Confab Minnesota 2013: More than Words

Posted on June 7, 2013 by David Sturtz

This week, resident content experts Maggie and Jill joined me at the Confab Minnesota conference. We were among more than six hundred content strategists whose projects run the gamut from global enterprises to two-person Web teams, manufacturing to healthcare, retail to non-profit.

Much time was spent as you’d expect: talking about words. Creating the appropriate voice for your organization, dealing with content overload, and, in general, creating better content experiences.

If you’re a Geonetric client, this would have been familiar ground, thanks to our eHealth Symposium and clients-only webinars. You already know how to create better cross-device experiences through responsive design, why structured content is essential for the future of search, how to find the right voice and tone for writing about healthcare, and how to make smarter content decisions using data. And if you don’t have time to stay on top of it all, you’ve got a team of smart folks backing you up.

For all of the talk about content, in reality, the conference was more about people than words.

Make a Change

It shouldn’t have been a shock. Content, the Web, and marketing all become a focal point for the organization. They are the external proof that great work is being done. That brings a lot of pressure — and a lot of resistance — to the change that is required to improve the content experience for our audiences.

Three tips for making change happen:

Talk to People: I’ve been amazed at how many client meetings I’ve been in where the people at the table from the same organization don’t know each other. They’re meeting for the first time because of the change—and you wonder why they’re uptight. So, go find people you don’t normally interact with. Ask them what they’re working on. Tell them what you’re up to. It’s laying the groundwork for collaboration in the future.
Celebrate Their Success: Neurology just got a new, non-invasive, uh… laser cat for zapping… yucky stuff and something something. They want a new microsite filled with jargon-y content? How exciting! As you’re talking to people, figure out what they’re excited about. Change and collaboration require shared goals. This is how you get there. Shared goals also help with focus and prioritization – helping you deliver more value, rather than more stuff.
Be as Cross-Functional As You Can Be: Nearly every presentation contained a photo of grain silos. The presenters talked about tearing down the walls, and working as an empowered, cross-functional team. Unfortunately, that’s not the current reality for many organizations. You have to be clever. Figure out how to get everyone to the table, open the channels of communication, and use those shared goals to help everyone pull together.

Change is never easy. It requires you to slow down. It necessitates a shift in thinking – rather than focusing on volume, focus on value. Rather than more content, more page views, more Facebook fans, it’s about getting the right content in front of the right people at the right time.

(Not a client? You can still keep up with how these types of emerging trends are affecting healthcare marketing – sign up for Geonetric’s eHealth Spotlight Newsletter.)

Stop Gambling with Your Marketing Dollars

Posted on June 7, 2013 by Ben Dillon

Marketing channels and audience behaviors are evolving rapidly. Traditional marketing campaigns take months to implement and even longer to see tangible value. And they’re much too rigid to work in today’s fast-paced marketing environment.

Geonetric approaches marketing differently. We launch Responsive Campaigns ― campaigns that not only help healthcare marketers prove their value, but also solve many of the flaws inherent in traditional campaigns.

With Responsive Campaigns, you begin with the results. The first step is to establish the goal and determine how to measure success. You create value right away ― you don’t waste time planning and brainstorming. You execute an arsenal of tactics in short iterations ― each week, you plan and create new work, immediately test it by taking it “live,” evaluate the results, and make rapid adjustments. You conduct many small experiments and adjust your decisions as new data is available. And your focus always remains on the results and ROI.

To learn more about Geonetric’s Responsive Campaigns, check out our free white paper – Stop Gambling with Your Marketing Dollars: A Guide to Geonetric’s Responsive Campaigns.

Schema.org, Structured Content and VitalSite 6.7

Posted on June 4, 2013 by Michael ONeill

The recent announcement from Google underscores the growing importance of structured content on the Web. This is not a new trend, but it’s one that has definitely been gaining more and more momentum recently. I expect this to continue to increase, which is why I’m excited to talk a little about how our upcoming VitalSite 6.7 release will begin supporting schema.org microdata.

Based on the enhancement requests I’ve seen since schema.org was launched by Google, Yahoo! and Bing, I know that a fair number of clients will be excited by this support. If it’s a new concept for you, hang in there: I’m about to give a quick overview describing what it is and why you should care. At the end, I’ll also share some helpful links.

One of the biggest problems faced by search engines today is their inability to understand the content on your Web pages. If you stop and think about it for a moment, it’s easy to see why. Take this sample Provider Details page as an example:

When you or I look at this, we immediately understand the content. We recognize that the big picture of the person is an image of the doctor, and that the images used as design elements on the page are not pictures of the doctor. This ability to understand the semantic meaning of content – something we often take for granted – turns out to be incredibly difficult for machines (including Search Engines) to do.

While we understand that the text across the top of the page is the doctor’s name, Google might not. We know that the phone numbers at the bottom are associated with the doctor, but Bing has to guess that relationship.

Making search engines guess is bad for business.

Think about what happens if Google makes a bad guess about what the phone number is for your hospital, or for a clinic in it. What happens when Bing gets the location of your Emergency Room wrong?

Content structured with schema.org markup helps address this.

It also opens the door to better information returned in rich snippets, and the ability to showcase your information in new applications and services (like Knowledge Graph) that are being built into search engines and the context-aware devices of tomorrow. At the end of the day, well-structured data makes your content more useful to everyone. Today, and tomorrow. On your website, and off your pages.

Schema.org is a joint standard defined by Google, Bing and Yahoo! (and later, endorsed by others) that helps ensure search engines don’t have to guess what your content is. It uses special markup in the page’s HTML to explicitly define your content in ways that ensure search engines understand which image of the 15 used on a page is the photograph of the doctor.

VitalSite begins supporting schema.org by implementing it on two types of pages: provider details pages, and provider search results pages. We use a subset of the schema.org Person object, and do it in core so that you don’t have to muck about in HTML to get it all to work. It’s just there, on all your providers, starting with VitalSite 6.7.

Resources for Curious Webmasters

If you’re interested in learning more about schema.org microdata formats, we’ll be communicating more specifics about how we’ve implemented it as we approach release. Geontric clients, you can keep your eye on GeoCentral for details.

If the world of structured content, the semantic Web, and schema.org microformats is new to you, here are some resources to get you started:

What is Schema.org? – Schema.org
Person properties – Schema.org
Schema.org and Search Rank – Matt Cutts (Google)
SEOs, don’t ignore structured data – Raven
Schema.org – Wikipedia
The Semantic Web – Wikipedia

Responsive Design is a Journey, Not a Destination

Posted on June 3, 2013 by Ben Dillon

We’ve been talking about Responsive Design for a long time. In truth, Geonetric was one of the first healthcare Web firms to promote the benefits of this approach in our industry. With the explosion of new devices, form factors, and formats like Windows 8’s touchscreen computers and convertible laptop/tablets, it’s more important than ever to evolve our thinking from “the mobile Web” to a “Whole Web” philosophy.

The initial goal of Responsive Design was simply to deliver all of the content and functionality on our websites to the mobile audience. And it accomplished that. Adobe Flash® features went out the window. Mouse-over menus were outfitted with touchscreen friendly navigation support. And content was prioritized to keep the most important items visible as screens got smaller and smaller.

But now as designers gain more experience with Responsive Design, they’re not just adapting their design techniques. They’re also adapting their processes to deliver a better digital experience given the new demands of emerging platforms. The mobile first design approach – where you create a design for the mobile site before the desktop site – is an example of this.

Changing our processes requires us to rethink the solutions we deliver. This has certainly proven true as Responsive Design evolves beyond making more usable mobile sites to developing the whole site based on the mobile experience. I’ve heard a lot of hospital marketing executives expressing a desire to have their website “not look like a hospital site.” And let’s face it – hospital websites were starting to look a lot alike. It’s time for change.

