The best of digital – 2011

The following is a compiled list of the “best of” 2011 in several categories. 

The 50 Best Websites of 2011 – TIME Magazine

The 50 Best iPhone Apps of 2011 – TIME Magazine

The Best Blogs of 2011 – TIME Magazine

Top 10 iPhone Medical Apps for 2011 – MobiHealth News

Apple’s Top 5 iPhone & iPad Apps of 2011 – iMedicalApps

Top 10 Marketing Sites, Apps and Tools of 2011 – Larry Chase’s Digest

Top iPhone Apps for Online Marketing – Business Marketing Blog

22 Social Media Marketing Management Software & Services – TopRank

Enjoy!

Don’t Let Marketing Language Mislead Patients

Campaign microsites no longer optional

Learn how health care organizations are using their microsites to enhance their campaigns.

What elements are necessary to implement a successful awareness campaign?

Awareness campaigns are often the first step to introduce your audience to a new service, staff member, program or facility.  Unfortunately, awareness campaigns have been used as a stand-in when more substantial marketing, branding, credibility or trafficking campaigns may be needed. 

By definition, awareness campaigns are designed to build familiarity and create top-of-mind brand affiliation.  Do not count on an awareness campaign to do more than it is designed to do.  It is not the best method to convey complex messages, emotional appeals, branding messages, lists of services, building credibility or traffic.  Awareness campaigns should leave your audience with a simple name and affiliation that can be recalled when they need it. The very succinct message or name should have a sustainable ring that stays with your audience – “Remember X when you need it.”

A progressive, modern awareness campaign has:

1. Support from top management. Leadership must walk the walk, talk the talk and reinforce the message constantly.
2. Measurement/metric thresholds that can be repeated with exacting accuracy before the campaign, three months, six months, one year and several years later to account for trending and awareness campaign investments.
3. A simple name, icon or message. If you have more than three words for your audience to remember, your statistical chance of unaided recall is significantly diminished.
4. Longevity.  Your awareness message needs to be an essential element in future marketing, branding or communication campaigns. It doesn’t have to dominate future campaigns, but it must be present.
5. A viral appeal. The best awareness campaigns are repeatable by your audience.  If you don’t use your audience to springboard your message, you’ve missed out on a million-dollar opportunity.  They spread the word.
6. Natural integration ability.  In our modern world of communication, your message has to be not only compatible with social media, existing web messaging as well as traditional modes of message delivery, but also include incentive for your message advocates to persuade them to incorporate the message into their own social communications. 
7. Easy access to more information. Don’t forget to include a “go to” element – a site, microsite, phone number, etc.
8. Unaided recall.  If your audience can’t remember it, you’ve wasted your time and money. There is no such thing as an awareness message being short or too frequent.

Follow these guidelines and you will have a productive and measurable awareness campaign.

Elizabeth L. Scott
escott@ravennewmedia.com

How can marketers create campaigns that break the “healthcare mold” but still resonate with consumers?

Most health care marketers follow one or more of the following themes:

• Attractive doctor telling the story of how he or she is “just like you;”
• Lineup of “star” doctors with a voiceover paraphrasing, “you deserve the best and we have the best doctors around;”
• Patient giving a testimonial stating that they had given up hope until they found XYZ hospital and their capable doctors;
• Artistic shots of high tech equipment or research prowess; or
• In the case of children’s hospitals, photo shots of kids with obvious aliments, smiling and happy as they receive treatment in the hospital or resuming their normal lives.

All can be effective. 

While many campaigns are good, very few health care campaigns are great.  They fade quickly — leaving us to scramble for the next creative concept designed to capture three seconds of attention we are often allotted by the consumer.

Where are the health care campaign equivalents of “gecko” ads or Mac vs. PC ads? Can hope and healing become so captivating that it goes viral and becomes a YouTube phenom? Possibly.

So how can we breakout and create effective and memorable campaigns?  Currently, we spend a significant amount of our advertising funds on concepts, designs and production. 

