Brand Isn’t about Advertising, It’s about Experience

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Ben Dillon

Conferences like the Healthcare Marketing Strategy Summit that I attended this week are always part education, part commiseration and part inspiration. That last bit is typically the role of the keynotes – someone from outside the industry comes in, preferably with a recognizable name or at least a few recognizable highlights from their resume, and gets all the attendees re-energized and excited about what we can accomplish when we return to work.

Former Starbucks and Nike marketing guru and author of A New Brand World Scott Bedbury fit the bill.

Bedbury’s talk wasn’t about new ways to approach brand-building, rather it was to remind us of the fundamentals. Your employees are the single biggest component of your experience as a service organization. And when you compromise in hiring, fail to indoctrinate your staff or don’t focus on morale – it can destroy your brand in the blink of an eye.

Here’s Scott Bedbury’s list of 15 branding tips:

Remember that consumers are really not that into you.
Respect consumer’s intelligence, their time, and their experiences.
Respect what they’re feeling in the moment you connect with them.
Respect the spandex rule – just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
Avoid looking like Sybil (Schizophrenics are entertaining but they’re hard to know or trust. Be consistent.)
You get what you pay for. Respect and reward those who help you.
Remember that 5% of humanity is crazy and that another 5% will never be satisfied with anything you do. (The customer is not always right.)
All brands need to be reinvented every now and then.
I truly don’t think there was a #9, but hey, maybe I just missed it!
It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.
Find art in everything you do.
Sometimes you need to change course when it seems impossible.
Unleash the human potential of your organization.
Be fully present in the moments that matter most to those who matter most.
Have fun.

He also shared lots of fun videos from his time at Nike and Starbucks that reinforce these points. Videos like Nike’s Walt Stack ad.

The biggest takeaway for me – brand isn’t about advertising, it’s about experience. What you put on a billboard isn’t your brand. Your customers determine your brand based on the place, the people and the experience.

eHealth Symposium 2013: Creating, Innovating, Pushing Boundaries

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Eric Engelmann

Last week we held our 8th annual eHealth Symposium. Clients from all over the country came to Iowa to work together on pushing the boundaries of healthcare marketing. With a jam-packed agenda of topics ranging from the latest website design trends to agile marketing methods to newsjacking, clients left with brains full of new ideas, knowledge and relationships:

Heading back to the 'boro. Taking with me great information, good memories and new @geonetric friendships. #geolive

— Matt McKinney (@MattMcKNC) April 25, 2013

Clients also received a healthy dose of Iowa hospitality, which consists of overwhelming friendliness, and over-the-top food:

Taking a lot of inspiration, ideas and knowledge back from #geolive. With all the great food, probably also bringing back 5 lbs.

— karamoran (@karamoran) April 24, 2013

It helps that we hold the event at The Hotel at Kirkwood Center, which is unlike any hotel you’d expect to find in Iowa:

Is this a Vegas Hotel? No, it’s Iowa. Really. Credit: The Hotel at Kirkwood Center.

The entryway to the Hotel at Kirkwood. Gorgeous, fantastic coffee, friendly staff, and cozy places to hang out between sessions. Credit: The Hotel at Kirkwood Center.

The Hotel also happens to come with a culinary school serving up delicious meals every 2-3 hours. In fact, that’s how we kicked off this year’s event, with Chef Anthony Green, talking about ways to take an ordinarily mundane recipe, Caesar salad, and kick it up a notch or three.

Everything’s better deep fried: Chef Anthony Green kicks a mundane Caesar salad recipe up a notch by making it from scratch, then deep frying it or pureeing it.

Our clients are such good sports – they volunteered to help whip up a deep fried Caesar salad on TV in front of everyone.

You never know what you're volunteering for when your raise your hand. You might wind up making a deep fried Caesar salad from scratch.

Chef Green asks for a volunteer from the audience – did you know you’d have to touch anchovies?

Having pushed culinary boundaries, it was time to move into more serious material. Two days full of speakers and presenters covered topics showcasing the best in eHealth.

Speakers and presenters covered a dozen topics showcasing the best in eHealth.

Geonetric experts doing what they do best: helping clients get the most from their relationship with us.

John Morgan, author of Brand Against the Machine, was our keynote speaker. He blasted apart conventions about branding. His entertaining and irreverent message was pitch-perfect, as Geonetric and clients work together to shake up the staid industry of healthcare marketing.

