Several times a year, Greystone.Net conducts its own primary research on a hot industry topic. Recently our study on the use of patient portals concluded, with more than 40 organizations participating. The results reveal a number of useful findings for both healthcare marketers and vendors:
One of my favorite board games is Stratego. For those not familiar, this is a game that is similar to chess, except in Stratego you don’t know the identity of your opponent’s pieces. The goal in Stratego is to capture your opponent’s flag, and victory requires (according to Wikipedia) “collecting information, planning, and strategic thinking.”
This Fall, the entering college class will graduate in 2014 (those born primarily in 1992) and I worry we won’t be ready for them as healthcare marketers and Web strategists unless we start right now. Is your organization ready? Does your organization have a strategy to get ready?
Lately I’ve been thinking quite a lot about transparency in the online world. Transparency is, after all, one of the basic tenets of social media. You must be transparent to remain credible when it comes to social media. That’s been taught to all of us as we’ve jumped into the social media world. When social media first started on the scene, the ideal of transparency really ignited me. I thought the world would be changed over night. Power to the people, and all that. Organizations would now have to be transparent to their customers, and to the world. However, here we are five years later and we all have learned a lot. I’m not quite as optimistic on that ideal anymore. I do think the bar on transparency has been raised over the past few years, as there are many stories of companies being held to task by interested parties. And the amount and speed with which we all have access to information is still staggering to me. However, I also think that there is still a long way to go on full transparency.
Greystone is pleased to announce the results of our recent survey on hospital/ health system Web budgets. We sent the survey invitation to more than 100 healthcare marketers, and received responses from 65. (please note: Greystone’s research panel is made up of hospitals or health care systems with at least one FTE dedicated to the Web, and members tend to be more “Web 2.0 savvy” than other hospitals and health systems)
We have recently received inquiries from several hospital or health systems Webmasters who want to know our opinion about Web sites like Alexa, Compete.com, and Quantcast.com. These “third party web data providers” use proprietary algorithms to estimate the number of visitors on any Web site, and have become a major resource for many Web marketers.
In case you missed the big news last week, Facebook announced that it has added its 200 millionth member. That’s right – Facebook Nation is now the fifth largest country in the world. If your temptation is to discredit the impact of this amazing growth on healthcare by assuming that these new members come from the ranks of teenagers and college students, you would be making a big mistake. A majority of Facebook users are now over 35, and the fastest growing segment of Facebook users is actually women over 55. According to CNN, “There are now about 1.5 million female users older than 55 on the site — roughly a 550 percent increase over six months ago.” As a 33-yr old who has recently received friend requests from my mother and several of her friends, I can personally attest that the AARP-ization of Facebook is for real.
Today we’re going to use our blog to point you to what has to be my favorite online article of the year from Smashing Magazine: 10 Harsh Truths About Corporate Websites
I had the pleasure of attending the 14th Annual Forum on Customer-Based Marketing Strategies this week, and among the more interesting presentations was one by Elizabeth Scott of New Maven Marketing on what she termed “The New Marketing Hybrid.” She defined that as somebody with expertise in both new and traditional media.
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.