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.

Anne – Molly – Kevin R. – Kevin S. – Nicole

If you are a non-profit headquartered in Linn County, IA we encourage you to apply for Operation Overnight by July 1, 2013. During last year’s Operation Overnight, four non-profits received brand new websites built by Geonetric’s experienced Web designers, developers and marketers. This year, it could be you we help!

In case you need more incentive to apply, here’s a sneak peak at some of the people who would be working on your site and why they think having a new website would help you.

“Having a presence on the Web is one thing. Having a high quality presence on the Web is another. Our teams will strive once again to build an experience for your site visitors that is better than what you can get elsewhere… and for free!” – Kevin Reiter

“Websites are becoming increasingly essential to the success of your mission. During Operation Overnight we promise to treat your mission as our own. At Geonetric we have experience producing strategic Web communication tools. Results? Ask any of the four non-profits we helped during Operation Overnight 2012. This year will be no different. Now it’s your chance! Apply today! Come October 18, 2013 you might be the one bragging about your new website. Let the good times roll!” – Kevin Stejskal

“It’s a no brainer – if you don’t apply we can’t select you! This opportunity isn’t like playing the lottery. There’s actually a good chance you could get a new website. You’ll find our application process quick and easy. Just tell us things you already know about your organization and how we can help create the website of your dreams.” – Molly Kovarik

“How many more lives could your organization touch and bless through a new website? If chosen, Operation Overnight could be your organization’s opportunity to expand its Web presence at no cost! Take five minutes to apply at www.operationovernight.com and tell us why your organization is the perfect fit for this gift.” – Anne Ohrt

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.

Marketing is a fast-paced discipline. Every day, new tactics and opportunities for getting your message out to your target audience are uncovered and vying for budget. Which tactics are best? How do you know if you should put your eggs in the billboard basket or the PPC basket? And how do you measure these tactics in a meaningful way, tying clicks and passerby’s back to actual procedures and service line volume?

No amount of gut instinct can tell you for sure.

A New Approach

That’s why we take a different approach at Geonetric. We launch Responsive Campaigns — campaigns that are flexible, nimble and easy to adjust.

With our Responsive Campaigns, we set a measurable goal, launch tactics in the market quickly, measure our efforts and adjust them immediately to maximize performance. We can measure the return-on-investment of any tactic at any moment – and we tell you which tactic is working best.

Most importantly, our team of experts invests itself in the success of a campaign. We measure our results against the goal daily, and we meet weekly with our clients to share our thoughts, results, and recommend a new series of tactics. This is not a “set it and forget it” approach!

A Shining Example – Colonoscopy Campaign

Want proof our Responsive Campaigns work? Last fall, we partnered with Crozer-Keystone Health System to develop a campaign focused on scheduling colonoscopy procedures.

We built the campaign using responsive marketing strategies and delivered results that matter – 73 new appointment requests in just three months!

See how we achieved this in our case study.

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:

1. Remember that consumers are really not that into you.
2. Respect consumer’s intelligence, their time, and their experiences.
3. Respect what they’re feeling in the moment you connect with them.
4. Respect the spandex rule – just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
5. Avoid looking like Sybil (Schizophrenics are entertaining but they’re hard to know or trust. Be consistent.)
6. You get what you pay for. Respect and reward those who help you.
7. 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.)
8. All brands need to be reinvented every now and then.
9. I truly don’t think there was a #9, but hey, maybe I just missed it!
10. It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.
11. Find art in everything you do.
12. Sometimes you need to change course when it seems impossible.
13. Unleash the human potential of your organization.
14. Be fully present in the moments that matter most to those who matter most.
15. 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.

You know it was a great workshop when you took away so many great points you couldn’t even fit them all into one blog post!

As I mentioned in my Invest More Time in Developing Content for Digital Properties post, I recently attended the content marketing workshop at the Healthcare Marketing Strategy Summit in Scottsdale, AZ this week.

One great insight I heard is the fact that truly great content marketing happens at the intersection of user needs, resources and business strategy.