Author and brand guru John Morgan, our keynote speaker, discussed building brands in today’s social world. Fun fact that I learned: they have a pharmacy at Disney World. You’ll have to read his book to learn why it matters. *shameless plug*

Ben Dillon presented on emerging trends in our industry, and how they affect clients.

eHealth Evangelist, Ben Dillon, presents on emerging trends in the industry.

Geonetric’s eHealth Evangelist, Ben Dillon, mesmerizes the room with that same sultry radio voice he uses in webinars. It makes statistics much more exciting!

There’s so much to learn that we used “Date-a-Geek” speed dating to make sure everyone had a chance to discuss critical topics around content, mobile vs. responsive design, and keeping up with the latest technologies and practices.

Relationships have to start somewhere. Why not start by speed dating?

With clients representing hundreds of hospitals, there’s issues that are unique to larger hospitals or rural hospitals. Our peer group roundtables let them focus on those topics, and learn what’s working and what’s not with peers facing the same challenges.

Peer group roundtables let clients with similar market needs and competitive situations discuss areas most important to them.

We’re renowned for our deep relationships with clients. One of the best ways clients get the most out of symposium is to spend some one-on-one time with their client advisors to work through the next year’s plans:

Clients love spending 1:1 time with their client advisors. And our advisors love it too!

We ended the program with a panel featuring Leslie Kelly Hall from Geonetric partner Healthwise and Gabrielle DeTora of DeTora Consulting, who gave us insights on the evolution of marketing’s role in engaging patients more deeply in their health, and how technology and data are fundamentally changing the role of marketing in healthcare.

Panelists Leslie Kelly Hall and Gabrielle DeTora gave an important outside perspective on eHealth.

@lesliekellyhall says “Empower patients and give them tools that allow them to do things for themselves.” #geolive twitter.com/HW_JoAnna/stat…

— JoAnna Brogdon (@HW_JoAnna) April 24, 2013

To add a little serendipitous fun, we hid Amazon gift certificates and gave out clues:

We have a winner! Congratulations Heather on finding the Amazon gift card – on your birthday no less! http://t.co/iVa0AsfsSt #geolive #hbd

— Geonetric (@geonetric) April 24, 2013

By the end of the day, with brains overflowing, we had switched to beer while playing darts, pool, and laughing at a local pub, followed by a good night’s sleep back at The Hotel.

Geonetric upstairs: Closed to the public

Sure, we’ll rent out the whole floor of a bar for a party. Of course we brought the deep fried green beans if you’re hungry.

Our post-Symposium surveys reveal that clients loved the event, learned a lot, made new friends, and are excited to come back! We’re already planning for the 2014 eHealth Symposium, to push the boundaries even further! We might even find something else tasty to deep fry.

Keeping Your Eye on VitalSite Search Metrics

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Michael ONeill

Search is the means by which people find the content they’re looking for. When it comes to a healthcare site, this might be a consumer looking for a doctor who specializes in their condition(s), a mom looking for the nearest urgent care clinic for her son’s earache, or a patient looking for the login page to the portal to renew a prescription.

While we typically look at search to assess how visitors find our site from big search providers (such as Google), understanding how visitors are using VitalSite’s built-in search engine is important too. Keep in mind, search doesn’t end at your doorstep! Understanding how your site visitors use VitalSite search can help inform decisions on where and how to tweak your site to respond to visitor needs and behavior by:

Diagnosing navigation problems
Identifying content gaps
Refining keywords
Refining navigation labels

Fortunately, VitalSite makes site search easy to monitor. Since it’s designed to work with Google Analytics’ Site Search reporting, the details of what visitors search for once they reach your site are easy to review. Let’s look at an example from a healthcare organization:

Notice anything interesting? I’m intrigued by the fact that four out of the top five search terms appear related to the client’s patient portal¹. If I saw this on one of my sites, I’d investigate a bit and ask myself a few questions:

Is the patient portal accessible/discoverable by searching the terms that actual site visitors use?
Are there clusters of pages where people tend to conduct these searches from?
Are there ways we can make the portal login more apparent to our visitors without having to search?
Do the search results for these terms bring me to pages that are helpful?

A few minutes of investigation reveals some promising areas to examine, and possibly improve.

Let’s take a look at another example:

Wow! Over 70% of the queries for the top ten search terms are baby related, and quite likely relevant to the Baby Photos module². Variants of “nursery” alone account for nearly 43% of top 10 search queries… and a little poking at this revealed the overwhelming majority of searches for these terms originated from the site’s home page…

The site’s home page… where there are no immediately apparent links to baby, nursery or baby gallery related content.

