Josh Elson of Fluent Care, a provider of real-time location services on the Intelligent Insites platform, took some time to speak with me at HIMSS11.
After meeting with with Hyland Software at last year’s HIMSS conference in Atlanta, I’ve kept an eye on what they’re doing with social media. This year, I caught up with their Twitter account manager, Kaitlin Maurer, who gave me the details of her tweeting and blogging success. Check it out:
I had a chance to meet up with Matthew Browning at HIMSS11. Matthew is a nurse and healthcare IT entrepreneur, whose product—YourNurseIsOn.com—is getting a lot of buzz. Matthew talks about how important Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are to his marketing efforts.
Cyndee Holden, AVP of Marketing at ARUP Labs
Public relations is a constantly evolving discipline, and Health B2B PR is certainly part of today’s evolution. To provide insight into how our vertical fits into the broader changes happening in PR, I asked a good friend, Cyndee Holden, to share some of her insights. Cyndee is one of the most PR savvy professionals I know, and has a ton of experience in all sorts of PR verticals, not just Health B2B. She is an associate vice president of marketing at ARUP Laboratories and the leader of their integrated marketing communications team.
Question: What are the public relations roles that your team fills at ARUP Laboratories?
Cyndee: At ARUP, our team covers the major disciplines and roles of public relations, including: branding, media relations, internal communications, crisis communications, strategic communications, event planning, public affairs and advocacy, community relations, and new media and web development.
What does your executive team expect out of public relations?
As an integrated marketing communications team, we focus on consistency of message and the complementary use of media.
Our executive team trusts our team to identify client insights and develop an appropriate promotional strategy with the right audiences and publications to create a strong brand identity and client relationship. They rely on us to know the right touch points to use to reach our clients and understand how and where they consume different types of media.
You’ve done media relations for all sorts of companies. In your opinion, what’s the biggest difference between B2B and B2C media relations?
The biggest difference is the perception of what constitutes a “big win” in media placement.
When my focus was on B2C media relations, my idea of a “big win” was reaching the largest number of potential purchasers through mass media. The idea of getting placement on all the TV stations and newspapers in a market or one big placement like The New York Times or Today Show was very exciting, because we knew we were getting our message out to the largest number of consumers possible. If we did segment the media pitch, we focused on media that skewed toward a broad demographic— like men 18-36 or females 18-36.
With B2B, the focus is on smaller audiences and niche publications. For example, getting a hit in CAP Today or Lab Manager is more likely to reach my potential client and build credibility more than a mass media hit. So while the publication may only hit 45,000 instead of 450,000, it is still a huge cause for celebration!
What role does social media play in your public relations efforts? Do you see that role expanding?
Social media definitely plays a role in our public relations and marketing efforts. The growth of social media has allowed people to build social and business connections online. In these communities, we can easily create content that draws attention to our company and encourages others to share that information with their own social networks. Social media has opened the door for increasing brand awareness and expanding conversations with our target audiences.
We view social media as a perfect combination of push-pull messaging. We push content to various platforms and then use linking and relationships to pull those users back to our website and our brand. As we continue to expand our relationships online, we will expand the role of social media within our marketing efforts.
Health B2B public relations covers a lot of ground: media relations, crisis communications, advocacy, internal communications, etc. And social media seems tailor-made for each of these areas.
I talk to a lot of health care B2B marketers, and most of them say that social media hasn’t matured enough to be a viable marketing tactic for their organizations. That may be true for their individual organization’s traditional marketing objectives. But social media still has a place in their marketing mix, and that place is public relations.
Health B2B public relations covers a lot of ground: media relations, crisis communications, advocacy, internal communications, etc. And social media seems tailor-made for each of them.
With its emphasis on sharing, social media can augment traditional media relations activities related to storytelling. It’s a fabulous channel for disseminating critical information in a crisis. It can augment activities where you’re trying to influence public opinion. And it can be used to communicate with employees and between employees.
Just like any other PR channel, health care B2B companies should have a strategy related to social media. Here are three simple strategies to get you started:
Connect with influencers: One strength of social media is that it is a magnet for influencers. If there are elected officials, celebrities, journalists or executives with whom you want to connect, there’s a good chance they’re on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. Your strategy should be to connect with them, interact with them and share conversations with them.
Contribute to communities. Another strength of social media is that it is a seed-bed for communities. There are LinkedIn Groups, Facebook Groups and Fanpages and Twitter hashtags for just about every interest. Find the communities that match your objectives and/or your audience, and start participating. But word to the wise: don’t show up with guns blazing. Listening and understanding the community’s culture should be the first order of business.
What if you can’t find a group that matches your interest? Create your own.
Become an influencer. In the information age, any person or organization can be an influencer. I don’t know of any health B2B organization that doesn’t want to be seen as a thought leader in their industry. Social media can help organizations do that.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that a company will be an immediate influencer just by setting up and providing content for a Twitter account, a Facebook fanpage or a blog. As in anything PR-related, it takes clear objectives, thorough strategy and flawless execution.
