By Amy Dawson, Senior Vice President/Healthcare Account Director

8 in 10 Internet Users Go Online for Health Information

More physician practices and hospitals are starting to embrace Facebook as an important tool in their arsenal of marketing tactics. As marketing dollars shrink, competition intensifies, and more people look to social media as a way to become informed, empowered healthcare consumers, any hospital or practice would be wise to consider how social media can enhance their existing marketing plans. We’re now in the era of Health 2.0 - using social software and its ability to promote collaboration between patients, their caregivers, medical professionals, and other stakeholders in health. It’s really pretty cool when you think about it.

Consider this: eight in 10 Internet users go online for health information. Sure, there are things to consider like staffing, HIPAA, content and more, but can you really afford to be absent from this space and let your competitors be the only voice in the discussion?

I’ve spent the last week looking at a variety of healthcare brands - both hospitals and physician practices - and how they’re using Facebook as a marketing and commnications tool. Some are early adopters and recognize that as their younger patients age, more of them will seek information online rather than schedule an appointment with their doctor. After all, it’s faster and easier than ever to get information online. One caveat here - accessing information online doesn’t replace the value of seeing your physician face-to-face but can certainly help you ask the right questions.

Here are a few examples of Facebook tactics used by healthcare providers that I think are pretty interesting:

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By Jenny Fuerst, Director, Corporate Communications

Fahlgren, Edward Howard to Join Public Relations Businesses

Neil Mortine and Kathy Cupper Obert

Alignment Forms Independent Powerhouse:

Largest Firm in Ohio and Top 30 Nationally

The acquisition, which joins the capabilities of Fahlgren Mortine Public Relations and Edward Howard, is expected to close during the first quarter of 2010 although integration and coordinated new business and marketing efforts will begin immediately.

Check out more details of today’s exciting announcement in the news release.

By Amy Dawson, Senior Vice President/Healthcare Account Director

Hospitals often seem like commodities, don’t they? With the exception of a couple well-known names, they’re pretty similar - they do surgery, deliver babies, most have an emergency department. So how do you differentiate one from another? Especially when most people really don’t want to have a relationship with your brand?That’s where we come in. As a communications company, we love to identify what makes our clients’ brands unique. Then we start to tell that story and engage customers in a dialogue. In today’s Web 2.0 world, it takes a blend of traditional and non-traditional strategies to produce great results.

This was the case with Riverside Methodist Hospital and the Innovation Campaign. The campaign features three real-life people who’ve benefited from a relationship with the hospital and its physicians. From these stories, we were able to build an attention-getting campaign that not only increased brand awareness for our client, but allowed us to stretch our creative legs in this niche, highly competitive market space.

The results went well beyond a move of the brand-awareness needle and rewarded us with a few feathers in our healthcare marketing cap. From thousands of award entries from across the country, the Innovation Campaign was recognized as the cream of the crop from renowned publications such as Marketing Healthcare Today and Healthcare Marketing Report.

We’re proud of getting awards like these, but even more proud of the results we help get for our clients.

By Katherine Zuehlke, Account Supervisor

When I was in elementary school, my daily lunch included four things: a turkey sandwich, fruit snack, juice box and a JELL-O Pudding Snack (preferably chocolate). JELL-O was such a staple in my childhood but during my 20’s, I didn’t buy JELL-O products as often. Not because I didn’t still enjoy them but because I wanted to try new and exciting flavors of desserts.

Capitalizing on Nostalgia

Marketers at JELL-O realized that they could capitalize on the nostalgia of gelatin and pudding, combined with the health and nutrition appeal of the products by marketing them to adults. JELL-O is now promoting their new 70-calorie Rice Pudding in three mature flavors: crème brulee, cinnamon and original.

Their quick and easy desserts with sophisticated tastes are targeted to adults who want a guilt-free treat in less than two minutes.

Companies have been adding new products to their brands for years, but when JELL-O added their new Rice Pudding, they not only added a new product they also added a whole new audience.

Introducing New Products and Programs

When considering new products there are four areas of criteria that one should evaluate to make sure the new product fits with their core brand.

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By Amy Dawson, Senior Vice President/Healthcare Account Director

Today in the New York Times, there is a story about how hospitals are moving toward the use of real, unvarnished stories about patients in their advertising.

We couldn’t agree more.

And it seems like our colleagues feel the same way, which is why we’re the fortunate recipients of several healthcare marketing awards.

Great hospitals have great stories to tell

We’re fortunate to work with great clients like Riverside Methodist Hospital that have allowed us to tell their stories in a real, human and emotional way.  And we think that our storytelling approach is critical in a society that is overwhelming us with marketing messages.

The Riverside innovation campaign, created by Fahlgren,  features three real-life people who’ve benefited from a relationship with the hospital.

The first is Bill Doherty from County Clare, Ireland, whose leg was saved because of a breakthrough vascular procedure; the second was Sarah Lancaster from Westerville, Ohio who recovered rapidly from a near devastating stroke and the final story included William Gray, MD, a New York physician collaborating on the latest in cardiovascular research with Riverside. Not only did we create television spots, but we also featured expanded patient and physician stories on videos posted on Riverside’s YouTube channel. 

Crafting a bestseller

The campaign won a Gold Aster Award for the total advertising campaign among hospitals with 500+ beds. The 2009 Aster Awards consisted of approximately 3,000 entries from across America.  Participant entries competed against similar-sized organizations in their category.  Entries must have scored at least in the top 85% to receive an award.  Judging criteria included creativity, layout and design, functionality, message effectiveness, production quality and overall appeal.

The total campaign also won a Bronze Healthcare Marketing Award and an Award of Merit for the television spots. Much like the Aster Awards, the 2009 Healthcare Marketing Awards received over 3,600 entries in this year’s competition.  

Finally, the internal innovation campaign for Riverside associates and physicians won a PRism award from the Central Ohio Chapter of Public Relations Society of America.

At the end of the day, however, what’s really important to us is that our work is getting measureable results for Riverside. To us, this makes the story a genuine bestseller.

If you want help telling your healthcare brand story, give us a call.

By Amy Dawson, Senior Vice President/Healthcare Account Director

Tweeting live surgeries is catching on as more health care systems embrace social media.

A couple months ago at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, surgeons used robotic surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from a man’s kidney and a benign tumor from another patient’s brain. Earlier this month, a woman had a robotic hysterectomy at Sherman Hospital in Illinois, and last week, surgeons at Aurora St. Luke’s Medical Center in Wisconsin perfomed a double knee replacement.

These surgeries are very different, but all of them were simultaneously broadcast via Twitter. While operating surgeons use Twitter to give short, real-time updates about the procedure.

A Peek into the Operating Room

I am not a nurse, doctor or other trained medical professional, but I have some medical knowledge and have watched surgeries performed firsthand. I’ve also become an avid Twitter user, so I decided to follow along when I heard about Aurora Health’s decision to broadcast the procedure.

I opened up TweetDeck and followed along, reading their tweets of the procedures.

I was fascinated at the speed, precision and honesty of the surgeons doing the double knee replacement. Pictures of the actual procedure were also tweeted. No, I wasn’t grossed out (I seriously love watching this kind of stuff), but those faint of heart followers can choose to not open and view the photos that are tweeted, another advantage of Twitter.

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