Is this a problem? Well, I’m tempted to say, “Of course!” But here’s where the art of interpretation comes into play. While I’d be suspicious of something like this and suggest a webmaster consider linking to the baby gallery from the home page, there could be valid reasons why they wouldn’t want to do this.

This leads us to an important point: use site search analytics to investigate, but don’t assume that every high-frequency search term reflects a problem with your site’s Information Architecture (IA) or usability. Remember, it’s just one signal of many, and you need to determine which signals are the most valuable to respond to at any given moment.

How to Track

VitalSite is designed to work with Google Analytics to ensure that site search information is captured. However, this functionality is not turned on by default in Google Analytics. If you work with Geonetric to manage your Google Analytics, we’ve likely turned it on for you already. If you manage your own Google Analytics account, we’ve provided instructions on GeoCentral (our client knowledge base) that outline how to begin tracking VitalSite searches in Google Analytics.

Footnotes

Of course, this assertion implies that “portal” searches represent site visitors who are looking for a patient portal and not an employee portal. This is something that would warrant additional investigation.
The assumption we’d want to investigate here is that traffic for the term “nursery” (all variants) is related to the baby gallery.

Web Writing Best Practices for Developing Useful Healthcare Content

Posted on February 25, 2013 by Nicole Knoll

Web writing has a different set of rules and its own best practices. Effective Web content helps attract new visitors to your site, tell your unique story, build relationships, lead visitors to take the next step and promote your services. But where do you start?

Ben Dillon, VP and eHealth Evangelist at Geonetric, goes beyond just the basics of Web writing in Get to the Point: Web Writing for Healthcare. In this white paper, Ben answers your top content questions and provides proven tips and tricks to help you:

Write effective Web copy
Establish your voice and tone
Create a Content Marketing Program
Structure your information architecture
Learn the latest in content marketing trends

Download the white paper now.

2 Powerful Strategies for Using Promotion Codes to Drive Event Registrations

Posted on February 7, 2013 by Michael ONeill

VitalSite 6.4 introduced a powerful feature: promotional codes. It’s been exciting to see how our clients are using them to promote their calendar events and drive revenue for their organizations.

So you’re probably wondering, “What’s the best way to use promotional codes?” Well, reach into your marketer’s toolbox and pull out two proven tactics: Limited Time Offers and Exclusive Offers.

Limited Time Offers

In the psychology of selling, limited time offers provide the consumer a strong incentive to act immediately, as they promote a sense of urgency that counters natural inclinations to procrastinate or forget.

VitalSite has a built-in mechanism for publishing and archiving promotion codes automatically on specific dates. By using this feature, you can create your promotion codes and start your campaigns with the assurance that site visitors will only be able to use the promotion codes on the dates you specify.

My favorite limited time offer campaigns include early-bird discounts to registrants who sign up at least two weeks before the class, and special one-day promotions to motivate registrations with the offer of a steep discount for acting immediately. Of course you can (and should) experiment and find the types of limited time promotions that work best for your organization and events.

As with any promotion, you’ll want to target specific communities, use the codes appropriately, and pay attention to the results. Too many limited time offers and your audience will quickly grow fatigued. Too few and you may miss out on revenue due to fewer registrations.

Exclusive Offers

Next to limited time offers, exclusivity is also a strong motivator for action. Chances are you have a number of opportunities to use exclusive offers to drive event registrations:

Direct mail – Identify a target market and send them a promotion code for a discount that is not publicly advertised or announced outside the direct mail campaign. Make sure to tell your readers that not everyone has access to this promotion code. Otherwise, the strong motivational component of exclusivity doesn’t exist and won’t work in your favor.
Social networks – Offer incentives for people to follow your organization on your social media outlets by periodically offering promotions and discounts exclusively through those channels. Not only can this drive registrations, but it provides your audience with tangible value for following your social media stream.
Organization blogs – Have mommy bloggers or doctor bloggers? A great way to reward blog followers while driving registrations is to promote relevant calendar events through these channels. Provide your bloggers with unique promotion codes they can offer their readers. Used effectively, this approach can drive registrations and readership at the same time.

VitalSite’s Calendar & Event Directory is a powerful tool that can help you contribute to your organization’s bottom line while helping with patient education, public health and community awareness of your organization’s expertise. In addition to the approaches indicated above, there are a plethora of other ways to use promotion codes (such as running combination deals, core SEO principles, and other approaches to marketing and promoting your events).

