior leaders demand ROI for these projects, how to provide it to them before asking for funding, and how this will dramatically change your staffing needs.

Register: Tue, Jul 14 3pm EST | 2pm CST | 1pm MST | Noon PST
Register: Weds, Jul 15 3pm EST | 2pm CST | 1pm MST | Noon PST

#3: The Good, the Bad, the Very Ugly
An Introduction to the Specific Challenges of Healthcare Website Design
Designing and reorganizing a website for a healthcare organization involves overcoming specific brand, organizational, and technical requirements. In this insightful webinar lead by our own Interactive Developer, you will come to appreciate the three essential principles of good web design, understand how to work within and around organizational barriers, and deliver a successful, attractive, and useful project.

The NY Times reports today about the lose a friend, gain a whopper campaign:

While many trivial actions do prompt Facebook to post an alert to all your friends… striking someone off your list simply is not one of them.

It is this policy that Burger King ran afoul of this month with its “Whopper Sacrifice” campaign, which offered a free hamburger to anyone who severed the sacred bonds with 10 of the friends they had accumulated on Facebook. Facebook suspended the program because Burger King was sending notifications to the castoffs letting them know they’d been dropped for a sandwich (or, more accurately, a tenth of a sandwich).

The campaign, which boasted of ending 234,000 friendships, is history now — Burger King chose to end it rather than tweak it to fit Facebook’s policy…

The ad, which proclaims a Whopper is stronger than friendship, is the first I’ve seen involving the de-leveraging of social networks.

I had thought, back in the day, Facebook did alert one to the changes in tides of friendships so I understand the nature of the policy: one’s social network should only grow.  But it does underscore how loose those bounds are: by Burger King’s math, every facebook friend is worth about $.25

Oct 31, 2008 – Cambridge, MA – MedTouch, the leading provider of interactive, web-based solutions for healthcare organizations, announced a special webinar entitled What Hospital Marketers Can Learn From This Year’s Campaigns — Online Strategies That Actually Work which focuses applying real world lessons from the campaign trail to healthcare-related cause marketing.

This year’s election has changed the game on how candidates raise money, putting more power with the everyday people than in any previous race. Last month alone the Obama campaign raised $140 million, largely from the campaign’s 3 million Internet donors.
 
“This year, the Presidential Campaigns leveraged email, mobile, and web technology to raise a staggering amount of money,” said Paul Griffiths CEO of MedTouch (http://www.medtouch.com).  “But more importantly, they discovered new ways to educate, mobilize, and activate constituents at a time when traditional advertising is losing ground.”

“Empowering supporters to engage in online conversations is the key next step for healthcare organizations.  Anyone can learn how to apply these innovations to their cause-based marketing, whether be it with patients, doctors, job seekers, or donors.  And we’re fortunate to have SocialSphere CEO and  resident expert on the subject, John Della Volpe, to guide us.”  

”For the best, most innovative campaigns this cycle, technology was not at one-time capital expense it was strategy.  The most effective campaigns empowered all of their major stakeholders with cutting-edge social technology to raise money, persuade voters and organize on election day.  Rather than relying solely on polls and TV commercials like years past, campaigns relied on volunteers and advocates to spread their message,” said John Della Volpe, SocialSphere Founder and CEO.

This webinar is the first step in a new partnership between MedTouch and SocialSphere also announced today, to ensure hospitals, healthcare providers, and integrated health systems engage their communities online.  Through this collaboration, both companies will provide services to clients through new, bundled service offerings.

The webinar is free to attend and will run on Wednesday, November 5 at 2pm EST and again on Thursday, November 6 at 2pm EST.  You can register at http://www.medtouch.com/webinars

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MedTouch (http://www.medtouch.com) delivers web intelligence for health care. Whether patient-focused websites, employee-focused Intranets, or online recruitment efforts, MedTouch combines design, technology, and innovation through its software and professional services practice.

SocialSphere (http://www.socialsphere.net) is a Web 2.0 product and strategy company that uses custom-built products to help clients profit in the new era of social computing. From executive briefings, to sophisticated social media influence mapping to the cutting-edge Idea Mine, SocialSphere is focused on putting every organization’s most precious resource – its most passionate advocates — to work for them.
 

1. Skagit Valley Hospital: a progressive, community hospital north of Seattle with a beautiful campus and now, a website to match it.

