Although we weren’t expecting these results, but we can certainly understand why voters voted the way they did.

Last month, we ran a poll that asked voters to suggest why they thought hospital leadership might discourage social media marketing.

Despite our initial presumption—that it is too complicated to organize multiple departments—voters were clear in their decision: 54 percent said that Web 2.0 is too much of a legal or information risk.

Why We Chose “Too Complicated to Organize Departments”

Our perspective is largely based on the fact that we are brought into projects once there is a desire to move forward with something like a new or overhauled Web site—in other words, after other issues have been addressed or resolved.

Furthermore, we’ve been on a number of Web steering committees, and more often than not, the most complicated part of the process is getting departments to work towards a common goal. Of course, we’ve been very successful in helping coordinate teams and working with them to produce effective and attractive Web sites.

We certainly don’t want to suggest that there are departments that are refuseniks. Instead, we recognize that—like at most any company or in any department—people are very busy and have limited time, staff and resources to commit to new, major projects.

Why Voters Chose “Legal or Information Risks”

Again, in our experience with helping healthcare clients develop and deploy new content, we’ve seen two things that would support this choice:

• The vetting process is too slow.
• Content can’t be created by committee.

With a Website, the content is usually carefully planned, created and most importantly, approved by a select group of people—most of whom are managers, executives and stakeholders.

Once approved and published, this content—or new content, especially when published quickly and easily with a custom CMS, such as what AVID Design offers—is likely to stay put for a while and isn’t changed until it’s gone through the same planning/creation/approval process.

Social media, on the other hand, is all about immediacy…which requires a lot of trust since an effective Web 2.0 campaign cannot be restricted with lengthy approval processes.

In particular, this includes responding to criticism or negative statements made, for example, on Twitter. However, as we’ve written elsewhere, an active Web 2.0 presence can do wonders for a hospital or any type of organization—including tackling criticisms and complaints head-on in the social networking environment.

We touch on these issues and more in our recent newsletter’s feature story, “Budget, Staff and Support: A Trifecta of Challenges Faced by Hospital Marketers.”

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 at 9:09 am and is filed under Industry Trends, Marketing, Research and Studies, 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.