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“The concept of creating an online community based on wellness is a natural extension of Inova Health System’s branding promise,” says Chris Boyer, Senior Manager of Digital Communications for Inova Health System. “The FitFor50 site also integrates a number of social media platforms, including blogs, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. We’ve made an effort to ensure users of the site can interact with the content in ways they are most comfortable.”

As of September 21, the FitFor50 website had more than 26,000 unique visitors, and more than 6,000 people had registered for the Wellness Playbook.

“This is a terrific example of a health system using health and wellness to engage consumers and build its brand,” said Interval president Chris Bevolo. “Rather than the typical approach of touting specialties or technologies that many consumers don’t need or can’t relate to, wellness is actually relevant to most people, and Inova has done an amazing job of leveraging wellness to connect with those in its market.”

This doesn’t come as a surprise to me. My wife and I are considering dropping our cable altogether in favor of online video. I flip on the news and the Tonight Show at 10:00 for background noise while I’m doing other activities, but the only shows I really look forward to (and actually watch) are delivered online — specifically a number of shows over on Revision3.com which I subscribe to through iTunes. I get my Comedy Central fix on Hulu along with the occasionally South Park episode over on southparkstudios.com. I have no real need for cable television.

Do you still find yourself planted in front of the television? Or do you find yourself abandoning traditional T.V. for online content? Are you integrating online video into marketing efforts? (And I don’t mean repurposing traditional television ads for a half-assed Youtube channel.)

See the full report on pewinternet.org:
http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/13–The-Audience-for-Online-VideoSharing-Sites-Shoots-Up.aspx

According to the Hubspot Inbound Internet Marketing blog, inbound marketing is defined as “marketing focused on getting found by customers.” This is the opposite of traditional, or “outbound marketing,” with its goal of finding customers. (Or what Godin calls “interruption marketing.”) Instead of pushing your message out to potential customers to compel them to try your product or service, you create content of one kind or another that pulls people to want to find out about you. Instead of TV commercials, it’s spreading videos virally on YouTube. Instead of a print ad, it’s a blog. (Check out the Hubspot blog post for a great overview of the concept.) In essence, it’s the difference between quantity and quality. With outbound marketing, the quantity of impact is usually measured, and more is always better. (Think of the millions of impressions you might get from a billboard campaign.) With inbound marketing, your goal is far fewer contacts, but those contacts are of much higher quality because they want to connect with you. So while the numbers may be lower, the effort is more effective, because you’ve spent far less money for more qualified contacts.

According to the blog post, there are three components of inbound marketing – content, Search Engine Optimization and Social Media. However, it would seem you could expand the concept beyond using only social media channels or assuming the end destination is a web site.

For years, we’ve been advocating that hospitals and health systems pursue inbound marketing, we just didn’t call it that. When we outline why “Joe Public Doesn’t Care About Your Hospital” and what do to about it, we’re invoking the concept. When we stress you need to remember consumers are driven by “what’s in it for me,” we’re invoking the concept. When we suggest hospitals connect with consumers about “health” (something everyone is interested in) instead of “healing” (something only the sick are interested in), we’re invoking the concept. (In one basic example, it’s the difference between a seminar on joint replacement surgery and one on joint pain.) One of the most successful campaigns we’ve ever created for a client, the St. Joseph’s Hospital movie campaign, had at its heart a strategy based on inbound marketing.

So fair warning: now that we’ve belatedly discovered an actual definition for this concept, expect us to bludgeon you with it for some time to come. What are other examples of this strategy in healthcare? Why is it effective? What are the drawbacks? What hurdles might you face in pursuing such a strategy? We’d love to hear from others on how they’re using inbound marketing successfully at their hospital or health system.

But then, last Sunday, I fell completely off the wagon. That’s when I participated in the Healthcare Communications Twitter Show, a regular twitter gathering held every Sunday from 8-9 p.m. CST. Co-founded by Arik Hanson, a communicator at Fairview Health System here in the Twin Cities, the show is put on by the Healthcare Social Media Group, and is a moderated session where healthcare communicators, marketers and others gather to have a conversation about various topics.

Last Sunday was my first show, and it’s hard to explain the experience. Imagine 40 or 50 people in a room, tossing out questions and comments one after another, non-stop. Some are asking you questions, while others are responding to your responses. There are side conversations, people shouting across the room, near-chaos for an hour. Instead, this all occurs in a twitter chat room, meaning statements are limited to 140 character tweets. It’s like 50 people constantly hurling text messages at one another, non-stop, for an hour. To call it frenetic is to do an injustice to the word frenetic. At times, my fingers cramped, and my eyes literally glazed over (yes literally, not figuratively), as my contacts felt four times thicker from lack of eye juice. It was insane.

