We get asked by a lot of hospitals about how they should start a social media campaign. More often than not, the questions lean towards content creation.
Like with monitoring patients in your hospital to better understand their needs and to deliver the best treatment, social media requires making the best use of monitoring.
Although it’s not difficult to understand the appeal and desire to start crafting messages that can be shot out via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc., it misses what has made Web 2.0 and social media so powerful and exciting.
Most simply, it’s the opportunity to listen—which means monitoring social media and the Internet.
The Fine Art of Listening
It’s human nature to want to be heard and understood. And traditionally, marketing has been about using one-way media channels to broadcast messages, with little (if any) encouragement of response other than to “speak with your wallet” and become a customer.
The Internet broke that mold, and Web 2.0 decimated it.
That is why the truly savvy marketer recognizes social media not only as a new channel to disseminate a message, but as a finely tuned receiver for hearing everything that is relevant—for better, and perhaps just as importantly, for worse.
The obvious and common example is hearing negative things about your hospital. But that’s but one example, and hopefully a rare one for your hospital. A more pragmatic argument is that social media can let marketers better recognize what they should be saying, to whom, and where those people are.
Additionally, monitoring social media lets you hear what is being said about and by competing hospitals, which again, is valuable insight for developing new, targeted messages.
Does your hospital have a trusted and reliable partner to build, manage and plan your online marketing strategies? AVID Design offers free assessments for Websites, content, strategy and more.
Derek Rudnak | Communications Specialist | AVID Design
Add to Technorati Favorites
Tweet This Post
This entry was posted
on Thursday, August 20th, 2009 at 10:30 am and is filed under Best Practices, Brand Monitoring, Marketing, Social Media, Web 2.0.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
