January 2010

Social media for B-to-B health care companies: Is there value?

There is tremendous buzz about using social media to promote all things consumer including health care treatments and diagnostics. But what if your company markets to hospital administrators and clinicians instead of patients? Does that mean there is no value for your company to engage in social media? 

When thinking about how the medical community is using social media, the perception tends to be that social media sites like Facebook and YouTube are only used to target patients, however also present are influential medical organizations and health care companies targeting clinicians and hospital administrators. The Society of Interventional Radiology (SIR) has a Facebook fan page that communicates updates on SIR's upcoming meetings, announces webinars and provides video clips of clinicians sharing their experiences using interventional radiology to treat patients. YouTube is also full of these types of videos designed for physicians to observe cutting-edge practices in surgery, diagnostics and other treatments.

With regards to targeting health care administrators, social media sites designed for professional networking--such as LinkedIn and Twitter--can be strategic venues for developing a presence for your brand. While LinkedIn is best known for providing individuals with a trusted network of business professionals to help them identify job opportunities, there is another component to LinkedIn that is conducive for helping to brand companies as key opinion leaders in their industries. With more than 55 million members including executives at every Fortune 500 company, LinkedIn provides a channel to get in front of key decision-makers in the health care business world.

Even better, it's very easy to begin building a corporate presence on LinkedIn. In minutes you can create a company profile that is essentially the same as the boilerplate section of a corporate website. Also simple to do is forming a LinkedIn group, a more interactive forum than a company profile that is designed to be a place for sharing industry and/or corporate news and allows members to begin discussions with one another. It is a great place to upload links to media coverage about your company as well as interesting articles about the industry.

One of the important choices when setting up a group is to either make it open to anyone who wants to join vs. invite-only. There are pros and cons to both options. If the group is going to be comprised of company executives who want to use it as a forum to share information between one another, then it would be best to set up the group as invite-only to prevent sharing information inadvertently with competitors who may unknowingly join a public group. If however, the number one goal of setting up the group is to elevate the company's brand to any and all business professionals, the public option will make it easier for more folks to join and would be the best choice. Also, it should be noted that if an inappropriate comment is posted, the group manager has the ability to delete the comment and/or subsequent comments in the discussion as well as remove "difficult" members from the group.

That said, it is important to remember that social media sites are not well suited to keeping information private. Anything you post to a LinkedIn group could be seen by clients, prospective clients and competitors. Social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn frequently change their privacy policies and settings. When changes are made they are not always transparently communicated to members.

If the idea of driving discussion seems too aggressive, there is still value in familiarizing yourself with outlets such as LinkedIn and Twitter. Like all communications campaigns, the key lies in finding outlets that reach your desired audience. Even if you're not ready to engage proactively, just listening to what business professionals in your industry are talking about can help inform how you go about reaching them. To this end, sites like Sermo are conducive to learning how physicians think about a particular topic. There are sponsorship opportunities available for companies to post questions and have access to the clinicians' answers, something that could be worthwhile if you are researching the best way to position a new product or relaunch an old one.

So the answer then is, yes, absolutely there is value for B-to-B health care companies to engage in social media, and we didn't even delve into opportunities on Twitter. Come back soon for a post dedicated to best practices on Twitter for health care companies with both B-to-B and B-to-C selling models. 

Posted by Sherry Feldberg on January 29, 2010 at 2:11 PM
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Inspiration and Perspiration in PR

Yesterday I met with an interesting company that was interviewing healthcare public relations agencies. They had developed a detailed set of criteria for the PR agency that they were going to select. This is not uncommon, in fact, it is de rigeur.  In this case, management kept coming back to their desire to hire an agency that “thinks out of the box,” and is “highly creative.”  Not the “normal type of healthcare or medical PR” agency.” Understandably they also placed a premium on results, with the goal of selecting the agency that could combine their intellectual and creative assets with a solid track record of delivering for their clients.

Our discussion made me think of Colleen, a senior account executive at Schwartz. For years Colleen and I have worked together on a non-branded campaign to heighten awareness of Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA). The target media for the campaign has always been consumer-type media of all kinds -  daily newspapers, women’s books, men’s publications, family magazines, etc. - the hardest and most difficult coverage to land. We have been hugely successful in our campaign, due largely to an account team composed of people like Colleen.  

