Social Media: The Price of Free

[Patrick Singson]

With the rise of social media, such as social networks, blogging and micro-blogging there seems to be certain common characteristics:

• They are free to use
• Facilitate interaction
• Takes time

Free to use
Here’s the joke: You know what’s so great about Twitter? It’s free to use. You know what is so bad about Twitter? Well, it’s free to use. Since the barrier to entry is essentially zero, the mob can then enter (with all that the mob brings). Highly relevant social media “sites” wind up fighting for a voice among the “unwashed masses.” Relevant voices do rise, but it becomes a matter of a quality dialogue that persists over time.

Facilitate interaction
Remember that drunk in the bar that insisted on telling you that story about the dog and the trashcan and couldn’t remember the point of the story, but anyways…Well, that can sometimes be the kind of interaction you can expect from commenters on occasion. Raising the quality of the dialogue to the level of quality content that others will be interested in is a challenge. The online world is filled with flamers, trolls, and those with an axe to grind. Having a strategy in place such as a posted “rules of conduct” page will help deter that kind of interaction. Turning a blind eye to it will not.

Takes time
It’s that third bullet that’s the rub: takes time. Takes time to post, takes time to view comments, and takes time to respond. The currency of “free” then is your time and energy that you use while enabling a social media strategy. The time suck is real, and includes:

• Regular posts displaying your expertise
• Monitoring and responding to comments

-and, for hospitals, avoiding the perceived pitfall:

• Legal

Which can be filed under the heading “Words that come back to haunt.” Chris Boyer discusses legal ramifications in his Top Five Myths of Healthcare Social Media, and Tom Stitt gives a great comment in response to the same article.

Current best practices governing any external communication is one answer. Another answer, as far as Google is concerned; one of their most followed and famous bloggers is a guy called Matt Cutts. He makes it clear that although he is an engineer at Google and writes about all things Google, it is his personal blog, and not Google’s. This is a kind of end-run around the whole legal issue since it then becomes a journalism-freedom-of-speech-issue versus hospital-regulations-issue. But, come on: he still writes about Google.

There are other ways of dealing with this issue by following how other sites and how they figured out how to deal with the question of legal fumbles. It’s a question that has been asked – and answered - by the many hospitals that are currently taking advantage of social media.

Strategy time
Having an online marketing program, especially in regards to social media, takes a strategy that is applied over time. You need to take into account the time it takes to post a social network/blog/tweet/social network profile, and how you will care and feed it. Social media is not a “post-once and watch the traffic roll in” type of tactic. It requires some thought:

• Which Social Media outlets will help drive my marketing mission?
• Do I have a subject matter expert on hand that not only has an expertise he can write about, but also writes about it well?
• What tools do I need besides the free social media site? Are there other tools (tweetdeck for example) that can help make the online campaign easier to deal with?
• Am I willing to invest the time in order to allow it to succeed?

It’s that last point: time to succeed. You don’t ever want to be setup to fail. Since developing an audience for any social media site takes persistent effort applied over time, you don’t want to “snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.” And what defines success? Well, if your blog/ning/tweet site drives one patient or B2B client to your door per year, would that define success? If the blog creates goodwill and shines your brand, is that a success metric? Define your metrics of success and leave a lot of wiggle room at the start of a campaign. Find your subject matter expert, the person with the time and a vested interest to champion any venture into social media. Your “champion” will put the “social” in social media and will invest the energy/expertise/time currency necessary to define success for this “free” medium.

[Patrick Singson]

I like that: "living room rules". Remember that line from "Planet of the Apes"? (Or was that "Battle for the Planet of the Apes"? Err...) "Ape Shall Never Kill Ape." Some things only seem like common sense.

I also like your last line: "Social media has very low direct costs and highly variable opportunity (time) costs for healthcare." My entire article in a single line. Nice.

[Tom Stitt]

Thanks for the mention. My friend Shel Israel calls his rules for acceptable online social behavior, including blog comments "living room rules." Basically, he doesn't tolerate any online social behavior that he wouldn't accept in his own living room. As I recall, he has a three strike approach: warning, unfollowing/blocking/mandatory comment moderation, and finally IP address blocking for comments. The lesson I've learned is that having dialogue with someone who is breaking the published online social behavior rules isn't productive. Best to just follow the published rules and move on.

I agree 100% with your point that social media requires interaction and monitoring by people who are skilled in the art of healthcare patient and practitioner communication interactions. I think this is one of the major challenges for adoption of social media in healthcare. Maybe we need to convince people like Lee Aase to make his virtual social media university a reality and offer training for healthcare social media moderators.

Social media has very low direct costs and highly variable opportunity (time) costs for healthcare.