Well, another year has come and gone. So long 2010, hello 2011!

We’ve put together a compilation of this past year’s featured stories and hot topics from our newsletter, AVID Insight. If you are not an AVID Insight e-newsletter subscriber (which I strongly suggest you be), then here’s what you missed…

January 2010 – Hospital Website Patient Portals: Where to Begin

Offering advantages to both physicians and patients, patient portals are increasingly becoming a popular service for managing health.

• What are some features and functions of patient portals?

• What are the advantages of having a patient portal?

• How do you start a patient portal?

February 2010 – Six Essential Hospital Digital Signage Uses: the 2010 Edition

Digital signage is becoming more of a universal communication platform for healthcare facilities—both large and small, and becoming an integral part of hospital’s overall communication strategies.

• What is the value of digital signage?

• How is digital signage growing?

• How can digital signage be used at hospitals?

March 2010 – Traditional vs. Online Hospital Marketing: Erasing the Lines in the Sand

Times are a-changin’ in hospital marketing dividing “old school” traditional hospital marketers and “new school” online hospital marketers.

• What is causing this erosion?

• What new hospital marketing paradigms are emerging?

• What hospital marketing obstacles remain?

April 2010 – Six Best Practices for Hospital INTRANET Usability

The value of having an intranet is significant, and is continually becoming embraced by hospitals and healthcare systems.

• What are the challenges in identifying an intranet strategy for hospitals?

• How do intranets improve the workforce?

• What are some intranet best practices hospitals should consider?

May 2010 – Emotion vs. Intellect: Quality of Care Content and Hospital Website Marketing

There are two types of writing styles when writing hospital Website quality of care content. These two types—emotional and intellectual—can be challenging to write in order to satisfy these sensibilities.

• What are the challenges for writing quality of care content?

• How do you properly prepare and balance quality of care content?

• How do you deploy quality information on your hospital’s Website?

June 2010 – The Magic Metric: How to Improve Hospital Website Conversion Rates

Conversion rates are the most critical metric when analyzing Website performance and ROI for online healthcare marketing analytics.

• What is a Website conversion and how do they affect hospitals?

• What are some types of hospital Website conversions?

• How do you build a successful conversion strategy for you hospital’s Website?

July 2010 – All Hands on Deck: Five Ways to Educate Your Internal Workforce to Promote Your Hospital Website

Marketing your brand internally is essential in promoting your brand externally, so maintaining a well informed workforce to enhance external perceptions of your hospital’s brand is crucial.

• Why should your hospital’s workforce be informed about your brand?

• Why should your hospital’s workforce harness their influence with hospital patients and visitors?

• What are some concepts to consider as you improve your hospital’s marketing potential?

August 2010 – Is Your Hospital’s Website Ready for Caffeine?

With Google Caffeine being released this past year, the landscape for traditional SEO and indexing is surely going to change significantly.

• How will Caffeine index relevant content?

• How will Caffeine affect healthcare and hospital SEO?

• How will hospital and healthcare Website content managers prepare for the change of your hospital’s Website SEO?

September 2010 – Your Hospital Can Can’t Afford to Not Attend Healthcare Marketing Conferences

It’s no surprise that healthcare marketing budgets are tight, especially this past year. Don’t let economic conditions diminish the value of attending a healthcare marketing that is focused on what you do for the hospital.

• What is the value in attending a healthcare marketing conference?

• How do you get expenses approved to attend a conference by hospital marketing leadership?

• How do you really afford to attend a healthcare marketing conference?

October 2010 – Overcoming the Healthcare Marketer and Hospital Foundation Disconnect

Sometimes there is a bizarre disconnect between hospital marketing departments and their hospital foundations, which one would think would have a remarkably integrated relationship since they both share similar objectives for the hospital.

• Why is there sometimes a bizarre disconnect between the two?

• What are some advantages of integrating both departments?

• Read about how Tanner Health System and MCGHealth integrate their marketing and foundation departments.

November 2010 – Fanning the Flames: Reviewing Predictions for Hot Healthcare Marketing Topics in 2010

Last year we made predictions as to what we thought were going to be the hot healthcare marketing topics for 2010.

