Posted in Hospital Marketing

Do Hospital Blogs Lose Credibility by Accepting Paid Advertising?

dandunlop's avatarThe Healthcare Marketer

Earlier this year, Mayo Clinic received some fairly harsh criticism for accepting paid advertising on its blog. You can read one example of that criticism in an article from Mark Schaefer titled “Lessons from a horrible social media strategy.”  Here’s a quote from Mark’s article, but read the whole thing to understand the context:

“Here is a word I rarely use on my my blog: Stupid.  But I think it is an unavoidable description when an organization sells the soul of their brand for a few advertising dollars with a mindless strategy of advertising children’s clothes to women who have just lost their child.”

As Mark points out, one of the challenges with accepting advertising and having it appear on the same page as health content, is that at times it will make you appear to be stupid and you run the risk of offending readers when the ads…

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Posted in Facebook, HCSM, Hospital Marketing

Healthcare Marketing: Customer Service Expected Component of Social Media

Jimmy Warren's avatarMarketing Your Hospital

Almost half of Facebook followers of your brand expect a customer service component.

Consumers are expecting brands to provide customer service options in their social networks.  A survey conducted by Oracle found that online users of social networks expect pathways to customer service from the social media site.  The expectations include click thrus to customer service departments and instant messaging.

Forty-six percent of Facebook users expected brands to provide customer service options through the social network.  Twenty-nine percent of blog followers expected customer service options compared to just seventeen percent of Twitter followers.

Not only do consumers expect customer service options, they also expect quick responses.   Over half of Facebook users and eight out of ten Twitter users expected responses within 24 hours or less.  Social media is always on and responses to concerns and issues are expected quickly.

The most common reason to follow or like a…

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Posted in Uncategorized

Social Media Scientific Session of Mayo Clinic

Dr. Bertalan Meskó's avatarScienceRoll

As a member of the External Advisory Board of Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, I’m gadly sharing their recent announcement:

The Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media is convening our first Social Media Scientific Session on Thursday, Oct. 18, 2012 as part of our social media week at Mayo Clinic, and we’re inviting abstract submissions demonstrating the value of social media in health care.

We’re looking for case studies documenting the impact of social media, as well as results from quality improvement projects and IRB-approved research protocols studying the use of social media in health care. Abstracts may relate to data gathered through social media or to the effectiveness of social media interventions.

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Posted in Uncategorized

Dr. Bertalan Meskó's avatarScienceRoll

For the last 4 years, I’ve been teaching medical and public health students about the use of social media and generally digital technologies in medicine and healthcare and I got a good picture of what kind of medical professionals they would become soon. They represent the new generation of physicians.

Here are my points and observations:

  1. They are technophile. I remember the time when there was no internet, I remember the first website I first saw online. They were born into the technology and internet-based world. For them, websites, Facebook, Twitter and blogs represent the basics. They love gadgets and devices.
  2. They are fast. They use smartphones, read news online, follow blogs and know what RSS is, they are familiar with multi-tasking. They are much faster than the previous generations therefore they need different tools and solutions in their work.
  3. But they use the technology for non-professional purposes

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