A few weeks ago I gave a presentation where I work about our beginning steps into the social media space. A piece I was intentionally trying to stress was for everyone to start learning how to integrate social media into what they are already doing or what they will do in the future.

You can view the presentation from this link: http://prezi.com/xltx7y9yflfy/

*Note this presentation and written post have changed since originally authored.

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.

 

Before engaging in the social media space you should have done several things to prepare for this new adventure. Here's what I have come up with:

1. Content audit. First things first here. You've got to know exactly what content you do and don't have. Are there gaps? And you must work to iron all that out before diving in. The last thing you would want to happen is to have that Facebook, Twitter, etc. account with nothing to put on it.
2. Content creation. Back to number one here. If you found some missing gaps, take care of that before diving in.
3. Research. Do all the research you can, be as prepared as you can be. Look at all the numbers and analytics for all the social media spaces. Where are the growth trends? What segments? Look at what your competitors are all doing with the tools. Which ones are successful? Why or why not?
4. Implementation. This is certainly something you don't want to be figuring out on-the-fly. Think about how the implementation of these tools will actually happen for your organization. Who will be responsible for which accounts? Are their multiple accounts for the same tool? What will be the internal process by which information is collected and decided on to post? How will you, or whomever is responsible, keep your ear-to-the-ground and get funneled all the stories to post?
5. Promotion. Lastly, come up with a plan on how you plan on promoting these new tools to your customers. You can't depend on search alone so how will you go about spreading the word?

As we're all figuring out, there is no 'golden ticket' award-winning solution or plan for this stuff. But going in blind is never the answer. You want to do as much to prepare and make educated decisions as you can. I think covering these bases should give you a great place to start when you do begin establishing your presence. What do you think?

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.

This post stems from notes I gathered while attending the session "Selling Social Media to the Man" at the SXSW 2009 Interactive conference. The panel consisted of Peter Kim of beingpeterkim.com, Miles Sims of communitymetrics.com, Small World labs VP of Product, Rebecca Caroe of creativeagencysecrets.com and Christian Caldwell of heart.org.

Q. ROI metrics for social media? Use ROI to help build your case. Although, ROI and social media have a rather ambigious relationship. But do try to use case studies and examples to help. From there, develop your own, including projections. One of the keys to social media is that it, in itself, should help drive other bottom line metrics (but you must show that connection). Impressions, digital advertising, cost-effectiveness ('how much did we save?' compared to other tools), brand awareness, lead generation and customer acquisition are good examples of these metrics that could be used. The answer to the ROI question is "it depends", depending on how your organization is setup, ROI though, is always moving.

Q. What can it do for us or our customers? Spreads brand awareness and creates another way for that connection to happen. Although this being said, your company must be ready for real customers with real feedback. You must plan and have the resources to handle this. It could potentially be overwhelming.

Q. What if we fail? Most attendees agree that they have experienced, within their organization, some sort of fear climate in their management, they tend to fear a failure or loss of control in some sense. Don't succumb to this, keep pressing on, don't fear failure. Show successes and failures, embrace them all. That type of transparency is what can aide a culture change within your organization. Be the catalyst for change! If you don't want to fight the good fight, then move on.

Q. How do we ensure success on our first social media attempt? It's an evolution, not a campaign that stops and starts. You're doing something bigger here, your helping create a change, a culture change. What social media is doing is helping build communities and reaching out to information seekers. Social media is a different channel but does not live on it's own island. It should be part of your marketing strategy; set expectations correctly and demystify those negative rumor mill stories your management has heard. For your first one:

• Be realistic
• Ensure it fits into what you're doing
• Keep it simple
• Show business value
• Make sure you can answer the question, "How does this help our customers?"

Understand your customers, show successes and failures, engage in conversation and articulate metrics. One of the advantages about social media is that you can immediately gauge how well you're doing.

Q. What about legal?

• Involve legal.
• See if you can get some leniency to have experiments and test/gather the concerns.
• Create common sense guidelines, e.g. “Don’t do anything stupid."
• Show that competitors are active in the space, this can motivate execs and even legal to take a few more risks.
• It’s a myth that entering social media means completely giving up control. Yes, this happens to a certain extent, but you can still control many aspects of your message and brand.

Q: Which departments are more or less supportive of social media? Evangelists can come from all departments. There aren’t particular patterns to support or blockages from different people. It’s more about attitude i.e. control freaks. Don’t assume that the younger folk will necessarily be more savvy to social media. There are some CEOs who are fired up and ready to go. Q: Best way to achieve success?

• Planning.
• Sharing success and failure with the organization.
• Define up front how you will evaluate success.

Q: Using things like Facebook or Twitter at work: productivity drain or worthwhile? Execs fear social media will be a big distraction. No different to when the web first came into the office. And no different to when computers were first installed (“oh no, people will play solitaire all day”). The key here is to prove it's value and worth. Then watch the resistance fade.