(this is part of 2 of a 3-part article on using Web 2.0 strategies in Health care. Click here for Part 1)

Join the current dialogue

Social media trends make Web 2.0 strategies attractive marketing options for health care organizations. Your target audience is already out there communicating with one another, so go ahead and join the conversation by listening to what your audience is saying and contributing to the discussion.

There are already a number of patient social networks –general communities like HealthCentral and MedHelp and disease-focused sites like PatientsLikeMe and DiabetesMine. Watch as former patients talk about the service they received from your organization. Thank people who sing your praises and learn from those who make negative comments about the service they received from your employees.

In addition to these health care-specific outlets, the mainstream social media sites are also engaged in important conversations your organization needs to be aware of. For those just starting out in the social media world, take time to learn about Facebook, Twitter, Technorati (blogs) YouTube and Flickr. These are “common” outlets that can quickly help you see what conversations are going on. For example, for Twitter, you can go to http://search.twitter.com/ and type in your organization’s name. This will search through all the Twitter conversations and pull up any mentions of your company.

Start your own community

While there are numerous conversations already going on, sometimes the best way to reach your target audience is to create your own avenue for dialogue. We helped one of our clients, White Memorial Medical Center, create an “I was born at White Memorial” Facebook group. To maintain the authenticity of the discussion occurring on the Facebook page, White Memorial has recruited actual patients born at the hospital to serve as the group’s administrators and be the face of the social media campaign.

White Memorial didn’t want their audience to see this as just another marketing gimmick. At the core of the campaign is an opportunity for White Memorial patients to talk to each other. By helping them see what they have in common – having been born at White Memorial –hopefully that will help forge friendships with one another and a lifelong relationship with the hospital.

The Facebook group has been introduced to the general public through organic and viral marketing, again with the ultimate goal of people viewing this as an authentic and natural place to converse. As the group further develops, it will likely also be connected to White Memorial’s marketing and fundraising efforts.

Check-in next week for Part 3 of this series.

The campaign, sponsored by L.A. County Department of Public Health, was almost a year in the making, and forced our agency to rethink everything we thought we knew about advertising and cause marketing.

I just published an article for MediaPost’s EngageTeens column on the approach that led to the creation of We’re Fed Up… you can read it here.

Jose Villa

Static Web sites are no longer enough to build lasting relationships with your customer base. Web 2.0 and the growth of social media have created valuable tools for health care organizations to successfully reach their target audience in meaningful ways that can help create lifelong brand ambassadors and loyal customer relationships.

But instead of just jumping onto the Web 2.0 bandwagon, it is important for health care organizations to take a step back and determine how they can strategically use social media as part of their overall communications plan.

The social network consumer

It is a common misconception that social networks are filled only with teenagers and college students. While these populations still comprise a key demographic of social network users, they are by far not the only ones. Earlier this year Facebook stated that women 55 years old and older are its fastest growing demographic. In fact, the 26 to 44 year old age group now accounts for 41 percent of Facebook’s audience. The percent of adult Internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s December 2008 survey.

Twitter, the latest Web 2.0 craze, has infected pop culture with celebrity users like Oprah and Shaquille O’Neal and has become part of politics with its user list including President Barack Obama and numerous members of the U.S. Congress. In the United States alone, according to comScore, Twitter recorded more than 4 million users in February, up more than 1,000 percent from a year ago. This includes a number of businesses utilizing this popular medium to reach their target audiences. One of the interesting things about Twitter is that the 45 to 54-year-old crowd is actually the one driving the increased interest in this outlet, as opposed to 18 to 24 year olds who traditionally were the social media early adopters.

These strong trends continue with the multicultural population as well. More than 40 percent of U.S. Hispanics who go online at least once a month maintain social network profiles, according to Ipsos. In addition, the Pew Internet & American Life Project reported that 43 percent of online U.S. African Americans have a profile on a social network Web site – 12 percent higher than whites / non-Hispanics.