Got Style? Why Your Organization Should Have a Customized Web Style Guide

Posted on February 7, 2013 by Jade DeLang Hart

We’re talking Web content style here. Before you prepare to strut your organizational stuff on the Web runway – regardless of the platform – make sure your style is intact and impeccable.

How? With a customized Web style guide that’s specific to your organization. If you don’t have one, you should. This is the document that defines and standardizes how your organization communicates online. It may be part of your overall brand guidelines, but Web content should be addressed specifically since writing for the Web differs from other forms of marketing and corporate communication.

OK, maybe this isn’t the most intriguing part of your marketing and communications program, but it’s an important, and often overlooked, tool in projecting your best image to the world.

Why Do You Need a Style Guide?

Defining your unique brand, style, voice, tone and editorial preferences in one place benefits your organization in several ways:

Professionalism – A unified voice and consistent editorial style project a polished and professional image of your hospital.
Brand and image credibility – Nothing dings your credibility like inconsistent use of your corporate name or logo and other careless inconsistencies.
Readablity – Good editorial style is invisible to readers. Inconsistent style and usage get in the way, distracting readers from your key message and even bouncing them off the page.
Efficiency – Putting your style guidelines in the hands of writers, editors and other contributors saves them time researching, allowing them to focus on the message rather than the mechanics.

What to Include in Your Style Guide

Keep it straightforward and scannable, just like your website. Make it easy for contributors to find what they need quickly. And don’t relegate this to the summer intern to develop. It needs a thoughtful approach by someone who knows your organization and your audiences.

Brand Guidelines

Include your brand identity guidelines to make sure your online voice stays consistent with other messaging. Define your voice and tone and include examples of sentences that do and don’t use the preferred voice.

Example: We are known for our personal service and compassionate care; our ability to interact with patients as individuals is a hallmark of our brand. Let’s speak as a caring doctor would to a patient: with confidence, warmth and clarity.

You’ll also want to consider your point of view – first person using “we” and “our,” second person focusing on “you” and “your,” or third person talking about patients and facilities. It all contributes to the image you’re projecting.

Editorial Style and Usage Guidelines

Here is where you define the editorial details specific to your organization that people can never remember:

Question: Is board-certified hyphenated or not?
Answer: Board-certified – Hyphenate only when used as an adjective.

Question: Do we capitalize medical conditions?
Answer: Capitalization – Do not capitalize medical conditions unless they contain a proper noun. Examples: congestive heart failure, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Achilles tendinopathy

Question: How do we write phone numbers?
Answer: Follow this convention for phone numbers: 812.333.4941.

This section needn’t be all-inclusive. Instead, spell out those details you’re most concerned about standardizing. For everything else, select and refer contributors to your preferred editorial standard, such as The Associated Press Stylebook or the Chicago Manual of Style.

Web Writing Best Practice Tips

It’s a good idea to include some tips to help contributors who may be new to Web writing. For example:

Always focus on the end user. Visualize your audience. If your audience is the general public, limit the use of medical jargon.
Keep it simple and scannable. Web users don’t read, they scan.
Make it easy to take action. Help users complete tasks by including clear calls to action (register now, learn more, get directions).

Design Guidelines

Include information on pre-set styles, templates, and other design aspects of the site, including how to size and insert images on the page.

Add anything else you want to standardize, for example, how to write calls to action, how to give geographic directions or contact information, and guidelines for internal and external linking. It’s your style guide. Make it work for your organization. Then be sure to distribute it to all contributors to your site.

Getting Started

VitalSite makes it easy to build your style guide into your content management system so it’s available to all contributors. VitalSite installations come with a “Content Master Guide” which contains pages on:

VitalSite Styles and Templates – defining and showing examples of all design styles and templates available on the site
Standards and Best Practices – giving tips on file naming, page titles, heading, hyperlinking, keywords, and more
Brand Standards Guidelines – a page for clients to insert or link to their brand guidelines
Working with Images – pointers and reminders to use when adding images to the site

These recommended sections offer useful information for all aspects of content development and management for your site; you can augment and customize them to reflect your organizational preferences.

Geonetric Can Help

If you need help creating your own Web style guide, contact us. Our content team will be happy to help you put your best foot forward. When it’s time to roll out the red carpet on your new or updated Web content, you’ll be stylin’.

