About Michael O'Neill

It’s not often you find a communications professional who is an expert writer, understands the power of social media and has the technical capabilities to embed on and contribute to software development teams. But that’s exactly the background Michael brought with him to Geonetric as the technical communications strategist. From writing eBooks to managing Geonetric’s digital presence, Michael uses his software know how and his marketing savvy to help tell Geonetric’s story through a variety of platforms. This former adjunct professor holds a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Worcester State College in Massachusetts and completed graduate level coursework at the University of Connecticut. In addition, Michael is also a Certified ScrumMaster, a contributing writer at iBusiness Magazine and a member of the Board of Directors at Gems of Hope. This new dad is known for his high coffee standards and has quite the following around the office when he brings in his favorite craft-roasted beans.

Charting A Course Through A Changing Marketing Landscape

Posted on January 12, 2017 by Michael O'Neill

Deciding which way to go in the new year Four years ago, Gartner made an announcement that many of us found unbelievable. They predicted that “in five year’s time, the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO.” Since then, we’ve seen the marketing technology (martech) landscape explode. There are now solutions to marketing problems that a few years ago we didn’t even know existed. And as the tools of our trade have become increasingly sophisticated, the costs associated with staying current have also continued to climb. So it’s no surprise that Gartner’s recent reaffirmation of their initial prediction (CMOs will spend more on tech than CIOs in 2017) passed with nary comment nor buzz.

But does the prediction hold for healthcare marketing? Are we really going to see a hospital CMO’s technology budget outpace the CIO’s technology budget?
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Security, Brand Promise, and the Healthcare Website

Posted on December 7, 2016 by Michael O'Neill

Not Secure website warning appearing in Google Chrome.

You’ve worked hard to build a reputation of integrity, safety, and security for your healthcare brand. You take your PHI seriously, and consistently reassure your patients that their confidential health and personal information is safe in your hands. But if you’re not prepared, Google’s upcoming plans may very well undo all your efforts by labeling your website Not Secure when viewed in the Chrome web browser (see above).

This upcoming change is part of Google’s HTTPS Everywhere initiative. If you’re in healthcare marketing, manage a website, or are involved with digital strategy, you need to know what it is, what the impact will be, and decide whether or not you need to take action to protect your visitors and your brand’s reputation for security.
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Digital Budgets Increasing for Healthcare Marketing Leaders

Posted on November 3, 2016 by Michael O'Neill

increasing budget
We’ve crunched the numbers, donned our data scientist hats and drafted the copy. And now that the 2016 Digital Marketing Trends in Healthcare Marketing Survey is available, I’m excited to dive in and share some thoughts on what the data reveals. There’s a lot that healthcare marketers will find of interest in the results, but some of the things that I find exciting relate to the changing trends in healthcare marketing, how these fit (or don’t) into the larger forces shaping B2C marketing, and what takeaways are important for healthcare marketers going forward.
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Preliminary Insights From The Digital Marketing Trends In Healthcare Survey

Posted on August 24, 2016 by Michael O'Neill

Note: The 2016 survey is now closed, but you can still sign up to be notified when the results are published.

Part of my job as a strategist — and no doubt part of yours as well — is to maintain an awareness of how marketing is changing, how the industry is changing and how our competitive environment is changing. I call this the “market context” in which we work, and the fact that it’s ever-evolving is what makes this profession so interesting.

An understanding of the market context is also essential when deciding where — and where not to — invest our marketing dollars. These decisions are at the heart of strategy, and can result in growth for your healthcare brand (and patient census) or stagnation while your competition eats away at your market share.

And this is why I look forward to the comprehensive Digital Marketing Survey we conduct every few years. Not only does it collect strategic insights from across the healthcare marketing industry, but we invest in making sure all healthcare marketers have access to the resulting analysis.
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Choosing The Right CMS In An Evolving Marketing Landscape

Posted on May 11, 2016 by Michael O'Neill

Criteria for choosing a CMS
Choosing the right content management system (CMS) for your success is as important as choosing the right partner, but it seems that with each passing day, the decision gets more and more complex.

Depending on your specific situation you may have internal politics to navigate, and balancing the disparate agendas and opinions within your organization can be no small task. Whether it’s an IT group eager to showcase their capabilities to the rest of the organization, the opinions of influential stakeholders in the C-Suite, or even your very own board of directors, internal stakeholders can easily turn a decision quagmire into an outright minefield.
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Getting Amped For Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

Posted on April 6, 2016 by Michael O'Neill

Amperes dial.

There’s a new project in town that promises to influence how your content performs in search and how your users experience and consume it. If you’re a healthcare marketer responsible for the search and experience side of digital strategy, you’re going to want to keep it on your radar. Early indications already suggest that it has the potential to reshape how you publish content to the web.

