How Can One Quarterly Survey Change A Deployment Process?

Posted on April 11, 2013 by Dawn Cooper

We’ve mentioned that we take feedback seriously. When we ask clients to fill out our quarterly satisfaction survey, we’re looking for areas to improve.

Our last client satisfaction surveys identified a key area that needed focus: our software upgrade and deployment process. It was our lowest category – getting a 4.5 out of 6. Not bad – but not good enough for us.

So we’ve made some impressive improvements to our deployment process lately – including push button deployments. To put it simply: We’re building a lot of capabilities into how we deploy and upgrade VitalSite so that we can deliver value faster to you.

Now that we’ve used the new push-button deployments capability, we’re really excited by what we see.

For example, since we developed our push-button deployment process we’ve used it to reliably deploy two major releases and two minor releases, all in the space of a few weeks. All tested in Dev, Stage and Live environments. In fact, thanks to this investment, for minor releases the only indicators that VitalSite is even being upgraded may be the deployment schedule and the appearance of new features.

This is a huge step for us. Our ability to deliver new features to clients quickly and reliably has improved tremendously. Now, we can be more responsive to client needs. Clients can spend more time using the great features and enhancements we add to VitalSite and less time waiting for them to be delivered. How many of the software products you rely on can deliver on that promise?

Now it’s time for our next quarterly client satisfaction survey, and we’re all holding our breath in anticipation of the results. This is the first satisfaction survey since we introduced our push-button deployments capability, and we hope clients have seen the same progress in our deployment capabilities that we have. We’re excited to see the results!

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.

CMS Extends Taxonomy to Public Files

Posted on April 4, 2013 by Michael ONeill

One of the new features we introduced in VitalSite 6.5 is a completely revamped administration for public files (public files are files available to visitors who are not logged in to VitalSite, such as images your administrators use in the content of your web pages). This change brings to the VitalSite content management system (CMS) many of the capabilities typically found in digital asset management (DAM) solutions.

At the core of this is a move away from storing public files in the file system in favor of storing them in the database and caching them to the file system when they are requested by a site visitor (for example, the first time a visitor views a provider page containing the image of their doctor). This change to hosting files in the database allows us to push public file management in a number of new directions, including:

Scheduled publications and archiving
File previews
File versions
Administration permissions
Public file search
Workflow – drafts & approvals

These are all great new capabilities on their own, but there’s one more change we made that has profound implications: we extended taxonomy to public files.

In the past, public files were organized using a standard folder structure: you created folders on the server describing the content, and uploaded your files there. This is the way people have worked for years, so it’s familiar. But it also introduced some unnecessary constraints. Perhaps most notable was the fact that a file could only reside in one folder. If you used the same image in two different sections of your site, you had to choose one folder to store it in (and remember which), or you created duplicate files and dealt with the resulting headache of managing duplicate content.

Taxonomy provides a better solution. With the extension of taxonomy to public files, you have the opportunity to create a rich metadata tagging environment for public files that is typically only found in dedicated DAM tools. In addition to the standard file type and module facets created by default for you, you can create new facets with rich terms descriptive of file contents, color schemes, review dates, and more. The sky really is the limit.

Once you’ve defined the facets and terms you want to use, you can browse your collection of assets by filtering by facets… even multiple facets simultaneously.

If you’re used to the old way of doing things, fear not: You can always create a facet, call it “Folders” and use terms reminiscent of folder names to tag your assets. Just remember that doing so utilizes only a fragment of the potential available to you with VitalSite’s new Public Files features.

One thing to keep in mind, however, is that even if a public file isn’t linked to or embedded in a VitalSite page, it’s still always publicly available (assuming it is published). Fortunately, you can use taxonomy and VitalSite’s Secure Files module to create restricted catalogs of your sensitive digital assets as well. These are assets that will never be visible to general public site visitors, but which you may make available to privileged site visitors who log in to a secure section of your site… say for a Board Extranet.

