As a strategy team, we take the same approach with our clients. We start off the year with a planning session and then, each quarter/month, we review and refine. With the pace of technology change today, it’s easy to become overwhelmed. Our plan helps us stay on course. This doesn’t mean we don’t modify the course in response to changing business goals and technologies but, more importantly, that we have a course.

As you chart your course for 2012, I’d like to share some successful projects from our clients in 2011, and some upcoming plans for their 2012.

1. Easier, faster and better reporting. Google Analytics recently released a new interface with multiple dashboards that allows you to create comprehensive reports in a custom dashboard that displays on a single screen.  Our clients love this time saver. It can be tedious going in to pull reports for different departments, but now you can create a custom dashboard for each of them.
2. Evaluating costs. Are you paying for printed doctor directories? IASIS and MedTouch partnered to provide online Print to PDF directories to put control in the user’s hands. It is now possible for a user to receive a dynamically generated directory, based on his/her unique search query results. This allows visitors looking for a specialist, like an allergist, to print to PDF filtered results from your Find a Doctor database. The prospective patient could then look back at his list later as he/she calls to find out which local allergist is accepting new patients.
3. Physician visibility. We all know ranking at the top of search engine results is vital for hospital services, but what about your physicians? Google your top physicians’ names and you’ll probably see sites like Healthgrades.com and vitals.com, but your website’s physician profile is nowhere to be found. When prospective patients are researching your physicians, it’s important they’re seeing YOUR website with all the information necessary to become a patient. Using advanced search engine optimization and search engine marketing (SEO & SEM) techniques can dramatically improve physician visibility, not to mention physician satisfaction.
4. Navigating the social media changes. In the last year we saw YouTube change its non-profit channel design benefit for hospitals (thankfully most of our clients had this on their 2011 list and were able to get in before the change), the introduction of Google+ pages for businesses, and numerous Facebook changes.  Having a roadmap and a strategist to provide a course and direction is vital in this fast-changing world of social connectivity.
5. Ad budget management. In 2011, MedTouch continued to grow as a leader in SEM for healthcare, demonstrating the value of search engine marketing through hundreds of successful campaigns. With proper setup, you can determine which online ads and which channels provide the best results. And “results” does not mean mere clicks, it means that visitors performed the actions you desire them to, such as calling a phone number or requesting information. Unless you’re tracking conversions and diving into data, ROI is a guess. Typically, Google and Facebook generate the most traffic, but Bing may deliver more conversions at a fraction of the cost. With SEM, you have the opportunity to do A/B testing and focus your ad budget on the channel that delivers the best result, not necessarily the most clicks.
6. Mobile tools for patients. Smartphone ownership expanded to over 50% of the population this year and our clients noted a marked increase in mobile traffic to their websites. Many clients allocated a portion of their budget to creating dedicated mobile sites to serve this segment; without one, mobile user experience is typically poor. Most mobile sites included Find a Doctor, to offer patients convenient contact look-ups on the go. A couple savvy clients dove right into mobile application development in 2011, well ahead of their peers, after identifying the accelerated pace of smartphone adoption in their markets.  ER Wait Times, GPS Directions, and Wayfinding were among the mobile application tools developed for patients.
7. Content Strategy. In 2011, MedTouch engaged in many content overhauls—from small site optimizations to complex audits and architectures to thousands of pages of brand new copy. As health care consumers’ expectations and capacities evolve, your content must become more targeted, strategic and tailored. Your key audiences—patients, visitors, referring physicians, researchers, donors, etc.—expect your web content to be a clear, personalized and intuitive extension of your care mission. The results for these clients were more action-oriented and relationship-building content, blog strategies and more informed and trained teams. The biggest content killers include: a lack of content speaking to basic patient questions (ie. surgery length and recovery time), too technical content, the absence of sound and user-friendly information and a lack of ongoing governance methodologies.
8. Accurate Google Places information and map markers. Patients searching from mobile devices are presented Google Places results above organic results. Google is the first place they’ll find your hospital listed. Chances are, if they’re searching for you from their phone, they’re looking for a doctor, directions, or a phone number. You’ll want to be sure they can complete these tasks quickly or they may start looking elsewhere. Many hospitals have struggled with inaccurate Google Places information, as Google doesn’t make it easy to take control of your listing or change your locations in Google Maps.
9. Prioritize service lines in your marketing and think outside the box. You can’t always achieve the results you want by focusing on the “whole enchilada.” Optimizing your entire website or running online ads on all your service lines is both labor-intensive and costly. Test a new idea on a service line first to see what works.  You’ll provide measurable returns on your investment and gain invaluable insight into your market that you can take back and use to refine your overall online strategy down the line.
10. Finally, the ability to associate content dynamically on your website. You can now display patient testimonials or related health news on a condition page by tagging the content within a content management system (CMS). Take the grunt work out of maintaining your website next year by making strategic enhancements in how you store and release new content through your CMS. Talk to your in-house or partner CMS providers on how to upgrade.  Your webmaster or marketing go-to on the front lines will love you for it.