So what is this new project? It’s the new Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project.
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The Next Step in Google’s HTTPS Everywhere Agenda

Posted on December 18, 2015 by Michael O'Neill

secure web browsing

It’s no surprise that Google is a big promoter of HTTPS Everywhere. They’ve even promised a ranking boost to HTTPS URLs in search results. Of course, whether this ranking boost exists or not is the subject of much debate. Still, one thing is clear: Google is doubling down on HTTPS.
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Six Landing Page Flubs, Foibles And Faux Pas (And How To Avoid Them)

Posted on November 6, 2015 by Michael O'Neill

Marketing campaigns aren’t easy. In such a noisy world it takes a lot of energy, talent and persistence to even get noticed by the audience you want. More still to get them to your landing page. And once there, the last thing you want is for them to bounce right off because of simple-to-avoid mistakes. And yet that’s often exactly what happens.

While landing page optimization is both an art and a science, there’s no excuse to flub the basics. Let’s walk through a few common problems that are easy to spot and resolve.
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Five Considerations For Implementing Physician Ratings And Reviews

Posted on August 26, 2015 by Michael O'Neill

Rating a physician
There’s been a tremendous amount of interest amongst healthcare marketers recently around publishing physician ratings and reviews on physician profiles. And for good reason. When done right, organizations often see a number of benefits including an SEO boost, reduced reliance on paid promotion, more engagement with physician profiles and improved patient acquisition. I covered some of this in my previous blog post, and wrote about it more extensively in our new physician promotion ebook. In this post, however, I’d like to cover a few important aspects about physician ratings and reviews you may not think about immediately.

If you’re anticipating implementing physician ratings and reviews on your website, there are some things you need to make sure you have in place before you go live. Getting these things taken care of will ensure that your physician ratings and reviews are trusted by site visitors and provide tangible value to your organization.
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Embracing The Brave New World Of Physician Ratings

Posted on July 23, 2015 by Michael O'Neill

An important part of creating an effective physician profile includes demonstrating the physician’s skill and expertise. It’s important because consumers look for and use this critical information as they engage in the process of selecting a physician. In our Physician Promotion eBook we outline a number of ways to effectively highlight your organization’s physician’s skills and expertise, but there’s one increasingly important way that deserves its own treatment: physician ratings and reviews.

From Amazon to Netflix and beyond, consumers are increasingly accustomed to seeing evaluations of the goods and services they shop for. Often these take the form of an iconic star rating system that’s become the Internet’s at-a-glance method of conveying user satisfaction (or other subjective measure) with the product at hand. But it’s not just for shoes and movies anymore. It’s also for your physicians.
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A Working Model For Understanding How Patients Qualify Physicians

Posted on June 29, 2015 by Michael O'Neill

A partial representation of how patients qualify physicians for selection.
As healthcare marketers, we often like to jump right to the tactics and bury ourselves in campaign work in the hopes that it will make a tangible difference. And sometimes it does. But more often than not, results are disappointingly modest, leaving us with the sense that we’re investing more and more just to maintain current performance.

Sometimes in our rush to do “stuff” or chase down the next great idea we lose focus of the fact that we’re choosing the work we do based on how clever it sounds and not by how it supports the patient journey.
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Mobilegeddon Q&A

Posted on April 13, 2015 by Michael O'Neill

It’s been a few days since I first wrote about Google’s upcoming mobile algorithm change. Since then, we’ve had a slew of questions, and we’ve even learned a few more things about the algorithm itself. Before I share this, let’s first recap my previous guidance for understanding the scope of your mobile traffic, and surfacing any problems you might have on your websites.

The Five Things You Need to Do To Prepare for April 21

Check your mobile traffic in Google Analytics
Using your smartphone, look for the “mobile-friendly” tag in search results
Check your pages with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
Review the Mobile Usability Report in Google Webmaster Tools
Check the Mobile User Experience score on Google PageSpeed Insights

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A #Mobilegeddon Prepper’s Guide to Surviving the Coming Mobile Searchpocalypse

Posted on April 1, 2015 by Michael O'Neill

If you pay attention to SEO or read the standard trade publications for webmasters, you’ve no doubt heard that the world is ending on April 21. OK, well maybe it’s not actually ending… But if you’ve been listening to some of the coverage concerning Google’s next algorithm update, you wouldn’t be remiss for thinking it was.

Rather than amplifying the message that the end is nigh, I’d like to cut through the noise, describe the pending change and share some of the concrete steps I’m taking to figure out what sites are well poised for the change, and which ones need to be worked on.