While we cheer this growing acknowledgement of social media as a marketing tool, we wonder about the effectiveness of most hospitals’ efforts as they “dip their toes into the water.” Are they building engagement? Are they forming communities? Are they advancing their brand and differentiating?

Social media without a social media marketing strategy may help us develop Facebook “likers” or Twitter followers, but we’ll never get the kind of engagement that will build an engaged audience and meet our objectives.

So what do we do? Let’s look at what Media Logic is doing for one of its medical clients, a large multi-site radiology practice in New Jersey, Altantic Medical Imaging or AMI. Radiology is a highly competitive field with private specialty practices jousting for patients with large medical institutions and multi-specialty physician groups.

To position AMI as a technological forerunner and thought leader, Media Logic focused their social media efforts on building awareness of one of the hottest issues in radiology — potentially excessive exposure to radiation. Dr. David Dow, an AMI radiologist and an ardent spokesperson for low dose radiologic techniques, became a spokesperson for the practice through topical blog posts, supported by Twitter and Facebook submissions.  Through a carefully planned content marketing strategy, link-building and traffic generation, AMI now appears at the top of the list for local Google searches and has developed a growing community of loyal and engaged followers.

So what does this mean for larger, more diverse institutions? Most importantly, this is your opportunity to shine – but you’ll likely never find the spotlight with an all encompassing hospital effort. It will be too broad and, frankly, too “institutional.” Focus on one of your “centers of excellence” as a beginning. Then, while it may be politically difficult, you’re going to need to have a “voice” or “voices” — real, live people to spearhead the conversation and create engagement. Finally, you’re going to need to develop an ongoing source of fresh and relevant content. For AMI, Media Logic’s Zeitgeist & Coffee^SM process has helped scour the landscape for up-to-the minute topics, trends and commentary. On the backend, precise tracking and analysis will help you determine which topics and discussion items are doing the “heavy lifting.”

It’s taken medical marketers 10 years to realize the promise of the Web. The smart ones won’t wait so long this time around.

Even though the effort has just recently launched, we have used “best practice” social marketing techniques we have learned through our work with highly regulated industries such as banking and insurance to build-in security while optimizing engagement. Here are three key elements we believe are important in using social media as a marketing tool for medical practices.

Dealing with Risk

Medical providers are (rightfully) concerned about the risk of HIPAA violations on social media sites. Medical providers are also concerned about expectations that they will furnish diagnoses and treatment advice in response to fan queries. The safest way round these issues is to have a clearly stated policy (published as part of a bio or “about” section on all social media platforms) that outlines what may and may not be discussed in a public forum. For AMI, we also crafted a library of physician-approved responses to some expected (and potentially problematic) questions that would, for example, refer the fan back to his/her personal physician.

We also knew that we should be prepared to the “airing” of patient-service issues (for example, long waiting times, billing concerns, etc.). These types of issues need to be addressed quickly in the public space to show the practice’s concern and then moved offline for resolution.

Perhaps most importantly, Media Logic (via its Zeitgeist & Coffee social media management service) established a rigid approval protocol for all social media postings, including responses to fan queries and blog comments.

Establishing a Voice

One of the most critical aspects of establishing an effective social media presence is to differentiate your practice from the sea of medical information available online and in the social space. For AMI, we looked to do two things. First, we needed a persona (or a “voice”) that would speak for the practice. No one wants to have a conversation with an institution or a faceless practice. At AMI, this voice was the voice of Dr. David Dowe, an eminent radiologist and a rather forthright persona in his own right. Dr. Dowe’s voice personalizes AMI and makes it distinctive in the social space.

Second, we needed a point-of-view. Why should anyone care to read AMI’s blog or to follow the practice on Facebook or twitter? We found the answer in AMI’s adoption of an important new approach to CT-scans using low doses of radiation. It allowed us to position AMI as a thought leader and champion of an important cause – beyond being “just another imaging center.”

