“The chief social media officer may be supplanting the chief branding officer as the zaniest human resources innovation in memory.”

Wow. Really? I’m not sure who should be more insulted, brand evangelists or social media zealots. Casting those who’ve built amazing brands at such places as Nike, Starbucks, Apple, the Mayo Clinic or Zappos as zany seems a bit misplaced, but hey, what do I know, I don’t work for BusinessWeek.

As someone who believes in both disciplines as important to any organization’s success, I guess I’m doubly the fool. The whole story is a tad pretentious, written with a little bit of a “tut-tut” attitude regarding how organizations are scrambling to hire people to manage their social media strategies. (E.G. “Opportunities in corporate social media are popping up faster than cat videos on YouTube.”) But it also does a good job of painting a fair picture of why such a position is in fact important, and how the career path is growing.

And no matter what Gillette thinks, neither title is even close to the ridic combo of “HR/Marketing” veeps that seem to be sweeping the healthcare industry.

1. Wellness is relevant to consumers. (You’ve heard us beat this drum before.) Whether it’s advocating for “inbound marketing” strategies or pleading that “Joe Public Doesn’t Care About Your Hospital” at healthcare marketing conferences around the country, our message is the same: Make your marketing communications relevant to your audiences.

   Remembering that consumers are constantly thinking “What’s in it for me?” provides the primary argument against daVinci Robot billboards and advertising that features physicians. Truth is, most people don’t need laser surgery or a new physician, so those ubiquitous brand-building approaches will not resonate as well. It’s not that you can’t build brand with these messages — you can. But because they’re not relevant to the vast majority of people in your community, it takes much more time and money for them to have an impact. Most people do have some level of interest in living healthier lives, whether it’s losing weight, cutting stress, exercising more, eating right, or whatever. A message focused on health and wellness is a message relevant to a lot more people, one that actually will build their awareness, along with their perception, utilization — and loyalty. And it’s a message that’s completely natural coming from a community health leader — You.

2. Wellness also helps deflect the negative focus on hospital advertising. As we noted in our last e-newsletter, there’s a small but growing “assault” on hospital marketing. Right or wrong, it wouldn’t be surprising if this sentiment spread as politicians, regulators, the media and others start to dig deeper into how our organizations spend their money. (A recent NPR story on the subject started with the on-air personality stating in a surprised manner that hospitals actually are out there competing for patients. Can you imagine?) It’s one thing to spend millions of dollars on advertising bragging about your awards or touting your new technology. It’s quite another to be focused on helping those in the community improve their health and pursue wellness. This isn’t a reason to focus on wellness as a brand position (see above and below), but it’s a nice side affect.

3. Wellness messaging will actually help improve the health of your community. Yes, anything we do as hospitals from a marketing communications perspective that brings the right patient to the right service helps improve the health of consumers (assuming, of course, the right service is your service). As opposed to marketing messages focused on promoting the benefits of your organization, however, wellness-based messaging focuses on what’s best for the audience, and is bound to help those in the community improve their health. So not only is it the right thing to do from a business perspective, it’s just the right thing to do period. (And for those in your organization who argue you don’t get “paid” for health and wellness, so why focus on it, see our blog post “Gettin’ Paid.”

The good news is that we’re seeing more hospitals and health systems attempt to build their brand on a position of health and wellness. The bad news is that if you’re not one of those organizations, you may be left behind. You see, that’s the Achilles heel of wellness as a brand position — anyone can claim it. Of course, like everything else (clinical quality, convenience, patient experience, advanced technology, etc.), how hospitals actually deliver on this promise varies greatly. But unlike some of the other potential positions a hospital could take, nearly every organization can pursue this position. And at some point, it could become ubiquitous as a position in a given market, like “we care,” or “high-tech, high-touch,” or “we’re award winning” have become.

So the key is to jump out there first and stick with it. Not for six months, not for two years, but for a long, long time. Be the first, be the most, and be the best — don’t just talk wellness, but build offerings and content that support the brand and that will consistently keep you ahead of the pack. Once you’re out there, if you don’t let up, it will be very difficult for others to catch you. Of course, if you let someone else get first dibs, the same can be said for you.

“Why should we invest in XYZ? We don’t get paid for that.”

