All Entries in the "Public Relations" Category

Do Mummies Have Anything to do With PR? Of Corpse!

Public relations can be one of the trickiest elements to a good healthcare marketing program. You have to work at it over time and develop solid relationships with the local media. But then again sometimes a brilliant PR opportunity will just fall into your hands—or, if you’re North Shore University Hospital, your CT scanner.

Four ancient Egyptian mummies, dating as far back as 1188 BC, journeyed from their display at the Brooklyn Museum to the Manhasset, NY, hospital so that the museum’s Egyptologists could learn more about their lives-and deaths. North Shore’s 64-slice CT scan, though normally used to detect heart abnormalities, provided the scientists with detailed images of the mummies’ tissues and skeletal systems without performing any potentially damaging invasive procedures.

“The Brooklyn Museum had a history of using medical technology to look at Egyptian antiquities to evaluate them and try to explore them without actually causing damage to them and going through them and opening them,” says Dr. Amgad Makaryus, North Shore’s director of cardiac CT and MRI. “The reason they contacted us is they knew we had this new 64-detector scanner technology that gives you high resolution images that would be helpful in exploring these mummies.”

Read more about the Egyptian mummies’ CT scans here.

Campaign Spotlight: Bills Lineman Tackles Cardiac PR

Derrick Dockery, a 330-pound offensive lineman for the Buffalo Bills football team, stands dressed in full uniform holding his helmet under one arm. But instead of wearing his usual game-face grimace, Dockery is smiling. Next to his image, the ad reads, “I protect the quarterback . . . you protect your heart!”

The ad promotes Buffalo (NY) General Hospital’s Chest Pain Center, a program Dockery has promoted since December 2008. The hospital has been marketing partners with the Bills for three years, and its marketers knew they needed a noteworthy player to represent the hospital’s heart services in 2009.

“I wanted someone who could speak from the heart, no pun intended, about cardiac awareness,” says Michael Hughes, vice president of public relations at Kaleida Health, Buffalo General’s health system. “We wanted someone who could legitimately talk about the importance of heart health and cardiac awareness.”

Read more about this awareness campaign here.

More Ways to Get More Media Coverage

In today’s column, To Get More Media Coverage, Think More Like the Media, I wrote about places reporters look for story ideas–and how marketing and public relations folks can use those sources when they pitch story ideas.  

As often happens, shortly after publishing the column, I thought of another source I wanted to share with you. Help a Reporter Out (fondly known to us in the biz as HARO) puts expert sources together with journalists. There are other sites that do that, but here’s what sets this one apart: Reporters send out requests for help with stories they’re writing to the experts who’ve signed up for the service.

That’s right, you can actually get reporters to pitch stories to you.

Now, help a reporter (and your fellow PR peeps) out: How else do you keep tabs on what journalists are writing about in order to make your pitches more effective?

Hospitals Get Ready: The Angry Americans are Coming

People just can’t stop talking about Wall Street, Main Street, bailouts, bonuses, private jets, rip-offs, criminals, compensation, collapses, crises, and conflicts-of-interest. And still the bad news keeps on coming.

You know the saying: Fool me once, shame on me; fool me twice, we won’t get fooled again? Well, what will we say the 800th time they fool us?

What’s this all have to do with healthcare marketing, you ask? The fact is, it’s an ugly climate for all businesses and institutions. Americans are angry. I’m angry. My mild-mannered mom and dad are angry. Anyone who’s earning less than $250,000 a year is angry.

Even if your hospital or health system is the pillar of the community, above reproach, and 100% transparent, it’s time to get out there and spray some Teflon on your reputation. And that goes double for non-profits, who will soon face scrutiny from all those angry Americans when information from IRS form 990 Schedule H, including details on the compensation of your top executives, goes public.

Read more about it–including three tips on how to protect and bolster your reputation in your local community–in today’s column, “Don’t Let Bailouts, Economy Erode Your Hospital’s Reputation.”

Customer-Based Marketing Strategies: Positive Transparency

I decided to attend both sessions in the customer communications track at CBMS this afternoon, shifting gears from my new media-filled morning.

The first was called “Secrets of Transparency in the Information Age,” which featured speakers from Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland Clinic Canada, and Vanderbilt Medical Center. Eileen Sheil from Cleveland Clinic shared an interesting anecdote about how the health system dealt with a PR crisis that began a few years ago.

In the midst of bad press regarding a conflict of interest situation Sheil and another Cleveland Clinic executive flew out to Manhattan to meet with a New York Times reporter who was writing a story about the situation. Sheil said she was shocked when she realized how little the reporter seemed to know about the health system’s business dealings and was worried the real story wouldn’t get out.

Later, after Cleveland Clinic made significant transparency measures online and in its hospitals, Sheil invited the reporter to visit the organization for several days. The article based on that visit, called “Doctors Show Their Hand,” ran on the front page of The Times business section in November 2008 and was very positive, Sheil said. In the following 12 days Cleveland Clinic was mentioned 1,200 times in the media.

Like Sheil said throughout the presentation, the plusses always outweigh the minuses.

Customer-Based Marketing Strategies: An Unexpected Surprise

Caesar's Palace: The Italia of the American West

I just came from a session I’d been looking forward to: Political-Style Research in the Healthcare World. The massive abyss left in my life after the 2008 presidential campaign ended has turned me into a political junkie, and I was excited to see how it could be related to hospital marketing.

But it turned out the political aspect wasn’t even the most interesting part of the session for me. When one of the speakers from Vanguard Health Systems shared a case study about Baptist Health System, I realized I had covered the campaign for the October Healthcare Marketing Advisor.

The San Antonio health system dramatically increased its market share and brand awareness after it launched a rebranding campaign, which included a guerilla marketing aspect called “Stroke Happens.” In a nutshell, the campaign involved suiting clothing mannequins in “Stroke Happens” T-shirts and stacking them in piles around town.

I know, at first it sounds like an odd mix of cheesy and morbid, but it’s a real attention-grabber. The press release caught my eye, the mannequins made the San Antonio locals take notice, and when the Vanguard speaker told the story today the audience collectively gasped and nodded. The campaign proves it doesn’t matter how great your message is if nobody is listening.

Campaign Spotlight: You’re a Brick House

Strong and solid, your hospital might be brick and mortar in the physical sense but it’s obvious that it’s more than the building materials you use that make a hospital what it is to its patients. Though most hospitals boast high-tech equipment and service line specific specialties to describe what they’re made of, I had the opportunity to speak with representatives from one facility, Lexington Medical Center (LMC), that had decided to look beyond LMC’s exterior and its technological capabilities to the people that have helped to make it a market leader and a generally friendly place to be.

Read more on Lexington Medical Center’s successful initiative.