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Social media is for hospitals too
Many use it to build a community and to raise funds
by Jack Scharff
Personal use of social media is widespread and is exploding in popularity. Business use is growing and evolving. Are nonprofits like hospitals involved? Yes, and more will participate as time and budgets allow.
Recently, Bio-Tech Digest spoke with Frank Barry, Internet strategy manager at Blackbaud, to get his insights on social media and hospital participation. Through his sage advice, you'll:
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Learn how social media is evolving
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See some actual examples of effective social media use
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Discover a fantastic website where you can see and analyze what other hospitals do
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Learn five basic decisions you need to make before you start a social media program
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Get a helpful white paper on social media use by healthcare organizations
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Be able to attend a prerecorded webinar on social media
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Complimentary social media marketing kit
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It's no secret that social media (SM) is a smash hit. There are over 400 million Facebook users, over a million blogs, over 150 million visits per month on Twitter, plus those using LinkedIn, You Tube, and other video and social networking sites.
It's extremely doubtful this is a passing fad. It's a new way to communicate; stay in touch; inform; and, as businesses have found, build brands and customer loyalty and increase sales. Nonprofit organizations like hospitals are also using SM to educate and raise funds.
Frank Barry, Internet strategy manager at Blackbaud, provides his insights on SM and, in particular, hospital participation.
Bio-Tech Digest: What's your definition of Web 2.0 social networking?
Frank Barry: It's dynamic and always changing. Web 2.0 is more about creating applications and websites that allow users to interact and to engage in dialogue. The Web 1.0 world was more about static Web pages and one-way communication.
BTD: How are businesses using SM to their benefit?
Barry: Businesses use SM in many ways. Companies like Ford, Virgin, Southwest, Pepsi, Toyota, Comcast, Dell, and many others see the power of engaging and talking with their customers and prospects and use SM to drive sales, improve customer support, and build buzz. Take a look at Pepsi's Refresh project, Dell's Twitter promotions, Comcast's customer support focus, and Toyota's Auto-Biographies to get a sense of what companies are doing.
BTD: How are hospitals using SM, and is this done individually or in an orchestrated manner?
Barry: Hospitals use SM to educate, build community, provide information, build attendance for events, and raise funds. Some may have started out as one person's attempt to educate patients or connect supporters, but in most cases it's an orchestrated strategy beginning on a website and carrying through other media by a communications team.
Children's Hospital of LA (CHLA) has an exemplary social media program. They are all about the community, the families, and the children. Outside of their website, they use three sites--Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. They use Facebook and Twitter to foster that community by sharing stories, connecting families, and engaging with supporters. They use YouTube to highlight their events, often with celebrities.
I interviewed Deborah Braidic of CHLA for our blog, NetWits Think Tank, about their SM program [excerpt below].
Barry: Why did you decide to jump into using social media?
Deborah Braidic: In our case, we were pretty lucky. Our team was doing early-stage research on social media, and we believed that our organization would benefit immensely from helping our supporters in the community spread the word about us on these channels. Right when we were working out a plan for how we might approach this topic with our leadership, we heard that our CEO was interested in knowing more about how we could leverage social networking for the hospital. When we heard the good news, we jumped in with both feet and put a plan together.
Barry: What process did you employ to get to your current social media strategy?
Braidic: Our process ultimately came down to answering the following questions:
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Who is our primary audience?
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What social networking outlet is our primary audience using?
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What are the popularity levels of each outlet?
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Which channels would be most appropriate to leverage media our organization already produces?
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How many outlets can our team realistically manage well?
Barry: Can you give others some advice on how to get started?
Braidic: Everybody always says, "Just get started," so it is already becoming a cliché, but in reality this is exactly what our team did. Long before we ever proposed our social media plan to our hospital leadership, each of our team members signed up for accounts with Facebook and Twitter and began using them, like it or not, just to see what they were all about and how they worked.
Using the tools gave us significantly more credibility; not only did we walk into the room and say, "Hey we know how it works," but we put together a plan that provided real, concrete strategies for how to use these channels to engage our supporters. Had we not used the channels ourselves, there would have been no way for us to see their true value and convey that value convincingly to our leaders.