This often comes from a CEO or CFO of a hospital, and what they mean is that whatever it is your asking them to invest in, the organization doesn’t get reimbursed for it. For example, we’ve heard this used in regards to investing in a better patient experience. One CFO we know said the following during planning for a major expansion:

“Why do we need to spend so much on patient rooms? We could just stick them in the hall and we’d get paid the same.”

Recently, this gauntlet has been laid down in front of marketers seeking to spend marketing dollars to promote health and wellness messaging from their organization. Why spend money there, the argument goes, when the hospital doesn’t get reimbursed for helping people stay healthy?

There are some exceptions – helping diabetics meet certain benchmarks, for example, can be tied to better reimbursement from payers. But from a short-term perspective, that’s mostly accurate – hospitals and physicians don’t get paid for keeping people healthy (though federal reform could eventually change that equation).

Here’s the disconnect: you will get paid from promoting health and wellness, just not today. Investing in health/wellness messaging, or a better patient experience, are examples of investments in building stronger brands, with the goal of increasing loyalty, word of mouth, and yes, over time, revenue.

So here’s the tip: next time this comes up, use our old branding friend Starbucks to make your point. Imagine the CEO of Starbucks had once said: “why should we invest in hiring friendlier baristas, or buying more comfortable furniture? We don’t get paid for that, we get paid when people buy our coffee.”

Seems kind of silly, right? People buy more coffee because of the investment in the Starbucks experience, and more people will engage your organization more times when you invest in the patient experience, or help them stay healthier with services, communications, education and more geared toward wellness. (Remember, the beauty of promoting health and wellness is that it’s relevant to your audience, making them more likely to notice, listen, and engage when they need you.) It’s not about getting paid today, it’s about getting paid tomorrow.

This has always been part of the hospital marketing dynamic, of course. When the industry in general doesn’t value marketing as a strategic endeavor, it’s not surprising marketing departments are used as some kind of whack-a-mole by organizations, smacking frantically at whatever issue pops up. What is discouraging, however, is that this marketing-by-spasm approach seems to be gripping more and more organizations in more and more situations.

While short-term myopia is in and of itself not very effective marketing, it carries with it a more damaging side-affect. The more reactionary marketing that’s carried out, the less time, money and energy there is for long-term strategic marketing efforts. This creates a vicious self-fulfilling cycle: the issues you’re whacking at today were likely caused by a lack of strategic thinking yesterday. If you need to increase general surgery volumes by the end of the quarter, no consumer advertising you can conceive will help that. And by not thinking strategically today (because you’re running around putting out fires), your organization is ensuring you aren’t addressing the problems of tomorrow, which then ensures more reactive panic later. And so on.

A good friend of mine told me about a strategic planning engagement he had with a small community hospital that was struggling financially. In the first meeting with the leadership group, the CEO grew frustrated and said: “We have too many problems now – we don’t have time for strategic thinking.”

And that, I believe, says everything there is to say about how many hospitals are approaching marketing. Hopefully, you work in one of the few organizations that mitigates that type of thinking. If not, at least you can take solace in the fact that you have lots of company.

According to an article in the Burlington Free Press on Monday, Vermont state representative Steve Maier is proposing legislation to ban hospitals from spending money on advertising or marketing in the state. Here’s a quote from the article:

“It’s not producing health care,” Maier said of the money spent on advertising (quote from a previous online version of the article).

Given the focus on healthcare costs at a national level, it’s not surprising a politician has latched onto the relatively easy mark of hospital advertising. (It is surprising that it took this long). Let’s put aside the argument surrounding advertising that supports public health issues such as obesity, smoking or wellness for a moment. There are at least three reasons I can think of why such a proposal doesn’t make sense.

First, a hospital’s marketing expense is a tiny fraction of its overall expense. To be generous, let’s say it’s 1% of revenues, including all marketing salaries, external expenses, media, etc. Obviously it’s higher in some places and lower in others, but the point is that eliminating this expense won’t do much of anything to impact the cost of healthcare in the U.S. Of course, this is politics, so the actual impact of something is pretty much beside the point.

Second, there are serious free-speech issues involved, and it’s very rare for the courts to allow a restriction on an industry’s ability to communicate or promote itself. This will likely be the reason legislation of this nature won’t go anywhere, and if it does, why it won’t survive.

