I was part of a presentation recently where one of the speakers made this statement: “When you go to a Web site, what do you do? You search, right? That’s how everybody finds what they are looking for.”
In case you are not aware, social media has invaded our web space. Transparency is popular and public health information is being shared. I find it amazing that the Internet is the number one source for educating one’s self on health related topics, even more popular than asking your own doctor! Wow, we have become an empowered bunch of know-it-all’s. Well good for us! We are, in fact, a generation of web savvy multi-taskers, able to simultaneously watch TV, surf the web, listen to music and talk or text on our cell phones. (Well, not me but the rest of you people out in cyber-land). We make decisions based on our network of friends, not traditional ads which is good because studies have shown that “groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.” (Surowiecki J.) So, we are, therefore, at the very least, know-it-all populaces in training.
Because of this societal change, more people are seeking social networking virtually, either in lieu of on in conjunction with live, face-to-face networking. Blogs, vlogs, vodcasts, discussion boards, forums, RSS, wiki, Facebook, Twitter, avatars, Flickr, Second Life, Technorati … overwhelming and seemingly never-ending. Yet, despite its monster type appearance, social media is worth taming and incorporating into your hospital strategy. Here’s why – MySpace, 100 million users, Twitter, 2 million tweets a day, Wikipedia, 2.4 million articles. So many people to reach, so little time. Are you ready?
Ralph Waldo Emerson said that it was, but on the Web, I’m not so sure. I’ve always advocated consistency in design and navigation for three reasons:
A recent article in Website Magazine talked about a new mashup from a company called Ifbyphone (http://public.ifbyphone.com/). This firm offers a telephone application that can integrate direct-response call data with Web-based advertising information through Google Analytics, which could ultimately offer us, as marketers, the possibility of gauging the overall effectiveness of a marketing campaign.