Have ideas for extending and enhancing the use of VitalSite’s asset management functionality? We want to hear them! Send us a comment!

How Metrics and Transparency Will Make You a Better Digital Marketer

Posted on April 4, 2013 by Ben Dillon

“You can only manage what you can measure.”

– Peter Drucker

It’s easy to get obsessed with numbers and metrics when you’re working with the Web. There’s no shortage of information about what’s happening with your website, app or campaign. The cup of data overfloweth.

For a certain set of people, and I count myself in this category, data is just fascinating. I find myself getting lost in spreadsheets and databases while attempting to tease out just one more insight.

But the point of data isn’t in the data. It’s often not even in the insights that come from the data. The point is the act of measurement itself.

Measurement creates focus. This is really the reason why we do it. This is really why it matters.

If you’re doing your metrics properly the process starts with defining goals. Aiming only matters if you know what your target looks like. So you start with goals and the goals lead to metrics.

If you don’t approach the problem from this direction, it’s easy to get into trouble. I was recently reviewing the pay per click (PPC) campaign work that a client was having done with a third party. Initially they were thrilled with the numbers they were seeing – a large numbers of clicks, with a low cost per click. As we talked about why they were making the investment and what their goals were – questions that they were never asked and hadn’t considered before starting the PPC campaign – it became clear that there were many issues:

Traffic was going to the wrong pages – generic service line pages rather than campaign landing pages
They needed offers associated with the campaign that didn’t exist
The quality of the traffic (complete with near 100 percent bounce rates) was terrible
They were paying for many brand keywords that were not specific to the campaign and which they already owned from an organic search perspective
And, in some cases, they were promoting offerings for which patients rarely choose providers of have much input

Where was the problem in this? They never defined the ultimate goals of the effort! And they confused operational metrics with goal targets. Beginning with a goal of scheduled procedures rather than the general tactical charge of “promote this service line” would naturally have led to questions about converting browsers to patients, targeting audience segments, messaging needs, and a just a more holistic view of the process.

Instead, they’d been feeling good about money that they were throwing away.

Setting up a process for goal-driven marketing is not hard to do. To learn how to do this, and to learn more about how metrics and transparency will make you a better digital marketer, join us on April 18, 2013 at 3:00 p.m. CST for a complimentary webinar Translating Site Data Into Action.

Embrace the Web’s Fluidity with Responsive Design

Posted on April 4, 2013 by Bill Basler

There’s so much change happening right now in Web design that I have visions of designers in therapy sessions.

“You’ve got to let things go, Bill! You have baggage and it’s holding you back,” the therapist quacks. “It’s time – move on. Responsive Web is here. It’s not Y2K anymore.”

“But, what about control?” I question. “I’m used to being in control. Isn’t responsive design trying to strip this from me?”

“It’s not about control, Bill. You need to revisit your Web design past,” he croons. “Remember, the Web is fluid and does not like to be contained.”

This is the mantra we all must embrace. The Web is fluid. It does not like to be contained.

Let’s Shed Some Baggage Together – Don’t Fear the Scroll

For years we thought all good content must be above the fold – anything of importance should be at the top of the page, visible on the monitor.

In the early days of the Web we were trained to fear the scroll. Why? Remember dial-up? Slow CPUs and primitive browsers? In thosedays, scrolling meant waiting for content to load. Chunk, chunk, grunt, flicker, stutter, grunt.

Today’s Web content can be viewed on dozens of devices – all with different screen sizes and aspect ratios. Today’s responsive Web pages do not have a fixed width or height. They respond – conform to the device they are being viewed on. As pages are viewed on narrower screens, they generally become longer. As well, swiping and pinching change the way we look at page limitations. Consumers are universally schooled in how to manipulate a page with these new gestures.

If we were to continue designing for “the fold” it begs the question, “where is the fold – and on what screen size?” Fast Web connections, CPUs and browsers (even on mobile) make scrolling a non-issue.

Let this one go. Breathe in. Breathe out.

