Healthcare Companies - Is Your Online Brand A Bully?

Many healthcare companies are missing out on a unique opportunity to engage new users and change the perception of their brand. If you look at most healthcare Web sites – from drug manufacturers, insurance companies to even hospitals you typically see a monolithic wall of corporate-speak and unfriendly content.

But according to research, 30% of Americans use some form of healthcare related Web content and online connection. These may be live chat sessions, message boards, user-generated communities, video sharing sites or even informational Web sites.

And most are looking for some level of emotional support and connection. Patients that are looking for that connection are typically unaccustomed to being “normal” one day and a “patient” the next. They want to connect to other patients to see what they’re saying about prevention, medication or treatment.

In short – if you’re a healthcare company – and your web site is nothing more than About Us, Management Team and Press Releases – you’re missing a unique opportunity to connect to your customers.

So. What can you do about it?

Listen Before You Leap

Understand what your brand’s patients are doing online. Understand where these people are going to find the information. What are the most reputable web sites pertaining to these conditions? What outreach and affiliations can you or do you want to have with them? How can you start to employ more of this content on your own Web site? You’ll be surprised at how much “free” market research is available to you through this exercise.

Participate

Start participating in the conversation. It may or may not be through Social Media channels such as a Blog, or Facebook. And even if it’s just through your own Web site, and you’re making topical information available with a feedback mechanism (e.g. asking “is this content relevant to you”) you’re taking an important first step in the conversation. And, you’ll be learning from your patients what they care about most.

Develop Content And Interaction
What can your organization do to become more conversational and friendly to patients looking for more information? What about an iPhone or iPad application? What if patients could interact with your brand AS they take their medication? What if they could communicate through a mobile community? That’s being approachable. That’s being a true caregiver.

As always, if you’re looking to approach your online brand from a different angle, we’re here to help. Let us know.

Facebook & Privacy? Should Marketers Be Concerned?

There is a great quote from privacy guru Danah Boyd talking about privacy online. She says “just because something is publicly accessible does not mean that people want it to be publicized.”

This is particularly apropos for marketing and advertising – because our whole aim is to make things as public as possible.

So, as marketers, what are we to make of the furor over Facebook’s announcement to expand the availability of consumer data with advertisers. Certainly Forrester has some thoughts about this (http://blogs.forrester.com/augie_ray/10-04-29-facebook_privacy_lawmakers_what_should_marketers_do). But the real question is should marketers be concerned?

At its surface it would seem that Facebook is honestly trying to do its best to alleviate customer concerns over making information public. But, they have really gone about this in a ham-fisted way.

Earlier last week the New York Times had this infographic (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/05/12/business/facebook-privacy.html) discussing how complex the privacy settings really are in Facebook. This certainly didn’t do the company any good from a PR perspective.

Some interesting facts:

• There are more than 50 settings with almost 200 options in order to set your privacy. That’s more settings than almost in any application we have installed in our company.

• Facebook’s privacy policy has more than 5,800 words in it—that’s 10 pages of fine print for the average consumer to go through.

So, at Boyd Communications, we are recommending our clients watch this closely.

It will be interesting to see if Facebook can move past this crisis – or if this is the beginning of the end for the giant social network. There are already talks of “open source” social networks starting up. One of them called Diaspora is being funded by donations and is claiming that it will be extraordinarily private. It’s oddly ironic that an “open source” social network will actually be created to be “tighter” on privacy and security – but these are the shifting sands of social media that we are in.

There is also a movement among many to “Quit Facebook”. A formal group has even announced a D-Day (of sorts) for it. It will be interesting to see on May 31^st (the Quit Facebook day)– if the social network will even notice the decrease however. Facebook is currently growing by more than 250,000 users per day. It’s quite possible that more people will join Facebook on “Quit Facebook Day” than will quit.

If you’re interested in how the new focus on privacy and publically available information might affect your own digital marketing efforts, as always please feel free to ask. We’re here to help.

Digital Branding Experiences – Why Say, When You Can Do?

The New York Times ran an article last week (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/business/media/10adco.html) that discussed how JetBlue is trying a new tactic. Instead of enticing customers with lower fares, or free luggage carriage, they are promising to “entertain” their customers.

In this new campaign, “fans of the airline” are presented in video clips. They tell stories of their wonderful “experiences” on JetBlue.

Marketing the “experience with the product”, rather than the product itself is certainly not new. But what’s making it more interesting is how the digital experience is becoming such an important piece of that overall strategy.

And, in fact, in today’s socially connected world – EVERY brand has a digital brand experience. The conversation about the brand is happening regardless of whether the company wants it. The real question for marketers today is – how will you influence the digital experience of your brand to best reflect its core values?

So, how do you get started?

First step – look in the mirror

The brands we all look up to (Apple, Nike) are not selling the “what” – they are selling the “why”. They sell the experience of their products and use that to differentiate against all the others. This is key for marketers – look in the mirror and understand what is the “why” of what we do.

Understand your customer - digitally

It’s something that we all think we know inherently. But plenty of marketers still fail to understand how their customers will behave online. Just because the hottest new social network hits the mainstream media – doesn’t necessarily mean your target customers are there. And, just because they are “there” it doesn’t mean they want to engage with your brand there.

Become a digital listener

One of the key first steps in developing a more digitally engaging experience is an understanding how the brand is being perceived in the first place. Engage both manual and technology based processes to help you “listen” online. Where are your customers congregating online? What are the influencers saying? What kinds of experience are they not getting that you could provide?

Explore small experiences – and get feedback

As you start to understand, you can start to explore small, testable experiences to see how they resonate with your customers. Find out how they resonate. Get feedback from those experiences and start to engage the users in a conversation.

Creating new and compelling digital experiences for your brand goes well beyond just making a promise to “entertain”, “inform” or “educate” your customer. In today’s digital environment, it’s a much more real-time and engaging set of conversations that have to take place.

If you’re looking for assistance in this, as always, let us know. As you might expect, at Boyd Communications we’re here to make your marketing experience that much more profitable.