I’m excited about 2012, the strategic roadmap kickoffs and the opportunity to work with our amazing existing clients and the MedTouch strategy team. Have a project in mind for us? We would be happy to hear from you!

Happy New Year

Google has introduced “sitelinks” to its results pages. If a page shows up in the coveted number one position, it is now often rewarded with this search game-changer.  The reward: real estate, and lots of it.

Sitelinks are links under a website’s main Google listing. These links lead to subpages within a website. Currently, Google will display up to twelve of these sitelinks, giving a number one listing a vast amount of screen space.  Here’s an example:

Google has said that it is improving its algorithm to present the most relevant subpages in the sitelinks. For now, it looks fairly random.  And, not all browsers support sitelinks yet.

So, what’s the answer to the question, what is the most important meta tag? The sitelinks are speaking, yelling, even: ALL OF THEM.

A well-crafted meta tag strategy will help steer Google’s crawlers in the right direction. With proper title tags and meta keywords, you can tell Google to put this in the sitelinks, but not that, please.

The above example for Virtua is an example of a good meta tag strategy. Notice that relevant keywords are displayed boldly and notice, more importantly, that the mini-descriptions under the links are all different. Even though they have very little space to explain themselves, they get the job done.

Here’s an example of poor meta tag strategy:

Notice that the descriptions repeat themselves and that they aren’t very, well, descriptive. Note also the page titled “2.” I’m sure that’s not what I was looking for.

Because of SEO fads suggesting that meta tags are not as important as we thought they were, many webmasters allow computers to auto-populate their meta tags. This puts the same keywords and description on virtually every page. This will cause the descriptions in the sitelinks to be repetitive and stale.  Each page needs its own unique set of meta tags.

The number one position on Google is the holy grail of Internet searching. The battle does not end there, though. Not only do we have to fight for the top, but we have to look classy when we get there. You can show up early for a job interview, but if you didn’t iron your shirt, your chances of landing the job aren’t great.

17% of cell phone owners have used their phone to look up health information, and 25% of Americans use social media as a health resource. As this trend increases, hospitals will want to take advantage of the opportunity to communicate with patients via social media and mobile channels.

Do sites like Foursquare disrupt the traditional balance of power between hospitals and patients?

Foursquare provides patrons the opportunity to review a facility and provide "tips" to improve the experiences of other patients.

Recently, many patients have started to publicly check-in at hospitals, which can lead to worry or excitement on the part of the patient’s friends. Encouraging the use of such location-based applications could disrupt the balance of power between hospitals and their patients. The ability to check in at and review a hospital provides the patient with more power and places more accountability on the physicians to run a smooth practice at a hospital that may now be under the public scrutiny of its social media-savvy clientele.

Privacy Concerns

Another big concern is privacy: when a patient posts a status update about his or her condition at the hospital, questions are raised as to the legality of such an action. On the one hand, patients may update Facebook or Foursquare or Twitter with medical information that may be considered private and confidential by the doctor or hospital; on the other, doesn’t the patient have the right to share their health information if they so choose? Ultimately, hospitals can’t control what individuals say in updates or tweets or reviews, but as more information on this budding location-centered market is gathered, privacy regulations may be introduced to keep confidential what needs to stay private.

The future of social media and healthcare could bring a few interesting developments:

1)       GPS tracking of on-call doctors could become the modern pager

There’s potential for non-invasive tracking applications to see where on-call doctors are in relation to the facility (which provides a more accurate estimate of when they’ll arrive to provide care).

2)       Social media can be used to gain insight into the patient experience

If hospitals were to pay attention to reviews and tips on Yelp and Foursquare, they could use that data to get a better idea of what patients are really saying and thinking about the facility or its employees and thereby attempt to improve the patient experience accordingly.

