LiveBlog: New Media Requires New Strategies
Written November 5th, 2007 by Thomas Ames10:51:48 It’s nice to be in a presentation that readily admits “content is king.” I don’t know how many times even over the past two days about new media and what I call a largely superfluous pizazz, and how it will impact healthcare. Will it? Sure. But too many organizations are lacking in content to adequately compliment their new media initiatives.
10:57:40 We’re going through some statistics about the average Web user. For instance, according to Dave Bennett and his presentation, “57% of internet users have watched videos online and most of them share what they find with others.” Many statistics relate to the usage of new media and how broadband has affected it. Sure, that’s true. But the question is whether this is relevant to healthcare. That’s always something that has eluded me: why all of this concentration on podcasting? The day I download a podcast about treating a kidney stone is the day I will give up the internet.
11:03:24 Here’s another reference to YouTube. Yesterday one of the Greystone sessions I went to was about new media, and YouTube was being very well recommended by the presenter. But there’s something perhaps only I noticed: the most viewed video on this hospital’s channel was 44. Granted, setting up a channel and uploading video doesn’t take much time, but I think it’s more than ridiculous to concentrate on YouTube as a way to proliferate your hospital’s message. I think some presenters are making a false analogy of “YouTube gets THIS many people; therefore, you should go here because you’ll get a lot!” My inclination and experience says that’s just not true, and if it’s between 15 minutes of putting up a YouTube video and 15 minutes of search engine optimization on Google, I’ll choose the boring SEO. It works.
11:10:03 As a traditionalist in terms of content, perhaps I’m in the wrong presentation. The presenter just asked if podcasting is important. His answer is that it’s as big as satellite radio. Again, I think this is a false analogy that if something is big and widely used, it can be conformed to healthcare. See my previous comment about kidney stones. I’m really close to turning off the internet. Considering how many people have tripped over my power cord in the last half-an-hour, they might encourage me to do just that.
11:18:54 There’s some discussion about podcast transcriptions. Some people seemingly outsource this. Couldn’t they just listen to the podcast and type it out? Maybe I just don’t understand.
11:21:45 Dave is talking about the importance of video. Despite not thinking YouTube is a great resource for us just yet, I think video can certainly do a lot for our organizations. Putting up a name and a picture truly does very little to establish an emotional connection between the patient and the practitioner. Given that the patient’s life is in the physician’s hands, I think video can serve as an important way of establishing a first emotional connection to the doctor. On the other hand, given that not every doctor is a great communicator, it can also be a negative. But I would definitely recommend creating as many videos as possible.
11:23:03 A question from an audience member is how the presenter hosts his Flash and audio. He uses external sources: didn’t catch the name for Flash, but he uses GoDaddy (.com) for audio. They have a very inexpensive option for podcasts and general audio storage and distribution. As a customer of GoDaddy, I definitely recommend them.
11:26:43 The presenter is telling us about a person who put out audio on iTunes about Alzheimer’s. They received over 50,000 downloads. Some questions: first, is it true? Second, I wonder if it’s because people looking for emotional support (as many family members of Alzheimer’s do) are more willing to download things from informal support groups and not just the dry physician speaking for 30 seconds about the same information they found on WebMD, Wikipedia, and the like. If we want audio to be successful, it has to be original and genuine.
11:29:01An interesting insight: “new media requires new search.” If someone searches for diabetes on your Web site, what do you want them to find? Well, there’s the service line page, your videos, audio, news releases, patient profiles. Dave broke it down by format into different boxes. Innovative, and I think it clearly displays all relevant content without making you arbitrarily value a video over a service line page.
11:33:50 While he’s speaking some more about video and text messages, it occurs to me that there’s a LOT of people in this room. In fact, they had to bring in more seats. So obviously the subject of new media is incredibly important to healthcare-oriented Web professionals. But interestingly enough, according to most of our surveys, we have very small Web teams and relatively small budgets. Can we achieve new media on small budgets and teams of 1-2 people? Nonetheless while balancing hospital politics, newsletters, content management, the ever increasingly popular intranet, and in-house SEO?
11:40:39 There seems to be a lot of interest in text messaging, and according to reports he has read, text messaging has been very successful. An organization won an award for their text messaging initiative, so this is obviously something coming. I’d like to know numbers, though: how many are using it? The services are free from this hospital but you might be charged per message by your provider. As someone who went over by 110 messages last month, I know how that can hurt.
11:43:18 Mobile sites are becoming more popular for us to implement. But as one audience member admitted, use has been “very slow.” We at St. Louis Children’s will be going through a drastic, messy highway construction initiative starting in January. Mobile is something we’re looking into to not just inform our patients’ families how to get to the hospital and alternate access routes, but also provide these very same things to our own employees. Despite this happening in the next couple months, this is more of a long-term goal. But, even so, it’s not any surprise to any CMS vendors that clients are now asking for mobile-supported pages, particularly for directions and contact numbers.
11:44:02 Well that’s the end of this session. Hope you enjoyed it!
November 5th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
Great comments so far, keep it up.
May 4th, 2009 at 7:42 am
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