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Hospitals, Social/Public Media

When Hospitals Engage by Megaphone

February 18, 2014 By Bryan Vartabedian · Reading Time: < 1 minutes

iStock_000017138912SmallLast fall while teaching at the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media Residency, I sat with an hospital admin who asked me about her facility’s twitter and Facebook feeds.  I told her it was a remarkable coincidence that everything created and shared was about her facility.  She suggested it was because so many remarkable achievements came from her hospital.

Surprising response?  Not really.  This strong sense of self is the rule rather than the exception.  And so organizations learn to engage by megaphone. Volume, it seems, is the greatest metric of success.  And as long as unidirectional output can be formatted as a graph on a Powerpoint slide, the beat goes on.

As it turns out, no one listens.  People care about themselves, not minimally invasive surgical centers.

Discouraging?  It should be empowering, actually.  The web is the great equalizer.  And it turns out that a hospital of any size is in a position to emerge as the biggest hospital in the public eye by creating material that allows health consumers to genuinely think and understand.  When your approach to content begins with consumer needs, only then do you stand a chance of patients seeing what you have to offer.

People care about themselves, not bariatric surgery centers.  And as long as you push lap bands with a megaphone, folks will cover their ears and vote with their feet.

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Tagged With: Facebook, Hospital marketing, Hospitals

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Bryan Vartabedian, MD

Bryan Vartabedian, MD
Bryan Vartabedian is the Chief Pediatrics Officer at Texas Children’s Hospital North Austin and one of health care’s influential
voices on technology & medicine.
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With a mashup of curated and original content that crosses the spaces of digital health, media, communication, technology, patient experience, digital culture, and the humanities, 33 charts offers unique insight and analysis on the changing face of medicine.

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