Notes I gathered from the Blogging: Communnicating and Marketing to Key Audiences (Healthcare focus) audio conference in Jaunary 2009. This conference featured three presenters and a moderator:

• Lee Aase, Mayo Clinic
• Sarah Brandon, Alegent Health
• Lisa Dombro, Neurologic and Orthopedic Hospital of Chicago
• Mark Gothberg, eHealthcare Strategy and Trends, moderator

Alegent Health, Sarah Brandon

You can see their blogs here, podcasts, RSS feeds and videos from these links. She says blogging can help you bridge employees across the land. This is relevant with Alegent since their locations span over several different communities. Internal Blog. She received support to move forward with blogging by presenting best-case scenarios and showing business value. As well as guiding leadership through blog comment approvals and other initial concerns they had. She enjoys a very supportive IT department who manage the technology side of things through MS Sharepoint, also she involves the internal communications team to actually manage the comments and then they also work with the resident-expert in the hospital to quickly address questions/concerns presented in the comments. Interestingly, she says the team has actually never yet had to not-approve a comment. She also says the most uneasy and hesitant managers throughout the hospital will become it's biggest adovacates once they see the window of communication open up. It's a great way to point out initiatives the hospital is engaged in and it connects the employees directly with leadership! About their blogs:

• 20-30 average comments per post
• Popular topics included: local/national news, organizational news, 'how's marketing doing?', 'why do we advertise?', understanding the marketplace, economic impact on healthcare for us, 'how can I learn about patient experiences in other areas?', recognizing hero's , sharing your story if you've been a patient as an employee and stewardship in your job.
• Some blogs that posted in December were still getting comments in late January

Quick tips for an internal blog:

• Conversational in tone and nature
• Embed content! Include videos, links, etc.
• Ask questions (to engage the conversation) throughout the post
• Managing team must be able to disseminate action items to appropriate personnel and get a timely response to the comments, otherwise employees will become disconnected and lose interest.

Mayo Clinic, Lee Aase

Lee maintains a personal blog and twitter account in addition to his management of the Mayo Clinic Sharing blog and podcasts for Mayo. A couple overall notes from Lee:

• They did, initially, use consultants to get internal buy-in for social media.
• Their expectation internally is that this is something everyone should get involved in, not just their "social media" employees.

Blogging. They created a terms of service and went through the legal issues. For them, the risk was low enough and the reward was high. Thier "community" blog, like the Chicago hospital (mentioned below) is their Sharing Mayo Clinic blog. Lee uses a flip-video camcorder at low-cost to produce some video segments for the blog. This gives sort of a behind-the-scenes and more genuine feel. Their expectation for this blog and their Facebook account is to aide in word-of-mouth mentions. For them, the flip-video camcorder helped reverse their prior decision to not do blogs. The easily done 5-10 minute interview also helped the temptation to ghostwrite the blogs. Also, they do have a group of video editors to help ensure quality. YouTube. Lee says there was a debate about having their own channel in the beginning and that they did do a survey about it. They found an overwhelming majority wanted one. So they now have over 150 videos separated into different playlists and use it as a host for their blogposts as well. See Mayo Clinic's YouTube channel. Podcasts. They started back in 2005, they took existing mp3 files and converted them into podcasts. Orginally, they were just 60 seconds, very short. Now, they are more subject-oriented. Covering subjects that include heart, cancer, mens and womens health, and bone and muscle podcasts. They are roughly 18-25 minutes in length. With these podcasts, they are not targeting a mass audience but a more specific one. As their subscription rate has increased, they have learned that this strategy works very well for the podcasts.

Neurologic and Orthopedic Hospital of Chicago, Lisa Dombro

Lisa mentions a few reasons why they blog:

1. Great SEO benefits
2. Develop an internal community
3. Many physicians want this to be able to see themselves on YouTube, etc...getting featured for the work they do

Their blog is now the 6th top referrer to their own website! They measure web performance by new patients to the hospital and their conversion rate is about 7%! Their community blog (which was built for internal use but now resides externally) highlights special individuals, nurses, local press coverage, new physician announcements and is used as a new resource to practitioners. She has gotten away from the typical internal email blast as this method as become more effecient. How does Marketing support the blog? They try to give food-for-thought to the physicians writing the articles for topics (from newspapers or what is current news on the web). Review? Yes. Review for red flags but resist the urge to wordsmith, she says to let it be transparent. Process? Pretty simple. Physicians email her the article, she copy/pastes into Wordpress. She or her team then set it up in Wordpress with the appropriate tagging, etc...and then publish.

Mark Gothberg, eHealthcare Strategy and Trends, moderator

Mark points out some issues you'll want to consider before starting a blog.

• What's the business value?
• Do you have enough content (don't over think this, if you can up with about a dozen topics then you have enough to sustain)?
• Casual in tone, not overwritten or corporate-talk.
• What's frequency? Once a week at least.
• What individuals will write it? Do they have time/ability?
• How do you host it? Sharepoint?
• Will comments be posted? How to manage them?
• How will it be promoted?
• Generating ROI

Lastly, a recap of the Q&A.

• External blogs: How do you really get a conversation going without being controversial? Try being inspirational.
• What about legal concerns over physicians blogging and giving health advice? Sometimes the patient commenting is seeking advice, they don't post those, but do respond to them privately via email. Even then, they just recommend the patient call the appropriate person.
• Re: internal blog for CEO, one organization is getting requests from employees to make their comments/suggestions confidential, what about that? Don't do it, if they post it, they must own it. This defeats the transparent culture you are trying to cultivate.
• Patients blogging on your behalf, should you pay them? Probably not, will affect quality and tone most likely, however, it is tough to find the right person.
• Difference in utilization of Twitter versus blogging? Mayo - currently use Twitter to feed out news releases and blog posts, but will eventually use it for more community building. Alegent - they feel Twitter is a more professional audience, so use it more to speak about conferences, health 2.0, new technologies, etc.