The drive to create great mobile experiences has initiated a Web design renaissance. We think not just in the horizontal but also the vertical. Designing “above the fold” is an antiquated concept, and scrolling is no longer verboten as gesture supports – such as swiping and pinching – make it easier for visitors to find information below the fold. Designers need to embrace the new reality – a lack of the type of precision control in how their designs will look to any given user as they build sites that adapt.

The emergence of mobile isn’t an event or a change that happened very quickly. It’s a series of changes that have been happening and will continue to happen. That’s why it’s an exciting time to be working in the healthcare Web space. But, it’s also a risky time for organizations that are resting on their laurels and not being aggressive in keeping up with a changing Web!

To learn more about how healthcare website design is changing and explore some hospitals that are breaking the “hospital website design” mold, join us for our webinar, “Pushing Hospital Website Design” at 3:00 p.m. CT on June 20.

Why Would You Try to “Cheat Death”?

Posted on May 31, 2013 by Ben Dillon

At first I thought it was a joke. But no. As part of the re-branding effort of Gaston Memorial Hospital to CaroMont Regional Medical Center, they also launched an edgy new tag line:

The re-branding was done by local ad agency Immortology which did nothing to convince me that the announcement in early April wasn’t just a big April fool’s joke. In fact the announcement included employees unveiling “Cheat Death” t-shirts and signing a pledge to help local residents lead healthier lives.

The backlash from the campaign was severe and the campaign was taken down within a few days — ultimately leading to the dismissal of the CEO two weeks later.

Honestly, I feel bad for the CaroMont team here. They were trying to be bold and a little controversial to get attention. Something that, quite frankly, we see too little of in healthcare marketing. Furthermore, the slogan overshadowed what appears to be a serious program intended to promote wellness and stave off disease. Again, a step that many healthcare organizations know that we need to be committing ourselves to and one that more than a few organizations give little more than lip service.

But it all went bad over two words: “Cheat Death.”

What can we learn from this?

For starters, healthcare is a unique space from a marketing perspective. More and more provider organizations are moving to agencies with big brand credentials over those dedicated to healthcare. But those agencies often don’t understand how their messages will play with a healthcare audience. We have an agency involved here that, according to their website, “…specializes in creating hard to ignore and impossible to forget solutions…” The campaign certainly lived up to their brand promise!

Now, if you’re putting a message out that you intend to be controversial, don’t be surprised that it’s controversial. I think CaroMont could have really embraced the controversy and stood by their decision if only for a week or two. This would have allowed them to use the publicity to push a message about improving wellness and working to reduce the incidence of disease. By caving almost immediately, the team looked incompetent.

Also use the Internet for some quick, inexpensive and very effective marketing research. For example you should Google your proposed taglines. In this case, the slogan wasn’t particularly original. Some of you may recall a similar outcry when the identical slogan was adopted by juice maker Pom in 2010. Certainly a quick Internet search would have turned this up.

Pom was pushing the limits and didn’t immediately back down. It made the short-lived campaign memorable. Maybe a drink maker who is regularly chided for making overzealous health claims about its product can get away with that in a way that a hospital can’t.

But there’s no reason not to think that the tagline would stir up controversy.

Perhaps the campaign was more fundamentally flawed than I’m giving it credit for. We’ve been talking more and more about the inherent risk in investing months and months – along with many thousands of dollars – into big splash branding campaigns.

The new tagline was really for their new wellness campaign. As a campaign message, they could easily have tested the message in the market using online promotion while maintaining flexibility to tweak things on the fly.

In fact, following an approach like Geonetric’s Responsive Campaigns^sm is the best way to avoid this sort of disaster using a very dynamic, results-driven approach that utilizes actual user behavior and feedback in optimizing the effectiveness of the communications throughout a campaign cycle.

