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.
   

I just attended the Mayo-Ragan Communications conference at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, AZ. A great conference with great information. Over 100 folks were in attendance and all in similar situations with their respective healthcare systems. Mostly all Marketing, Public Relations or web healthcare people there.

Some key notes I took vary in range from specific social media tools, ideas for those tools or notes in general:

1. YouTube: With keeping regular updates to your YouTube channel usually being a challenge, how about start getting physicians to talk about whatever the theme of the month is for healthcare. Example...this month is Breast Cancer Awareness month, get a doctor to explain some things about breast cancer and mention the services you have available.
2. YouTube: Ensure all your videos you place on YouTube have branding information placed on the video itself. Since someone can use YouTube to embed your video anywhere, it may not always be in context, this at least ensures your brand is staying with the video.
3. YouTube: Check out Henry Ford's YouTube channel, a great one to model yours after.
4. Monitoring: Check out Glassdoor. See what employees are saying about your company.
5. Monitoring: Sites like Vitals do exist, where patients can rate your doctors on their experience with them. These types of sites will only gain in popularity.
6. Podcasts: Check and use iTunes University. MD Anderson has done alot with this.
7. Podcasts: They are not dead as some have claimed, in fact, there are more than 3x the number of podcasts hosted by iTunes then the number of radio stations out there (over 100K).
8. Podcasts: Having podcasts without the blog or way of establishing community is not social media.
   
9. Blogs: There are other lifeforms for this other then the WordPress blogging platform, even though it dominates the market. MD Anderson uses Moveable Type for their internal blogs.
10. For physicians: Promote social media internally to your doctors. One way for them to see the benefit if they are unfamiliar with the tools out there is Sermo, an online community espcially built for physicians.
11. Flickr: For any site that you use to share images, be sure and use the Creative Commons licensing, images you are trying to share should not have "All Rights Reserved".

See also the second post in this series.

Last week I had the opportunity to meet with Lee Aase of Mayo Clinic. He was gracious enough to see me at the last minute and it was great to finally meet him.

I've been following and conversing with Lee for some time now via email and Twitter. Lee heads up social media efforts for the Mayo Clinic and also manages a great blog called Social Media University, Global on which he educates on proper usage for many different social media tools.

 

Today I posted a simple tweet stating the fact that I just learned of a co-worker coming down with the H1N1 Flu virus.

Immediately, a follower of mine on Twitter (and whom I follow), Detroit Medical Center, responded with a message that was helpful, informative, quick and simply spot-on. They responded with letting me know that I may want to check out their H1N1 Flu resource page on their website.

Before today, I followed them on Twitter because they're a hospital that's on Twitter and I try and follow a lot of hospitals on Twitter to see what they're all doing. I would say I follow somewhere around 40 or 50 hospitals. No other hospital sent any message like this (and yes, most of them follow me back).

But it's not just the fact that they're the only hospital that did this. In fact, I certainly wasn't looking for a hospital to do this, I was really just passing along that this virus seems to be everywhere. It's more of what that gesture symbolizes in their mentality of handling Twitter.

• They aren't just pushing out marketing materials.
• They ARE talking to people
• They ARE seeking conversations out (my example)

This is probably part of the reason they're ranked 15th on Ed's Top 20 Hospitals on Twitter. With over 2,000 followers, they're doing it right, and this is a major reason.

Of course too, at the end of the day, due to their great response, I now consider them to be a knowledge expert, a valued resource for medical information. Because they exposed me to what they offer, I was made more aware of their brand, they engaged me and I'm now a fan of theirs on Facebook too.

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.