Author: Lee Aase

Larry Weber on the Future of Hospital Marketing & Social Media

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Today I’m presenting at an event for the Massachusetts Hospital Association (@MAHospitalAssoc), and the first speaker is Larry Weber (@theLarryWeber), who is chairman of Racepoint Group. There’s a great crowd here (more than 100), and I’m also getting a great chance to meet David Harlow (@HealthBlawg), and he’s going to show me around Boston this afternoon.

Larry says there’s nothing really complicated about social media, and that it’s just common sense (which fits really well with my Thesis #1.) Among his predictions: Like it or not, there will be no newspapers by 2015, and no nightly news programs by 2018. He also says one of the most underused marketing techniques is permission-based email.

Health care is now the #1 marketing spend segment in the U.S. economy, with $90 billion a year in network TV ads. A lot of that is going to move online.

Larry told the story of how Amazon.com embedded some video of author John Updike and sent him an email message about it, which led him to spend more than an hour on the Amazon site, during which time Amazon learned a lot more about him, which will enable further serving of interesting information. Oh, and by the way, he bought 9 books.

Larry made a good point that hospitals don’t have a lack of resources to do social media; they should stop producing so much collateral. Told the story of how he took his daughter on a college tour and got tons of collateral, and she didn’t look at ANY of it. She made her decision based on blogs and other social commenting. Why would you not divert resources to efforts that relate to how people actually make their decisions.

Larry says don’t “dip a toe” without doing your homework. I really think it’s good and important to do homework to understand social media, but I will be disagreeing a bit with that. My Thesis 14 runs counter to this, at least in emphasis. Yes, you don’t want to be mindless, but I think the real problem is more likely to be analysis paralysis.

Larry also says, however, that “social media is a requirement for all hospitals — large and small.” It will have more impact on our lives than television has had. I completely agree with that. See Thesis #4.

He also believes mobile will explode. Right again. It will be used a lot more for business transactions (e.g. buying a Coke by holding smart phone next to vending machine.)

Larry closed with a point that redeemed my one disagreement with his presentation, when he said hospitals should go for full-body immersion in social media (instead of dipping a toe.) So…as long as you don’t overthink, and move relatively quickly to implementation, I think his advice is good. The only way I would temper it is to say that people in hospital PR and marketing SHOULD dip their toes…right now…to get the personal experience so they can educate leadership on what would be a reasonable strategy.

Top SMUG Book Recommendations

While we have a SMUG book store that I plan to reorganize and upgrade, I wanted to take a moment to highlight three books that most professionals thinking about applying social media will find particularly helpful.

Getting Things Done, by David Allen, is my absolute first recommendation, particularly if you just don’t think you have the time or energy to fit another thing, social media, into your already overcommitted life. This blog started out as a way for me to learn about blogging, and Getting Things Done (or GTD) was a key element of my posts for the first year or so. Just type “GTD” in the search box at right and you’ll see several of those posts. A good way to get an intro to GTD, before you buy the book.

On a similar topic, I recommend The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, particularly for his observations relating to email and meetings. He’s snarky bordering on sarcastic and I don’t buy into his “new rich” goals for life, but he has some excellent and immensely practical observations on how to get the most out of your work time.

Finally, on a more theoretical note, I offer Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson. This book won’t help you swim through the torrents of email and other commitments, but it will give you perspective on how and why it makes economic sense for services like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to be free to users. And it may help stimulate your thinking about you work or business, and how you can incorporate free into your business model.

I’ve reviewed each of these books in more detail here on SMUG, so look in the book review category for background. If you click the affiliate links above and buy the books, SMUG would get a dollar or two. But if you have an Audible.com account, you can get this last book for free. The other two also are available on Audible.com, which leads to no SMUG kickback. It doesn’t matter to me…get them however you would like, but I really think you’ll find these books helpful.

Another Facebook Baby

In my presentations I frequently introduce my granddaughter, Evelyn, as someone who owes her existence, humanly speaking, to Facebook. As a Presbyterian elder I believe God ordains everything, but also know that He uses secondary causes to bring about His purposes. In Evelyn’s case, Facebook was the means by which her father, Kyle, met her mother (my daughter, Rachel.)

I would call that a really significant ROI from social media.

This weekend I got to travel to Grand Rapids, Michigan to meet Evelyn’s baby brother, Judah, who was born on April 9th (and pick up my wife, Lisa, who had flown there to help Rachel.) He’s a pretty sweet little guy, and here are a couple of photos:

Judah Scott Borg

You can see more pictures from our visit….you guessed it… on Facebook.

