Patient Testimonials–Are they an effective form of communication for your practice?
If a picture is worth a thousand words… a video is worth an entire story.
One of the reasons why I love getting patient testimonials on video is because they move me. Really. More than a decade ago—when I first started producing medical stories—I could not believe that people would allow me to come into their homes with a camera crew, sit down under the bright lights, and share one of their most powerful, emotional experiences of their life so candidly. Whether the patient is talking about having a life threatening disease or undergoing plastic surgery, the emotion captured on video of their experience can make you feel like you are sitting at the kitchen table with them. Interestingly, that’s what I tell every person that I sit down with… whether it is the patient, or the physician… I say, “we’re just going to have a conversation” and then we do. I let them know that I am genuinely interested in their story. Everyone has a story and I love hearing all of them! Allowing them to tell their story in their own words makes the video authentic—no stale script, no non-professional actor trying to read a script that someone else wrote for them about their own experience. It’s real, and that’s what comes across on camera. Hopefully, anyone who views the video will feel the same way about the person’s authenticity. That is what makes patient video testimonials so effective. When you integrate this powerful medium into your marketing objective, you make a connection with the patients you currently serve as well as prospective patients searching online for a doctor they can trust. Nobody says it better than the person who has gone through it.
E-Health Insider :: Half of European doctors use web video
E-Health Insider :: Half of European doctors use web video.
Half of European doctors use web video
Nearly half of online physicians in Western Europe watch online video for professional purposes, according to a new survey.
Online video adoption has grown steadily over the past three years, jumping from only 28% of online European physicians using for professional purposes in 2006 to 46% in 2009.
Online physicians in Western Europe are even more likely to use online video as part of their clinical research than SMS text messaging, blogs, or chatrooms and message boards.
The findings come from the ‘Taking the Pulse Europe v9.0 study’ from US pharmaceutical and healthcare market research company Manhattan Research.
The company argues that the jump in online video use by European doctors means it has become a viable way to reach them in 2010.
Taking the Pulse Europe is Manhattan Research’s market research and advisory service focused on how physicians across Western Europe use the Internet and technology for clinical purposes and for engaging with pharmaceutical companies.
The study was fielded online in Q4 2009 among 1,125 practicing physicians in Germany, Spain, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom.
As well as online video the study provides in-depth market research on many other physician technology and digital marketing topics, including email communication, smartphone ownership and mobile activities, use of online journals, virtual conferences, social networking, health and medical website visits, search engines, patient education, pharma website visits, videoconferencing with reps, and electronic detailing.
Manhattan Research is offering a complimentary white paper on the European eHealth Landscape, discussing some of the latest trends in how physicians and patients across Europe use the Internet and technology for health purposes.
How Powerful is Web Video for Marketing Healthcare?
How Powerful is Web Video for Marketing Healthcare?.
How Powerful is Web Video for Marketing Healthcare?
by MATTHEW O’BRIEN on APRIL 3, 2010
“A picture is worth a thousand words…a web video is worth thousands of views!”
Medical Web Video
Most people prefer pictures and video over reading when it comes to the Internet. When you get into technical topics which are the norm in the medical field, the power of video is unmatched…especially on the Internet. Most medical professionals, health care providers and medical related businesses are missing the boat because they are not leverage the power of web video to drive traffic and create brand awareness for your business (it goes way beyond just having a YouTube account).
How does web video work?
We are going to share the results of a video campaign we implemented over a year ago and have received close to 100,000 views with some days reaching over 600 views per day and all videos are still ranked for the terms we were targeting (see an example for prostate biopsy exam).
Web Video Views
Over an hour of video was turned into 10 short videos based on an interview featuring two doctors on topics pertaining to prostate cancer, prostate biopsy exams and questions like, “Is a prostate biopsy necessary and frequency of prostate biopsy”.
Each web video was created based on our keyword research and the online conversation in social media around prostate cancer. We then referenced the most relevant search terms and published each video into the most relevant online marketing channels. Here are the ingredients to a successful web video campaign; keyword research, social media research, search engine marketing (and optimization) and the power of syndicating web videos to the top video web sites, podcasting sites, blogs and social networking sites.