When Foursquare users aren’t checking in, they might be posting “tips,” or short reviews about the place they’re visiting. Yelp is a site with a similar purpose that used to be confined to food and drink – now, people have begun to grade physicians, hospitals, and healthcare services. Because users are generally honest in their grading, helpful information and data can be gathered that could help to improve or benefit the hospital or practice in the future. For example, if many users on Yelp and Foursquare rate a hospital’s parking facilities as lacking, the hospital could use that information to fix their parking issue and make the hospital experience better for everyone.

3)       Social media could be used to identify patient health trends

If a patient comes in complaining of heart distress, his doctor could reference the patient’s check-ins at different places (such as gyms, steakhouses, or fast food chains) to help form a better picture of the patient’s health behaviors.

With technology constantly improving and expanding, it’s up to other industries to stay relevant and keep up, and the healthcare industry could benefit greatly from active use of social media sites like Foursquare.

I’m often asked to prove the value of social media and Elizabeth’s analysis and results were so interesting I asked if I can share.

Below is a summarized version of her report:

PCRMC Physicians Group was able to go live with their Facebook account the week of May 1, 2011.  During the first week the page was very plain, had no character and no ads.  The only likes that were received were those of the administrators.

The group had decided to experiment with a few ads to see if it would ignite an increase in their page’s likes.  The spark was lit and a trend was started. The data that was received from the Facebook reporting site showed consumers would click the ad, but only 20-40% would take the extra step and like the page, or be a follower of the page.

After consulting with MedTouch, PCRMC Physicians Group decided to invest in a personalized landing page. This presents the visitor with a welcome page that provides answers and calls-to-actions instead of the Facebook Wall. PCRMC saw a tremendous change as a result of this new landing page, which the Facebook ad redirected too.  Over 80% of consumers that clicked the ad also Liked the page.

Before adding the About Us Welcome page, PCRMC had 100 Likes. Two weeks after launching the About Us Welcome tab, they had 300.

Thanks PCRMC for partnering with MedTouch!

If you would like to know more about Facebook pages, please contact our business development team to start a conversation.

For now, Google is discouraging businesses from creating Google+ profiles, instead promising a business experience to launch later this year which will “far exceed the consumer profile in terms of its usefulness to businesses”.

It’s anybody’s guess at this point what this might look like. Some have speculated on a style similar to Facebook business pages. Sean Percival posted a concept on his blog suggesting tight integration with Google Maps, Google Offers and more.

Improving Google Places
Personally I’d really love to see Google+ and Google Places join forces for one unified Google business experience, giving businesses greater control of what users see and an easier way for customers or patients to share their experiences.

Today, there’s very little sharing within Google Places. Google relies heavily on 3rd-party sites like vitals.com for reviews and business information, which is often wrong. Reviews on Google Places are often tied to a single physician instead of the facility and users rarely utilize Google’s built-in rating system for positive remarks.

Hospitals have already invested time and effort into building (and often correcting) Google Places accounts. Allowing businesses & users to interact via the Google+ and “+1” button could reduce Google’s reliance on 3rd-party sites and actually feed better data to Google on which hospitals or clinics are deserving of more attention, aka better search engine ranks.

Most importantly, I’d really hate to see one more Google business presence to claim and verify if it’s anything like Google Places verification.

Has your hospital created a Google+ profile? If so, we would love to hear about what you’re doing.

Join my circle on Google+

It was a time of just a few media channels. Everyone received the same creative message and it was delivered via the same delivery channel. It was a time when the general masses still believed 1st party media. The Golden Age of Advertising was the height of unaccountable marketing and advertising. There were no considerations for relevance, real-time consumer behavior or even a methodical way to track analytics and return-on-investment. It was a time ruled by cigarette smoke, subjectivity and unaccountable strategies.

The Golden Age of Advertising has left us long ago. Communication since then has evolved into the data-driven, permission-based and socially connected society we know today. However, many marketers and advertisers today still employ the same Mad Men unproven traditional strategies of the 1960s. Following are the top five things every marketer should know about keeping your traditional Mad Men accountable:

• Offline impressions are a poor success indicator of print advertising as they are often estimates. To track the value of your print advertising, consider instead employing specific call-to-actions that lead the consumer to channels with better analytic tracking abilities, such as a designated microsite or a vanity phone number.

• Broadcast media buys can only segment down to a profiled household. For a deeper level of segmentation, consider taking your media budget online, where you can target a specific user and track their behavior in real-time. This makes for a great re-contact opportunity.

• Time-spent-with-brand is not a valid success indicator for traditional broadcast anymore. Instead, consider integrating broadcast with other consumer touch points such as social media to track brand engagement.

