My post on October 27th presented the idea that social media, eMarketing, and other new technologies could have a profound impact on health care, if that “community” embraced them. However, engaging stakeholders with this movement would be the ultimate hurdle to get over – or would it?
The Challenge:
Any reasonable person would agree that it wouldn’t be easy to convince a health care professional to “use this app all day, every day to drastically improve how we interact, educate patients, train new nurses, or perform health care services”. We need to engage the right people to make this happen. We need to energize the groundswell, but that can only be done by knowing who the people are that would embrace being “energized”. …Not everyone is excited to “like” something on Facebook, or writing a 200 word blog-post, if that makes any sense. But some people love it.
Direction:
One way to think about this is to evaluate the social technographics profile of our user-base, (see Groundswell by Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff), and enable specific groups of people with a means to communicate that is natural to them. The challenge here is to identify who’s who within each hospital micro-market and and enable a method of communication that would be the most impactful (The “like” button vs. the blog).
Recommendations:
We could cast a wide-net and let the chips fall where they may. From personal observation, I think we could compare this strategy to Facebook’s, where there is a wide variety of users from “Creators” to “Spectators”. Facebook has had a tremendous amount of success casting a wide-net-platform that allows individuals to decide how involved they want to be.
Another option would be to pigeon-hole, say, nurses into one of the broad segments on the technographic ladder, and ensure that the right way to participate in the community is a means they are comfortable with. This specific direction might be the most impactful, especially within a market that is incredibly sophisticated, and where people’s lives are at stake. But maybe not. This raises another question.