I’m talking about press releases and promotional summaries.  The really dry… really boring… really inconsequential kind.  The kind that say our stuff is great, we’re certified, we all went to college, you know, the kind that makes you wish you never clicked on the link.  They seem to be highly prevalent in healthcare, may be because there’s so much to be proud of, so much to say, the desire to not appear to debase the institution with a perceived low-brow huckster approach, or maybe it’s regulatory.

No matter the reason, the end result is the same.  Ineffective content that comes nowhere near representing the message you’re trying to convey.

Hey everyone does it.  It’s not a new topic – and if you browse through the upcoming events line up on ORLive, you’ll see that we aren’t always winning in our attempts to convince our clients about this.  We hear a lot reasons why:

• We’re marketing to the clinical audience; they need to know we’re serious.
• We only want “serious” viewers.
• We don’t want to appear like we’re trying to market
• Surgeons don’t respond to marketing messages (my favorite – and oh by the way, they do, just ask a surgeon about their buying decisions)

It’s not easy to write good summaries or releases, but it’s not as hard as it seems.  It also doesn’t require taking on the late, great Billy Mays approach – but it does take shifting your perspective from trying to share information to trying to start a conversation.  Think about it.  You wouldn’t start a conversation about your favorite recipe with someone by describing the measurements and prep work – you start by telling them why they should care.  How great it tastes, the experience – you establish the need to continue the dialog.

Same is true for health care – even if you’re attempting to share information about a new surgical option available – avoid falling into a “dragnet” approach – “just the facts”.  The problem with just facts is that no one cares – not from you.  They just don’t.  They can get the facts anywhere – there are a million sources – maybe even a googol.  If you want to have a relationship don’t barrage them with statistics, clinical references, and expected information – instead tell them why they should care, why they should explore more deeply, and what you have to offer.

In the coming posts we’ll try and scour the web for some great (or not) examples of “dragnet” releases and how a different perspective may have helped make them better.

Remember, you’re starting a conversation – chances are your brand has already established how solid your reputation is – don’t waste the opportunity to engage by telling them about you.

Make it about them.

Every now and again you get lucky and you get reminded why you do what you do.

Last Thursday I got to attend the opening gala for the International Brain Mapping and Interoperative Surgical Planning Society’s 2009 World Congress.  There I saw the presentation of their Beacon Award for those who have shown courage in their efforts to raise awareness of neurological disorders on behalf of patients and families.  One of this year’s recipients, Colin Rich, spoke to the group – and totally blew us away.

In 2002 he did what he had done for more than 20 years.  He cinched up his boots, strapped on his helmet, grabbed his weapon and headed into harm’s way in Afghanistan, where he was wounded – not for the first time, but this time it changed his life.  The head trauma that he received eventually took his sight, and as the world closed in on him, he also discovered he now had a form of epilepsy.

You would expect his acceptance to be a thank you to those that have advanced the science and practice of neurology, and to remind us that there is more work to be done. 

And he did – but not directly.

Instead he chose to remind us that this award doesn’t belong to him or to others like him, that it must be shared with those that are too often forgotten in the process.  In his case, it was his wife Nancy.  The one who helped him through his struggle to regain much of what he had lost, the one who never gave up even when he wanted to, and the one who gave him the reason to have the courage to push beyond the limits his injury had imposed. 

It shouldn’t have surprised us that a guy who spent his life serving others, would remind us that the award is not about him, but those that surround him. 

It shouldn’t surprise us, but it does because it’s so unfortunately true – we forget those that stand behind the wheelchair, across the gurney, who sit in waiting room, or in that uncomfortable extra chair in the corner of the exam room, are part of the patient experience.  They may not feel the pain, but the share it, and the best examples of emerging systems account for them.

So bringing it back to the purpose of this blog; remember what Colin Rich tells us – there is more to the patient experience than the individual.  We need to remember that as we develop the next generation of communication tools and experiences. 