To Understand Our Responsive Design Future We Look to Our Past

A mobile-first approach to Web design forces us to prioritize content so that it’s optimized for a small screen.

People tend to build out to their constraint. In other words, we fill the space we’re given. For example, a desktop Web experience is often deep and broad, much like a brochure – big photos, lots of content, and lots of pages. A mobile website is more like a billboard. It has the same underlying concept and aesthetic as the brochure, but we concentrate on the one thing. We only add content as the screen size allows for a broader view.

Ironically, as we build great mobile Web experiences, we are inherently revisiting our past. We are eliminating bandwidth. We are reducing clutter. We are embracing fluidity.

And we are becoming comfortable with things we can’t control. Which reminds me of this quote:

The control which designers know in the print medium, and often desire in the Web medium, is simply a function of the limitation of the printed page. We should embrace the fact that the Web doesn’t have the same constraints, and design for this flexibility. But first, we must ‘accept the ebb and flow of things.’

- John Allsopp, “A Dao of Web Design”

Thank you Mr. Allsopp. Your statement is timeless and brings clarity.

The Web is fluid. It does not like to be contained.

Repeat.

Continuing the Operation Overnight Mission with Mission of Hope

Posted on March 29, 2013 by Andrea Joyner

It all started with a crazy mission… Operation Overnight: building new websites for local non-profits in a 24-hour time span. One of those sites we built during Operation Overnight benefited Mission of Hope. Imagine that, on a mission to help Mission.

Mission of Hope is a great organization that’s a Christ-centered ministry offering support to those in need – free meals, shelter, worship, a food pantry, jail ministry, clothing and support services. Working with the ladies from Mission of Hope was truly inspirational. Tina and her team are so passionate about the program that it was contagious! I thought it was just me, but when we finished the Operation Overnight mission and launched the site, every team member looked at each other and agreed we were not done. What else could we do?

There are many ways anyone could support Mission of Hope – give time, money, clothes, or food. We decided the most meaningful way would be to roll up our sleeves and REALLY get involved by volunteering to help serve lunch for their free noon meal program. And this is not a one-time thing. Geonetric committed to volunteer once a month going forward. We wanted to see Mission of Hope in action!

And the very first time we helped out, that is exactly what happened. Towards the end of the lunch hour, a man walked up to hug Tina and they spoke for a few minutes. She turned to us, with tears in her eyes, and explained that this was someone who had previously been in the Mission of Hope program. He came back because he now had his own business and wanted to offer free services to Mission of Hope to show his gratitude and to give back to a program that helped him through a difficult time.

It’s one thing to support a cause, but to it’s another to witness that service come full circle first-hand! It was breathtaking. All you can think is, “Wow, that’s why they do this!”

We never imagined that by building Mission of Hope’s website that the organization would become a part of our lives at Geonetric. Last Friday was my third time helping to serve lunch at Mission of Hope, and it won’t be the last. If you want to learn about opportunities to help, you can check out their website or like them on Facebook.

Or, just get out there and get involved in helping ANY organization that has a great cause and really impacts people’s lives. And if you find an organization in the Linn County, Iowa area that doesn’t have a website or has a website that needs a little love, send them our way. Operation Overnight 2013 will be accepting non-profit applications starting May 1^st!

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?

Reinventing a Website

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Michelle LeCompte

Seven hospitals. 2,500 affiliated doctors. More than 70 additional locations representing physician practices, imaging centers, surgery centers and more. All under the umbrella of HCA Virginia. And all represented by dozens of disparate, unconnected websites.

Sound familiar?

Freestanding hospitals are increasingly joining forces as large healthcare systems, which results in expanded offerings — more providers, broader services, advanced technology — and new brand identities. If you’ve experienced this as a healthcare marketer, you can appreciate the thought and effort that goes into communicating these changes. If you haven’t, you can learn from those who’ve been there.

The sweeping changes that accompany large-scale restructuring demand strategic communication. You have a new opportunity to express who you are and what you do. You have a chance to reshape the perceptions of consumers, referring physicians and competitors.

