In the first post of this series I explained how I recently went to the Mayo-Ragan Healthcare and Social Media Conference in Scottsdale, AZ. In continuing on, here are some of my other takeaways from that conference:

1. Blogs: Wonder how Mayo finds out from their patients all those great experiences that they blog about on their Sharing blog? They use a great technique which is to actual give patients that visit physicians for appointments a special card that invites them to visit the blog and contact them to share their story.
2. Blogs: Another great tip from Mayo. Setup a blog that is set to private. Keep it ready to go live in case an emergency happens.
   
3. Social Media: Do you find yourself working for a company (like so many of us) that blocks social media sites from its employees? Visit StopBlocking.org to learn more about this and start getting the ammo you need to combat your company's restrictive policies.
4. Resources: Two more tools out there for you to share documents with others....Slideshare.net for powerpoints and Scribd.com for documents.
5. Resources: Try using Audible.com for audiobooks. There's lots out there to learn and listening instead of reading really helps with time management.
6. Resources: Use DropBox for free online storage of your video or audio files. Under 2 GB is free on this site.
   
7. Podcasts: For iPhone users only...try using Audioboo and iTalk. Audioboo is free and iTalk has a free and fee version. The speaker on the iPhone is great and so easy to use with these apps.
8. YouTube: Check out the When I Grow Up video from Kaiser Permanente. Great video, this had the room cheering.
9. Social Networks: Kaiser Permanente showed off their amazing internal social network that has been very well received. They used Jive Software to create this.
   

As you may have noticed I recently made the switch over to Posterous from Wordpress.

Without having read to many other peoples insights on this, I'll speak to my own experience so far.

Why move? Clearly WordPress is the dominate blogging platform. Well, some would say Posterous isn't blogging, it's something different. I'll let the big brains work that one out.

1. I love the look and feel. I love simplicity. I got my start in web as a web designer and I guess I still hold onto that. Simple equals easy.
   
2. With Wordpress, despite their claim to be the easiest solution for blogging, I found it not so easy. Sure, if you just want to throw up text, okay, perhaps, but not for what I was looking to do. I never found a free theme that either gave me the functionality that I wanted or had a design that I liked. So, I ended up buying the Thesis theme. And although that helped considerably, you ultimately need to be a programmer to get all the kinks worked out and have everything exactly how you want it. Along those lines there's all those upgrades that may or may not work and all the plugins you have to keep up with. Just too much for me.
3. Also, and I thought this was pretty cool, Posterous allows you to create subscriptions from other Posterous users. So, in a sense, it's developing it's own community.
   
4. And lastly, I'm still in experimenting mode here. I need to test the waters on these different platforms to help in my professional knowledge and decisions I make at work. That means I've got play with most everything that shows signs of being adopted, and Posterous shows those signs as you can see from the images I attached.

Now, for the experience I've had so far with Posterous.

1. Well, they have an import function that will grab your current blog and import it into their site. Easy as pie, right? Could be, if it worked. I went through it and it didn't work. I emailed their support and ended up taking half-a-week for it to finally import. Not cool.
2. I also went through the process of changing the ISP of my domain to, of course, reflect the new Posterous blog. Now that piece went very smoothly.
3. Google Analytics, set that up, and is working well on the new blog.
4. All you do to post a new article is email it in. Super simple, super easy.
5. I've even now set up an additional blog for my family. I set about 4 different people up with the ability to post to the blog. Guess what, they're all very non-technically savy people, and they all get it and are loving it. Pretty cool.
6. There is some additional functionality with Posterous that is lacking. But it hasn't been too much so far to really turn me off, and every time I emailed their helpdesk about it they said they were already looking at adding it.

I only expect the Posterous experience to get even better. And, I predict, that Posterous will continue gaining popularity.

What are your experiences?

A reminder to keep your Google Feedburner RSS settings updated for your feed. There are several great options for your feed under the Optimize and Publicize tabs that you'll want activitated for pretty much any blog. You don't just want to setup your account and leave it alone. Dig into these options and experiment with it. Under publicize, I would definitely recommend allowing email subscriptions to your feed. This can be done by just activitating the option and you can even set it to notify you by email if anyone unsubscribes to your feed. Under optimize, there are four that I would recommend initially:

• Browser Friendly - This allows people who use different feed readers to easily view your content. Such programs as NewsGater, NetVibes, etc.
• Smart Feed - This automatically converts your feed into a format compatible with your viewers feed reader.
• Feed Flare - This gives you many options for your readers to share or actually interact with your feed on the spot.
• GeoTag - Automatically tags your feed with location-specifc information.

Selecting, at minimum, these options will at least get you a good start with your feed. But keep experimenting, and check back, they may actually throw some updates in there.

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.

Venturing into WordPress lately, there has actually been quite a learning curve. Probably mostly due to everything I'm trying to feature on the blog. Certainly having and maintaining a simple blog would be easy enough. Some plugins I am using (this list is sure to grow):

• Google XML Sitemap Generator - Works well and of course Google loves this stuff to help your rankings.
• Akismet - A highly popular spam blocker for your comments.
• Samsarian PHP Widget - This is very handy, it allows you to easily have and maintain text widgets in your sidebar (well more then the WordPress default).
• Add to Any buttons - This plugin automatically puts social icons at the bottom of your posts, very easy to install.
• WP Database backup - Another popular one, I haven't had to use it yet fortunately.
• All-in-one SEO pack - Another one that is popular and recommended. I'm not sure exactly how the plugin goes about optimizing your site, but am sure it can't hurt.
• Thesis Open-Hook - Only applies to the Thesis theme, but if you are going to use that one, this plugin is a must.

Something you'll have to decide is whether or not you want a self-hosted blog. I chose to go the self-hosted route because I wanted the freedom that offers with the additional big benefit of full web analytics. The last dilemna I sorted through was whether or not to pay for a theme or not. The first few days of getting familiar with WordPress I played with some of the many different themes it has to offer. Ultimately, none of these satisfied me, although I am sure there are a ton of satisified customers out there. Again, due to all the features I wanted my blog to be capable of. I ended up selecting Thesis, a paid theme. The potential it offers is quite amazing. However, I have come across some negatives. Such as the difficulty in getting support. They offer forums, but pretty horific to search through and if you ever do get your question answered, consider yourself lucky. Additionally, they claim it's all very easy, however if you don't know CSS or PHP, then I actually don't recommend it. I'm having a tough go of it with my knowledge of CSS and no-knowledge of PHP. If they just had better support I would feel better about it. They do have at least one competitor that I know of, Revolution, but I don't know much about it.