by Lisa Kersey

When Dorothy was lost in unfamiliar territory, the Wizard helped her find her way home.  Today, hospitals find themselves in a similar place – but not for the reasons you might think. 

Yes, hospitals have room for improvement when it comes to quality and patient safety. They have opportunities to decrease waste and duplication to help decrease the cost of healthcare. And it’s also true that hospitals need to improve the overall patient experience. But those things alone will not differentiate one hospital from another; health reform is requiring all hospitals to improve in these areas and upping the ante on incentives for achieving them.

So, how will hospitals differentiate themselves in the new world order of healthcare? No offense to our brethren in the Sunflower State, but we’re not in Kansas anymore! The rules of the game have changed, and you’d better change your approach, if you want to attract and retain physicians, nurses, clinical staff and, yes, patients.

Will differentiation matter? You can bet your little red shoes it will. While there is unprecedented consolidation in healthcare and while bundled payments will force unfamiliar alignments, people will still have a choice of where they seek services. If there were a Wizard along the yellow brick road of health reform, here’s what I think he’d have to say to hospitals to help them differentiate themselves:

1.  Stop talking about yourself!  While awareness will always play a role in hospital public relations and marketing, the conversation needs to change. At its most fundamental, healthcare is about people and helping them to be as healthy as they can be. So quit talking about your technology and your awards. Besides, no one’s really listening anyway. And it’s not a monologue. People want to have a conversation about their health.

2.  Engage with people! Don’t be so distracted dotting your i’s and crossing your t’s in your new electronic health record that you forget what your mother taught you. Make eye contact. Say please and thank you. Introduce yourself. Listen more, talk less. Anticipate the needs of your patients and their families. Say you’re sorry – even if it’s just for how they feel, and not because you did anything wrong.

3.  Embrace your new surroundings! While there are a lot of unknowns, there are also a lot of new tools that can help you build relationships with your patients and community –use them. Start with what you can control –your own website, your social media properties, and leveraging mobile technology.

4.  Don’t budget tactics, budget strategy! If your budget includes line items for print, broadcast, radio, advertising and PR, then you are destined to be led by tactics rather than by a strategy. The name of the game is integration. So, depending what your hospital may need, consider budgeting for things like reputation/brand building, service growth and strategic communications (which would include things like change communication, crisis communication, etc.).  This will help to link your tactics to measurable objectives so that you can evaluate whether or not your approach was successful.   

And the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow…

5.  Focus on the “health” in healthcare! Talking about sick care is just not that pleasant. And unless you’re one of the 25 percent of people actually looking for a doctor or hospital service at any given time, you don’t care anyway. So why not engage with 100 percent of people in your community by talking about something that’s relevant to them – their health. What can you do to educate them in new ways? How can you help keep people out of your hospital? How can you use new media to connect people with information and other people who share their interests or concerns? What can you offer that will cause people to associate your hospital with holistic care, with wellness?

There are several health systems that have found the Wizard. They have connected with people and embraced the health in healthcare: the Mayo Clinic, Henry Ford, Intermountain Healthcare and Inova.  These systems understand the value in making the 180 degree shift, and they have made a purposeful investment in wellness.  Now before you go clicking your heels together and tell me that you’re going back to Kansas because you think wellness is reserved only for the few, listen. No matter the size, location or ownership of your hospital, you have the opportunity to focus on the health in healthcare. But don’t revert to tactics like advertising about how you care about wellness; instead, develop and implement a strategy that demonstrates it to your patients and to your community.

Are you off to see the Wizard? 

THE BOOZE BIN

By Pia Mara Finkell (@piamara)

This is my last Booze Bin post before Baby Finkell joins the party, so I thought I’d leave you with some of my favorite wine social media tools and platforms for 2012. Don’t worry though, my much smarter and wittier colleagues will be pinch hitting for me while I’m on maternity leave. The Booze Bin lives on!

 Now on to those hot tools for grapey greatness. The first applies to much more than wine, the second saves you time and keeps you engaged (for free) and the third offers a good solution to small business owners trying to get on the social train.

1. Pinterest: I’ve heard mention of it so many times in the past month that it seems a waste to not start a drinking game, or at least scream Pee-Wee’s Playhouse word-of-the-day style with every reference. For those of you without estrogen running through your veins or a close female friend in her early 20’s, Pinterest is an invite-only, visually-beautiful, digital bulletin board that takes your magazine cutting and scrapbooking habit online, and makes it searchable for others with similar interests.

Now one of the top 10 social networks, Pinterest is perfect for wineries and wine regions looking to engage potential customers online with cool visual (image + video) elements of their winery and wines, pairings and recipes, new label ideas, etc.

