Last 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.