But it was, in a word, intoxicating. That hour simply flew by (and this from an xBox junkie, where video game playing can suck time like no other pursuit). I interacted with people from Seattle, St. Louis and Nashville. There were communicators, marketers, competitors, PR-ers, social media wizards and a few physicians (way to go docs!). I had extended conversations with a dozen people that lasted into the night, and some throughout the week. Topics included the value of awards and rankings in hospital marketing, managing user generated content from health system employees, and the idea of gag orders on patients by physicians (preventing patients from posting negative comments on the Internet).

And now, I’m addicted. I’m tweeting constantly. I tweet in the morning. I tweet by myself. I have a few tweets for lunch, then another after for kicks. I sneak a tweet waiting for the kids at the bus stop. I stay up late into the night tweeting, and loving every minute of it. I find myself having to turn it off completely, go cold turkey, just to get work done.

Why the sudden spiral into chronic twitterholism? Because now I’m engaging in true dialogue with others. I’m building relationships – good ones. And I’m learning a ton.

If you haven’t tried it, have a tweet on me. Take a sip. Heck, have a case of tweets. You’ll be buzzing in no time.

The comments from Powell can be seen at roughly the 13:40 mark of this C-SPAN video from the event.

Carol.com is exactly the kind of consumer-focused innovation we need more of in healthcare. Let’s hope the interest grows.

• Chris Bevolo’s Twitter home page
• Adam Meyer’s Twitter home page
• Jackie Ritacco’s Twitter home page

You can also see our latest Tweets here on our site, on our Stream of Consciousness page.

“We’re excited to continue focusing exclusively on serving hospitals and health systems,” said agency owner Chris Bevolo. “As always, we’ll be monitoring the impact of trends like consumerism, changing competition and new media, and applying that expertise to help our clients address marketing challenges in new and better ways.”

For more on the name change, view the official news release.

2) Free CRM. Yes, that’s right, a free Customer Relationship Management solution. Sounds like a gimmick, right? Offered by some folks I have deep respect for at Reach 3 out of Madison, WI, “CRM Launch” allows healthcare marketers to leverage the company’s proprietary healthcare segmentation models and communication technologies to implement CRM (the catch, if you want to call it that, is that resulting marcom tools such as direct mail, must flow through their offering). I’m not shilling for the product – I actually have no idea how it works or how well it works. I just love the concept. CRM, like brand building or call centers, is an example of the more sophisticated approaches our industry needs to embrace. Providing healthcare marketers who otherwise can’t afford full CRM systems or can’t convince others of the value of such a system with this option is a great way to help the industry along. Assuming the service is as robust as it seems, now there literally is no reason not to employ this critical strategy.

3) Web 2.0 is a bad, bad thing. Not my words, but those of author Andrew Keen, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture (read his blog for more). Keen was the keynote speaker this morning, and offered some fairly radical opinions on how Web 2.0 offerings such as Google, YouTube, Wikipedia and the blogosphere have led to the false belief that just because everyone can contribute, we all have equally valuable things to say. (Sounds eerily similar to the desktop publishing revolution that ushered in the misconception that just because you had an Apple computer with Quark Express, you were qualified to be a designer). This “democratization” of the Internet serves to remove all the filters for what’s true, what’s accurate, what’s smart, and what’s expert. He stresses that in fact, most people are not qualified to speak on most topics (a perusal of the comments section on most any web-based newspaper article seems to verify this point). He points to the “empowered patient” as an example of this, with her printed wikipedia pages and pharma ads, trying to dictate to a physician (who has spent years in school and practice) on what’s best for them clinically.

His advice? Don’t give in, don’t allow the masses to generate content they’re not qualified to generate, given they aren’t filtered, edited, or experts. Whether you agree or not with this rant against the democratization of the Internet that is Web 2.0, Keen definitely provides some points to ponder. (Like, where does this blog sit given that contention? hmmmmm.)

Wouldn’t it be great to receive “clippings” when these folks rant or rave about quality of service — or, better yet, be a fly on the wall in the midst of a conversation? New services are popping up that allow just that. And, yes, they are ethical.

A few weeks ago I wrote about Twitter — a recent phenomenon in social networking. GetSatisfaction.com is a new service that taps into Twitter filtering millions of conversations, rants and raves based on product or company name. If I wanted to get a feel for what people were saying about Apple, for example, I could enter the company name and get the low down.

I plugged in a few local hospitals and didn’t get any results. But this service and the channel it monitors are only in their infancy, so that’s no surprise. Given the nature of the web, however, I also wouldn’t be surprised to see results tomorrow.

As the popularity of Twitter and other social networking outlets continue to rise (here’s another one that just popped up: plurk.com), filtering tools such as GetSatisfaction are going to become invaluable to healthcare marketers. So, hit that bookmark button and be sure to start checking these resources from time to time.

As I grew, my gaming “career” evolved with the various gaming platforms. Commodore VIC-20, Atari, Nintendo, Sega, PC games, Xbox… you name it, I played it. I still do, actually. Whether it’s raiding dungeons and killing dragons with friends from around the world, or playing fake instruments in a wannabe rock band, gaming is still one of my favorite past times. Yes, I’m a bit of a nerd.

