There’s something that happens anytime a group of hospital and healthcare webmasters get together. You can almost see it in everybody’s eyes: “I’m not the only one going through this. I’m not alone!”
I’m always intrigued by questions from clients regarding the value of licensed healthcare content. Nobody really argues that if you want complete and current healthcare information, you need to license it. Doing that yourself would be a logistical nightmare.
I’ve heard it at just about every stop in my career since focusing on the Internet: “We can’t do that because….” All too often the conversation stops there. And when it comes to some interactive or operational element on the Web, it often becomes the answer for a long time, even if the “because” is not longer valid.
With the dominance of Google, and the availability of MSN, Yahoo and others, online search may be one of those services that you don’t know you want better until you get it.
You know what they say about laws and sausages (you don’t want to watch either being made)? The same is kind of true of watching the educational program for the Healthcare Internet Conference being put together. Dozens of proposals, all on seemingly different levels, and the program committee tries to pick the plums to create a coherent and strong program. It’s not easy.
But it’s most definitely enlightening. We see real trends in the submittals each year. This year, for example, it’s become clear that social media is no longer such a great mystery for our industry. In fact, we probably have more proposals to talk about something related to social media than all of the past years combined.
As another testament to the progress our industry has made, the number of proposals on the basics of site redesign, usability, mobile (smartphone) strategies, SEO, SEM, etc., seem to be lighter this year. A few have been bold enough to offer a case study on showing ROI or actual results, and we’d love more of those. More proposals on intranets would be great to see, too.
Actually, if you have not submitted a speaker proposal, we’d love to get one that shares what you have accomplished (if you have a great social media story, don’t let me scare you off). That’s why we’ve extended the deadline for proposals to Wednesday, June 3, 2009.
Share your expertise and get a free conference registration to boot! Click here to download the speaker proposal form