Meanwhile, here’s a video update on Evelyn:

‘Tis the gift to be simple…

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I had the delightful experience yesterday of meeting Dr. Carl May (@CarlRMay), a British collaborator of Mayo Clinic’s Dr. Victor Montori (@vmontori) on the concept of minimally disruptive medicine. I was honored that he wanted to meet with me during his visit to Mayo, and based on something he said during coffee I asked (or rather compelled) him to share his perspective on what makes social media valuable and successful in health care, and what he appreciates about our Mayo Clinic approach.

Here is some of what he had to say (shot in front of the famous bronze doors of the Plummer building):

Dr. May had earlier said that what he appreciates about our Mayo Clinic YouTube videos is that they are what the Quakers might call “plain” (although I’m not certain members of the Society of Friends would go for using video at all. But maybe I’m over-interpreting.”) Still, one of the famous Quaker (check that…Shaker) ditties extols the virtues of simplicity:

‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,
‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gain’d,
To bow and to bend we shan’t be asham’d,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come round right.

I appreciated Dr. May’s compliments and wanted to share and react to them to illustrate a few points.

  1. It’s always good to have a video camera with you. If I hadn’t had my Flip camera, I would not have been able to capture this video. I almost always carry a camera in my coat pocket or laptop bag. That enables me to take advantage (in the best sense of the word) of opportunities.
  2. We do our best to make the quality of video the best it can be, given the circumstances. I would have like to have had a tripod to keep the camera completely steady, but it’s most important to get the video. It also would have been better to perhaps be a step back from him, but we were in front of a door through which people were entering and exiting, and it was slightly drizzling. We needed to be closer. And I also wanted to be sure viewers could hear him. Thus, being closer was the right solution for the situation.
  3. Unadorned video does appear more genuine and authentic, but we don’t pursue that for its own sake. The point is to be nimble and cost-effective, making valuable information and stories available. Some of the videos we put on our Mayo Clinic YouTube channel are from TV news segments our team produces, and others may be extended sound bites from those same broadcast-quality interviews, like this one on deep brain stimulation. Having those in the mix is great for YouTube, and the point is to make good information available in a nimble, resourceful way. If you have some video shot for TV with a broadcast-quality camera and lighting, by all means use that on YouTube too. But if the only video you put up is highly polished you will have some problems, which I will discuss in a future post.

Finally, here is a video of Dr. Montori discussing minimally disruptive medicine, which is among the videos Dr. May appreciated:

Resistance is Futile: Smartphone Apps Coming to Health Care

How Smartphones are Changing Health Care for Consumers and Providers is the topic of an excellent report just out from Jane Sarasohn-Kahn (@HealthyThinker) and the California Healthcare Foundation. It begins…

The topic of smartphones in health is an intersection of two fast-evolving ecosystems: health and technology. The junction is a dynamic one in which a particular communications platform is advancing both consumers’ and providers’ engagement with health information technology.

The speed of the uptake has been remarkable for a nation that has been traditionally slow to adopt HIT…. Two-thirds of physicians used smartphones in 2009. About 6 percent of these were using a fully functional electronic medical record or electronic health record system — while only 1.5 percent of hospitals had a comprehensive electronic health record system as of 2008.

On the consumer side, 42 percent of Americans owned smartphones as of December 2009, despite the recession that began a year earlier. In fact, according to cnet, the smartphone market was “unfazed by the recession.”

I’m glad to have put Jane in touch with my colleague Scott Eising (@ScottEising), who is coordinating our Mayo Clinic mobile ventures, and that Scott’s comments are featured in her thought-provoking report.

Here are a few of the thoughts it provoked in me:

  • With such broad adoption of smartphones, corporate blocking of social networking sites in the workplace will be meaningless within a year. If two of three physicians – and more than two of five consumers – already have smartphones and can access the Internet, there is no way social network blocking can be effective unless employee phones are confiscated during work hours. Therefore it would be more profitable for IT departments to facilitate the right kind of social networking usage instead of trying to hold it back.
  • Rapid Growth. The low cost of developing smarthphone apps, combined with the amount of funding being devoted to health IT and the speed with which apps can be deployed, means we will continue to see rapid growth in innovation in apps for both providers and patients.
  • The iPad will make a significant difference in mobile health IT adoption. OK, it wasn’t really Jane’s report that provoked me to think this. I stopped at Best Buy and played with one. Beautiful device. Super fast. Great interface. I probably won’t buy one until the next generation (just as I waited until the second generation of the iPod and the iPhone 3g), but I see it really changing the way people interact with computers.
  • Is it Health Care or Healthcare? The report’s title is How Smartphones are Changing Health Care for Consumers and Providers but the sponsoring organization is the California HealthCare Foundation.

What other thoughts does the report provoke in you?