As Ed Bennett, Scott Linabarger and Shel Holtz explained, to create great content, adhere to the following strategies:

1. Align with business needs. Some content is simply going to be more valuable to the organization than others, so focus on strategically important specialties and then partner with your service line marketing folks to understand what moves the business. Content is a long-term strategy and not an event, so meet regularly to identify, prioritize, review and plan. At the Cleveland Clinic, Scott Linabarger asks the following questions to determine what content will be most valuable: What will people travel for? What do we do best? What do we offer that is unique? Where are the growth opportunities?
2. Be user focused. This applies not only to the writing style that you employ but also to the content you choose to develop and the way you deliver it. Start with a general idea of user needs and then refine with analytics. For example, Cleveland Clinic noticed an increase in food-focused searches on its site around 4:00 pm on weekdays. Why? Most likely consumers are getting hungry or planning dinner. An interesting insight, but what can you do with that information? The Clinic started regularly posting recipes in the late afternoon with great success. To ensure that they’re posting recipes that their audience wants, they occasionally ask their Facebook followers what they’d like to see. A typical morning post might be about breakfast choices, information to help in planning your day, or a topic about things that are interfering with a good night’s sleep. Mid-afternoon is often recipes. While a late night post could discuss how doing yoga improves sleep.
3. Editorial calendar. It’s hard to consistently deliver great content if you’re waiting for a spark of inspiration. Plan in advance what content is needed and commit to a regular schedule.
4. Stretch your content investments by leveraging a range of formats. Look, for example, at how McKinsey Quarterly unbundles research reports – they offer a summary abstract, the full report, the full report in eBook format, along with podcasts, short video interviews and sometimes even infographics.

For more information on content marketing and content production for your website, check out Geonetric’s white paper on Web writing for healthcare and learn more about the latest in content marketing trends.

In truth, we should be spending more time on content and less on functionality, organization and design.

This was the underlying message in a content marketing workshop at the Healthcare Marketing Strategy Summit in Scottsdale, AZ this week. The workshop, led by industry heavyweights Ed Bennett from University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC), Scott Linabarger from the Cleveland Clinic and consultant Shel Holtz not only discussed the growing importance of good content, but also focused on steps to develop and promote this information. Here are just some of the highlights:

Every organization is a media company now.

This used to be the case for companies that made their money selling content or allowing the rest of us to accomplish our marketing goals by advertising alongside that content.  Today, thanks to Tivo, dual-screen viewing, or the ability to tune out, consumers can easily ignore the flood of messages that make up a normal day.

People couldn’t care less about our hospitals right up to the point when they need us.

So the best strategy is have the content they need available and findable at that moment when an individual consumer needs it. Then become the key health information resource for them. Regardless of their health situation and level of engagement.

We’re seeing convergence.

PR is no longer just earned media. The lines blur. Earned, owned or paid and social are all colliding. When someone sees a video that a friend shared, they don’t care if that video was created as a TV ad created by your agency or by an enterprising individual in your emergency department. They only care if it’s interesting, relevant and engaging.

Content must be discoverable.

UMMC’s Ed Bennett asks a simple question – Why do our Web visitors come here? The answer is often as simple as they were recently diagnosed with some condition, searched the Web for more information and found UMMC content. So the discussion moved on how to make your content findable:

• The most obvious, but sometimes overlooked answer is to get your content online. For example, you may put out a print magazine, but it’s never there when you need it. Putting that content online creates an asset with lasting value.
• Avoid vapor – have good content and lots of it.
• Don’t ignore the long tail – UMMC has 80 doctors and other medical professionals answering an amazing 12,000(!) patient questions every year. They’re creating great content that’s very discoverable. The long tail is important here because these are the terms that allow you to compete with fewer people for consumers who are more likely to come to you.

It’s important to create content that’s very shareable as well.

My.Clevelandclinic.org is a busy site with more than 4 million visits per month. The health encyclopedia format worked well for findability in search engines but made the content less prone to be shared so they’ve added a new Web property called HealthHub for newsy, topical health articles written by or reviewed by Cleveland Clinic experts. HealthHub features 3-5 new posts each day in one of five content categories:

• Improve my health today
• Validate me and my condition
• Give me hope
• Cure me now
• Tell me something I didn’t know

Shareability and findability are both important.