I hope that the take-away from this isn’t that we should avoid being bold and memorable. That we shouldn’t take risks in our advertising. Healthcare marketing needs a real shot in the arm. While this effort may have missed the mark, that doesn’t mean that we should step back to only do what’s comfortable and safe.

How Healthcare Marketers Can Improve the Mobile Experience

Posted on May 17, 2013 by Nicole Knoll

With the dramatic rise of mobile-enabled devices, healthcare marketers are looking for new ways to connect with mobile users. Stand-alone mobile sites and mobile apps just aren’t cutting it.

It’s time to consider a whole new approach to the mobile Web. One that is much more efficient for healthcare marketers to maintain and improves the mobile experience for visitors to your website.

It’s called responsive design.

Responsive design enables a website to automatically adjust to the device being used. Every site visitor has an optimal experience regardless of whether they are accessing the website with a Smartphone, tablet or on a desktop computer.

Geonetric’s Vice President Ben Dillon shares how Cone Health and Rush-Copley Medical Center leverage responsive design in his latest article “Connecting With Mobile Users: Responsive Design Offers a New Approach” which appeared in Issue 2, 2013 of the Healthcare Strategy Alert! published by the Forum for Healthcare Strategists.

Check out the article and see how responsive design helped these healthcare organizations meet their online goals.

Newsjacking Angelina Jolie

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Jill Jensen

You may find no better subject for newsjacking than Lara Croft, Tomb Raider. The New York Times op-ed piece by Angelina Jolie—My Medical Choice—caused a big stir and lit up the interwebs within hours of its publication on May 14, 2013. And it was still going strong a day later.

Did you get on the bandwagon? Did you newsjack this story? Or were you curating content? Each approach has its merits, but you need to be aware of what you’re doing so you can be effective and efficient. Since trend data on this topic may not even show up for a couple of days, you want to engage the conversation at the sweet spot where everyone’s still talking.

Newsjacking provides your expert, quotable insights on a topic. (See our recent post, Newsjacking: Seize the Second Paragraph, for details.) It offers your original perspective and helps position you as the go-to source for more information on the issue. If breast care, cancer care, or genetic testing are important services for your organization, be prepared to join the conversation quickly.

Mary Greeley Medical Center in Ames, Iowa, took that approach by repurposing relevant content for the current context. Key points? They knew they had an existing piece that fit the bill—a patient’s decision after genetic testing—and they understood how to reframe and expand it with original information to hit the topic of the day. Of course, they were paying attention to the news and took advantage of the opening.

https://twitter.com/MaryGreeley/status/334328983313326081

When you curate content, you sort through the fire hose of online information, pull out interesting links from assorted sources, and republish them under a cohesive theme with a bit of context as framework.

Curating content is a valuable service—one that definitely should be part of your marketing toolkit. But why not take a few minutes to talk with the breast care/cancer care/genetic testing specialists at your facility, gather comments on the issues involved, and be ready to make an original contribution to the conversation? You’ll build credibility in your own market, as well as with news organizations who will recognize your value and come knocking the next time they need expert input.

Whether you newsjack or curate, go light on the self-promotion. Just being in the conversation—and providing information that helps your readers—garners more than enough attention. Remember, it’s always about being helpful to your audience first.

Thomas Goetz Tells a Healthy Story

Posted on May 8, 2013 by Ben Dillon

During a general session at the Healthcare Marketing Strategies National Summit this week, Thomas Goetz told a great story about engaging health consumers.

It’s the story of Jean Nidetch, a 1960’s housewife who battles with her weight for many years. There’s new research at the time indicating that the best way to lose weight is to eat fewer calories and become more active. While this is common knowledge today, in the 1960’s this was a revelation.

This new information is so important, in fact, that the New York Department of Health decides to take this new information directly to the public through a series of community meetings and Mrs. Nidetch attends.

While she believes the new information and takes the advice to heart, it simply doesn’t work for her. She’s still unable to maintain these behaviors despite her wish to do so. But Jean decides a different strategy and takes the information that she’s learned to her friends and neighbors. They then begin meeting regularly to give one another advice and support.