As healthcare marketing begins to embrace content marketing and social media, one of the biggest challenges is letting go of the impression that your website is at the center of the web.  In preparing a post on how healthcare marketers measure success of content marketing, a pattern emerged, where success was being measured by how many hits the content brought back to the website.  While this is ultimately where you’d like to get your content seen, it’s a misplaced goal and you can be even more effective if you shift your perspective.

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="284" caption="The Ptolemaic Web"][/caption]

Back in the second century Ptolemy, published authoritative works that put the earth in the center of the universe, with everything else revolving around earth in perfect concentric circles.  Applying the perspective that your site is at the center of the web, you get a Ptolemaic Web similar to the one illustrated here.  In a Ptolemaic view of the web, the focus is on your site and doing whatever it takes to get the traffic there.  Micro sites get developed to focus on special events or topics, a premium is placed on understanding what your competition’s site is presenting and making sure your site is leading in capability and “cool” factor, and you’re always looking for ways to get industry press or news sites to link back to your website.

The weakness in the Ptolemaic Web, is it’s distance from the user.  Yes you’ve built great interactivity into your site – evaluation programs, self assessments, maybe even a PHR interface, and once you have the user registered, you are pretty sure you’ve got them.  But here’s the challenge – how do users find your content?  SEO?  SEM?  Should I post on Facebook, tweet on twitter?  Drop a video on YouTube, Vimeo?

As it turns out, on the 4ooth anniversary of his telescope, Galileo may have the answer.  He confirmed the earth wasn’t the center of the universe.

That’s right – the earth isn’t at the center, and the order of things isn’t so neat that everything is orbiting in perfect circles – things that are close one day may be far away on another.  So how does this apply to content marketing and social media?

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="The Galilean Web"][/caption]

Your site, is not at the the center.

Content marketing success is a measure of the value of the content (and by extension your brand), the goal is to make your site a destination, not drive click-throughs.

I know it’s subtle, but a visual of the Galilean Web may help.  In the Galilean Web, each user represents a separate and unique “web solar system”, with their launch point being at the center.  Users may have multiple “web solar systems” for each activity on the web – like searching for related health information.  In the example here, search is at the center, with other relevant destinations like blogs, Facebook, YouTube, and networking sites serving as resources.  Social media and communication tools are on a separate orbit, identifying other potential destinations.

Where’s your site?  It’s that dot in the corner.  You’re not in their system – they’re searching for information and content and your site isn’t showing up because there is competing content in multiple locations on the web, and these aggregation sites are more relevant to users and search engines.

So how do you get into this user’s web solar system?

Content.

Place your content where you know your users are.  Not just in one place – get it out there!

Context.

Make it relevant, assure its quality, and update it frequently, and they will reward you by becoming frequent consumers of your content – shifting their social media orbit to be closer to your site.  Over time, they may even make your site a destination in their solar system.  Shift your focus from counting click-throughs to observing how the content is consumed.   Adjust what you’re publishing based on the feedback you’re getting.  You are going to benefit by being seen as a valuable contributor to their information needs.

It’s important to note, they may never visit your site – but it doesn’t matter if they’ve become your brand advocate and choose to get their healthcare services from you because of your content.

At the end of the day, isn’t that your objective?

 For the last 9 summers, I’ve had the pleasure of living with a working broadleaf tobacco farm in my front yard.  Regardless of how you feel about tobacco and its uses (cigar wrappers for this crop), tobacco farming is a fascinating process.  In our house we mark summer milestones by the process, planting in June, mid-summer “topping”, and the late August harvesting, and the fall drying season.

So what does that have to with healthcare marketing?  It struck me as I watched the farm hands “topping” the tobacco (removing the flowers from the plants), cutting away those things that pull energy away from growing what is really important, that there are many parallels to the challenges facing healthcare marketers today.