The secret Mint Social sauce: Our 10 x 2 x 50 Strategy – 10 web videos created in 2 formats (one for viral marketing and one for social media optimization) promoted in up to 50 unique marketing channels. Note – since this project we now have the 10 x 3 x 100 strategy for web video…click here torequest more details.
What were the results?
In less than 30 days the 10 videos were viewed over 2,600 times from the 13 channels tracked (and this was our worst month). After 14 months the videos have been viewed almost 100,000 times and are still receiving between 100-600 daily views.
These web video views are for extremely targeted search terms relating to prostate cancer and prostate cancer treatment.
Through our online marketing and syndication process, additional web sites and blogs have picked up and published these videos to further the online reach and increases viewership and branding. We also achieved top keyword rankings in Google for the targeted terms and in most cases we have multiple rankings in Google within the top ten.
Household Income
What is the demographic audience that web video reaches?
Many question whether web video will reach their target market demographic. With over two years of tracking demographic data on web sites like YouTube.com, the median age of viewers has risen sharply. In addition, the average income and education of video viewers is well above the U.S. average.
Marketing healthcare procedures with web video and the rightcontent marketing engine is extremely powerful. You have the ability to reach millions. If over 75% of all online viewers are in places like YouTube.com and other top social networks, marketing to these websites is almost mandatory for achieving online marketing success. Web video marketing is a must, especially when education is necessary for your marketing message. Educational advertising with video makes healthcare marketing work. Please contact us if you would like more details on this Mint Social web video marketing case study.
Healthcare Marketing: 5 Social Media Examples – Online Marketing Blog
Healthcare Marketing: 5 Social Media Examples – Online Marketing Blog.
Healthcare Marketing: 5 Social Media Examples
retrieved from: TOP RANK-Online Marketing Blog
More than ever, it’s essential for hospitals and health providers to rethink their healthcare marketing mix to include social media.
The proof is in the numbers: 34% of consumers use social media to search for health information, according to research data from How America Searches: Health and Wellness.
While it’s easy to identify demand, many healthcare marketers are not exactly sure how they might tap into the social web to reach business goals. To help understand the possible applications, consider these five examples of how the social web can work for hospitals and others in the healthcare industry:
1. Tweet Live Procedures
In the past year, social media channels have helped open up an area of healthcare previously only available to a select few: the operating room.
Last February, Henry Ford Hospital became one of the first hospitals to Tweet a live procedure from an operating room. Doctors, medical students and curious non-medical personnel followed along as surgeons tweeted short updates on the kidney surgery to remove a cancerous tumor.
This healthcare marketing tactic can effectively create excitement and raise public awareness for a healthcare organization. In the case of the Henry Ford procedure, Twitter was abuzz that February day with users both re-tweeting the messages from Henry Ford and adding their own thoughts on the event. That buzz can help healthcare organizations both attract new patients and recruit medical personnel.
2. Train Medical Personnel
Some healthcare organizations are beginning to recognize the potential impact of leveraging social media channels to complement training efforts. Mayo Clinic Social Media Manager Lee Aase, for example, incorporated social media into a recent training presentation for local chapters of the American Heart Association. (Check out Lee Odden’ssocial media interview with Aase for Online Marketing Blog.) During the presentation, Aase leveraged Twitter to encourage participants to contribute to the discussion using the #AHAchat hashtag.
Weaving social media into healthcare training initiatives can provide multiple benefits, including:
- Giving trainees a forum to ask questions and quickly receive answers
- Providing presenters with immediate feedback from trainees (i.e., if trainees have mastered a concept of if more guidance is needed)
- Enabling organizations to complement healthcare marketing efforts by sharing slideshows, video or pictures from training sessions on social sites like YouTube or Flickr
3. Reach Mainstream Media
70% of journalists now use social networks to assist reporting, compared to 41% the year before, according to a Middleberg Communications survey reported by PRWeek. With numbers that high, it only makes sense for healthcare marketers to leverage social media channels in order to achieve coverage by both mainstream media and industry publications.