Photo credit: Charis Tsevis (cc) Detail One of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg for Wired magazine
If you're gathering Twitter info on trade show prospects, how do you nurture them to become qualified leads? By using the strengths of Twitter, of course.
So let’s say you took my advice: you gathered Twitter handle info from your trade show prospects and you grabbed a grundle of other Twitter handles from your trade show re-tweet promotion. Now what?
Nurture your little birds. Chances are, most of the Twitter accounts won’t be held by people who are qualified leads. You’re going to have to nurture these contacts in much the same way that you would nurture any trade show contact. But this type of nurturing won’t be through typical email and direct mail channels. You’ll be nurturing through Twitter. Here are four steps to developing an effective Twitter lead nurturing campaign.
Step 1 – Develop a Twitter outreach strategy. You’ll want to answer some important questions before you jump into the Twitterverse.
- How will you brand your organization on Twitter? Will it be through some variation of your corporate or product brand, or through a named staffer?
- How will you make your Tweets relevant to your clients? Knowing your prospects’ Twitter handles is only half the battle. Getting them to connect with you is the other half. Following someone on Twitter is sometimes all the reason that person needs to follow you. But many will need more reason than that. You’ll need to tweet relevant topics that educate, inform and entertain your audience. What are those topics? What sort of tone do you want to set? What are the main messages you’ll be pushing?
- How will your tweets move your prospects down the sales funnel? The point of any lead nurturing activity is to turn contacts into leads. What type of actions will a Twitter prospect need to take to become qualified?
Step 2 – Find the right Tweeter. It’s crucial to find the right person, whether in or out of your organization, who can Tweet for you. If you have a team tasked to qualify leads, a person from that team may be the right choice. The marketing and PR departments are always dependable resources for people who know how to stay on message. Or someone on your sales team may be the right choice. And there’s always outsourcing. Whomever you choose, make sure that person has the motivation, the discipline and the know-how to move an unqualified contact to a qualified lead.
Step 3 – Start tweeting. Once you have a sound strategy and the right person, get to work. Start conversations. Pay attention to your prospect’s tweets and jump into the conversation when appropriate. At early stages in the conversation, overt calls to action aren’t called for. Develop a relationship and understand prospects’ needs before presenting solutions.http://healthb2bmarketing.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=314&message=10
Step 4 – Take the conversation to another level. At some point in the conversation, a percentage of your Twitter contacts express a need that you can fill. At this point, remember that Twitter is a public medium. Your public response should be general but helpful. A more specific response should be sent to them via email, if you have the contact’s email address. Or even better, through Twitter’s direct message function.
However, a word of caution: I recommend using the DM function sparingly—people are already complaining about direct message spam. Only direct message when a private response to a prospect is more appropriate than a public one.
Thoughts? Other ideas? Please share in the comments.
If you're like me and you see social media as the next great health care B2B marketing frontier, why not extend and lengthen your trade show interactions online?
On the heels of my last post on trade show lead gathering, the thought occurred to me that in the social age, health care B2B marketers may want to be gathering more than just the standard trade shows contact information.
As customer and prospect interactions on social networks increase in volume, health care vendors should be augmenting their CRM data with their social network interactions. CRM service providers such as salesforce.com are already integrated with Twitter and Facebook. If you’re like me and you see social media as the next great health care B2B marketing frontier, why not extend and lengthen your trade show interactions online?
Trade shows and Twitter. Booth interactions at trade shows should be short and low-commitment, two qualities that are inherent in Twitter’s micro-blogging platform. Plus, the culture of Twitter is more open to meeting new people than LinkedIn or Facebook, so it’s the right venue to use to start a social media relationship.
When you’re asking gathering information from a prospect, ask if they’re on Twitter. If they are, ask for their Twitter handle. Chances are, they’ll be happy to give you their handle. Twitterers love followers.
Another way to get trade show participants Twitter handles is to integrate your giveaways with Twitter accounts. Offer a special raffle for people who re-tweet your trade show tweets.
So, what do you do once you have all this information? That’s the subject of my next post.
Dr. Wes Fisher, a blogging cardiologist, succinctly shared half of Twitter’s value equation:
I have grown to appreciate Twitter with time. Not as a panacea to all that ailes medicine, cardiology, or my social life, but as a means to transmit information publicly VERY fast and keep up with the constant stream of ideas emanating from others with similar interests to me.
The other part of Twitter’s value equation, for me, lies in how easy it is to connect and network with like-minded people.
You never know what you're going to get with the #healthcare hashtag.
Apologies to Forrest Gump, but you truly never know what you’re going to get out of Twitter.
Like many of you, I follow some common hashtags for our industry on Twitter: #hcmktg (short for health care marketing), #hcsm (short for health care social media) and #healthIT. Lately, I seem to be posting more to and learning more from #healthIT. Just this morning, I saw a tweet from a handle I haven’t yet noticed: @icd10watch, which is run by journalist Tom Sullivan. ICD-10 Watch promotes a website developed by MedTech Publishing and sponsored by InfoSys. With the HIPAA 5010 transition deadline approaching fast and the ICD-10 deadline not far behind, the folks at InfoSys are smart to position themselves as a visible leader in the space.