As healthcare marketing shifts from low engagement, broadly targeted traditional marcomm strategies (traditional PR, print/display, radio,  and television advertising) to highly engaged, highly focused content marketing and social media they have to look at their objectives the same way a broadleaf tobacco farmer does.

Know Your Objectives and How You’ll Get There
Growing tobacco requires that you’ve got the right tools and resources at each step of the process.  For healthcare marketers, content marketing demands that you understand who you’re targeting, how they communicate, and what’s relevant to them before you begin.  Understanding how each communication tool and content resouce supports your objective – then delivering to your audience in the right context is critical to success.

Be Prepared And Adapt To Changing Conditions
Each growing season brings different challenges, to much or too little rain, pests, fungus, and catastophic hail, all conspire to limit crop yeild, so the broadleaf farmer has an arsenal of tools that are used depending upon the conditions presented.  The healthcare marketer needs to do the same – adjust their media mix as consumers move from traditional media to on-line, adding a blog or responding to a social media post, or letting the conversation happen and just listen.  They must continually measure and assess what’s resonating – developing the relationships with the target audience that helps them understand how their message is being received.

Constantly Cultivate - Don’t Let Weeds Compete
It’s long summer, so the farmer constantly turns the soil, preventing weeeds from taking root.  The same is true for content marketing – keep turning the soil by updated with valuable relevant content.  Consistent and reliable delivery is the surest way to grow a reliable loyal audience, and is the best way to combat negative dialogs.  The days of controlling the message are over – don’t let your voice be pushed out of the conversation because your not updating.  Lack of attention will lead to your voice being irrelevant, choked out by the weeds.

Topping Focuses Energy On What Matters Most
By ”topping” the plant, the farmer ensures the plant will focus its efforts on growing leaves and ultimately producing a viable crop.  The healthcare marketer needs to closely examine their communication arsenal – do the traditional broad target, low engagement, very expensive mediums (TV, radio, print, environmental, etc.) support your objectives, or do they pull energy and resources away from them.  “Topping” your marketing strategy may be required.

Don’t Be Afraid To Get Dirty
Broadleaf tobacco farming sometimes requires getting your hands dirty.  A successful content marketing strategy requires engagement, and engagement requires a continuous, interactive approach.  You have to listen as much as you communicate, and sometimes you may not like what you hear – but you need to listen, and more important, respond.  If your willing to wade in and interact, you will be successful.

So there really are a lot of paralells, know your objectives, be adaptable, keep on top of it, focus on what matter most, and don’t be afraid to get dirty.  Good advice for healthcare marketers – but sort of seems universal.

Oh… and how’s this year’s crop look?  Lots of rain.  Too much actually, so yeilds are likely to be down – but there is a lot of summer left and a few dry weeks could change that.

A huge part of context is having a place to put the content.  Something that we’ve been working on here at ORLive is the idea of a Branded Communication Channel.  Think about it, you’re familiar with Branded Entertainment Channels – you don’t go to the Discovery Channel looking for a situation comedy or a hockey game.  Branded channels work two ways – you know who’s on the other end that is seeking a specific type of content, and those seeking content on a branded channel have very specific expectations of the content when they get there.

Consumers of health care – Informed Care Seekers – have an array of information never before seen in history.  According to Comscore, in 2008 health information sites grew four times faster than the internet and were up over 20% from the previous year.  This means that more than ever providers of health care products and services must find ways to rise above the noise.  This is a touchy subject, people get real uncomfortable with the idea of marketing healthcare – after all that’s what the term “snake-oil salesmen” was all about.  In a recent NY Times article on hospital marketing, bioethicist Jeffrey Kahn asked “do we really want to treat health care like other consumer goods?”  That’s a great question – but I think it’s already been overtaken by the vast sea of information out there. 

For me, the question is, “in all this growing noise, how consumers get the right information?”

Every hospital should be working to establish on on-line presence.  This doesn’t mean a facelift to your website, or banner ads with a “stud-doc pose” in front of a da Vinci Robot – it means taking all the great knowledge you have about your market and developing content that is meaningful and relevant to them – then putting out where they can find it in the context they expect it to be in.