12 Tips for Promoting Your Health Event Online

Posted on November 1, 2012 by David Sturtz

Events are a huge component of many of your marketing, health promotion, community outreach, professional training, and fundraising efforts. But would you know it from looking at your website? Too often healthcare websites include brief event descriptions copied from print materials, challenging navigation, and few calls to action that frustrate registrants on many healthcare websites.

Here are twelve tips for ensuring potential attendees can find your listing, have the information they need, and can figure out how to sign up for the event.

Enhance Your Event Content

Expand your event descriptions. Try to help potential attendees learn about the entire event experience – where it’s held, who will be attending, what they will be asked to do, and what information will be presented.
Use photos and videos of the event location, class materials, props, speakers and even highlights of the content.
Include feedback, quotes or testimonials from past participants. First-person perspectives can help potential attendees imagine themselves at your event.

Make Event Listings Easy to Find

Be sure events can be found by topic. Visitors to healthcare sites tend to focus on finding events around a particular topic, rather than browsing events on certain days. They are more likely to want to know when the next flu clinic is than everything that’s going on this Friday. Make sure they don’t have to look through tons of irrelevant information to find the event they care about.
Watch out for navigational dead ends and cul-de-sacs. Categories with no events, expired event listings, and lists of events with no calls to action can create a frustrating online experience.
Cross-link events throughout your website. Visitors arrive on your website in more places than just your home page. Make sure it’s easy to access information about relevant events from these entry points.
Link related events together. Make it easy to locate the best date for a particular topic, as well as support groups, screenings, or wellness topics relevant to a particular condition.
Promote events with social media. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Pinterest can be great ways to share information about upcoming events. Use multimedia elements (see number two) to make your posts even more engaging.
Pay attention to search engine optimization. Page title, description, and properly-structured headings can help searchers locate your event listing.

Make it Easy to Take Action

Make the call to action clear and prominent. It should be obvious what someone needs to do to attend the event. Online registration, a phone number to call, or the fact that no registration is required should be among the most prominent items on the screen.
Let attendees sign up online. If you require advance registration, letting people register online just makes sense. It’s convenient for registrants and a timesaver for call center and event staff.
Follow-up with clear email messages. Always let individuals know the status of their registration. Don’t leave registrants wondering if they’re “on the list.”

Putting it All Together
We’ve taken all of these ideas (and many more) into consideration as we’ve built VitalSite’s Calendar and Event Registration capabilities. From robust, multimedia event content, to related event SmartPanels, to a fully featured event shopping cart with online registration, VitalSite is the best way to promote events on your healthcare website.

For more information on how to promote your health events online, check out our recent webinar Revenue Drivers: Improving Your Site’s eCommerce Capabilities on our website.

Community Management Best Practices for the Healthcare Marketer

Posted on October 19, 2012 by Nicole Knoll

If you manage your hospital’s social media channels, blog, or really any area where your customers interact with your organization online and offline then you, my friend, are a community manager. Unless you work at Dell or McDonald’s, community management is likely only one facet of your role within the marketing department. But it’s a very important one.

Three Main Roles of a Community Manager:

Develop Customer Trust – Community managers are advocates for your brand’s customers. They set up and monitor communication channels (such as Facebook for example), listening to your customers’ concerns and responding to their questions. This helps build a trusting relationship between the customer and your brand.
Be a Creative Kickstarter – Through their conversations community managers are able to identify needs in the market. Do you get multiple questions about an upcoming flu shot clinic? Then you should check your landing page or calendar of events online to see if the information is easy to find. By identifying the needs of customers, community managers can identify revenue opportunities and potential new resources and services.
Be the Expert – This one may not be intuitively sale-oriented, but it is. After developing customer trust, community managers continually share their knowledge through their online interactions by providing the right resources at the right time. This improves your image as a trusted health information resource which can lead to word-of-mouth promotion and other new customer opportunities.

Over the past couple of days I attended the Social Brand Forum 2012 where social media experts shared some great tips and advice. I found the community management best practice tips by Kary Delaria (@KaryD) from Kane Consulting particularly valuable for healthcare marketers. Below are the highlights from the presentation she shared.