To their credit, HCA Virginia used the transition from a collection of hospital sites to an integrated central site as an opportunity to transform their online presence. They built a new website from the ground up, eliminating four websites representing seven hospitals in the process.

New Brand

They invested in a new brand campaign – Life/You Only Get One – promoting the combined power of their network, expertise and technology.

New Content

They also created entirely new Web content, dedicating the time and resources to getting it right. In partnering with them on this project, one of our objectives was to express the breadth of services across the entire system. We started by identifying and learning about each hospital’s offerings, a process that yielded great insights about the mix of offerings across HCA Virginia.

As is typical of many hospitals, many services were under-represented on the Web or had no visibility at all. On the new site, all services are included, along with reasons to choose HCA Virginia for care:

New Structure

The new site was not without its challenges. Individual hospitals were accustomed to a separate, robust Web presence. With the new site, content on services focused more on the system brand and less on distinct facilities. Had we created robust content for the system and for each entity, we would have ended up with a lot of duplicate content (and risked a negative impact on organic search).

HCA Virginia was willing to make hard choices to meet their objectives. Consumers and community physicians learn about services at the system level and follow paths to accessing care at specific facilities. While content for each hospital has been significantly reduced, coverage of healthcare services has been expanded. As a result, the new website has less than 500 pages and a lot more impact.

Grant Sanborn, Director of Interactive Marketing for the HCA Capital Division summarizes it well: “Ultimately, the way we structured the content is logical and makes sense for consumers, which was our goal. The new site consolidates content around services, displays the breadth and depth of what we offer, raises the profile of physician practices, and, in the process, lifts all boats. “

Learn more about this initiative by watching our webinar: The Content Conundrum.

Healthcare Content Marketing: Which Dinner Guest Are You?

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Ben Dillon

Content marketing can be a tough concept to wrap your head around. The idea that we should market by not bragging about ourselves seems counter-intuitive to many marketers.

But really it makes a lot of sense. It helps to think it through with a real-life example. So let me tell you a story. It’s called “A Tale of Two Dinner Guests.”

Think back to dinner parties you’ve attended in the past. You probably remember that one person who talks a little too much about himself. The subject of conversation doesn’t matter— he always finds a way to spin it to be about him. He name drops here and there, and certainly shares lots of chatter intended to say, “Look at how awesome I am!”

Elsewhere in the room was probably a party guest who is always surrounded by a flock of people. She is smart and speaks with authority on a variety of topics. But more importantly, she’s a good listener and spends more time asking the right questions than talking about herself. Other guests find her interesting and respect her perspective. And chances are those same guests are quick to reach out to her when they need help in her area of expertise.

Now, think about your marketing. Which dinner guest are you? Do you constantly interrupt the conversation screaming, “Look at me!”? Or are you a good listener, letting others direct the conversation and providing useful and interesting insights?

Content marketing is about being that second guest. Spending less time telling people how awesome you are and instead, demonstrating it by providing interesting and insightful information about the topics your audience cares about.

In some ways, this isn’t such a radical concept for healthcare organizations. You probably send out a monthly magazine through one of the custom publishing houses. That’s content marketing!

But content marketing has become far more sophisticated since it went digital. Pinpoint targeting and real-time tracking are now the norm.

To learn more about how organizations have embraced content marketing and how your organization can do the same, join us for our complementary webinar on March 28 at 3:00 p.m. CST – Content Marketing for Healthcare.

Push Button Deployments: The Greatest Feature You’ll Never Use

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Michael ONeill

It’s kind of hard to get you excited about a VitalSite feature that you won’t click, open, save or interact with. And it’s kind of hard to build enthusiasm for something that won’t make your day-to-day work any easier. But I’m going to try anyway. Mostly because it’s important you know about something huge we just released in VitalSite 6.5.

In short, we’ve implemented push button deployments. This means we can now deploy a new version of VitalSite to websites by pushing a button in a deployment dashboard.

