It’s been a couple of weeks since Greystone’s first Webmaster Workshop for 2010. We really had a good time getting to know all of those that attended.
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.
It seems, especially in health care, that we tend to get wrapped up in our day-to-day duties and the brainstorming and creativity of promoting our organizations online gets lost along the way. That’s why I feel it’s important to keep our eyes open in our everyday life and experiences, and draw ideas from places other than competitors and peers health organizations’ websites.
At Greystone we are a pretty lean company that gets an extraordinary amount of work done. There are lots of things we could probably do better, but given our size we really accomplish a lot. This is in large part because we have a great team of dedicated and talented individuals working here. Most importantly, everyone is ready to pitch in and do whatever needs to get done at the time. Keeping up this blog is something we all agree is important… we believe in the power and value of blogs, and make recommendations to our clients all the time that they should have a blog of their own. However, when it comes right down to it, Greystone is not great at blogging. The Greystone blog is one of those things which our busy schedules make it tough to get done and days and weeks can go by without anyone writing or posting anything to our blog. That’s why a few weeks ago we created a weekly schedule and assigned everyone a week to post something to the blog. So far, I’m happy to report that we are only a week behind. :) I won’t tell you who at Greystone hasn’t finished they blog post yet, but the pressure is on!
Every day people say great things about your hospital or healthcare system. “They saved my brother’s life”, “They are some of the nicest people around”, “We’ve had our babies there and it was a great experience”. They say it in the grocery store, in church, during poker night, and at the salon.
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.
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
If you manage or are otherwise responsible for your organization’s Web site, I’m sure you’ve heard that more than once. I used to hear it at Aurora all the time. I’d get off the phone with a colleague from another hospital or health system who was just gushing about the site and asking how on earth we did all that, and somebody would darken my door to tell me right to my face how bad our site was.
I recently co-authored an article for the Marketing Health Services Journal about the potential impact of the loss of Net Neutrality on healthcare. I thought I would share some of the thoughts and concepts about it in this post.
It is hard to believe that it is already 2008. What will that mean for us in healthcare interactive marketing? What new trends will we see? It seems to me, at a minimum, it will include: Read more…