The Twemperor is Woefully Under-Dressed
Written March 10th, 2009 by Marc NeedhamI spoke on a panel at the recent World Health Care Congress 2nd Annual Leadership Summit on Consumer Connectivity. My panel was ostensibly about patient education but my focus was to be Twitter. To get a sense of the audience’s comfort level I asked, “How many people are familiar with Twitter,” expecting to have to explain the concept to a room half full of confused people.
Nearly everyone in the room raised their hand. Bearing in mind that this was a diverse audience ranging from physicians to health care communicators to CEOs, I was very impressed.
It seems that everyone, everywhere is excited by the apparently endless possibilities offered by this simple web app – hardly a day goes by without a major news outlet burping out a hurriedly-assembled Twitter puff piece. The hubris (twubris?) bubbles up in places as unlikely as health care. Health care providers across the world are scrambling over one another to find innovative and exciting new ways to leverage this newest kid on the social media block. Twitter is trotted out and touted as the answer to questions ranging from, “how can I find out what people think of our brand,” to, “what is the best way to educate my patients?”
I’ll admit to having been pulled along for some time, even contributing to the noise. However, as time wears on I’m finding myself plagued by my inner curmudgeon. He steps forward with reams of data from monitoring tools and traffic analysis programs to suggest an idea so sensible that it sounds radical, “Twitter is a lot of fun and it has some narrow utility for a health care provider but it isn’t the best answer to any of the important questions our industry faces today.”
Consider the following questions:
What is the best way to connect with my patients online?
Your patients are all over the web but as it stands now, most of them aren’t on Twitter. They’re looking for information about you on search engines and your website. They’re finding reviews of your physicians and facilities, they’re finding your competitor’s SEM campaigns, they’re finding your poorly optimized and neglected website.
The Scripps Health Twitter account is creeping up on 800 followers – this audience, while significant, doesn’t represent even a fraction of the 170,000 people that roll through Scripps.org every month. They’re both self-selected audiences with an interest in our brand but I feel that the latter deserves a proportionally larger share of our attention.
What is the best way to monitor the ‘buzz’ around my brand online?
A few well-built search terms thrown into TweetGrid or Monitter will likely unearth people saying things about your brand on Twitter. Searching for Scripps and some health keywords pulls up people tweeting about family members in our ICUs, recent visits with our physicians, complaints about parking, complaints about billing and an unnecessarily graphic description of a recent injury. Some of those tweets represent opportunities for us to reach out to a person with an obvious and immediately-addressable need. Others are simply opportunities for us to creep out an unsuspecting patient with our Big Brother tactics.
If you really want to know what people are saying about your brand online, there are much deeper wells than Twitter for you to drop your bucket into. People on blogs and review sites have been complaining about your facilities and your doctors for years. Sensible and effective brand monitoring practices deserve to be a key part of your customer service and/or web strategies. From Google to SocialMention myriad tools exist to serve as your sherpas on this journey of digital self-discovery. Twitter will leave you with a narrow and incomplete picture of the mountain that lies ahead.
I’m not saying that the Emperor is naked; I’m just saying that he might want to consider wearing more than a thong before stepping in front of the crowd.
Twitter should not be all things to all people – it should merely be some things to some people. So what can it do for us here in health care?
How about using it not to monitor buzz but to build buzz? The spotlight is shining brightly on Twitter and clever uses of the platform get tons of exposure – witness Henry Ford Health System’s recent ‘live tweeting’ of some surgeries and the resultant CNN story about the event.
How about using it to hone your marketing communications? If you have any halfway decent web traffic analysis tool you should be able to see how many clickthroughs every news story, event or marketing message receives when posted on Twitter. Over time this will give can give you a clear picture of what topics, headline styles and keywords are really grabbing your audience. Get fancy and try some multivariate testing around a single issue. Retweets count for a double point bonus.
How about using it as a white-glove concierge service for customers savvy enough to be in the right place? Zappos does this to great effect by responding quickly and helpfully to any and all customer issues raised on Twitter. You might not be able to climb the mountain of patient complaints you’ll find on the internet but you can get a start by kicking the pebbles you’ll find on Twitter.
Tim O’Reilly recently tweeted, “Analogy of twitter to fruit flies was in context of genetics. Twitter evolves fast, so it’s a fab case study in where internet wants to go.” and he was right. Twitter has attracted a frothing audience of early adopters and innovators that are tweaking and hacking Twitter in all sorts of exciting ways. Plenty of people are guessing where it will head next but only time will really tell. Hopefully the steady beacon of utility will be lit before the damp kindling of fad burns out.
March 10th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
Great post – challenging to a lot of us in the twittervers, but in a good way.
a few questions:
First, a lot of marketing and communications folks focus on using social media to connect with patients, but most CEOs are concerned with connecting with their staff. Even if the audiences are small by comparison to web sites, could the be substantial in terms of percentage of total employees?
Building on that, can providers reasonably expect to ‘invite’ people who are not using social media to do so? Can we say “hey, come interact with us here on twitter?” and expect to get employees and/or patients?
Thanks for the thought provoking post!
-N
March 10th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
We Twitter when we can, but we realize we’re reaching such a small fraction of our audience (like Marc mentioned) that spending considerable time on it is hard to justify. It appears the most active segment of our Twitter audience is all of you – our comrades at other medical centers.