• Mass communication is a primitive form of advertising, as the marketing message is often very general and basic. Focus instead on relevance of messaging and delivery channel to increase qualified leads.

• Creative is still important, but you can eliminate the subjective nature of reviewing creative work by running a small A-B test, and then comparing results from both creative campaigns. Facts win hands down every time.

Interested in learning more? Contact us!

Working collaboratively with our web design team, Angie advocates for clean, usable, user-tested design that supports optimum content delivery. Post-launch, she continues to work with clients to optimize content for search, usability and editorial relevance.

Content that Means Business

According to Angie, effective content—inclusively defined as text, video, actions/transactions and anything that carries useful message and meaning—serves your business by serving your most valued users.

When a patient, caregiver or provider arrives on your website, your content—both in essence and in presentation—should make his or her tactical needs and experiences paramount priority. When your users feel central, consumer relationships are validated and reinforced.

Conversely, untended information, poorly presented and born of organizationally insular perspectives, invites confusion, frustration and, ultimately, strains and frays valuable consumer dialogues.

The idea is so obvious it seems almost unnecessary to state: usable content is a critical business asset.

Yet,  user-centric content is still de-prioritized in large-scale healthcare web initiatives. It’s an afterthought. And the fundamental tasks of organizing, auditing, interviewing subject matter experts and stakeholders, planning, mapping, writing, migrating, optimizing, reviewing, publishing, setting and enforcing standards and measuring outcomes (and on and on) are heaped on one to one-and-a-half persons. The web manager, tasked to manage every other aspect of the web project as well, is forced to to cut corners.

Thoughtful content—and its requisite production phases—takes time to create and curate. This is where a dedicated, experienced content strategy partner can help.

You Need Content Strategy

Does your organization have a robust, comprehensive content strategy? MedTouch provides content strategy and services for healthcare.

Our Content Strategy offerings include:

• Healthcare Content Writing and Development
• Quantitative and Qualitative Content Audits and Assessments
• Information Architecture and Site Mapping
• Taxonomy and Metadata Schemes
• Content Governance Plans and Editorial Strategies
• Content Migration
• User Behavior Research
• Usability Testing
• Analytics and Reporting
• Standards/Best Practice Training and Writing Workshops

MedTouch can help you create and implement effective content strategies. For more information, contact Angie Toomsen at atoomsen@medtouch.com for a thought-provoking conversation. Read more about Angie

Google has done extensive eye-tracking research to see how users at different stages in the buying cycle use their results pages.

If a user types “hip replacement surgery” into Google, they are most likely doing research on the topic of hip replacement surgeries. This is where a good SEO strategy comes into play. Google has found that people doing research on a topic are more likely to look to the organic results on their results page. This is where you would find the Wikipedia entry about hip replacements and all sorts of other informational sites.  If a website’s organic listings are crafted to be more geared towards a researcher, meaning, making the listing look more academic and encyclopedia-like, they are more likely to get research traffic to their site.  It’s always good to have researchers click-through to your website site because they might stick around and look at some of your services as well.  Plus, the click is free.

A good organic listing in this case might be:

Complete Hip Replacement Surgery Facts | Your Hospital – Your Town.
What happens during Hip Replacement Surgery, your guide to everything you need to know. www.yourhospital.com

Google’s research goes on to suggest that when users are past the research stage of the buying cycle and are, for instance, looking to specifically find a clinic that does the surgery, they start to look more closely at the sponsored links on the search engine results page. Gearing these listings to a user on the verge of a conversion*can help drive traffic to physicians’ pages, or to an online appointment form.

For example:

Local Hip Replacements
Dedicated, Experienced Hip Replacement Physicians In Your Area
www.YourHospital.com/HipReplacement

It’s not enough to pepper the search engines with ads and listings. These strategies must work together to more completely flesh out a brand.

* A conversion is an event that takes places when a website visitor takes an action, such as clicking on an advertisement, signing up for a newsletter, or submitting a contact form. Conversions help us marketers gauge interest level.

Image Courtesy of Will Lion on Flickr

While the ban is not a death-knell for the print directory industry, as San Francisco is rarely a driving force in shaping the nation’s statutes, it is a further signal of the slow and steady decline of the yellow pages.

The major print directory companies, including Dex and AT&T, seeing a reduction of phone book usage over the years, have already begun to focus more of their energy on incorporating search engine advertising services into their product lines. Why would good-ol’ yellow pages companies turn to the web? Because search engine marketing is essentially directory advertising. The phone book companies have hundreds of years of combined experience in parsing business verticals down to keyword headings for ease of search in their books.  Google did not invent the keyword; Google’s use of the keyword in search is just a natural progression of the organization of information by heading, only instead of letting your fingers do the walking, Google’s famous algorithm takes you where you want to go. Getting into search engine marketing (SEM) is an obvious move for any print directory company.