This was, as you may have guessed, the founding of Weight Watchers.

What Jean Nidetch discovered was the power of what we now refer to as a feedback loop. Her meetings instituted a few simple steps that are still at the heart of Weight Watchers meetings today:

Education
Support and encouragement
Transparency and accountability (the weigh in)
Repeat every week

It wasn’t enough to have a set of goals. It required a process to support these goals in order to make these changes in her life.

Enter Technology

Building on this story, and what Thomas Goetz explores in his book The Decision Tree, is how to empower health consumers to make healthy changes in their lives through technology.

We can do what Jean Nidetch did, but thanks to technology we can roll it out and scale its adoption in ways that we’ve never been able to do in the past.

Weight Watchers online provides a toolset to support members between meetings. Using the online platform in conjunction with in-person meetings is the most effective way to lose weight and keep it off.

Stickk.com uses negative feedback to encourage adherence to goals. Users set goals on the site along with a donation. If you fail to achieve your goal, the money gets donated to an organization that you hate. While not exclusively for health-related goals, it gets lots of health goal usage.

The Nike Fuel Band is an accelerometer that measures your activity throughout the day and can work in conjunction with the Nike+ running system. The strength of the tool is not just in its form factor – a bracelet that is difficult to forget or lose – it also connects to an online portal which uses goals and community membership to encourage users to pursue their fitness objectives.

Basis watch is another wearable tracking device that measures more than just movement to track the quality of your sleep and other biometric indicators. Plus, it’s a watch, and don’t underestimate the power of that to get users to put it on every morning.

Moving Ahead

From online health portals to accelerometer watches, there is no doubt technology is being used to help us live healthier lives. But, are they working?

According to Goetz, there are four principles technology needs to achieve to really improve our ability to make positive change in our lives:

Speak to the individual
Minimize friction
Allow for failure
Mark progress

Many of the technologies out there do a great job of this – creating a personalized experience, making adoption easy, creating non-threatening environments and focusing on the all-important measurement, measurement, measurement.

Thanks Mr. Goetz for an interesting session and for telling a great story – and for providing an interesting perspective on how we can use technology to manage population health.

Newsjacking: Seize the Second Paragraph

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Jill Jensen

After a couple of weeks filled with amazing news headlines — from letters filled with ricin sent to a senator and the U.S. president, to bombings at the 2013 Boston Marathon, to deadly explosions at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas — newsjacking might seem like a no-brainer for your marketing department. But take care to know what’s really involved and establish some basic guidelines for your organization to follow.

Exactly what is newsjacking? According to David Meerman Scott, author of the latest e-book on the subject — Newsjacking: How to Inject Your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage — it’s the opportunity to instantly put your organization into the news of the day and keep it there over time. It’s a social media post or news media promotion that points to relevant content in your online media room or blog.

When you newsjack, you provide your expert, quotable insights on the news topic — insights that help position your organization as the go-to source for more information. You want to quickly deliver well-written, verifiable, and valuable information that journalists can quote verbatim — as if they’d talked to you in person. It should flesh out the “why” behind the “who, what, when, where” and help keep the story alive. Your take becomes the second paragraph in the story they’re telling.

Examples range from Kate Middleton’s morning sickness episodes to Oreo tweeting “You can still dunk in the dark” during the Super Bowl lighting snafu to reminders about the warning signs of stroke that appeared after the death of Britain’s Margaret Thatcher. Almost any topic offers an opening for newsjacking. To make the most of it, you need website content that is helpful, welcoming, user-focused, and action-oriented — content that describes how your services benefit your patients and how it fits a news topic. Posting your ‘take’ on the story to your blog also helps search engines find you.

Geonetric client Adventist HealthCare tapped into an online conversation with this successful newsjack:

Want to begin newsjacking? Geonetric can help you get started!