Community Management Best Practices

Assemble your people. For a community manager to be successful, they need to have an advisory committee who will help guide social media communications. Someone from every department should be involved – from human resources to marketing. And make sure at least three people have access to all the accounts used by the community manager. They can help respond quickly when a high volume of communication is needed.
Define the rules. Keep the whole company in the social media loop. It can’t be isolated within marketing. Establish a company-wide social media policy both internally and externally. It will protect you and the company if a situation arises. Your policy should define what employees can and can’t do. It should also establish a voice and tone for your organization.
Develop your system. Determine the types of posts your community manager should respond to. Questions? Anger? Praise? Everything? When these posts come in make sure the community manager knows who to turn to for quick answers if they don’t already have them.
Set your benchmarks and goals. Figure out where the organization is right now and where it needs to be. Then identify a marker for determining how the actions of a community manager will be deemed successful. Have check points where smaller goals should be reached along the way to the larger overall goal.
Plan your content. There is a love/hate relationship with editorial calendars because they aren’t agile, but they do help establish what kind of content can be posted. Be careful when auto-posting content on social media.
Monitor conversations. There is an art and science to reputation monitoring online. There are a variety of tools out there to help, from Google Alerts to Radian6. But also know when to disconnect. Have a priority list of what type of alerts should be responded to immediately and which ones can wait.
Engage with purpose. Go to where your audience is. Be direct and give them calls to action like ‘Sign Up for October’s Breast Cancer Walk.’ Never lose track of the end goal. Always ask, “What do they need/want right now? What do you want them to do next?”
Measure and report what matters. There’s no shortage of data. Based on your goals and benchmarks, outline what information is important to track (web traffic from social channels, keyword-rich mentions, leads/conversion rates from social media, etc.)Then create reports based on who measures the success and include actionable next steps related to strategic goals.
Assemble your toolbox. There are many tools available to help. Klout, PeerIndex, SimplyMeasures, HootSuite, HubSpot, Google Analytics, and even Excel are just some of the options available for a community manager to use.
Keep survival in mind. Community managers are going to make mistakes. But sometimes the key is in the response to those mistakes. Make sure everyone understands what to do in various situations outlined in the social media policy.

At the end of the day, know that Community Managers just need to have thick skins sometimes because it’s impossible to please everyone. Focus on expanding your audience and connecting with your brand advocates the best you can. Geonetric can help you think more strategically about your goals and identify that sometimes-difficult measurement of success with social media ROI.

Show vs. Tell

Posted on August 6, 2012 by Michelle LeCompte

As a leader of a team that cares a lot about words, I shudder when I read sentences like this:

At Three Platitudes Medical Center, we’re proud to offer world-class healthcare services, state-of-the-art technology and cutting-edge treatments.

Of course, none of you would fill your Web pages with clichés as hackneyed and – in the case of “cutting-edge” – painful as these. And I’m okay with an occasional “state-of-the-art” as long as it’s used sparingly and accurately.

But I’m a lot better with content that shows, instead of tells, what it means to be the best.

Brand Proof Points

When we begin a content development engagement, we ask clients for their brand proof points, the specifics behind their best-in-class positioning. Increasingly, we find clients have already defined these as key support points for their healthcare marketing. For those who haven’t, we interview them and their subject matter experts to define what sets them apart from the competition.

Consumers are rightfully skeptical of clichés, but hungry for information that helps them make better healthcare choices. Information that avoids buzzwords, but clearly describes benefits. When we write Web content, that’s what we aim for.

A Few Examples

Don’t tell: We offer exceptional stroke services and are accredited as a Primary Stroke Center by the Joint Commission.

Continue reading →

The Editorial Board: Your Chance to Maintain Consistent Voice in a Siloed Organization

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Michael ONeill

This past week I had the opportunity to attend STC Summit 2012 in Chicago: three days of back-to-back sessions covering everything related to communications from MarCom to agile communications practices to information design and video training. Among the insightful talks was one by Elizabeth Reese, a senior editor at Microsoft. Her presentation described how Microsoft uses collaboration and a service-oriented editorial board to create and maintain a single voice across the organization. Coming away from her session, I realized three important and portable points about the issue:

The challenge of maintaining a consistent voice increases as the number of communication channels grow.
We all face the same fundamental problem of consistency in voice across our organization, regardless of size.
The solution to the problem scales to organizations of any size.

The first point is important to acknowledge, as we’ve seen how many organizations are faced with an explosion of communication channels sprouting from within. These are often new media channels (such as blogs, Twitter accounts, Facebook pages and Pinterest streams) that develop from different nodes on the organizational chart and as such, may not fall under the governance purview of traditional teams handling the organization’s established communication assets. This is likely the new reality for many organizations: there are always going to be new channels gaining prevalence in the market that someone within your organizations wants or needs to use.