The other day, I decided to follow the #healthcare hashtag. Wow. The deluge of tweets was immediate and varied, to say the least. Most of them centered around health care reform, and it was illuminating to say the least to see how much misinformation that’s flying around out there.
Here’s a tweet from @redorgreenpill:
Dis bitch asked to see my medical card I told da hoe #ShutBITCH #HealthCare is #FREE
Truth in 140 characters. If you think that’s a problem, check out this tweet from @TrueSongMedia:
BOTH HOUSE AND SENATE BILLS REQUIRE MICROCHIPPING OF ALL AMERICANS http://bit.ly/arIthv #healthcare #motb
This headline was too good to pass up, so I clicked the link. It went to a blog called “Silver and Gold Outlook” (?) whose anonymous author tries to scare his readers into thinking that RFID chips inside implantable medical devices are paving the way for the “mark of the beast” prophesied in the New Testament. His scare tactic worked: read some of the nearly 300 comments—there’s a lot of fear and out there.
My takeaway: the more specific the Twitter hashtag, the better. Speaking of which, if you’re tweeting about anything related to health care B2B marketing, use the #hcB2Bmktg hashtag. Are there other hashtags for health care B2B?
What is health care B2B's killer social app? I started with a question and what I thought was my answer...
I just had an experience that I often have as a writer, where I start with an article idea but end up writing something completely different.
I fully expected to finish this post concluding that Twitter is health care B2B’s killer social app. It’s not.
I love Twitter. I’m on it every day. I’ve made some valuable connections through Twitter. But it’s not the killer social app, the one site health care marketers need to focus on, exclusive of all others.
Here’s where I started: a health care B2B marketer’s ultimate goal is to help her organization develop loyal, satisfied customers. To achieve that goal, she positions her company as a trusted resource with health care decision makers and influencers, persuading them that her company’s product or service is the best solution (i.e., attraction marketing). But before she can persuade, she must have built and nurtured a relationship between her company and her prospect. I’m a believer that social media can help us build relationships, so what’s the one social site we marketers should use to build strong relationships?
Let’s start with Twitter. The best thing about Twitter is its low barrier to entry. It’s easy to get started and easy to learn. You can make quick connections with the people or organizations with whom you want to connect, since the culture on Twitter lends itself to inclusion, not exclusion.
But finding and making the right connections on Twitter is not easy. I’ve heard people compare Twitter to a gigantic cocktail party. You might be at the party, totally on your game and making great conversation, but the right people may be at the other end of the ballroom. Or they may not be there at all. Most of the health care B2B marketers I talk to are intrigued by Twitter, but not convinced that their audience is there.
What about Facebook? It’s the social app that seemingly everyone is on. In fact, in February, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that there were 400 million users on Facebook worldwide. Facebook has also posted some undated statistics that state roughly 70% of their users are outside of the United States. If that percentage holds true, that means that there are roughly 120 million U.S. Facebook users, which means that roughly one out of every three Americans is on Facebook—a staggering number. That also means there’s a good chance that your audience is on Facebook. Facebook has some decent tools for businesses, as well: fanpages, groups and Facebook’s unique ad formats give health care B2B companies some good options.
But let’s be honest: the main reason people are flocking to Facebook isn’t to make business relationships. It’s more for personal reasons: to connect with old school friends (and flames), to stay in touch with family, and, if you’re network is anything like mine, it’s to play those hideous browser games that clutter my Facebook news feed. Ugh.
Don’t get me wrong: health care B2B marketers need to have a Facebook strategy, but it’s not our killer social app.
So, maybe it’s LinkedIn. In terms of why people use it, it’s the polar opposite of Facebook. Professionals use LinkedIn to stay in touch with former colleagues, to make new connections through their current network, to find job leads, to ferret out new business opportunities. It’s a great source for business research, whether you’re looking to hire a new employee or find out more about a prospect or a competitor. Tools such as business profile pages, LinkedIn Groups and LinkedIn Answers can be great ways to promote your business and develop relationships. Honestly, it’s probably the closest thing we have to a killer B2B social app.
But it has its limitations. The culture of LinkedIn is exclusive, not inclusive. You’re limited by the network you have. Sure, your three-deep connections may give you access to 2 million or so professionals, but that’s only theoretical access. Your first level network is really the only group to which you have open access. I’ve been on LinkedIn since 2004, and I have about 350 connections. I like and value all the people that have connected with me, but they’re not all prospects. Answers and Groups are options to give you access to potential prospects, but so much of what I see on these areas is truly spam—sales hacks trying to make a quick buck, not develop real relationships. And there’s nothing that will poison a marketing well faster than opening up a few million cans of spam.
So, in conclusion, there is no one killer social app for health care B2B—no social site that we should use to the exclusion of all others. Rather, health care B2B marketers should develop a comprehensive strategy to utilize the strengths and manage the weaknesses of all these sites, plus others that are continuing to emerge.
And because I wrote this blog, I now know that the killer social app for developing relationships isn’t just one site. The killer relationship-building app for health care B2B is, simply, social media.