Applying Social Media session summary

Last Thursday (6/18/09), I attended the "Where Social Media and Health Care Meet - Harnessing New Media Tools" conference put on by the Texas Hosptial Association in Austin, Texas. This particular session, Applying Social Media, was put on by Jon Lebkowsky of Social Web Strategies and Jennifer Texada of M.D. Anderson.

From Jon: Jon points out that social media is an investment, it's not "free". It's an investment of employee time, which is the biggest piece. Setting a clear strategy means a better ROI. You need to clarify what your goals are, what your message is and define if your speaking internally, externally or both. Jon speaks also to some points of social medai versus traditional media:

There is a low outsource investment
There is a lower cost per communication transaction
A low to zero cost of technology investment
Smaller chunks of audience, "long tail"
Relatively high staff involvement but more distributed (not just Marketing Communications)

He also recommends strategic planning:

Define your goals so that they're clear (but prepare to be flexible)
Define and write policy guidelines
Clarify ownership (probably distributed)
Identify core messaging

And lastly, Jon has some recommended actions:

Listen first
Determine the best platform to match
Work through existing social networks

On to Jennifer's section: Jennifer is the Digital and New Media Program Manager at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. Her responsiblities include:

Social media education and training
Identification of departmental needs and interests
Multi-departmental buy in for guidelines documents
Development and ownership of audience based social media content

She spoke at length about the third bullet point above. She tapped multiple departments when they were creating their social media guidelines and says this was very important to the process. They even created a Facebook group and held discussions there alongside the meetings that took place. Ultimately, having many departments have a piece of ownership with the guidelines helped tremendously with implementation of it. For their guidelines she points out three questions you need to ask yourself:

What are your goals for social media use? They should align with your mission or broader communications/marketing objectives.
Who is your audience and what do they need? HIPAA protection for patients.
Are you ready to be transparent? Who are the guidelines meant to protect?

You can find their guidelines on the CancerWise website. Beyond the guidelines, M.D. Anderson is heavily involved in many social media tools. They have six different Twitter accounts, two blogs, six Facebook fan pages, a LinkedIn account, four different video sharing accounts and two podcasts. They also use Yammer for internal communications. You can find some of their accounts listed on the M.D. Anderson website. She also mentions different ways to measure your social media activities: