All Entries in the "Social networking" Category

Five Reasons Healthcare Recruiters Must Engage in Social Media

As physician shortages worsen, one of the most pressing marketing challenges facing many hospitals today is recruiting top talent. To meet this challenge, in-house recruiters routinely deploy an all-too-familiar marketing mix of job board posts and journal ads, while largely ignoring social media.

But why the snub?

Granted, a job tweet on Twitter doesn’t yet have the same reach or cachet as a recruitment ad in the New England Journal of Medicine. But I do believe social media offers immediacy and relevance that may be more effective than traditional means to connect with a growing segment of healthcare job seekers.

Still skeptical? Here are five reasons your recruiters must actively engage in social media.

Your candidates are already there. If you don’t think your next Chief of Surgery or Head Nurse could possibly be on MySpace or Facebook, think again. Social media is fast becoming mainstream media-and clinicians are embracing it. My company recently surveyed physician and RN job seekers and found that 56% are using or interested in social media and 37% use Facebook. And adoption rates will continue to climb with Facebook adding 600,000 new members a day, the fastest growing segment of which is adults 35 and older.

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Reading Roundup: Marketing Blog Posts and Stories You Might Have Missed

Reading roundup: A random and sporadic list of our favorite marketing articles and blog posts from the past week or so.

Best practices for community relations: I love lists (who doesn’t?) and this post on Livingston Communications’ The Buzz Bin has two of them. Both are packed with tips, techniques, best practices, and plain old etiquette for organizations using online social media sites to reach customers. So you can act more human and be more effective.

Will small ad agencies get us out of this mess? (Good Twitter response to the question from Mindpower Inc., by the way) Small advertising agencies do things for their clients that big shops can’t, writes Alex Bogusky. “With fewer people and less overhead, they offer the nimble and fast approach to problems a lot of nascent brands need.” 

Global marketer says economy will spur medical travel: But, says Jason Yap, marketing director for Singapore’s Raffles Hospital, medical travel growth in the region has the potential to help, rather than hurt, the business of healthcare in the United States.

If your CEO doesn’t see the value of marketing, guess who’s out of a job? In interviews with Robbie Kellman Baxter, CEOs cited two reasons they fire marketing staff–and then turn right around and hire marketing consultants to replace them. First, they say, their marketing team wasn’t creating enough value. Second, they weren’t creating a focused, market-driven strategy that makes the most out of limited resources. 

Want to win friends and influence people? Chip Mahaney, director of digital content for The E.W. Scripps Company in Cincinnati, adapts Dale Carnegie’s  guidelines to social media. One tip–don’t try to join a conversation by screaming headlines at people when they’re trying to make lunch plans and complimenting each other’s shirts. (Trust me, read the post and you’ll get it.)

Twittering Surgery, Live, at Henry Ford Hospital

OK, you have to check this out: Henry Ford Hospital is live tweeting a surgery. Right now. As I type this.

From their site: “Dr. Craig Rogers is leading a surgical team from Henry Ford Hospital as they perform a robotic partial nephrectomy. The public will be able to receive updates and information from OR 25 at Henry Ford Hospital, and communicate with the surgeons via the Twitter microblogging service.” Read more about the live surgery, including details about the patient’s condition and why this case is particularly difficult.

Why is Henry Ford doing this? “Twittering during surgery provides patients and others with exposure to new technology and surgical procedures,” they wrote on their Twitter feed. They’re also answering questions about everything from HIPAA to infection control.

What do you think–is this a great way to create buzz, promote your surgeons and technology? Or is it just a little too cutting-edge for your taste?

It’s created a pretty big buzz in the twitterverse. You can follow what everyone’s saying about the event on the search page (tag HFHOR).

Customer-Based Marketing Strategies: New Media Frenzy

I devoted the first half of my day today to Web 2.0 marketing. Perhaps all this live blogging has brainwashed me into feeling an unusually strong affinity towards new media.

Collect more "amies" on Facebook

The first session I attended on the second day of the Customer-Based Marketing Strategies conference in Las Vegas was “Doing More with Less: Integrating the Old with the New,” which featured Christine Murray, director of business development and marketing services at the Medical University of South Carolina.

The hospital redesigned its online heart risk assessment tool and created an integrated ad campaign, which it launched 45 days early to take advantage the increased heart disease awareness generated by Tim Russert’s death.

It appears that bumping up the launch was a smart move, because the campaign generated some major results. The hospital collected 2,300 new prospective email addresses during the 90-day campaign.

Next, I sat in on a session called “The New Marketing Hybrid,” which was presented by Elizabeth Scott, principal strategist with Raven New Media and a judge for the 2008 Marketing Awards.

Scott explained how marketers could either transition an existing FTE into a new media role or hire a new employee as an “online community relations specialist” or “social media marketing specialist.” (She noted the word “manager” should never be included in a title that also has the word “community,” since managing a community is impossible. And it’s a big red flag to potential job candidates that your facility isn’t up on social media trends.)

I especially appreciated how Scott’s presentation was completely void of any Generation Y cracks, a habit that many new media-referencing speakers tend to fall into. Though she did warn attendees not to let us Gen Y-ers convince them that checking their Facebook page counts as market research.

I beg to differ…

Healthcare to social media: We’re coming

The first podcast Mayo Clinic ever posted was listened to 76,000 times in one month. And that was four years ago. Now the health system has more than 3,000 Facebook friends and its own YouTube channel.

Mayo isn’t the only health organization breaking into Health 2.0: The American Red Cross is popular on Twitter, Partners and CIGNA both are active in virtual world Second Life, and doctors are networking with each other on Medscape.

So where does your organization fit in? Anywhere, really. Most social media accounts are free and are pretty user friendly. Mayo said it cost less than $1,500 to implement all of its social media. Now that’s got to be raking in some serious ROI.

Read more about these healthcare organizations’ forays into social media in this Jacksonville Business Journal article. Do you think healthcare has a future in social media marketing?

A YouTube Lightning Strike

Every once in a while I search for new healthcare commercials on YouTube. Usually, after trudging through countless clips of General Hospital and E.R., I find nothing new.

But today I stumbled upon a clip from Martin Memorial, a Florida health system I just featured in a Healthcare Marketing Advisor article.

The video below is Martin’s fourth and most recent edition of its “MDoc TV” series. This installment focuses on patients who are battling lung cancer and undergoing weight-loss surgery.

The clip doesn’t have a high production quality, but it does get a good deal of information across for what I assume is a small price point. You can view more MDoc TV videos on the Martin Memorial Channel YouTube page.