Growing up with controller in hand, I experienced the proliferation of advertising in video games. The earliest I can recall being billboards in various sports games in the early 1990s — though other in-game ads were reported as early as 1978.¹ While one might think these ads would have been annoying or distracting, they actually added an element of realism to these virtual worlds. And, to an extent, they were welcome because they were targeted. I actually noticed and read them — I can’t say as much for most of today’s advertising.

In 2005 alone, spending on in-game advertising was $56 million. This figure is expected to grow to $1.8 billion by 2010.² Now, we’re not talking about marketing to kids here. The average age of today’s gamer is 29. This demographic is not entirely testosterone-driven — 26% of today’s gamer community is comprised of female adults.³ Some sources claim that men make up just 59% of the market.⁴ Of all age groups the average gamer spends 6.5 hours a week indulging in their favorite past time.

So what does this have to do with healthcare? Are we recommending that hospitals slap billboards around virtual speedways and cityscapes? Of course not. But, the industry is beginning to dip its toes in the water and you should be aware.

Yesterday from The Guardian (a UK news source):

Spanish health authorities launched a virtual portal through the Second Life website yesterday designed to help young people too embarrassed to speak to a doctor about sexually transmitted disease or a drug problem.

Real doctors will log on and offer advice to their anonymous patients. What both will see is an image of a consulting room with a doctor and a typical patient.

What’s more interesting is that they are not the first to do this. A simple Google search on “Second Life, health care” yields interesting results.

If you’re unfamiliar with Second Life, it’s an online virtual world in which participants create and control avatars (digital characters with completely customizable characteristics). These avatars interact with each other much like people do in the “real world” — I use that term loosely, as our “real world” is redefined by the minute.

The healthcare industry is one of the first to go beyond advertising in video games to actually providing a service. This isn’t just entertainment anymore. The popularity of gaming is going to continue to grow. Messaging and services provided via gaming are going to continue to evolve. Have you thought much about this medium and how it may affect the services you provide and messages you deliver?

Twitter is an online service that allows people to share short messages (tweets) with their friends, family, colleagues and the world. It’s kind of like e-mail, but not really. It’s kind of like an instant messenger, but not really. It’s kind of like text messaging, but not really. It’s a method of communication that’s unique, addictive and gaining in popularity every day — every minute may be more accurate.

Tweets serve a different purpose than the aforementioned methods of text-based communication. With e-mail, IMs and text messages, you’re probably expecting a response or some sort of action. Maybe you sent a text message to your spouse’s phone to pick up some milk on the way home. Maybe you e-mailed a vendor asking for an update on a project. Perhaps you IM’d an offsite colleague, needing a quick response to a burning question. With Twitter you post your thoughts (in 140 characters or less). That’s it.

I know what you’re thinking. Why the (insert expletive) would I do that? The answer is simple: Many people actually care.

Take a moment to check out twistori.com. This service “taps” into the vast stream of tweets spewing from the minds and fingers of people across the world. Choose a category on the left, such as “Love.” Now, watch an endless flow of Tweets containing the word “love” flood your screen. These are coming to you in real time. The twitterers sharing these thoughts literally hit the enter key the second before you read their comment. Maybe I’m a complete nutjob, but I found myself lost in these random thoughts for… I’m… not sure… how long…

OK I’m back.

Twitterers can chose to password protect their comments or leave them exposed to the world. Most are left exposed — intentionally. One of the points of tweeting is to say, “Hey world! This is how I feel right now!” Twistori scans all exposed feeds and filters them by category. I use it simply as an example of how captivating even thoughts from random strangers can be.

Imagine if your friends and family were Tweeting. Wouldn’t it be cool to receive a continuous flow of thoughts from those you care about? You don’t even need to be at your computer. You can post and read tweets from mobile phones, instant messengers, e-mail programs and the Twitter site itself. It’s up to you. You might be thinking, “I don’t want to see all that! I don’t have time to respond!” The point is not necessarily to respond — though some Tweets may warrant a response. It’s just to keep you connected on a very personal level with those who care about you.

“Starbucks coffee is so much better than Caribou.”

“The tulips are popping up around the tree out front. I just love spring!”

“I shouldn’t have put my taxes off for so long! I have a headache.”

Those are tweets. They keep you connected, but don’t necessarily distract you from your day. They simply give you a quick slice of someone’s life. In an age when it’s hard to find time to stay connected, twitter is truly a revolution.

So, how do you use this method of communication in healthcare marketing? I can’t give you the answer. But I can assure you that it has a place. Without question, members of your community are tweeting. Perhaps referring physicians too. Other industries are using it. Perhaps they could help get your wheels turning.

Be sure to let us know when you’ve started. Happy tweeting!