Death of the Mobile Web

Posted on April 9, 2013 by Ben Dillon

It’s time to stop talking about mobile.

Sure, smartphone and tablets are increasingly becoming our go-to devices for browsing the Internet. The average Geonetric client has more than 20% visits to their website coming from mobile devices today and will likely clear the 25% level by mid-year.

So, why should we stop talking about it?

Convergence

We’ve had increasingly fuzzy categories in the mobile space for a while now. Phones are getting so large that they barely fit in your hand. A greater range of tablet sizes have made some “tablets” barely larger than some “phones.”

More than that, though, Windows 8 has hit the scene.

Windows 8 is the latest Microsoft operating system. While it’s similar to what you use today, it’s designed to natively support touchscreens. The result is an explosion of new devices on the market. Wander into your local Best Buy and look at the new computers and laptops. You can now buy a 27” touchscreen computer that you can pick up and put on the coffee table to flip through vacation photos – is that a tablet? My wife just purchased a new convertible laptop. It’s a 12” laptop that, with a flip of the screen turns into a large tablet. Or look at the heavily-marketed Microsoft Surface Pro which the folks in Redmond bill as “A laptop in tablet form.”

The numbers aren’t keeping up

Most of us these days are using Google Analytics to get our Web metrics. While GA is adapting to the quickly changing landscape, they’re clearly not keeping up with what’s important when it comes to the mobile landscape.

I mentioned earlier that one-in-five visits to our clients’ websites came from mobile devices. Last year, GA finally rolled out the ability to view traffic from “tablets” separately – an important bit of information. Your strategy might be different if your traffic comes primarily from iPads verse phones. It doesn’t, by the way. We’re typically seeing mobile traffic split about 4:1 phones to tablets. But I digress.

GA isn’t categorizing devices like the Microsoft Surface as tablets or any other form of mobile. Furthermore, it only reports other key information in specific scenarios (touchscreen support only for mobile) or not at all (do they have a mouse?).

So what does it all mean?

Going forward, we’re not going to be able to determine how many mobile-esque devices are really used to access our sites. From here on out, we’re undercounting.

But remember why we cared about this in the first place. The information isn’t merely academic. We wanted to know because our desktop-targeted websites just didn’t work on these new devices. We were building stand-alone microsites as a crutch to provide some limited access to our online presences for smartphones.

But that’s not the way serious websites deal with their mobile audience anymore. We use responsive design which, we all recall, helps insulate us from whatever new devices come in the future. At one-in-five visits (and we have some clients that are closer to half of visits), haven’t we reached that tipping point where there’s really a choice not to go with responsive sites?

So it’s time to stop talking about mobile and, from here on out, just refer to it as the Web.

The desktop-centric Web is dead. Long live the responsive Web.

Healthcare Marketing Reform

Posted on March 15, 2013 by Ben Dillon

I’ve spent a lot of time recently pondering the role of marketers in a post-reform healthcare system. Healthcare is undergoing an incredible period of change. While we’re still unclear on the specifics of how things will play out, the failures of the current system that we hope to correct are well established:

Costs are growing out of control.
No accountability for the costs of delivering care.
No accountability for quality or outcomes.
The results that we get from the current investment is mediocre.
A lack of consistent, evidence-based, data-driven decision making.
Lots of waste resulting from a lack of coordination.

As marketers look to understand how we’ll adapt to reform, there’s no shortage of ideas. Some suggest that marketing will go away. Others predict that the goals of marketing will simply change. Instead of driving usage of expensive services such as cardiology and oncology, marketers would focus on driving volume to preventive and early detection services that would reduce or eliminate the overall costs of treatment. Still others suggest that, despite the changes, marketers will do pretty much of what they do today, only targeting that slice of the patient population with high-paying private insurance.

What I don’t hear is any discussion about changing how marketing gets done.

The healthcare industry is being asked (or told) to change the way that it does everything. The models of care delivery are changing, as are the payment and delivery structures.

