If bloggers’ comments about your hospital are following current trends for their tone toward retailers, then they will likely be positive.

Although these numbers reflect select retailers, hospitals are certainly not exempt from a similar range of extreme commentary—positive or negative.

Last week, eMarketer.com published CARMA International numbers that said nearly 42 percent of bloggers had positive things to say.

As refreshing as that may be, the percent that didn’t blog positive things also commanded some impressive numbers (nearly 28 percent).

The Brothers Johnson ‘70s funk hit “Strawberry Letter #23” comes to mind. The song is about a guy that is holding the 22nd love letter written to him on strawberry-scented paper, and he’s anticipating a 23rd.

Although the odds are in your favor, do you know what bloggers are saying about your hospital? Are you getting “strawberry letters”? And even if you are, are you prepared for sentiments that might be sour?

As most anybody that works in public relations and marketing—or even those that follow pop culture—knows, it only takes one instance of negative or unfavorable content to destroy years of hard-earned loyalty and respect—much as we saw earlier this month during the Domino’s Pizza viral video PR disaster.

Although that was viral video and not a blog, had Domino’s been monitoring blogs more closely, they could have mitigated and possibly prevented the ultimate damage.

If you don’t know what is being said about you and don’t know how to find out, AVID Design offers free Web 2.0 assessments and services that include blog monitoring.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 at 11:25 am and is filed under Blogs + Blogging, Brand Monitoring, Industry Trends, Pop Culture, Research and Studies. 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.