We’ve discussed using it for reaching internal staff, but to avoid the hassles of getting them to make their own accounts and follow a feed, or get SMS, we’d have to just point them at the URL of our account. At that point, why bother? Just use a real blog (rather than a limited micro-blog). Which is pretty much what our internal communications site is.
Some things to consider when asked to use Twitter on the job (see below). These will be straightforward to you all, but I’d like to hear any other additions to this, or thoughts on these.
What about this problem lends itself to a micro-blog? Would a full-blown blog be more appropriate?
Is there a dedication to posting new content?
What’s the measure of success?
How will this effort tie-in to your other Web efforts?
March 10th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
A nice, candid post, Marc. Web professionals, especially those in marketing, often seem to have an “I’ve got one of those” approach to online strategy:
Facebook? Check.
Twitter? Check.
YouTube? Check.
Virtual world presence? Check.
2.0? Check.
There are a number of reasons for this scattershot practice: web folks like to tinker; many of these tools are free, and take little time to use; it’s fun; it sounds good in presentations and networking cocktail receptions at conferences.
But to be truly effective and worth the time to maintain (which is crucial), these tools are best deployed in the service of an overall strategy. You have to answer some crucial questions beforehand, and craft an execution plan: Who is the specific audience for the tool? What is your specific goal? What specific kinds of content can you deliver to achieve your objective?
Generally, simply “putting it out there” doesn’t do much outside your Powerpoint presentation. You end up with a toolkit full of blunt instruments.
March 10th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
Marc, great post – I told everyone Twitter about it
I agree with most of what you say. Twitter is not going the save health care, solve global warming or restore the economy. I too am weary of the true believers who think it’s the magic bullet for any problem.
At the same time, I’ve had enough of the nay-sayers who go on about it being a complete waste of time. I get it. They don’t like it, and that’s fine.
Is there no place for a reasonable, balanced view? Twitter is a simple idea that has great potential. Just like the telephone, it’s value increases as the network of members grow. If there are only two phones in the world then you have an interesting toy. If everyone has a phone you have indispensable business tool. Repeat with the fax machine, email, etc.
The entry costs for all these tools are low, so trying them out it is easy. I don’t agree that you need a detailed strategy. If I had to build a full-blown business case, strategic plan and ROI forecast for every web opportunity – well, you know hospitals, we’d still be thinking about launching our first Web site.
Try, experiment, see what works. There will be many dead ends (see Second Life), but there will also be great successes, and no business case will tell you which one to pick.
Of course, you don’t put all your focus on Social Media. As I’ve noted before, out of 1,000 visitors to my site, 700 come from Google and 1 comes from Twitter. You better believe that I pay attention to SEO and SEM.
But, if you think like I do, that in the long-term Social Media could change the landscape of the Web, now is a good time to get started.
March 11th, 2009 at 5:03 am
Spot on post, and I love the earlier comment that we seem to be Tweeting among ourselves. That’s been demonstrated in earlier studies as well. But still worth experimenting with, and I love the possible use with employees. Look at most hospital Facebook pages, for example. Most of the “fans” are employees!
March 11th, 2009 at 10:46 am
Throughout our five or so months of trying out Twitter, it’s become extremely apparent that the tool is useful with connecting with media, our local community and national healthcare stakeholders.
For instance, recently, we posted live tweets from a press conference held in our Hollings Cancer Center. We received direct feedback from local media reps who wanted us to “tweet away.” Perhaps local media reps in other markets are not as responsive on Twitter, but in Charleston, every outlet is covered on the Twitterverse. Also, national media outlets are encouraging their journalists/reporters to have a Twitter account, so you can connect with them as well.
Also, I completely agree with the comment made about trying multiple messages out. Throw it out there and see what sticks. Now is the time to experiment. Twitter will catch on more and more each day. When the ‘eureka’ moment occurs in the healthcare industry regarding Twitter, you’ve already built a captive audience.
Addressing your key point, however, perhaps Twitter is not the right forum to engage with patients. In fact, I would argue online communities are the better forum for such a conversation.
For now, my suggestion would be to start with a simple strategy. Decide on the audiences you are trying to reach and post messages that would engage them. If you see someone posting about your institution, follow them. If you see people in your local community that fit your target audience, follow them, too. They will help spread the news about community events. And lastly, engage with your local media reps. They see it as a mutually-beneficial relationship.
March 12th, 2009 at 11:30 am
I find our Duke Medicine Twitter account to be a useful tool for getting the word out about cool info on our sites (no matter who is listening). Twitter is what you make of it. It’s another tool in a suite that would include enewsletters, blogs, etc. What strikes me is that we tend to push people from those social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) to our main resource — DukeHealth.org. It all comes back to having a strong site, and strong content on that site. Any patients we get from social media is icing. As long as we don’t spend too much time on it, it is likely worth it.
I also like the brevity of Twitter. I’ve spent more time on this comment than I would on three Tweets.
March 13th, 2009 at 9:46 am
Great post and I agree — it is “narrow utility” now. Further, I’m not sure it will widen. I didn’t say this first, but it has become a bit of a mantra for me: to be social, people follow people, not organizations or products. Unless you’re a self-labeled “social media expert.”
March 13th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
@Chris: I couldn’t have said it better myself. “People follow people”.