As part of healthcare marketing efforts, organizations can use social media channels – including blogs, forums and microblogs – to share success stories from out-of-the-ordinary operations or treatments, medical research or other significant achievements. For example, when Aurora Health Care tweeted a knee operation in April, it received significant media attention, both from mainstream media and industry publications including Good Morning America, the local Milwaukee public radio network and Hospital Management Magazine.
4. Communicate in Times of Crisis
When disaster strikes – whether it be a flood, an earthquake or a terrorist attack – hospitals and healthcare providers are at the center of it all. Healthcare providers can leverage social media networks to provide real-time updates both for those directly affected by the crisis and those watching from afar.
During the November Fort Hood shooting attack, Steven Widman of Scott & White Healthcare – one of the hospitals that treated Fort Hood victims, used Twitter to provide up-to-the-minute news. Through Twitter, Widman provided updates on emergency room access and hospital operation status, re-tweeted news from Red Cross and communicated with reporters.
Widman shared with Found In Cache Blog the results of the social media crisis communication efforts:
- Twitter followers increased 78% in just three days
- Scott & White Healthcare was listed on the front page of Twitter as a “trending topic”
- The hospital’s YouTube channel was ranked the 79th most viewed non-profit channel during the entire week surrounding the crisis
5. Provide Accurate Information to Patients
73% of patients search for medical information online before or after doctors visits, according to this video from the HealthCare New Media Conference. With the magnitude of health information available on the web – both accurate and inaccurate – it’s likely that these patients can easily be misinformed.
By integrating social media into the healthcare marketing mix, organizations can share accurate, timely information regarding symptoms, diseases, medications, treatments and more. Social sites like Inspire are providing a forum for patients to share their health problems and questions about treatments with other patients, as well as qualified medical personnel. Inspire, for instance, partners with trusted health nonprofit organizations to ensure information is accurate and its community is safe.
The benefits of integrating social media into healthcare marketing efforts are priceless – from improving patient care to gaining media coverage to attracting new patients and staff. If your healthcare organization hasn’t already taken advantage of social networking channels, now is the time. If you’re having challenges getting approval, check out “Social Media in Healthcare Marketing: Making the Case“.
How else can healthcare marketers leverage social media to complement their efforts?
Healthcare Marketing: Making the Case for Social Media – Online Marketing Blog
Healthcare Marketing: Making the Case for Social Media – Online Marketing Blog
Healthcare Marketing: Making the Case for Social Media
Retrieved from: Online Marketing Blog
For marketers in any industry—from manufacturing to real estate to banking, and everything in between—making the business case for social media isn’t a quick and easy process.
But in healthcare marketing, it’s an understatement to say that gaining buy-in for social media isn’t easy.
Consider for a moment just what healthcare marketers are up against:
- A multitude of privacy regulations
- Nursing and support staff shortages
- Increasing demand for services thanks to the quickly aging Baby Boomer generation
It’s not difficult to understand why some healthcare decision makers may be slow to adopt social media. But instead of throwing in the towel, consider these 5 tips for making the case for social media in healthcare marketing:
1. The movement has started. Healthcare may not be as quick to adopt social media as some other industries. But there are many hospitals and healthcare organizations that are quietly innovating on the social web, as Digital Influence blogger Rohit Bhargavasuggests.
In a recent post, he points out that there are 367 US hospitals using social media. They are responsible for 10,000 Tweets from 267 Twitter accounts. When making your individual case for social media in healthcare marketing, leverage some of the great examples out there:
- Patients Like Me is an online community site created in 2004 by MIT engineers to allow patients to share information and their personal experiences. The goal is to connect patients with the same or similar diseases so they can rely on one another for support.
- The Center for Connected Health community website is designed for healthcare providers and policymakers. Community members can discuss controversial topics, and share best practices, new ideas, upcoming events and research.