2. Mass Eye and Ear launched their first site with us, highlighting their involvement in the Temporal Bone Consortium.

3. Brooks Rehabilitation launched a new version of their homepage, now focused on driving volume and addressing issues of patient quality and outcomes. (Thanks to our Content Management Software, design templates changes are a snap!)

Finally, since we’re webinar giving addicts and we’ve been having dozens of you stop by every month, we’re going to try and run a 2-3 hour special event next year about social marketing for a small fee. Given the increase cost of traveling to conferences to hear the same old, same old, we thought that a few cost effective case-studies with the thought leaders in healthcare marketing on the web — our clients and others — might be worth, what, $150 a shot?

So feel free to drop a line to solutions[at]medtouch.com if you’re interested in getting on that list.

In the meantime, if you’re at all near the Carolinas, come to CHPRMS where I’m giving a talk entitled, “Why Patients Trust Facebook More Than You.”  Intriguing, no?

There are many good reasons to deplore Wikipedia, not the least of which is its authors’ cultish smuggery about the righteousness of their cause and the rightness of their content.

Of course there is also its internecine complexity of processes. The documentation tracing the petty bitchery about an entry is often longer than the entry that is produced. The international collectivist negotiation over matters of “fact” is beginning to remind me of the United Nations, but without the fancy New York headquarters.

A brief diversion from usual topics, but I too have been listening to the “wisdom of crowds” nonsense for long enough.

Wikipedia is great, but it has a limited ability to do a few things well: reign in pop culture to a reasonable degree and make anyone with an iPhone at a cocktail party the final arbiter on any topic.  (Full admission: I am an iPhone user.)

But even their model has broken down.  To wit, there is a long and extensive series of gatekeepers who review articles and decide if they are worth keeping.  As Craig writes, much of this reasoning is circumspect, and now, Wikipedia is going to make it even harder to publish on their site.

What you talking ’bout, Wikipedia?

As much as they might downplay it, there is still a chain of human command laboring behind the curtains of Wiki.   The crowd wisdom has little to do with the success of wikipedia; what’s truly amazing thing is that by appealing to basic emotions of all humankind — the need for fame, the need to judge others — most of these writers and editors do work for free.

You could get the same results if you dumped a series of photos, videos, ancient texts, etc. that were all authored by a small group and set the wiki admins loose on organizing it.   See Amazon.com and their wishlist series – it’s a neat way for me to bring order to a disordered set of data; Amazon provides an incentive for me to do so –small amounts of fame and the hope that someone might buy me a gift. 

I’m curious, didn’t we use to call this job “being a librarian?”

What I find increasingly strange about the Wiki-universe is how distrustful it is of its own fans.   There is now a sniff-sniff, Wikipedia is too good for that kind of attitude regarding certain types of content.   Articles that are not “relevant” or “news-worthy” — again, decided by the overly-invested, unpaid admins – are deleted.  So what if the article on historical Christian hairstyles wasn’t good enough to make the grade, isn’t the point that Wikipedia has no limits — that because it is the very antithesis of an encyclopedia set, which once bound and printed is limited — so it should be able to encompass all kinds of knowledge, however random?

But here’s the last laugh.  Wikipedia is now authoring an encyclopedia.  (One wonders, Will they e-mail out updates?  Will digital ink self-correct?) 

Such a move is proof that the printed word — the book that you can hold in your warm, Kindle-less hand — is still something the crowd aspires to, whether ’tis wise for the Wiki franchise or not.

I wasn’t suggesting that the kitchen should be turned over. I’m exploring the ideas of openness even in restaurants. For example, I’d like to know which dishes get ordered more so I can use that in my decision. Or perhaps diners can suggest improvements in recipes. And so on.

Next I’m tackling health. Since that’s your expertise, how do you think Googlethink could come to health care? Could it? Can doctors and health institutions be more transparent? What would we learn from aggregated and open data? Would there be value in a social relationship among patients? And so on. I have some ideas but I’d love to hear your thoughts.

From my point of view, the biggest challenge in healthcare institutions is the institutional thinking that goes on behind the scenes. Many good hospitals are trying to keep it all together, given the unfair hand they’ve been dealt: price-setting from insurance payors, even lower price-setting from the government, and the legal responsibility to treat anyone sick enoug to walk through their ER doors. Add in overall costs of service delivery increasing at a time when the costs of insurance are biting Joe Q. American’s pocketbook and Michael Moore’s Sicko… well, it’s a rough time right now in healthcare.

