Guest Post by Shawn Zehnder Lea
A Conversation with Shawn Zehnder Lea
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Hospitals engaging in social media have consistently grown in numbers of late. (Ed Bennett, who tracks hospitals using social media, saw his numbers jump by 79 in just six weeks time in January of this years.) Fear of HIPAA, lawsuits, and a lack of message control kept some hospitals out of social media for too long. But a recent Greystone.net report shows that even though social media is growing in hospitals, social media strategy is not growing as quickly – only one in three had a social media plan in place.
In addition to gradually supporting service lines through social media and improving communications with communities, hospitals need to get ready for the rise of what is being termed the “e-patient” and create and adjust social media plans accordingly. Currently, many hospitals are talking through social media channels but they are not necessarily listening well. And they are not alone.
I did a presentation in Virginia last fall about hospitals using social media and the rise of consumerism in health care and how that will affect hospital social media. I had a roster of the hospitals attending, so, of course, the first thing I did was visit their social media sites.
On this one particular day I looked, I noticed that @CarilionClinic seemed to be responding to a patient. I went to @SwiftFalcon’s site and saw that he or she was confused about a bill. I don’t know how it all ended, but I was impressed that an actual patient was actually helped on an actual social media site. It took three days, but, still, I was impressed. Because most often what I saw were press releases. The same ones that were on the corporate Web site. The same ones sent to local media, just now on Twitter. And Facebook. And blogs. And wherever else they could be posted.
In an eMarketer.com report in July of 2009, U.S. executives named the top two reasons (both at 81% in importance) that they saw value in social media: enhancing relationships with customers/clients and building our company’s brand. I didn’t see “distributing press releases” anywhere in the top five.
In the coming year, I hope to see more hospital social media sites used for customer service, patient education, crisis communication, nurse recruitment, mobile access to information, and community and physician outreach. I hope to see help lines online and communities of patients forming. (And, yes, press releases on Employees of the Month and the latest award the hospital or a hospital department has won.)
I hope to see more social – and more strategy.
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