The third reason, and the one that is perhaps the most frustrating, is that hospitals and health systems in the U.S. – whether they’re for-profit or non-profit – must compete for patients to succeed. That’s the way the market is set up, and unless we went to a single-payor Canadian-style system, that’s the way it will likely stay. And with that type of market, organizations must be allowed to do whatever it takes to attract the customers (patients) they need to succeed. Many in the public would find this nonsensical or outrageous – “why do hospitals need to spend money to attract patients?” And politicians can prey on the public’s misunderstanding of the business of healthcare to drum up support for this type of legislation. But those who want hospitals banned from advertising their services miss the point that these are businesses that compete in an open market, and that’s a good thing.

If you believe in capitalism, you believe that competition drives innovation, efficiency, service and more. Competition should make healthcare better, not worse, though not everyone agrees with that. But the point is a bit moot – as long as we have the “system” we have of providing care, where providers must compete to find and keep patients, they should be allowed to use the tools other businesses use to pursue the same goals, and that includes marketing and advertising.

What do you think? Is this just an obvious/defensive position coming from a healthcare marketing firm? Will this legislation or others like it take hold? If they did, what would they mean for hospitals and all of us marketers?

“If you’re like most people, you’re way too smart for advertising. You flip right past newspaper ads, never click on ads online and leave the room during TV commercials. That, at least, is what we tell ourselves. But what we tell ourselves is hooey. Advertising works, which is why, even in hard economic times, Madison Avenue is a $34 billion–a–year business.”

We’ve covered this ground before in this blog (see posts, “The demise of old marketing: ‘I’m not dead yet!’” and “Truth #4: If you want to know what will work in healthcare marketing, don’t ask your customers.”) But we’re encouraged that this type of thinking has found its way to mainstream media. And we’ll keep beating this drum until we see more hospitals and healthcare systems trying different approaches (such as metaphor-based interviews and ethnography) to better learn how consumers really think and act.

To give this a little context, the SVP had focused most of her efforts on business development, and specifically, on acquiring physician practices and building physician referral channels. So the comment was really about comparing the value of marketing to that of business development when it comes to business growth. In addition, it’s assumed that “marketing” was meant to equate “consumer marketing.”

Not surprisingly, we take a tad bit of exception to classifying an entire discipline as stupid. But for starters, let’s acknowledge the reality: when it comes to affecting immediate and substantial business growth, typically nothing can be as effective as acquiring physician practices, specialty practices, or merging hospitals and health systems. The surest way to increase market share or dramatically increase volumes is to lock-in independent referral sources, or acquire competitive businesses. In essence, organizations are “buying” new patients, and mergers and acquisitions are a time-tested way in any industry to grow business. In healthcare, one sign that hospitals and health systems recognize this power can be seen in the growing cache of business development titles. Often, what used to be senior marketing titles now include ‘business development,’ and business development is typically seen as a higher-level discipline than marketing throughout the industry.

Does that mean spending time, energy and money on marketing your hospital is, in fact, stupid? Er, not exactly. Let’s start with the well documented fact that the majority of mergers and acquisitions in business fail. For example, a BusinessWeek article titled “When CEO’s Go Courting, Watch Out,” cites research showing that 60-70% of deals fail, stating:

“Mergers tend to destroy value, not create it.”

One of the primary reasons for this is that trying to mush two corporate entities into one is not easy, and if not handled well, costs increase, efficiency drops, service and quality suffer, and customers flock to competitors. The same can of course happen in healthcare, so simply buying patients by acquiring a physician practice doesn’t guarantee a hospital will keep those patients. Systems become ineffective, doctors aren’t happy, negativity abounds, patients flee. Marketing communications, of course, can play a huge role in communicating the benefits of a merger, and can help specifically target patients with important information and service recovery efforts. Acquisitions reflect a hospital’s desire to obtain patients, but they don’t necessarily reflect what patients themselves want. Without effective marketing communications, it would be very difficult to maximize the impact of a key acquisition or merger.