The Old Standard Deployment Process

Before we get to why this is important, let’s talk about the standard deployment process. Keep in mind, this process is not specific to VitalSite, or even to Geonetric. It is, rather, what deployment looks like for most hosted products without deployment automation.

Looking over the flow chart, chances are the words “fragile,” “complex,” “unreliable” and perhaps even “broken” come to mind. And for good reason. We all know that any process which appears so complex and incomprehensible is tragically flawed.

In the software industry specifically, a release process that looks like the above imposes all sorts of downstream constraints on the software, not the least of which is infrequent releases. Software vendors end up bundling multiple changes, features and fixes together because it’s difficult to get them to you. We call this bundle a “release,” and the act of getting it onto your sites a “deployment.”

Geonetric averages three to four releases a year, so we’re definitely doing better than most when it comes to delivering new features. Consider, for example, how often a new version of Windows, MS Office, or SharePoint is released. We’re far and ahead better than those products. But compare this to how often new versions come out for other software as a service (SaaS) solutions like Facebook or Google. These get updated frequently and most people don’t even know it. What we do know is that Facebook has about one minor release a day, and one major release a week. Google won’t go on record with specifics, but Matt Cutts admits an update to search at least once a day, and we track on average 500-600 updates a year. For search alone. It’s obvious we have room for improvement.

There are, of course, many more ways that a manual deployment that looks like the flowchart above will constrain the software. The point is not to enumerate all of them. Instead, I’d like to show you how we’ve addressed the problem.

The New Automated Deployment Process

We’ve changed our deployment process so that instead of a dauntingly complicated manual deployment process, it looks like this:

A big green “Deploy!” button for each client, on a dashboard showing all environments.

By automating our deployments, we can now deploy the latest code at the push of a button. Not only does this reduce the time it takes to reliably deploy to all of our client sites, it opens up some opportunities for us in the future:

Feature Releases: Instead of bundling many changes, fixes and new features into a few deployments a year, we could now push a feature or fix out to you as soon as we finish developing and testing it. Let’s face it, working software that isn’t in your hands is not good for anyone.
Continuous Deployment: This takes Feature Releases to the next level. We could deploy to production every time a new iteration of the software that passes testing, even multiple times a day. The gap between development and client feedback becomes much shorter, allowing development teams to be more responsive to clients than is possible when changed code takes months to put into use. In addition, the deployment system gets exercised continually, so deployment bugs don’t hide for months before being noticed.
Improved Quality: Smaller releases with fewer changes typically result in better test coverage and better code quality. Conversely, when you combine many changes together into one enormous release, risk goes up. Feature Releases and Continuous Deployments both mitigate this risk and improve quality.
Rapid Feature Testing: This is the process where we deploy a new feature, measure how it’s being used, solicit feedback, and improve it. We could do this in a period of days instead of the months it takes when dealing with quarterly releases.
Self-Service Deployments: With automated deployments, there’s no real need for a developer to be responsible for kicking off a deployment. It’s possible we could turn this over to project managers or even clients directly.

VitalSite 6.5 was the first release to be deployed using our new push button deployment capabilities.

While the release included other enhancements (we’ve included security groups, SEO enhancements, improved public file management, bug fixes, and more) the new push button deployment capability represents a tremendous strategic investment that has the potential to change the fundamental way we develop and deliver VitalSite in the future.

Three Ways to Improve Your Landing Page

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Casey Hansen

It doesn’t take long for website visitors to make decisions. Within a few seconds, they’re either taking the next step to interact with your organization or(gasp!) moving to the next site.

Your landing page plays a huge role in which choice your visitors make.

Here are three easy things you can do right now to improve your landing pages:

Match Creative Pieces – Does your landing page coordinate with your ad? Do you use similar creative, with logos and imagery? Is the content related? Keep the experience coherent. Logos, imagery and text all matter.
Remove Extra Navigation – Your landing page should focus on one goal: conversions. If you include multiple links that allow visitors to wander off, your conversions will suffer.
Add a Strong Call to Action – What do you want users to do next? Think long and hard before asking them to fill out a four-page form. Short forms, phone numbers and easy downloads are excellent ways to encourage immediate action. Bonus tip: keep your call to action near the top of the page! Don’t bury it.

