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.

                   

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