Second, consumer marketing should help create demand, regardless of what acquisitions are made. Strategies such as driving orthopedic surgeries through joint pain classes, or offering heart disease screening to build downstream cardiac business, are all driven by consumer marketing. There is no doubt that much of a hospital’s business is referral driven, but sophisticated organizations don’t stop there, realizing there are many opportunities to drive patients in through marketing directly to consumers.

Which brings us to the third point – business development and marketing shouldn’t be an either/or proposition. Unless your plan is to acquire all the providers in your market (or you live in Canada), there will always be competition for healthcare services. And whenever there is choice in a market, you will need to fight for your customers using marketing and brand building strategies. Compared to the big growth spike that comes from a large merger or acquisition, ongoing consumer marketing may seem like a long, slow slog. But it will pay dividends when done well. In the end, if both you and your competitors are pursuing strategic business development, but only one of you is also investing in marketing, who do you think will come out ahead?

What do you think? Is marketing a hospital a waste of time? Do you hear statements like this from senior leadership? How do you respond?

Rather than provide an in-depth analysis of the trends and key moments of 2009 (break out the No-Doz, yo!), let’s look at one simple metric – the most popular blog posts of last year. Is there something we can glean from the list? First, here are the top five posts from the Interval blog, with title, publish date and total pageviews:

• #1. “The economic crisis: Tipping point for healthcare consumer behavior?” (March) (609 page views)
• #2. “Truth #4: If you want to know what will work in healthcare marketing, don’t ask your customers” (July) (478)
• #3. “Truth #2: Healthcare marketing needs a serious shake-up” (January) (380)
• #4. “Truth #3: Great healthcare marketing requires great healthcare leaders” (May) (204)
• #5. “Hospital awards – the madness continues” (September) (156)

I have one overall reaction to this list: awesome!!! The first entry is understandable given the economic maelstrom healthcare faced in 2009, and in retrospect, the post has some fairly ominous overtones (if some of the predictions come true, hospitals will be facing quite the financial malaise in the coming years).

But if you can get past that Scrooger, the other four make me want to leap for joy. Because they mean we’ve hit hundreds of people with messages we believe are essential to moving marketing forward and improving its station within healthcare organizations. Certainly, not everyone agrees with our points in these posts, and it’s fair to say posts 2-5 could be considered somewhat controversial. Even then, that means the battle has been joined, the debate engaged, the conversation had. And that, from our standpoint, deserves the label of “awesome.”

We’re very much looking forward to starting more fires here in 2010. And thanks for giving us a read!

In general, this seems like a pretty fair assessment, though certainly expertise concerning social media varies greatly, falling along a scale from “luddite” to “multiple social media efforts led and measured.” And there are many odd twists to the question of expertise as well. For example, there are a class of folks who seem to believe that simply by using social media, they then have the the proper credentials to drive organizational strategy, or sell consulting services in this area. And while it would seem impossible for someone to lead a social media effort without actually using the tools themselves, being a user does not equate to strategic or even tactical expertise. Just because I watch a lot of TV doesn’t make me a great television producer or screenwriter, yes?

The latest issue of BusinessWeek has a great article on the growing backlash against social media consultants and “experts.” The title – “Beware social media snake oil” – pretty much speaks for itself. Perhaps the best insight comes from James Cooper, who serves as digital creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi, a global ad agency. Cooper states that anyone who unequivocally claims that using social media will work is either “lying or deranged.” His point is that the medium is still too young to guarantee results, and he likens the innovative nature of social media to that of venture capital, where 1 out of 10 bets might pay off, while the others fail completely. He also worries about how results are measured:

“If something’s got 20 million hits on YouTube, that’s a good thing. But what if half the comments are negative? I don’t think anyone’s got a long-term case study yet.”

Social media offers potential opportunities to hospitals and other providers in the areas of brand building, customer service, marketing, public/community relations and more. But the jury is still out on whether in the end all of the hoopla and effort will pay off in material ways from a long-term perspective.

Of course, that’s no reason to drop or minimize social media as a marketing/communications tool. It just means healthcare marketers need to go into the effort with eyes wide open. Social media should still be considered an innovative strategy, and with innovation goes the understanding that failure is sometimes an accepted part of the game.

Have you been pitched by a “social media expert”? How do you determine someone’s credentials with such a new medium? Are you OK with “failing” in order to learn what works and what doesn’t?