Barry: What obstacles/challenges did you have to overcome in "selling" social media to your internal stakeholders?
Braidic: Hurdle 1: Employees won't get any work done if we open up Facebook and YouTube to the entire in-house network.
To overcome this hurdle, our team took responsibility for drafting an internal policy specifically to cover the use of social networking outlets that basically, in so many words, says, "We can see you online" and "Google is forever." Even though the policy was later championed and owned by the human resources department, we partnered with our manager of information security and took responsibility for hashing through what the policy should cover, drafting the document, and helping to bird-dog it past the right people for review and approval. We also drafted an e-mail for the CEO to send out to the house after our launch that treated this topic humorously but still got the point across that our first priority is to accomplish our mission, but in your spare time, it would be great if you could be our fans and spread the word online.
Hurdle 2: Employees might release proprietary or patient health information online.
The aforementioned policy covered this area as well. Now that we have launched our new site and notified everyone in the organization about our online presences, our policy officer will regularly remind people to not place proprietary and patient information on social networking channels.
Hurdle 3: Aren't we going to lose control of our brand?
To overcome this hurdle, we really had to do our research.
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First, we overwhelmed them with statistics. Jeremiah Owyang's data on the differences in online channel metrics between the Obama and McCain campaigns is stunning, even to our own team. We paired these stats with a few great quotes from Fraser & Dutta's book Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom for good measure.
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Second, we did our homework. We scoured social websites to see what people were already saying about us, and what we found was pretty awesome. We had 17 Facebook groups already related to us in some way. We had some pretty great posts on Yelp both from employees and from users of our services. We loaded all of this information up as proof that others already have control of our brand, and they were, by all accounts, doing a pretty good job with it. The best part was that since it wasn't "us" saying it, it was even better than what we might say about ourselves.
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Third, we used peer pressure. When we looked at what our peers were doing, it turned out that the organizations we aspired to be like were already in the very spaces we were suggesting we enter.
BTD: How does a hospital get started with SM?
Barry: There are decisions to make and action to take:
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The first decision is all about goals and strategy. What are you trying to accomplish? What are your goals? How can SM enhance existing strategies and goals efforts?
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The next decision relates to responsibility, time, and resources. How will you staff this effort? Remember, you can't just create a Facebook page or Twitter account and expect it to be awesome or have the effect you're looking for immediately. Instead, you need to come up with a plan to staff this new set of things to do.
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Listening, also known as monitoring, comes next. This step is all about monitoring what people say about you and what the people you want to reach are talking about. Try to find out more about what are they interested in and which social networks you can find them on. This prepares you for the next step.
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Map out where you plan to engage. Is it Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, all these, or perhaps an obscure forum that your targets monitor and participate in? Based on what you learned in the monitoring step, you should have some insight into which social networks you should use.
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Then engage. Start engaging and sharing resources and see what interactions occur. Adapt and improve as you see results.
Here's a white paper, Nonprofit Social Media Primer, that may help you. And attend this prerecorded webinar, Donor Engagement through Social Media, to learn more about SM usage for fund-raising.
BTD: What's the scope of hospital SM usage and how do you see this evolving?
Barry: There's a fantastic website created by Ed Bennett. He shows and provides links to 3,002 hospital social networking sites used by 830 hospitals.
Editor's note: This is, indeed, a fabulous website. You can see what other hospitals are doing and, perhaps, adapt your efforts to encompass some of their techniques and strategies. Check out these links:
Barry: It's a very dynamic world that's rapidly evolving. SM will continue to evolve as technology and devices evolve, particularly mobile devices and the applications created for them. As things evolve, SM will become more and more a part of every organization's communication, marketing, and development strategy. Hospitals are no exception.
Frank Barry, Internet strategy manager at Blackbaud, blogger at NetWits ThinkTank, and guest blogger at Mashable, helps nonprofits use the Internet for digital communication, social media, and online fund-raising so they can focus on making an impact and achieving their missions. Contact Barry at 858-795-8947 or Frank.Barry@blackbaud.com.
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