Identify who it is you need to communicate with.  Understand what content will resonate, and then identify the best way to reach them.  Don’t be locked into your site.  Contribute to blogs, build an interactive component to your site, start a podcast, and leverage communication channels that already have an established audience that meets your needs.  The goal is to get your content seen and create brand advocates – it doesn’t have to happen on your site.

It’s not a question of should hospitals do this.  The reality is that if they do not, they become irrelevant and commoditized.  Step up and extend your brand.  It won’t happen overnight, but it won’t happen if you don’t engage.

If you’ve taken the time to dig into interactive marketing and social media, you’ve already been introduced to the phrase “content is king”.  When it comes to engaging with your target audience, there are very few more effective approaches than to provide high quality, relevant, content to them at a reliable frequency.    The thing is, great content only becomes great when its seen by an audience that values it – too often the siren song is publish, publish, publish – but if content isn’t great unless someone sees it and values it, what’s missing? 

Here’s an example.  Being a surgical broadcaster, I keep track of surgical video appearing on the web.  I recently found a tweet that told me to check out a video of “Robotic Removal of Prostate Cancer”.  The tweet came from the UCLA Health System, so I thought I was in for a treat.  What I found was completely out of context.

I found a well produced video with limited viewership, on a communication medium so cluttered that more than 15 hours of video content is loaded each minute, surrounded by singing australian, french speaking prostate related video, and some prostate gag films (really?).  A little exploration, I found they had a nice UCLA Health System channel, but by that time I would have been off chasing the dog related content suggested at the end of the video.

Exploring their YouTube channel, I found that they simply weren’t getting good viewership numbers.  Twenty here, fifty there, but it was good content – really informational.  Was it just bad luck – not yet “viral”?

It’s not luck, it’s context.  It’s knowing where you expect to find your audience, and understanding what it is they’re expecting when they arrive.  It’s understanding the nature of where you’re placing your content, and adapting your presentation to fit the culture of the site.  It’s also knowing how your content will be presented in the site – what other content, or advertisements, will appear beside it.  Can your content be found? If it is found, will it be seen in the context you need it to be seen?

The whole UCLA channel is well produced case study/PSA video – it would have been better placed on Vimeo, where the viewers are looking for well produced video, and they would have had a much nicer player to embed on their site.  They could have tagged it Da Vinci Surgery, so all the videos surrounding it at least had a robotic surgery theme.  Or rather than attempting to shape the context, they could have placed it in a branded channel like ORLive, where it would have been surrounded by surgical videos being watched by medical professionals and informed care seekers – which I believe was their ultimate target audience.

Context matters. 

Context is king. 

Welcome to EnagedMed, where we’ll explore and discuss how hospitals, device manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and other bio companies, are reaching their target audiences and building relationships.

Seems simple enough – reach your audience, engage them, build a relationship.  That’s the goal, but is it achievable?   Of course it is, but it’s not always a simple proposition and let’s face it, we’re talking about a very conservative marketing culture that’s either risk adverse or highly regulated – and more often than not, both. 

The thing is, the market is moving and changing more rapidly than ever before.  Consumers today are bombarded with messages about the latest advancements in pharmaceutical and clinical technology, while their financial responsibilities are increasing as insurance plans are redesigned to stimulate a consumer driven environment.  Doctors and allied health professionals are feeling the same information overload, as their ever increasing time commitments are strained by the need to keep pace with rapid advancements and the urgency to respond effectively to patients seeking informed care. 

They’re not going to wait for you to figure out how to reach them – they are moving to where they can find relevant information, where there is high quality content that is precisely what they need when they need it.  If you’re not giving it to them, they will get it somewhere else.

So that’s what we envision this blog to be about – to examine how companies and hospitals are engaging their target audiences, and have a little fun while we find what’s good and occasionally great in the market.