- Individual hospitals are involved in social media efforts as well, Bhargava points out. The Sarasota Memorial Hospital uses Twitter to answer patient questions and provide immediate customers service. In March, the Henry Ford Hospital used Twitter to connect with 1,900 people and answer questions during an actual brain surgery.
2. Patients—and potential future patients—are involved in social networks. A March 2009 report (pdf) from Nielson Online found that 67% of the global online population takes part in online communities. Plus, time spent on social media sites now accounts for almost 10% of all time online.
Clear and simple, patients use social media. Hospitals can utilize social channels to answer healthcare- or illness-related questions or simply provide medical information—just as the Sarasota Memorial and Henry Ford hospitals have done. If the numbers aren’t convincing enough, consider this: Patients are comparison shopping for hospitals, CNNreports.
With the increasing cost of healthcare and a growing number of available hospitals, it’s only natural. Social media is just one tool for hospitals and healthcare organizations to stay top of mind and relevant for patients.
3. Patients are online, and so are physicians. Consider a few statistics from Manhattan Research:
- As much as 89% of US physicians rely on the Internet as an essential part of their professional practice
- Approximately 64% of physicians now use smartphones
- 41% of physicians’ research takes place online The bottom line is physicians and other healthcare personnel are already spending time online.
Additionally, Doctors have their own social network, Sermo, which has over 110,000 practicing MD’s participating.
By embracing social media, hospitals and healthcare organizations can provide their current staff with a mechanism to share information and best practices. Plus, organizations can use their social efforts as an incentive when recruiting new employees.
4. Healthcare is top of mind, in the news and constantly changing. Particularly since the last presidential election, healthcare has been thrust into the public spotlight. From universal healthcare to electronic health records to patient privacy, there’s a new healthcare news item in the headlines every day. Social media can provide an effective mechanism for hospitals and healthcare organizations to stay involved in healthcare legislation discussion.
Take the lead from Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. The hospital CEO is using his blog to discuss and comment on potential health insurance legislation – among other topics.
5. Social media efforts don’t have to involve a lot of costs. Budget cuts have become a common business practice across nearly all industries—hospitals and healthcare organizations are no exception. But social media campaigns don’t have to include a significant financial investment.
Consider the healthcare marketing success story from the Mayo Clinic. The Mayo Clinic in 2005 began utilizing social media channels to promote and increase downloads of its podcasts. The clinic posts the podcasts, along with video and text, on its blogs. It also leverages a Facebook fan page, a Twitter account and a YouTube channel. Downloads of the podcasts have increased by more than 8,000%, thanks to using three free social channels.
Be sure to read this recent interview with Lee Aase, the manager of syndication and social media for Mayo Clinic, where he offers specific advice for other companies on his “MacGyver-style” testing , developing a social media strategy, winning management approval and measuring social media ROI.
Post Script: Here’s a newly launched blog in the B2B Healthcare category of Medical Imagingfrom McKesson (a TopRank client). It integrates with a Picture Archiving and Communication System web site.
These tips, of course, are just a starting point to help healthcare marketers make the case for social media in healthcare marketing and creating better connections with the healthcare community, hospitals and patients. What examples of social media in healthcare have you found worth pointing out?
4 Rules of Engagement for Mobile Marketing
4 Rules of Engagement for Mobile Marketing
Carla Paschke is Director of Mobile Innovation at Engaugewhere she is responsible for providing best-in-class mobile strategies for clients, including Coca-Cola and Chick-fil-A. Follow her on Twitter @carlapaschke.
Smartphones, the most powerful data-collection tools ever created, don’t just tell brands what consumers want but where consumers are. Sometimes they even tell brands what consumers are doing at different times of the day.
Location, activity and time are a powerful combination, however, many companies, in a rush to seize a toehold in the exploding mobile market, mistakenly focus on the technology instead of the people using it.
Their messages lack relevancy and consumers filter them out the mobile equivalent of telemarketing. To be relevant to consumers, and to slip past the filter, companies must shift their approach to mobile marketing.
