Tapping Social Networking Tools: Faster, cheaper, greater impact & more powerful. Over the past four years I have heard from hundreds, if not thousands, of people tell me “Mike, I just don’t get it. What’s the big deal with blogging and micro-blogging?” Those words usually are spoken by a  baby boomer and not a member of Gen X, Y or Z. The post boomers not only “get it” but use it every second of their lives. This “new” form of social interaction has become pervasive at school, work and play, transcending borders, time zones and cultures. All you had to do was watch President Obama’s recent State of the Union address to see how younger Congressional staffers influenced elected officials, as they eagerly “twittered” to constituents back home during the speech. 

Medium IS the Message: Lessons Learned from Social Networks. In the late 1970s and early 80s, when I was in college at Regis University (www.regis.edu) and later at George Washington University (www.gwu.edu), I was studying marketing and communications. The “Internet” may have already been “fathered” by Al Gore and/or Vint Cerf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinton_Cerf, but the primary modes for communications then were the telephone, fax, radio and television. As Marshall McLuhan  www.marshallmcluhan.com/ famously stated, “The medium IS the message” and was credited with coining the term “The Global village,” reinforcing the current “state of flux” and chaos in communications world wide. Now informal mediums, including social networking tools such as blogs, vblogs, twitters, and SMS, are replacing the “traditional” mediums used by previous generations. There is a reason why the newspaper I read during my college years in Denver, The Rocky Mountain News, (http://www.rockymountainnews.com/)  closed 55 days short of its 150 years in publication. The market moved, the paper did not. Period.  

Brief Hx:  Like Kleenex for tissues and Xerox for photocopying, “Twitter” (www.twitter.com) has become the generic term for “micro-blogging.” Started by Evan Williams and Biz Stone as a tiny experiment while operating another company (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evan_Williams), it is a very simple premise: Provide interested “followers” with minute by minute or daily updates about yourself, your company or your healthcare organization’s news, events, trends, commentary, etc.  Twitter limits users to 140 characters—not words—per entry.  (In comparison, the blog you’re now reading has roughly 777 words and 5,1798 characters.) This viral and social networking medium has exploded to 100 million people users world wide and is growing exponentially each month.  The power of micro-blogging is communicating in brief summary form, rather than a long-winded narrative (like this blog perhaps? lol).  Short and to the point, it is geared towards a generation accustomed to “sound bytes” from traditional mediums and wanting to share similar “bits” of communications with their friends, family, co-workers, voters, patients, community and followers across the globe. 

Harnessing the Power of Tweets, Blogs and Direct FROM consumers (DFC) communications. In the past five years, many corporations and organizations have produced corporate blogs to promote their latest products or services or share news with their customers.  They are usually written by the CEO or marketing executive as a means to provide another “medium” with information. On the other hand, blogs and micro-blogging tweets have been a powerful tool for customers to provide feedback– both positive and negative–for the entire world to see (remember Global Village).  

Direct To Consumer vs. MD channel Model. As an example how changing the transitional communications paradigm has worked successfully, anyone who has watched television in the past ten years has witnessed the new advertising category created by pharmaceutical companies called “DTC” or direct to consumers. By advertising via TV, radio, print, and Internet, drugs sales for ED, heart disease, cancer, depression, etc. have soared during the past decade. Eschewing the traditional means of selling medications to physicians first—then patients—the  pharmaceuticals have been able to increase sales, create direct relationships with patients, and increase profitability.  

Direct From Patients^TM (DFP) Model. A similar phenomenon is beginning to emerge where consumers are practicing “Direct From Patient (DFP) communications. Patients, families and health consumers are sharing their micro information with friends, families and communities both locally and globally. Internet marketing pioneer Seth Godin recently commented on the impact micro-blogging can have on a company, hospital, organization or practice, “Angry phone calls are your friend. They’re your friend because the alternative is angry tweets and angry blog posts.”  So, while the “old” mediums, like letters and phone calls, are currently able to “contain” the anger of an unsatisfied customer or patient, such an approach will soon be obsolete in the new “Global Healthcare Village”–thanks to the immediacy of heavily trafficked tweets, blogs and DFP mediums.  

Take care, 

Michael

Michael G. Ryan, FACHE

Chairman

Executive Impact Group

San Francisco, CA USA

www.execimpactgroup.com

Linked In:www.linkedin.com/in/mikeryan/  

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