1. Consider engaging with an out-of-market research group with no ties to your system or your agency to conduct consumer preview testing.  Do not get too concerned with local participation.  Local audiences come to the research table with their own biases. Health care consumers often align with community demographics – rural, inner city, or suburbs, etc.
2. Use advertising to build your brand and increase awareness.  Advertising is rarely the influential factor in health care decision-making.  Effective marketing to health care consumers requires a complex combination of traditional advertising, public relations, community participation, physician support, new media and patient advocacy.
3. Your breakthrough, experimental “playground” is new media.  Try applying formulas that are successful in other industry verticals and test it with consumers through new media.
4. Bring in fresh ideas by engaging with local college marketing, communication or advertising students in campaign development or formal brainstorming.  Let them have creative license to think about creative messaging.  It is a fertile ground for new perspectives.

Break the mold and perhaps you’ll be the one to take hospital marketing to the next level.

Elizabeth L. Scott
escott@ravennewmedia.com
Raven New Media & Marketing

Healthcare for your brand on a budget

When funds are scarce and investments are heavily scrutinized, you owe it to your shareholders to assess your brand’s state of wellness. Here’s why. –iMediaConnection.com

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100 ways to use Twitter in your hospital

“Nurses are an essential part of hospitals and can function as a communication lifeline to patients, doctors, and others in the facility. These days, there are lots of different tools you can use to communicate, but Twitter is an exciting one to consider, just because it holds so much potential. Read on, and you’ll learn about 101 different ways you can use Twitter in your hospital.” 

Great list from the LPN to RN blog!  http://ow.ly/BW9D

What are the best, cost-effective ways to increase patient satisfaction and the patient experience?

I’m going to take an unconventional stab at this one. “Patient satisfaction” can be simple…’hospital’ should be about hospitality and patient satisfaction is the result of helping people.

I may get some flak for saying that, but we, in health care, have made ‘patient satisfaction’ a beast to manage. The pressure to increase Press Ganey scores, the long litanies of procedures, policies and recommendations are often not helping our patients.  It is easy to become mechanical and too busy to take time to address anything outside of our immediate job responsibilities.

Most of us have been a patient at some point.  While it is natural to want to leave the worst parts of a patient experience behind us and just move forward, I would encourage us to remember one thing that was frustrating, frightening, overwhelming, emotional, isolating, impersonal or disappointing about an experience and find a way to make it better for the next person who comes along.  This means getting involved. Don’t just send an email with a suggestion. Get active. Consider the following:

Small changes in habits

• Set aside 10 minutes to get up from your desk, out of your department and head toward the parking garage, the hospital lobby or waiting room and help someone.
• Make it a personal mission to do at least one kind thing for a person you don’t know.  It doesn’t have to be a patient. Consider family, friends, hospital volunteers, etc.
• Give a sincere smile to everyone.
• Look into people’s eyes.
• Avoid shop talk in the hallways and elevators if possible.
• Pay attention.
• Slow down.  Don’t buzz pass visitors unless there is an emergency. 

Random acts of kindness

• Cover the cost of a cup of coffee or muffin for the stranger behind you in line.
• Feed a parking meter that is running low.
• Roll a stranded wheelchair back to its designated place.
• Offer to walk a lost person to his/her destination.
• Buy a couple of cafeteria gift cards and give them out occasionally to weary-looking people in waiting rooms.
• Donate books, crossword puzzles, or blank note pads that can be used in a doctor’s waiting room. Better yet, “adopt” a waiting room or busy hallway and get permission to help make it a friendly, inviting place.  May I suggest immediate care centers!

You can do it!

– Elizabeth L. Scott

Social Influence Marketing Strategies & Tactics to Win Customers

Lots of helpful hints for using social media to win business.

What is mobile media's role in health care?

Any thoughts about the future of mobile technology use by health care consumers or clinicians?