• What were some of 2010’s hot healthcare marketing topics?

• Were some of our predictions correct?

• Which healthcare marketing topics from 2010 will still be on fire in 2011?

December 2010 – AVID Design’s Annual Internet Healthcare Marketing Predictions: 2011 Edition

Since the year is coming to a close, we’ve come up with a few topics that are on the top of our list as far as what we believe is in store for online healthcare marketers and experts in 2011.

• What are our predictions for online healthcare marketing technologies in 2011?

• Is social media still hot? Is mobile technology still hot?

• Will increased spending for rich media continue?

Coming in January’s edition of AVID Insight: Hospital intranets and employee communication. Sign up today!

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Imagine that your hospital or healthcare system was a hotel. Independent, franchise, chain, doesn’t matter—like hospitals, hotels come in all shapes and sizes.

Now imagine that you are at a customer review Website such as TripAdvisor.com—and not only do you discover some extremely unpleasant reviews, but one of the authors is currently one of your admitted patients. Would you respond? How would you respond? Would you call the police and throw the patient out?

As extreme as the last question sounded, that is precisely what happened to a couple after using TripAdvior.com to criticized a hotel in Blackpool, England, despite having pre-paid for a multiple night visit. (Ironically, there is a medical twist to the story: It was the couple’s first vacation since one of them had been diagnosed with cancer 18 months earlier).

The circumstances are almost irrelevant: Even if the hotel was somehow a fully innocent victim of an attack by a maleovelent guest, the damage is done—to wit, the USA Today article (and others like it) linked in the last paragraph.

Hospitals vs. Hotels: Is There a Difference?

An argument can be made that hospitals are remarkably similar to hospitals:

• First, there is the fact that they both host overnight guests.

• Second, hospitals are regularly judged by the quality of their facilities and services.

• Third hospital guests have choices in where they go—and are increasingly using the Internet to do research before they make a decision on where to go.

And those are just the most obvious similarities.

Of course, there are TripAdvisor.com equivalents for hospitals. A simple Google search for “hospital review” delivers page after page of links to Websites where people can review, rank, comment, criticize and express virtually any type of opinion about your hospital, physicians and more.

Don’t think it can’t happen to you. When people feel slighted—regardless if they are justified in their feelings—they want immediate remedy. And when their demand for remedy seems ignored or marginalized, they’ll find ways to be heard…and the Internet is one of the best venues to do so.

Do you regularly review these sites? Which ones? And have you seen negative sentiments about your facilities, services or staff?

But perhaps just as importantly, what are your policies for responding to unfavorable feedback? Do you let it slide? Do you engage with it? And what if that feedback was being written by a patient that is admitted to your hospital at the moment you read it?

AVID Design is highly experienced with best practices for drafting hospital governance policies that address issues involving the Internet, Websites, social media and more. Contact us today to learn how we can help your hospital establish winning policies that reduce and mitigate risk.

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Many hospital and healthcare systems look for new ways to reach out to their patients and the community. Sometimes they implement new and possibly non-traditional hospital and healthcare strategies to reach those in their community who may not be familiar with them, or are newcomers to the area.

Spam is not good... for hospitals OR to eat!

A hospital client of ours recently started a service to welcome newcomers to the area.  This service allowed new people to sign up on their Website for free items–area maps and an environmentally-friendly shopping bag–from the hospital, as well as allowed them to register for things, like a gas card.  Things were going well until they noticed that all of a sudden many of the requests were from around the country and NOT their target area.

Hospital Website Monitoring = Good; Spamming = Bad

The client was, luckily, monitoring their Website and caught this before it snowballed into a huge headache and chaotic mess.  It turns out, that someone found the link on the client’s Website, copied the link and then spammed it on an online forum that caters to the “sharing of knowledge about couponing, refunding and frugal living.”

Process of Removing Forum (Spam) Posts

So, to find out about how I could get this post removed for our client from this online coupon forum, I took on a pseudo-investigative journalistic approach.   I simply contacted the moderator from the coupon sharing Website, told them I represented the client and politely emailed them about removing the post with the link in it due to the fact that it is only available for a select, targeted audience.  Although I received no email back, I did notice that within 24 hours the post was taken down.  Success!