Even though the major directory companies have started to see that their main product is antiquated, and are trying to get into the internet game, their business practices have not been so quick to adjust to the new climate.  When selling advertising in a print book, the directory companies have an actual, physical product to sell to clients. They can charge whatever the market will allow for inclusion into a particular book. This is billed at a monthly rate. When selling search engine advertising, the print companies face a very interesting quandary: there is no physical product to sell to their clients. This does not stop them from treating AdWords clicks as a tangible, monthly-billable product.  Most print companies running SEM campaigns set a monthly budget for their advertisers to spend on clicks. This monthly budget often  includes a built in margin. So, for example, if you have signed for a $500 per month SEM campaign, you are actually getting significantly less than that amount to spend on clicks. This is a click-as-product versus a service-as-product model.

This is no good for advertisers for many reasons. Firstly, the margin, as is the companies’ prerogative, is not disclosed. So, any campaign statistics that advertisers see reflects an artificially high average cost-per-click. This leads advertisers to believe that clicks on Google are too expensive, and often turns them off from search engine marketing altogether. These advertisers believe that Google itself is to blame, unaware that their print company is tacking on a hefty margin. (Google has gone to great lengths lately to force SEM management companies to disclose their margin to customers when one is applied.)

Most troubling, though, about the practice of adding a margin to AdWords clicks is that the print companies managing search engine marketing campaigns are under heavy pressure to spend that monthly budget every month, regardless if there is true, qualified traffic out there to deliver quality clicks. The companies can only realize revenue once a click is made. The most important goal of an SEM company that adds a margin to a click is to spend, spend, spend—as quickly as possible.

This is a viable, if print-world derived business model, but it is not in the best interest of the advertiser. Better SEM companies do not charge a margin, only a set up and management fee. The pressure is on, then, for these companies to deliver quality clicks at a reasonable rate.

There is plenty of ad space out there on Google for everyone, and the print companies have every right to be players in the market. Hopefully, savvy advertisers will realize that the old directory way of doing business, as applied to online search, does not translate into better leads.

It’s good of San Francisco to keep the directories out of their landfills and sidewalks. Hopefully this will encourage the print companies to revolutionize their billing practices as well.

Image courtesy of loungelistener on Flickr

Some interesting statistics about mobile:

• There are approximately four billion mobile subscribers across the world.
• Nielsen predicts that smart phones will account for nearly half of worldwide mobile sales by 2013.
• Americans today are spending an average of 3 hours per day on the Internet from their mobile devices.
• Over the past few years, the shipment of mobile handsets has grown 16% annually – reaching 400 million sold in the last quarter of 2010. Mobile device companies sold a total of 1.39 billion units in 2010.
• Approximately 30% of U.S. mobile phone users have a smartphone, according to Nielson. This number is expected to grow to approximately 43% by 2015, according to eMarketer.
• By 2014, mobile internet usage is expected to exceed desktop internet usage.

Have you developed your mobile strategy or figured out how mobile can benefit your organization? MedTouch has been working with healthcare clients to develop mobile strategies that fit their goals.

1. Patients and Visitors interactive campus map with GPS and Google map integration with links to key locations and services.
2. Multi-facility wait time with GPS integration to find the closest location to you.
3. Hospital quicklinks: Find a Doctor online, wait time, maps and directions, careers
4. Special event apps: For example, a Foundation run event with GPS integrated maps and directions, ability to make a donation, real-time stopwatch and alerts, schedule of events and the ability to upload photos and testimonials.
5. Extension of your Intranet: Providing secured access to hospital news, message from CEO, alerts and notifications, special events and disaster recovery communication.

If you need help understanding the potential of mobile and how mobile strategies can deliver results, contact Sandra Fancher at sfancher@medtouch.com for a thought-provoking conversation.

Here is a little more about Eric:

An experienced iOS and Android application developer and an expert on all things mobile, Eric is responsible for developing and guiding mobile strategy at MedTouch. This includes integrating mobile and social media channels as well as developing Facebook applications.

Previously, Eric resided in Tokyo, Japan, and developed iOS apps for eiGoTown.com and B3 United Inc using Xcode, Simulator, and Instruments. Eric is also fluent in Japanese.