Whether it’s Facebook or Twitter or through your own social network, there are multiple ways to reach out and communicate with your target audience. The challenge for any health care organization is figuring out where to start. The first inclination is to jump into anything and everything that is available, but it’s important to find the mediums that work best for each organization and what they are trying to accomplish.

Check-in next week for Part 2 of this series.

Description: A talk at the Personal Democracy Forum conference on research into the social patterns of teenagers on online networks.  Dr. Danah Boyd is a Social Media Researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

The Sensis Take: Not all social networks are created equal.  Facebook’s Ivy League origins and Myspace’s urban hipster roots are still evident in the socio-economic skewing of users.  Be aware of the social divide between users when using social networks in your social media campaign

“As we think about creating public spaces, what’s the meeting point for our conversations? Is it MySpace or Facebook? Twitter or IRC? What you choose matters. Where you and your colleagues hang out matters”

An Anthropological Introduction to Youtube

Description: A talk by Dr. Mike Wesch at the Library of Congress last Year.  Dr. Wesch is the leader of Kansas State’s YouTube Ethnography project.

The Sensis Take: What you do is much more important than how you do it. Hidden by the myriad of social media tools is the fact that there are only four functions to social media:

• User generated content
• User generated distribution
• User generated filtering
• User generated organization

Will My Video Get 1 Million Views on YouTube?

The Sensis Take: The small chance of a video going viral in a big way is more reinforcement that high quality creative is a necessary component in successful social media campaigns.

Online Ad Spending Rises At Double-Digit Rates, Gains Share Vs. All Other Media

The Sensis Take: As uncertainty increases in a chaotic economy, the granular analysis available to digital advertising makes its value to advertisers unassailable.

19 Presence Management Chores You Could Do Every Day

The Sensis Take: Sometimes, all it takes is a few minutes to participate in the daily conversation to keep your brand personal.

The Feed: What the Government is Twittering Now

Description: Nextgov.com just launched a new tool that aggregates Twitter feeds from dozens of federal agencies. See what’s going on across the entire government on one page.

The Sensis Take: Enabling user generated distribution via twitter is just a start to facilitating the democratic process.  The public wants to participate, make sure your agency knows how to crowdsource democracy.

~Blair Goldberg, Associate Digital Strategist

Having drunk my social media Kool-Aid and the White House’s history of new media success, the circumstances were set to love last week’s Online Town Hall on Obama’s health care plan.  But the event fell short.

They had a great Facebook integration with a newsfeed of on-topic status updates, but it didn’t matter.  They deftly used hashtags with Twitter, but it still didn’t matter.  They solicited compelling video questions through YouTube, but it just didn’t matter.

With all of these innovative approaches and platforms for connecting with stakeholders, they couldn’t manage to get a clean video stream with the video content on either http://www.whitehouse.gov or http://www.facebook.com/whitehouse.  It made the whole experience unbearable until I went and found a video feed from CNN that didn’t give me a headache.

Despite all the things that didn’t go well, including one humorous reference to whitehouse.com instead of .gov, I would say that the White House new media team did an effective job of integrating all of these different social platforms into one event.  By crowdsourcing questions and facilitating the digital conversation, the White House provided a vehicle for increasing the inclusiveness of a frequently all-too-distant political process.

My only major non-technical complaint was how overwhelming all of the information was.  I’m a fairly quick reader, but there were several long entries in the town hall newsfeed that scrolled before I could finish reading them.  At first that was frustrating, as it felt like trying to participate in the conversation would be akin to whispering into a hurricane.   Over the next few hours, I saw the real power of this process.  It engaged me in dialogue with my friends who didn’t participate in the actual event.   While “Internet Time” is normally discussed as acceleration, this process extended the event for hours (days in one case) as the dialogue continued.

Today’s big idea: If you can’t manage the basic technologies of the Internet, the most sophisticated tools still won’t help the idea spread.