Being Committed

Finally, participating in social media requires a commitment. “In & out” attempts fail to build followers and can, in fact, produce a negative response. AMI, working with Media Logic, established firm expectations for participation (for example, number of Facebook posts per weeks, number of blog posts per month, etc.) to make sure that we were actively conversing with our target audiences. Using Media Logic’s Zeitgeist & Coffee dashboard as control central, a Media Logic conversation manager tracks the schedule, promotes topics of conversation, encourages client participation and handles the details of posting and follow up. Most social media efforts fail because they are just not anybody’s “real” job.

Just as eMarketer was making this prediction in January, Media Logic was ramping up a strategic social marketing effort with Healthways SilverSneakers Fitness Program® that would help prove its validity and demonstrate how social media can effectively engage the older adult crowd. By implementing a collaborative marketing approach and launching a site specifically designed to encourage information sharing in a safe, supportive online older adult community, SilverSneakers witnessed active engagement on its Facebook page grow from fewer than 500 fans in December 2009 to nearly 12,000 fans today.

The success of our work with SilverSneakers supports the upward trend of social media adoption among older adults while highlighting the value of social media as a marketing tool enabling conversation-centric, two-way models of communication for membership-based organizations.

Working Social Marketing Into a Mature Network
As far as membership organizations go, the award-winning SilverSneakers Fitness Program was thriving – offered to Medicare Advantage plan members through their health plan clients at more than 9,400 participating fitness and wellness centers across the country, SilverSneakers provides an innovative blend of exercise classes, health education and social opportunities to help mature adults maintain active, independent lifestyles. Studies have even found that older adults who participate in SilverSneakers are admitted to hospitals less frequently, have lower overall healthcare costs and experience a significantly reduced risk of depression.

SilverSneakers was already a hugely popular program, but the strategic use of social marketing has provided the organization with new and effective ways of connecting with potential members, and perhaps more importantly, encouraging loyalty to the program, ongoing member participation and involvement.

“The program is an inherently social experience,” according to our client and Healthways’ senior manager of Member Engagement Marketing, Michelle Eckert. “Introducing social media has allowed our participants to further enhance their social connections by sharing stories, photos, tips and notes of encouragement to others. Our experience supports the research that shows older adults citizens will adopt social media and participate, provided they see content and groups dedicated to their needs and interests.”

Managing Social Media Without Breaking a Sweat
While SilverSneakers began experimenting with social media late last year, the program needed a systemic approach, guidance, and support to create stronger interest and active participation. In January, the organization partnered with us and deployed Zeitgeist & Coffee^sm, our social media management suite specially designed to help organizations ramp up their social media marketing efforts, making them more effective and easier to implement and sustain.

Since implementing Zeitgeist & Coffee, SilverSneakers has realized…

• A significant spike in Facebook fans
• A dramatic increase in fans’ levels of engagement
• More fans who are potential SilverSneakers members visiting the Facebook page to learn about the program
• Friends and family members of SilverSneakers participants are joining the Facebook page to lend support and enthusiasm

SilverSneakers’ experience with Media Logic and Zeitgeist & Coffee has meant the difference between having a Fan page and having an active community.  By providing the methodology, marketing expertise and technology to fully leverage social media as a marketing a tool, we’ve made it easier for organizations to engage older adults and foster a meaningful social presence with the mature audience.

Related Articles

• Engaging the Aging: Creating Conversation for SilverSneakers (logicaljuice.mlinc.com)

Watch as our conversation manager, Michelle, provides a behind-the-scenes look at how Media Logic and SilverSneakers are using social media as a marketing tool for collaboration and interaction with an active community of older adults.

Blackshaw does a wonderful job highlighting the dualities and absurdities (not to mention clichés) that emerge in any discussion of social ownership. I think these dualities emerge because what we have in social is one of those “duck/rabbit” or “vase/face” optical illusions which delight and frustrate us because, although we can see both things easily, our brains won’t allow us to see both at the same time. “It’s a duck! It’s a rabbit! It’s a duck!”

It’s the same with social.

Looked at one way, the “duck” way, social is the sum of social promotions – the games, viral videos and contests designed to trigger sharing. Ownership of the “duck” is a pretty easy call … it’s the marketing department plus the marketing department’s professional service partners (its “digital agencies” or whatever).