Don’t just study Google’s Pagerank algorithm. Also learn about Facebook Edgerank, the rating it uses to determine what posts appear in a Facebook user’s new feed. Edgerank takes into account not only how current a piece of content is, but also an individual’s relationship with the brand posting it based on how they’ve interacted with that brand since becoming a follower. Clicking “Like” on a post doesn’t account for as much value as clicking on the link in a post or sharing posts from the brand with their own friends. So getting Facebook followers is important but most people who like a brand on the popular social networking site never go back. Engagement is more important to Edgerank than the sheer number followers that you have.

When looking at content sharing the number of views is less important than the number of shares. If they’re not talking about you, you don’t exist.

That’s not all!

As you can see, it was a great session with a lot of takeaways. In fact, I couldn’t fit them all into this blog post. Check out The Keys to Creating Great Content for more information from this workshop.

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:

1. Speak to the individual
2. Minimize friction
3. Allow for failure
4. 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.

In addition to promoting the hospital’s Centers of Excellence, the website takes advantage of VitalSite SmartPanels to cross promote events, providers and locations. This functionality provides the visitor with a quick link to providers and locations that are tied to a key service line. The new website also features the Healthwise health library, which provides health information, decision points and a symptom checker.

Congratulations on the launch of your new website Concord Hospital and welcome to the Geonetric family!

There is a misunderstanding with some online marketers that simply believe looking at your website’s visits and pageviews is indicative of the successes or failures of your site. Really? Come on, you can do better… a lot better.

I challenge everyone to dig deeper, but not so deep that you generate data puke. Data puke is the difference between ‘Web Reporting’ and ‘Web Analysis.’ It’s a term that Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist, uses heavily and it’s one that has stuck with me ever since first reading about it. In essence, most of the time Web reporting generates data puke, where Web analysis generates actionable data.

In Avinash’s blog post, The Difference Between Web Reporting And Web Analysis, he gives readers a list of 10 signs you’re doing Web analysis in hopes that you can identify data puke when you see it. While I agree with what Avinash has to say, I would like to put my own spin on this list and share with you 5 signs you are generating data puke and then give you 5 signs you are generating actionable data through performing Web analysis.

5 Signs You Are Generating Data Puke

1. The only numbers you are looking at are the high-level “dashboard” numbers (most of the time dashboards are data puke).
2.  “What’s this?” or “What’s this showing?” is how someone else looking at the report you just created instantly responds.
3. It doesn’t pass the “so what?” test. Ask yourself “so what?” for every statistic you pull, and if you don’t have a measurable or economically identifiable reason to measure it, then don’t. You’re wasting your time.
4. If you are looking at a report and there is no mention of a ‘target’ or ‘goal’.
5. There is no context behind anything you are presented with or presenting to others.

Now, keeping in mind the 5 things listed above…

5 Signs You Are Generating Actionable Data through Web Analysis

1. The “thing” you are looking at isn’t just data, but data along with measurable action items that the business can take based off of that data. Or in the same vein, it is showing data that directly corresponds to the targets and goals the business has set in place.
2. If you are looking at something that has a clear and defined path of how the analyst got to the point of gathering that specific information, it probably took some analysis (a breakdown of big data into actionable datasets).
3. If, when looking at or generating a report, you see an explanation of the business implications, or economic value, that the data is showing outlined in the report itself.
4. Any glimpse that you can see where someone is comparing data to previous timeframes and giving someone a visual queue of whether things are improving or getting worse. The person is at least looking at the numbers now compared to where they used to be, which is showing some form of business analysis through the analytics (although it still needs to pass the “dashboard” and “so what?” scenarios listed in the previous section).
5. When viewing or creating a report that effectively has segmented data or user information, that is probably the product of someone performing Web analysis. After all, according to Avinash Kaushik, “All data in aggregate is crap.”

So, does any of this ring a bell? Are you performing Web analysis or creating Web reports filled with data puke? Challenge yourself. Challenge your peers. Stop generating Web reports that are filled with data puke and start performing Web analysis, which in turn generates actionable data.