Even if you already have a handle on new media, any organization with more than one content contributor quickly runs into the problem of maintaining a consistent voice. Usually the first step in acknowledging and addressing the problem is a corporate style guide. The shortcoming of this, however, is that a section in an arcane document hosted somewhere on the intranet isn’t always accessible to the people that increasingly find themselves assuming communication responsibilities in the organization. Furthermore, describing a style or something like voice in a style guide doesn’t guarantee comprehension on the part of the reader.

The last point builds on the previous two: the solution to the problem scales to (or can at least inform) organizations, regardless of size and degree of departmental fragmentation. In fact, I’d venture to call the solution a fundamental design pattern (to borrow a term from software development) for communication governance. Reese’s presentation clearly spells out the core components of this:

Establish an editorial board composed of representatives of the various silos within the organization and charge them with collaborating on governing a consistent voice through all communication channels. At Microsoft, this board meets once a month. It is responsible for the ongoing maintenance and development of the style guide, and is chartered with a strong service responsibility in the organization (see below).
Establish an accessible service arm of the editorial board whereby anyone in the organization can ask a question and get guidance, direction and advice on their content issues. Reese noted that at Microsoft this service arm consists of an email distribution list and an online forum, but you can use any number of channels at your organization to provide the service component of your editorial board. The trick is to use something that’s accessible, is a good fit for your culture, and that can provide timely responses to queries.

By establishing an editorial board responsible for creating and maintaining a consistent voice across all communications channels, and by establishing a strong service component to this board within the organization, there is a clear opportunity to maintain a consistent voice across your content channels. This solution has been employed by Microsoft to effectively govern voice across departments and organizational silos, and is likely a useful pattern for most organizations to adopt.

Everything You Know About Mobile is Wrong

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Ben Dillon

2011 was a breakout year for mobile Internet use. I’m not just referring to the growing number, size and power of smart phones and tablets or the near-universal availability of affordable Wi-Fi and cellular data networks. Mobile Internet users have also become more numerous, adventurous and sophisticated.

The truth is we’re playing catch-up with our users. If your mobile strategy is a year old, it’s time to throw it out and start fresh.

The “Common Wisdom” Around Mobile
For the early adopters, mobile Internet use isn’t new. We spent years addicted to our BlackBerrys, Moto Q’s and first generation iPhones, which allowed us to check the occasional website. Many of our preconceptions come from these early experiences – screens were small, bandwidth was at a premium, and many websites were marginally functional on our little lifelines to the digital world.

As the number of Internet-enabled mobile devices grew, we saw our opportunity to make the online world more hospitable. The percent of site visitors started growing and we made the case for creating an optimized mobile experience.

Given the struggles of accessing information on those early devices, we created a set of use cases for how users use the mobile Web. These assumed mobile users are typically on the go, and looking for phone numbers and addresses. In other words, we built mobile sites for users who need information while driving and operating their phone one-handed.

The result was small optimized mobile sites containing only a fraction of the content on the full website. Mobile sites included simplified navigation, big buttons for large fingers on small screens and few features for tight bandwidth limitations.

The Tipping Point
In January, Nielson reported 116 million U.S. mobile phone Web users and Apple sold more than 55 million iPads last year alone.

In research performed by Geonetric with 30 hospital and health system websites, the average site saw a 230% growth in mobile traffic from

January 2011 to January 2012. In that time, the percent of all visits coming from mobile devices grew from 4.6% to 11.5% with some individual sites seeing more than 20% of traffic coming from mobile devices!

The reality is that mobile users have changed. They’re no longer the early adopters. They don’t just use their smart phones and tablets when on the go.

Visitors no longer just want maps and directions. And they’re looking for more than just that physician directory. Careers, service information, health resources and even baby photos get lots of use on mobile devices.

A Mobile Future
There’s a new way to approach mobile. It’s no longer sufficient to provide a mobile-optimized window into a small sliver of your site. Consumers want mobile access to your whole site.

All of your Web pages should be mobile-optimized for a range of screen sizes and device capabilities. Mobile isn’t just about phones and tablets anymore. Internet-connected devices are popping up everywhere. There are a variety of ways to surf the Web on your television, cars are coming with Android-based navigation and entertainment systems include a browser … you can even buy an Internet-connected refrigerator.

Of course, that might explain why the banana I ate this morning had a QR code…

Learn more about where mobile is going by joining us for our upcoming webinar Everything You Know About Mobile is Wrong on May 24 at 3:00 p.m. CT.