Consumers no longer passively participate in campaigns. Instead, they respond in real time, influencing both the scope and direction of promotions. It’s a two-way conversation. It’s not enough to release a sparkly new mobile app. Innovative applications are important, of course, but brands have to do more.
Brands have to motivate people to act by designing campaigns as dynamic and flexible as the mobile market, which now includes search, social, video, music, gaming, payments, retail transactions, location-based services and augmented reality.
Brands need a deep understanding of how mobile apps can drive views, downloads and checkins, and how to schedule specific calls-to-action around release dates, product trials and related campaigns, both on and offline.
Brands need real-time information monitoring from mobile apps and social media to get a broad perspective. They also need to zoom down to ground level, tailoring the user experience on an individual level.
Further, brands must build these new mobile capabilities atop a solid strategic foundation. Rather than developing a series of one-offs, brands should consider how their mobile applications integrate with the mobile web.
With all this in mind, here are four cardinal rules to consider.
1. Send Useful Signals, Not Meaningless Static
According to Gartner, the mobile advertising market is expected to double to $3.3 billion in 2011 and swell to $20.6 billion by 2015. Yet many of these mobile ads will never be seen. Bombarded by emails, Facebook status updates and tweets, consumers are overwhelmed by noise.
This dynamic isn’t going to change. A wise brand strategy, then, swims within the current instead of against it, presenting itself as a useful component of the filtering process.
Mobile isn’t a channel for disruption. For example, if you’re a brand targeting dieters or health-conscious consumers, develop an app to filter the latest research on super foods or the latest cancer discoveries.
2. Create Two-Way Conversations to Build Brand Value
From a messaging standpoint, the great novelty and power of a mobile device is context: A mobile phone is the only consumer appliance that knows where it is at all times.
Companies can unlock that power by sending hyper-targeted messages based on narrow windows of opportunity or location. But the process shouldn’t end there. Brands and their agency partners need to know how to get consumers to talk back, to register their preferences in low-key, frictionless ways.
Multi-billion-dollar companies have been built atop algorithms tied to small clickable buttons — think about the “Like” button on Facebook, or the “Was this review helpful to you?” button on Amazon. For Amazon, simply adding that question to each product page brought in $2.7 billion of additional yearly revenue. When people see that their input actually does have some effect, they appreciate it and come back. The more they register their preferences, the more trust brands will build.
3. Socialize the Content & Campaign With Conversation
As social networks have become seamlessly integrated into the rituals of daily life, it’s not surprising to see that the social network market has become saturated.
Overall growth is slowing. In 2010, 134.6 million people used social networks across any technology platform each month, and in 2011, that number will rise by a little more than 3%, according to eMarketer. But consider that social networking is now the fastest-growing mobile activity.
Brands need to take this shift into account as consumers get in the habit of checking Facebook on the run and ignoring brands that don’t respect the coin of the Facebook realm: direct interaction.
Facebook is a tool for conversations. Ad campaigns are conversations too. This is a nice coincidence and a useful one to any brand that knows how to effectively integrate the sometimes chaotic feedback that comes streaming in from this new class of smartphone-liberated consumers, jabbing at their phones in stores, schools, trains and homes.
4. Understand and Apply Usage Data
By combining three types of mobile data — location, activity and time — it’s now possible for marketers to assemble a subtle and detailed picture of consumer behavior, one that also takes into account the shifting personas of consumers. A mom, for instance, is a different person at 7 a.m. when she’s getting the kids ready for school, than she is at 9:00 a.m. when she gets to the office.
Can a savvy marketer shift her message to stay relevant to that mom within a few hours? Relevancy is both the challenge and the opportunity of the revolutionary data-collection capabilities of smartphones.
How Social Data Built a Better Health Care app
Every year, poison control centers get more than one million calls for pill identification. Each one of those calls costs nearly $50. Social software is helping biomedical researchers collaborate on better ways of identifying drugs. “Pillbox is a digital platform for communities to solve challenges related to pharmaceutical identification and reference,” says David Hale, the program manager. The National Library of Medicine’s mission is to gather, curate and distribute the world’s biomedical information, said Hale.
