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We all know that Mayo Clinic is an example for all the healthcare institutions in the world regarding the inclusion of social media in their communication. Here are two stories that happened with Mayo Clinic and that they could handle properly.

1) A Latvian doctor at Mayo sent a controversial letter to a Latvian government official in 2009 in which he stated “as a physician, [he] cannot treat equally Russians and Latvians.” Now the letter was translated and caused serious troubles to Mayo as users left comments on the wall of the Mayo Facebook page. Mayo could deal with this properly by using fast, accurate communication with users, open comments and they tried to “flood” the stream of negative comments with positive news and announcements. Later, they asked users to comment on this issue on a different discussion tab leaving the main page for other news.

For a clinic…

A few days ago, I came across an article entitled “Calling Dr. Google” by Jeff Jarvis. The writer describes his experience “googling” his symptoms and finding that the internet brought him the correct diagnosis. He uses his personal story of appendicitis to point out that physician fear of information on the internet is overblown.

One would hope that the argument that you cannot find any trustworthy information on the web is an old, tired one by now. In just the short time that I have been involved in social media and medicine, internet search results have improved significantly. In fact, nowadays, I often refer patients to specific websites for information after I’ve made a diagnosis.

But diagnostic Google is still evolving; symptom checklist websites, as I have tested them in the recent past for myself, have brought up the most benign to the scariest of things. Jarvis had…

Do you want your website to be referenced on the first page of google? Do you want people to be able to find your online presence easily and quickly?

Why blog? Why spend time writing blog posts? How will a blog benefit my business?  To what extent will a blog help my business?

If you have a website, you want people to be able to find it easily and ideally, you’d like it to be on the first page of google.  However, unless you are prepared to pay  for google advertisements, your website will not necessarily feature on the first page throughout good website optimisation alone.  An effective blog is invaluable in improving your  SEO to the extent of achieving the top of page one.

When I started blogging in early 2008, there were two blogs that I became aware of very quickly.  Why? Because everyone (in related fields)…