Nielsen Misses the Mark on Mobile

Posted on April 12, 2012 by Ben Dillon

“Good mobile user experience requires a different design than what’s needed to satisfy desktop users. Two designs, two sites, and cross-linking to make it all work.” – Jakob Nielsen

“Interesting, but no.” – Me

It’s been a time of explosive growth for mobile internet use and healthcare websites are no exception. We’ve seen average growth of 300% in mobile visits to hospital and health system Web properties! It’s no surprise, therefore, that we’re spending a lot of time exploring solutions for better serving mobile visitors.

Through that exploration, our understanding of mobile Web usage has evolved as devices have progressed and consumers have become increasingly savvy in their use of these tools.

So I was quite surprised to read the opening quote from Nielsen which feels like an outdated approach.

Reading through Nielsen’s writings on mobile, he makes the following observations:

Traditional websites are very difficult to use on mobile devices
Sites designed to be optimized for mobile devices don’t serve desktop users well
Both mobile and desktop users are best served (i.e. best able to complete tasks) by Web interfaces that are optimized to their personal use cases

All of which is very logical. From that, Nielsen concludes that you should have separate sites for mobile and desktop. Further, your mobile site should not only have an optimized user interface, but should cut features and content to support the mobile use case.

This is what Geonetric’s been doing for mobile visitors for the past several years.

Continue reading →

Defining Readability

Posted on April 5, 2012 by GeoVoices

As professional communicators, we understand the importance of writing for our audience. But as healthcare communicators, the topics we cover can get complex quite fast. We’ve got a tough job – attempting to strike the right balance for explaining the latest oncology treatment with the fact some of our readers might not even know what oncology means. How do we justify the terminology choices we make on the Web?

It all comes down to readability. Readability is the term used to describe how easy something is to read and understand. On the Web, readability relates closely with accessibility and usability.

Readability refers to health literacy in healthcare and plain language in government. Researchers have designed formulas to measure readability’s quantifiable characteristics: sentence length in words and vocabulary level. Content quality, style, design and organization play major roles, too, but are more difficult to measure.

If you’d like to learn more about readability and health literacy, check out the Health Literacy of America’s Adults report of 2003. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) set four levels for health literacy: Below Basic, Basic, Intermediate and Proficient. 53% of American adults rated Intermediate, 22% Basic and 14% Below Basic.

Select health literacy tasks illustrate what the different levels require. The study demonstrates a variety of demographic variations to help identify audiences, including which audiences used which channels for health information, like the Internet, by proficiency level.

Test your own pages using online readability calculators like Read-able.com to get an idea of your writing level. You’ll get reports from a variety of formulas. If your text explains medical vocabulary terms using common health vocabulary, remove the technical terms and run the calculator a second time to see if you can achieve a 6-8th grade level on your pages.

Addressing health illiteracy is our job. Paying attention to readability is one way to make access to healthcare services and patient education materials as easy as possible.

Can You Over-Do Your SEO Efforts? Google Thinks You Can

Posted on March 22, 2012 by Casey Hansen

When writing content for your website, you likely take the first step of identifying keywords to focus on. After all, you want your content to match the words used by potential site visitors as they search for information.

But in an article from Search Engine Land, Barry Schwartz sheds some light on a new search algorithm change Google is working on that may change the way you write content.

At the recent SXSW mega-conference, Google’s Matt Cutts announced Google will soon be trying to identify websites where content is over-optimized. It’s an attempt to level the playing field and give smaller businesses (with great content) a shot at ranking higher in search results.

So what does this mean for you?

One of the better blog posts about this change comes from HubSpot. As they call out, this change is going to affect how you approach Web content. You may want to start by identifying keywords you want to rank well and molding your content around that research. But Google is saying, “cut it out.”

Google is trying to look out for the end-user. They want their search results to be relevant and useful instead of annoying. So as you write content, don’t focus on keywords. Instead ask yourself:
●    What topics will be most useful to users searching for this information?
●    Am I using titles and keywords because they’re popular, or because they are actually relevant to a potential visitor’s needs?
●    Will users want to share this content via social networks and help increase visibility in social search?

What does this mean for SEO?

Google made it clear that best practices for SEO are still acceptable and encouraged. In other words, page titles, page descriptions, good information architecture and some keyword strategies are certainly still the way to go.

Google simply wants to target websites that take SEO too far – those which try to game the system rather than focusing on the user.

And, really, who can argue with that?