It’s very presumptive to think that marketing will continue to work as it always has, with only a few small tweaks to what it is we’re marketing or who we’re marketing it to.

Look back at the list of issues faced by the healthcare industry. That list could just as easily have been applied to healthcare marketing:

We cost too much.
Our results are often intangible and take too long to deliver value.
We have no accountability to prove what tactics are working . . . and, in the absence of that data, we continue to put our resources behind strategies and channels that don’t produce results.
We aren’t coordinating our efforts in a way that have the maximum impact on the health consumers that we need to reach.

Certainly, this requires bold adoption of new marketing tools, both tools for reaching consumers and tools for measuring the results of our efforts.

More importantly, it’s going to require marketers to be better, faster and stronger. We’ll need to deliver more value, more quickly, for a lower investment.

It’s a bold challenge that lies ahead. Our organizations are setting up new foundations to enable the changes that they’ll go through in the coming years. Is your marketing department ready?

So What is Vine and How Can Healthcare Marketers Leverage It?

Posted on February 20, 2013 by Nicole Knoll

If you haven’t heard of Vine yet, you soon will. Just as Instagram turned sharing filtered photos into a social craze, Vine is poised to revolutionize video clips. Vine users create and share videos that are six seconds or less which are then put on a continuous loop.

Twitter has been the biggest player in the growing popularity of Vine since it acquired the application in October 2012 and launched the free mobile version for iPhone in late January 2013. Just as Twitter’s success is attributed to the character limits imposed on status updates, having a six second time limit to their videos should benefit Vine. Vine’s connection with Twitter will undoubtedly help the application thrive and spread quickly to other social networks as well.

So now that you know what Vine is – what’s it mean for healthcare marketing?

Vine offers great marketing opportunities for your hospital or healthcare organization. Adding Vine to your content marketing toolbox will help add variety to your marketing messaging on social networks. Another advantage to Vine is the simplicity it offers. Instead of investing a lot of time into making a “professional” video for YouTube, you can put together a quick-hit, high-impact video.

Have a blood drive coming up? Maybe you can post a Vine video featuring a few people whose lives have been saved by blood donations saying ‘thank you.’ Or maybe you want to promote weight loss surgery? A quick patient testimonial would be a great way to compliment a tweet about that service. The creative possibilities are endless!

Since Vine is still a new-comer on the social media scene, very few (if any) early adopters are healthcare marketers. If you want to talk more about Vine or other ways to differentiate your organization online, feel free to get in contact with us. We’re always ready to help our clients stand out from the crowd.

Are You Tracking Your Health?

Posted on January 30, 2013 by Ben Dillon

According to a new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, nearly seven in 10 Americans track a health indicator, such as weight or blood pressure.

As we look to the health system of the future, more self-management will be required, and capturing this information and sharing it with a caregiver will be critical for patient-centered medical home models. So seeing people track their health is a good sign. But 7 in 10? That seems out of step with my personal experience.

Let’s look at what Pew means here. From the Tracking for Health report, they found that people who track a health indicator track their weight, diet or exercise routine (60%), track other indicators like blood pressure, sleep or headaches (33%), or tracking health indicators for a friend or loved one (12%).

Furthermore, half of “trackers” chart progress “in their heads.” Only 34% put that information to paper and a spare 21% use technology (I know that doesn’t add to 100% – respondents could pick multiple answers).

So that 7 in 10 includes everything from diabetics with glucometers to weight watchers to anyone at the gym who knows how much weight they lost last week. It’s broad, but at some level more of us are paying attention than we might realize.

And I shouldn’t be so cynical. Respondents with more chronic conditions were much more likely to be tracking (no chronic conditions: 19%, 1 condition: 40%, 2+ conditions 62%), so we can assume that some of that tracking was for those chronic conditions. In addition, more than half of trackers say that tracking has affected their health or how they treat an illness or condition.