The Point About Monitoring Your Hospital’s Website

Offering incentives is a great tactic to help you connect with your community while driving traffic to your Website, but be aware of what could happen if you are not monitoring relevant traffic to these promotions or services.  It may even be wise to put a clause or note on your Website specifying that this promotion/service is only available for a certain area of people.

This case is not closed, because monitoring never ends.

AVID Design specializes in online healthcare marketing and offers hospital Website monitoring.

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Just the other day AVID Design was approached by a client who had a question about monitoring their brand on Twitter.

Searching through "junk," much like "dumpster diving," is NOT how you want to obtain your search results.

When searching for their name – which happens to also be an acronym shared by others – a lot of unrelated “junk” showed up on the results page.

The client was eager to learn that filtering out all the “junk” (by using Tweetdeck) with Twitter’s search operators makes it easy to follow mentions and search specific keywords.

Tweetdeck – No Need to Ask…

You’ve heard us talk about Tweetdeck before and how most of us at AVID Design use it and advocate it.  It turns out, that it’s a great tool for brand monitoring and a way to keep track of certain types of mentions and Tweets for your hospital’s Twitter account.

Basically, Tweetdeck is an organizational tool for Twitter that takes your feed and breaks it down into pieces which you can customize, manage and monitor.  Tweetdeck allows you to easily see what is (and what isn’t) being said by your hospital and about your hospital.  It’s especially useful if you have multiple Twitter accounts in need of monitoring, which you know you must do.

That’s all groovy and gravy about monitoring, but what about filtering out the “junk” and drilling down to find what you are really seeking?

Twitter’s Search Function – A Smooth Operator…

Not only can you search Tweets based on words, people, places, dates and attitudes, but many Twitterers are unaware that you can also use Twitter’s search operators in the search box to help filter out the “junk” and become more specific with what you are looking for.

For example, if you want to search for specific Tweets that contain the phrase “swine flu” with links, you would simply type “swine flu filter:links” in the search box and your results would appear.

But what about searching for something like “nursing” without generating tons of results such as “nursing home” or “nursing school?”  For this, you can use a search operator to contain a word, while omitting one commonly linked to it.  You would type “nursing -home” in the search box.  And voilà…the results you want!

This awesome search technique allows you to dig deep and drill away to get the search results you are looking for.

We know you don’t have a lot of time and are understaffed, that’s why AVID Design offers free Web 2.0 assessments and services for online marketing strategies such as social media and brand monitoring to make your job and life easier, just like we did for the client mentioned in this blog post.

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After being away for business for nearly a week, I received a Google Alerts message saying that AVID Design had recently released a new product. First, I was excited to hear of such news, but then when I saw the product, I was shocked. What would AVID Design need a Gun Tool for?

Monitoring your brand online is equally important so that you are aware of what is being said and posted about your organization, company or product.

The Gun Tool is basically a single multi-tool device specifically made for hunters and shooters that includes 18 of the most frequently used long tools for shotguns and rifles. This all-in-one instrument appears to be pretty versatile in what it can do. Let’s take a look:

• Can be used to tighten fasteners (I like nuts and bolts)

• Take down trigger assemblies (…ok)

• Swap out choke tubes (sounds interesting)

• Mount a scope and more (now we’re talking!)

That’s pretty impressive…but, hey wait a minute….This is not the AVID Design who are search engine optimization gurus. This is not the AVID Design that creates award winning hospital website designs. This is not the AVID Design that has an enterprise content management system that was developed specifically for hospitals and healthcare systems. This is not the AVID Design that understands best practice strategy for hospitals and healthcare Web sites…This is that other AVID Design that just happens to have our same name.

Guns N’ Online Monitoring

So this brings me to the point of branding and online monitoring. Branding as we all know is pretty much your identity and it plays an important role in a business. It should convey a message and appeal to your target market.

Monitoring your brand online is equally important so that you are aware of what is being said and posted about your organization, company or product. I use Google Alerts and receive an email when something is indexed by Google based on my selected terms or topics, or through the likes of social media sites. It is definitely something that every hospital should do. Do you currently monitor your brand? Do you know what people are saying about you?

You should.

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. ku

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