Around three years ago (yes years!) Colleen first interested a senior editor at Self  in  writing a piece on OSA. This was a key outlet for us because women are gatekeepers to family health and our research had shown that spouses and significant others frequently “turned their husbands and boyfriends in” due to excessive snoring  -  a leading indicator of OSA. Colleen was thrilled since Self is a such a tough “get.”  She sent information to the editor but the piece kept on getting pushed out. The editor left Self and Colleen had to start over again and again and again…Every time important new studies came out on OSA, Colleen would renew negotiations with a revolving cast of editors.  As Ahab, it became her Moby Dick. Time passed but Colleen would not be deterred. Then one blessed day last month, Colleen arrived at our meeting breathless with the news that after getting a freelance writer interested in writing the story for Self and prodding her to conduct interviews, the piece was finally going to run in the January 2010 issue of Self. And you know what? It did. Here’s an abbreviated version:

What's really keeping you awake

So, what does any of this have to do with the company I met with yesterday?  Like them, I believe that great healthcare PR people need to be creative and be willing to leave traditional ideas behind and think expansively and “out of the box.” Over the years on this campaign we had consistently provided the client with some really great, innovative concepts. BUT….and this is a big “but,” more than anything, the best PR people I know are tenacious, “never-say-die” advocates for their clients. I have always thought that great healthcare PR or PR of any kind actually combine a dose of healthy inspiration with a continuous dose of perspiration. While companies sometimes think that there must be a magic bullet or mysterious secret sauce to what we do, I disagree.  It’s pretty simple if you think of it.

Creativity and brilliant strategy is essential to all effective PR.campaigns. We take great pride in our ideas here at Schwartz. But sometimes it is the sheer effort of a bright, energetic, tireless, undefeatable PR pro - like Colleen - that makes the difference.  In PR as in life, there’s no real substitute for going the extra yard.

 

Posted by Lloyd Benson on January 27, 2010 at 9:21 AM
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The Changing Media Landscape: What it Means for Healthcare Companies

When you convene a group of leading healthcare journalists, in front of a room full of healthcare PR professionals, sometimes there's no telling what you might hear. Journalists and PR folk, especially healthcare PR agency specialists, have a bit of a love hate relationship. We both need each other, for different reasons of course, and in light of the different media world we live in today, it's more critical than ever that we best understand how we can help each other. As a PR practitioner, I'm most concerned with finding creative and impactful ways for my medical device, biotech and biopharmaceutical clients to get their message out to their key target audiences. The game has changed and in fact continues to change on what often seems like a minute-to-minute basis. OK, maybe I'm exaggerating but you get the point.

To that end, we prepared a special report with our takeaways from this session, thoughts on how the media environment is altering communications strategies and ideas on how healthcare companies can capture the right mix of influential mindshare. Is it shocking that healthcare journalists are busy (no), have fewer resources (no) and have less time to pursue feature-based stories (no)? How about the fact that several of the reporters we heard from have yet to jump on the social media bandwagon? Probably not shocking, but interesting, yes especially when the media organizations they write for are knee deep in trying to drive eyeballs to their respective Web sites via the multitude of social media tools and channels available. Check out the report and read on to uncover the good, bad and the ugly of what to expect in 2010. Feel free to opine on our blog with your thoughts and observations, we would love to hear from you.

 

Posted by Risa Goldman Burgess on January 26, 2010 at 8:58 AM
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New York Times Report on Radiation: Balanced or too Sensational?

The January 24th edition of the Sunday New York Times ran a Page One Investigative report on the perils and dire consequences on the use of radiation in medical diagnostics and cancer therapies. The lengthy report, put together by an investigative team of six people, left the reader chilled and saddened for the families of the two patients whose experiences formed the substance of the vast majority of the Times’ reporting. Indeed they suffered greatly as a result of what the Times inferred was a result of a human error and/or faults in complex technology. Rare will be the reader who will put the piece down believing as much in the safety and efficacy of radiation as when they began reading.

Yet the Report was both disconcerting and troublesome to me.  As a healthcare public relations professional, I have indeed represented companies who had developed both radiation diagnostics and various types of therapies, yet even so, I found I was not biased by my professional associations. What really was disturbing to me was this quote found in the 9th paragraph of the 4 full page article.

“Without a doubt, radiation saves countless lives, and serious accidents are rare.”

OK.   I get that—and I believe it. For many years radiation based protocols have been the standard of care and indeed gold standard in more procedures than I have time to list here. And this knowledge, juxtaposed with the Times reporting of yesterday is totally perplexing to me. I feel that the Times reporting was both sensationalistic and severely unbalanced. If they were to use all of that hugely expensive space in the Sunday paper detailing the potentially dangerous applications of radiation, would not a great deal larger amount of space be required to tell the stories of just some of the “countless” number of lives that the Times says radiation therapy has saved. I don’t get it.

Of course medical error and improper use of new and different technologies are serious problems. They deserve to be covered and extensively reported on. But to run such an emotional and one-sided account as the Times did, disappoints me. Not only as a healthcare PR Pro, but also as an informed potential patient.  I love the Times. It is my favorite newspaper and a ‘must-read’ every day. But in this case they fell far short of their usually high journalistic standards. And in doing so, carried out an injustice to their readers by painting a picture that only tells a small, small part of the story.

Posted by Lloyd Benson on January 25, 2010 at 5:27 PM
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