- Blair Goldberg, Associate Digital Strategist

Basically, the folks at Buy.com took the scavenger hunt concept and took it to social media, including Facebook and Twitter as points of entry into the promotion.

To take part, you are asked to follow Buy.com’s Twitter feed where they will intermittently post questions. The answers to these questions can be found on different pages on the Internet. Once a participant identifies the answer to the question, they must post their answer on Buy.com’s Facebook wall.

Very clever use of social media. Not only is this a cost-effective way to launch a promotion (that is very organic to online retail), but Buy.com is building it’s social media communities. As of the posting of this blog, they had 11,409 followers on their Twitter account and 5,432 fans on their Facebook group.

Buy.com definitely “gets” social media.

Jose Villa

The social network was created Steve Ressler in late 2007 using Ning, a platform for creating custom social networks. I became a member a few months back (the site is open to anyone with an interest in connecting with the Federal government).

Needless to say, for those of us who work with the Federal government, this emerging tool has huge potential to change how we look at doing business with the government. I personally use it to keep track of trends and discussions occuring among thought leaders in the government. 

Congrats to Steve and GovLoop on the big milestone!

Jose Villa

President

According to the report “these technologies are most often thought of as social – more pleasure than business. When discussed in the context of work, they are tended to be regarded as a drain on productivity, a leaking of people’s social lives into office hours.” As younger employees enter the workplace there is the struggle between organizations who set limits or bans on these social networks and these qualified employees who insist on staying connected. Some companies choose to ban the use of Facebook, MySpace and YouTube by their employees at work others embrace it and have their own company Facebook, Twitter feed or LinkedIn to connect with potential employees or clients.

The report is a great resource for companies trying to determine how social networks will work for them and offers four key takeaways.

1. Recognize that ’social’ networking is not neatly separated from ‘professional’ networking.
2. A greater value should be placed on developing networks with people outside the firm, not only by senior management but throughout the various levels of the organization.
3. Maintain relationships with former employees that have left the company, these links can bring in information and experience from the outside.
4. Finally companies need to be aware of the potential dangers of networks and realize that managers cannot (and should not) attempt to monitor or police the social networks evolving within the company. Instead they should encourage people to channel the power of networks in progressive directions.

Bradwell and Reeves state that “Networks, as an organizing force, have always existed. But technologies have made it easier for people to connect and collaborate.” Understanding what place social networks have in your company is important during difficult economic times, according to their analysis ”the ‘ties that bind’ within organizations are important incubators of innovation and productivity. Networks contribute to organizational resilience, a vital attribute in an economic downturn.” 

-Diana

Account Executive

To download the full text as a PDF visit http://www.demos.co.uk/publications/networkcitizens.

In this guide I found an interesting article on Hispanic mobile advertising that highlights the importance and success of including mobile in the Hispanic marketing mix. Not to my surprise, I found that although online and general technology adoption among Hispanics lags behind the general market–it’s no big secret that the Hispanic segment significantly over-indexes in mobile phone usage.

In 2007 the Mobile Marketing Association found that 75% of Hispanics own a mobile phone and use it regularly.  Mobile marketing messages are also more successful amongst Hispanics, particularly coupons, status alerts, and sweepstakes or contests. Text message usage also increased dramatically, over 39% in the last 12 months according to a recent comScore M: Metrics study.

Sites like MTV Tr3s and social network MocoSpace offer mobile Web sites, and increasing mobile Web traffic to these sites proves that Hispanics are active and engaged mobile users. Additionally, premiere advertisers like P&G, IKEA, Coca Cola, and McDonald’s have jumped on board mobile advertising for Hispanics in an effort to deliver highly targeted and interactive mobile content to engaged users.

Evidently, mobile advertising is an essential component when marketing to Hispanics, and recognizing this sophisticated, fast-growing mobile user segment will definitely become more and more essential as mobile technology and adoption continues to grow.

Isabella Bejarano, Sr. Account Executive

Natalie Romero

Account Executive