This leads to institutional thinking: how do we keep this boat together? And the simplest answer is command and control leadership. Don’t take risks, don’t innovate, trim costs wherever possible, etc. That’s not a critique — I’m sympathetic to the challenges here — but it does mean that providing patient access to data inside of a hospital is risky because it opens the hospital up to more risk.  Patient benefits be hanged!

I have been point-blank told, at more than one hospital, how much they’d like to get rid of system X or software Y, but they can’t. Even though it doesn’t work and there are better products available, they just can’t. It would be too costly — politically or capital-wise.

From an infrastructure standpoint, most hospital software is cumbersome, expensive, and (let’s face it) old. The sales cycle for a hospital engagement is often 18-24 months — contrast that to a Google service: free, immediately available, updates whenever you want! As good as the technology is, each hospital technology infrastructure is a jigsaw puzzle that barely fits together as is, never mind inviting a behemoth like Google into the mix.

A typical patient experience, from a hospital standpoint, goes as follows:

1. I’m healthy.
2. I’m worried I’m sick and go online to get health information.
3. I see a doctor/RN for diagnosis.
4. I go to a hospital for treatment.
5. I am discharged.

Being a patient in a hospital is a terminal experience: it ends in discharge or death! The medical systems were created long before Starbucks convinced every industry that consumer relationships were what mattered (thank you, SB, for getting the stinky breakfast sandwiches out; here’s a to a $30 stock price again.)

Google Health might end up being a great tool for diagnosis but hospitals can’t embrace it… unless so many the physicians demand it for their patients.

The churn and noise about hospital transparency is basically saying, “Here’s proof we don’t kill that many people.” Transparency = quality of outcomes for a hospital. But in 5 years, that won’t matter. Once the measures of quality are open to the public, the payors and Medicaid/Medicare will use it as an excuse to stop paying hospitals with lousy outcomes. So, overall, the healthcare experience should get better. But that doesn’t mean we’ll know any more or less about the process.

I place much more faith in the power of patients to self-organize in a way that wasn’t possible even two years ago. With sites like PatientsLikeMe, patients in recovery — discharged, perhaps from a hospital — are about to connect about their quality of treatment in a real-time, clinic study fashion. Sites that provide disease/condition/treatment communities will be where hospitals can knock it out of the park. Imagine if every cancer patient in your town heard that XYZ Hospital was the best — from the site moderator!

That’s where the openness will come from: empowering patients who had great experiences to market the hospital with a level of authenticity not possible any other way. We just ran a few webinars on this topic — so popular, agencies and competitors showed up in droves to hear what we had to say. That tells me we’re striking a chord.

But, as I always say, the nice thing about talking about the future is that it’s difficult to be proven wrong.

Besides the silliness of open source restaurants as a concept — technique matters far more than recipe — the NY Times contrasted that notion with the need for efficiency in dining, noting that too many choices killed the Manhattan diner.

But art demands risk and taking a step forward into the unknown.   Asking your customers to make all the choices — which, one might argue, is an artistic choice in and of itself — is not the same thing as crowdsourcing.  For example, Threadless.com has plenty of folks vote on the best designs, but still maintains final creative control on which t-shirts to send into production. 

Even Wikipedia, famed for its “wisdom of crowds,” has become more bookish and patroling than in the past.  Giving an example at a client site, we created a page for their hospital… and then they got banned.   For copyright infringement. 

I think the point of the restaurant was “Can we imagine Google mashups working in a world outside of technology?” 

Sure, go to any jam band or jazz pickup group.  The improvisational talent is found plenty of places.   But if you don’t share a common level of expertise, you can’t play along.

The power of simplicity can’t be understated.  By example, I had a microwave/toaster oven for a brief period of time.  It was left by the previous residents of the house.  Wonder why?   Because I’m sure they found it difficult – as I did – to determine how long to cook something (no numerical keys; just dials) and to take items out when it was a toaster (you needed tongs) and why you couldn’t leave things on top of it (much surface area hotter than a microwave).

In short it was a “time saving” device, but only if I could adapt to it. I couldn’t.  I had a solid understanding of a Platonic microwave and toaster oven ideal.

Twitter is an excellent example of an application that is so simple, you know we are still working to understand and appreciate its value.   In that sense, adding more features to something we are still in the process of discovering, robs that experience of joy.

Now, not everything can be Twitter, but this certainly explains why we prefer a conversation rather than an RFP.  There’s a joy to the creative process that comes out in conversations in way over-processing never quite gets at.