If your landing pages break any of these rules, it’s time to get to work. These easy changes can boost your conversion rate significantly!

Building a Peer-Accountable Culture with Agile Methods

Posted on March 5, 2013 by Eric Engelmann

It’s been said that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. We took our first step toward Agile in 2008 with our development team. We’ve taken hundreds of additional steps since then. But by 2013, we felt like we had taken all of the easy steps we could take. The next steps looked tougher.

So we decided to take a big leap instead.

We did some soul searching. We did lots of reading. We were particularly inspired by companies that have destroyed the boundaries of traditional management thinking. Valve Software’s employee handbook drew a picture (literally!) of how far you can go. Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, has a renowned 126-slide presentation on culture that challenged us to really think about what’s most important to us as a company. Steve Denning’s writings had us questioning things we thought were sacred. The Agile movement as a whole, especially Richard Lawrence and Joe Justice who came to Iowa last fall for our company-wide Agile Boot Camp helped get us ready to rethink everything.

And so, on January 9^th, we jumped:

We flattened the org chart. We went to an entirely flat organizational structure, to clear the way for smart people to do what they do best. There are no managers at Geonetric anymore. Everyone is on a self-organizing team, focused solely on how to best deliver value to our clients as quickly as possible.
We ditched traditional departments. There are no departments either: almost every team is now cross disciplinary, or soon will be, and can respond to client or marketplace needs without departmental relays or hand-offs.
We’re getting radically transparent. We already share a lot more information internally (and externally!) than most companies do. But to make these changes possible we took an even bigger leap forward by sharing much deeper levels of financial, client satisfaction, and operational information with our teams.
We’re building a deeply peer-accountable culture. Team members commit to each other, and to their clients or prospects. They don’t need to be “held accountable” by a supervisor.

As a team, we’ve historically been very open to radical ideas and making big changes, but this one is particularly complex. We spent the last 10 years carefully constructing tidy organizational charts, lines of communication, thoughtful performance evaluations, methods for working that depend on departments, and detailed planning tools and systems to keep track of it all.

And on January 9^th we pretty much abolished all of that. As a result we’re learning a lot – very, very quickly.

Perhaps the most radical aspect of all this is that we’re not hiding this learning process. No man behind the curtain here. We’re pulling the curtain back so you can see. The fact is there are very few companies that have taken Agile company-wide.

We’re ahead of the curve on this – certainly in our industry and in the state of Iowa – and since it’s an exciting story we intend to blog about it, warts and all.

So you’re invited to join us on the journey. Come along with 73 people who are excited to make changes. To get better. Get faster. Get smarter.

We hope you’ll learn alongside us.

Is Your Future Site Headed Toward Responsive or Mobile-Optimized?

Posted on March 4, 2013 by Heather Stanley

Wondering what kind of mobile website you should build?

I’ve got some news for you. You already have a mobile site. Whether you think about it as mobile or not, the site your hospital has right now is being accessed by smartphones and tablets.

What kind of experience are those site visitors having?

If you’re not sure, it’s time to make mobile a priority. You have two main options for presenting online content to your growing mobile market. The first option is to create a mobile-optimized site that is separate from your main website. The second option is to have one website built using responsive design, which allows it to adapt to different screen sizes.

Both options are better than not having any mobile-optimized presence; but choosing one path for your mobile future is important.

Geonetric’s Vice President Ben Dillon gives you all the information you need to make this tough decision in his latest article “Choosing Your Mobile Future” which appeared in the March/April 2013 issue of Spectrum.

Ben goes into detail on the two options, explaining the advantages of each. He even showcases a great example of each – Methodist Medical Center of Illinois mobile-optimized site and Altru Health System’s responsive website.

So if you’re not sure how to choose your website’s mobile future, start reading!

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.

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.