Looked at another way, the “rabbit” way, social is something entirely different. It is not a set of channels or promotions. It is a toolset, completely under individual user control, that allows us to connect selectively with the people, news and information sources and assistive technologies (like search) that we trust. We – both individuals and businesses – customize and use this toolset to make sense of, and fully exploit, the fire hose of information that pours into our lives and our businesses.

Questions of ownership of the “rabbit” generally spiral into infinities. It’s everyone. It’s no one.

But maybe it is not about ownership, exactly, but more the path of least resistance, or better yet: path of greatest value.

Blackshaw writes, “In my experience, the leader who gets the best (and most inclusive) listening dashboard or radar in place quickly accrues the most organizational legitimacy. Listening pipes, after all, feed many mouths and can drive unity around a common purpose.”

Our experience with Zeitgeist & Coffee shows us that while the marketing department cannot “own” the social “rabbit” (any more than it can own the telephone or people’s private conversations); it can rather quickly become kind of a super-smart “switchboard operator.” Using Z&C, marketing departments, in partnership with us, can confidently and productively connect all the departments within their organization to their respective “networks of trust” – key stakeholders, influencers, customers, and, of course friends and fans (both current and future).

And it gets better yet.

We have found that deploying Z&C toward the goal of creating content for social channels quickly leads to the development of “silo-piercing” circles of collaboration. These circles of collaboration then become entities of independent value, that empower marketing departments to become central to corporate strategy through the process of rationalizing, managing and extracting full value from the direct daily conversations that now take place between organizations and their customers.

In her excellent recent article for Advertising Age, Kunur Patel outlined the struggles big-name social media pioneers have faced trying to implement effective social media content creation and approval processes.

One of the companies, Ford, stumbled on something really remarkable.

What the automaker found lines up nicely with what we’ve discovered ourselves: that the act of collaboration between marketing, advertising, PR and product development necessary to meet the real-time demands of social media has turned out to be an end in itself.

In Ford’s case, in order to create good social strategies and promotions, the company had to pull together people from R&D, PR, merchandising and marketing. In doing so, Ford forged connections through Scott Monty, its head of social media. It found it could leverage these connections through the social web to collaborate and respond to all kinds of business challenges, whether product-related, politics-related or promotions-related.

In the process, Ford’s collaborative media, PR and creative collective (what the company has dubbed “Team Detroit”) found itself at the natural center of strategy; newly empowered as the social hub – the “conductor” as some have taken to describing the role – of a wide range of marketing, product, PR and policy discussions.

A great example of the power of social collaboration is the organic evolution of The Ford Story, a site that started its life as a political advocacy effort and then quickly evolved into Ford’s frontline face. This, folks, is the new company “homepage.”

Ford’s story comes as no surprise to us. At Media Logic, we have found that solving for the social media problem leads to rapid evolution and a new, more strategic role for marketers. All of this is driven by the demands of the social web. But what is perhaps underappreciated is that all of it is possible because of the communication tools necessitated by the social web.

A range of applications for managing Twitter, Facebook and blogs – like HootSuite, CoTweet, Vitrue’s Social Relationship Manager and our own Zeitgeist & Coffee – are evolving into full-fledged collaboration tools that not only meet the communication demands of social media, but unleash the potential of social business.

Learn how to integrate, manage and maximize your company’s total social marketing universe. Request your Zeitgeist & Coffee demo now.

The “Enjoy the Go” promotion is an attempt by Charmin to build buzz and drive awareness using a conversation-centric marketing approach. Twitter chatter has died down since last week, but we will be watching (from afar) to see how this promotion develops when it launches at the end of November.

Jason latched onto our product as an easy way to step clients into social media.

And in true social media fashion, his feedback helped us refine our pitch.

Media Logic’s Zeitgeist & Coffee opens a fat pipe of information that flows without resistance between client, agency, influencer and customer. But raw information is not where the value lies. It’s the social interaction surrounding its contextualization and use – particularly when managed with a real live human at the hub – that modifies creative thinking, leading to more rapid development of innovative strategies, refined brand positionings and even new products.

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