Techno-trackers

Let’s focus in on the 21% of technologically-engaged health trackers:

8% use a medical device, like a glucose meter
7% use an app or other tool on their mobile phone or device
5% use a spreadsheet
1% use a website or other online tool

Younger trackers are more likely to use an app (16% of 18-29 year-olds) but older users are more likely to track overall (41% of 65+). Older health trackers are also more likely to use a medical device in their tracking (14% of 50-64 group, 12% of 65+ group), but this is probably due to the chronic conditions that are more prevalent in these populations as much as age-related factors.

This tells me a few things. First, convenience matters. The ability to take the tracking tool with you seems to correlate with greater adoption rates as does having a device that does the tracking for you. Second, health consumers use the tools that their doctors give (or prescribe) to them.

Third, and perhaps more astounding, is that the growth of apps in this space must be very dramatic. We know that SmartPhone adoption has grown at a tremendous pace in the past several years. Couple that with the fact that use of mobile tools for tracking has nearly reached the level of tracking of medical devices (which we’ve had for a long time), and it appears that mobile tracking will be the most significant shifting point in this space.

Convergence of mobile and devices?

We’ve seen substantial growth in the number of connected health tracking devices in recent years. These range from internet-connected bathroom scales, to blood glucose meters that sync through apps on your mobile device, to internet-connected forks that help you manage overeating. In fact, this year’s Consumer Electronics Show dedicated two tracks to digital health.

Devices based in the home, like the bath scale, typically utilize Wi-Fi to sync up data. For devices on the go, however, the growing pool of SmartPhones provide a more reliable tool set to sync data, visualize the data and support self-management.

This allows devices to be smaller and more elegant. Consumers love this. For example, the Misfit Shine, a quarter-sized activity tracker recently raised eight times its goal in a crowd sourced funding campaign.

Coupling better devices and better tools will bring progress, but if these tools are then prescribed by doctors and made part of the care experience for patients, this could be an industry game changer.

One parting bit of data for the analytics geeks out there. Several Pew reports have been released recently. In addition to the Tracking For Health report, there’s also a new version of Pew’s internet healthcare tracking report, Health Online 2013 and, in November, a report on Mobile Health was released.

Let’s pull together a few stats across those reports:

Healthcare Marketing Trends for 2013

Posted on January 10, 2013 by David Sturtz

It wouldn’t be January without a few predictions, so here are my top three areas to keep an eye on in 2013.

Browsers, Browsers Everywhere

As predicted, 2012 saw continued proliferation of Web-browsing devices and platforms – the iPad mini, Microsoft Surface, Windows Phone 8 – the list goes on. If you’re thinking of creating a mobile site we highly recommend you consider responsive design. Responsive design is the new table-less Web design – a watershed moment in how websites are constructed to adapt to any screen size.

From a design perspective, addressing the needs of smaller screens has created a trend toward leaner websites with minimal, but sophisticated, designs.

Check out our video to learn more about responsive design.

Semantic Search

Search engines are rapidly evolving into answer engines. Rather than responding to users’ queries with a list of links to possibly relevant Web pages, the search result has become the answer itself.

For healthcare marketers, SEO is more than ensuring you have keyword-rich Web pages and inbound links from high-ranking sources. SEO also involves confirming that search engines have accurate data about you – your locations, phone numbers and social media pages – all the data elements that get returned to searchers without them ever visiting your site.

Content Marketing

Content marketing grew rapidly in 2012. Simply put, content marketing is when you create content to engage consumers and encourage them to take some action. Healthcare content is increasingly diverse, including infographics, video, digital magazines, eBooks and more.

We see a continued rise in content marketing for 2013, which means a continued focus on social media. If your social media strategy can be summed up as “like us on Facebook,” you’ve fallen behind. Make sure you’re treating your social media activities in the same way as traditional media – incorporating owned, earned and paid media.

These are the three main trends we’re keeping our eyes on. No matter what trends you’re paying attention too, it’s sure to be an exciting year!

Category Archives: Industry Trends