2. Social Connect: Created by a friend’s wine digital think tank, the second is a killer tool to help the wine industry listen and engage with their customers in the online sphere FOR FREE (yes, actually free, forever). It was a cool tool as Cruvee, but the spanky newest version of this web application mines and delivers all online conversation around your wine brand on wine blogs and discussion boards, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, CellarTracker and others. It has lots of new bells and whistles, but bottom line, it’s a great free tool to measure online discussion specific to the wine industry. Rad.

3. Social Candy: Great for individual wineries on a shoestring marketing budget (take a look at their client lineup), Social Candy offers small businesses simple, online tools to create and manage Facebook content, including wine e-commerce, events and integration with other online mediums (blogs, websites, etc.). One of their customers from Lambert Winery testified, “the integration to our eCommerce system allows us to change content in a single location, and it automatically updates on our website and in Facebook at the same time. Social Candy also makes it easy for us to change our featured wines, update event information and showcase our beautiful winery.”

Cheers y’all and thanks for reading the Booze Bin. Lordy knows I’ll need a stiff drink once this baby is on the outside, so you can be sure you’ll hear from me soon.

Photos courtesy of Godammit.com, Wine Industry Network and AppsBistro.

By Mike Mulvihill

 While Super Bowl fanfare dominated last week’s news, the Interior Department announced the conclusion of a study that sets the stage for the equivalent of a Bowl Championship Series for offshore wind development.

The environmental study found there would be “no significant environmental and socioeconomic impacts” from offshore development. This brings the department a step closer to actually selling leases for waters off Maryland, Virginia, Delaware and New Jersey. Right now, not a single turbine spins off these shores.

In addition to moving a step closer to selling leases, the study also moves project development onto a faster track. According to the Offshore Wind Development Coalition, the study finding could reduce the permitting time for offshore wind farms by as much as two years by alleviating the need for studies and government review required by an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the study territory.

There will still be plenty of environmental impact studies required for any specific offshore wind project. But alleviating two years of time and money just to propose a project will encourage many more companies to move forward with bidding on leases that may actually become projects rather than financial albatrosses.

The Interior Department needs to get things moving if it wants to further the Obama administration’s energy strategy to deploy 10 gigawatts of offshore wind generating capacity by 2020 and 54 gigawatts by 2030 (targets that include both state and federal waters off both coasts, the Gulf of Mexico and other regions). Fifty-four gigawatts would be enough to power more than 15 million average homes, according to the Energy Department – or equivalent to the output of 81 average sized coal power plants.

The Giants taking the Super Bowl is worth a parade today. But for generations of Americans, this mundane study may be worthy of a much bigger celebration.

Three Must-Attend Sessions for Advanced Digital Marketers

By Priya Ramesh (@newpr)

I don’t know about you but I am really, really excited about DC’s first ever Social Media Week starting next Mon, Feb 13th. It’s about time the DC, Virginia, Maryland tri-state area joined the global  during Social Media Week activities. Social Media Week offers a series of interconnected activities and conversations around the world on emerging trends in social and mobile media across all major industries. In just under three years, Social Media Week has expanded to 21 cities, including New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto, Vancouver, Sao Paulo, Rio De Janeiro, Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Istanbul, London, Paris, Rome, Milan, Glasgow, Berlin, Moscow, Beirut and Hong Kong. Starting in 2012, SMW is adding Tokyo, Singapore, DC and Miami.

Check out the complete schedule for the DC Social Media Week here. This will be a week-long celebration of all things digital and technology with workshops, expert panels and networking opportunities. If you spend a chunk of your life in marketing, communications, social media, make use of this fantastic opportunity to meet peers and learn what some of our DC area companies are doing in the digital space. Hats off to Peter Corbett , CEO, iStrategy Labs and his uber smart team for producing Social Media Week DC. Peter is a household name in the DC technology scene and was recognized as Great Washington DC Board of Trade’s “One To Watch” for being “A rising entrepreneur who has a bright and sustainable future in Greater Washington. You won’t be disappointed with Peter behind the event.

As CRT/tanaka’s social media lead, I have been speaking at several industry events and also try to attend at least ONE solid conference a year to stay ahead of the digital curve. But I am sure you will probably relate to me feeling a little “conferenced out” (thanks Shashi Bellamkonda, advisory board member, Social Media Week-DC for coining that phrase). So when the Social Media Week DC email arrived in my inbox I had the same feeling of, “here we go again, another one of those events where agencies and vendors line up panel discussions with catchy titles and pretty much say the same thing you heard last year at a different conference.” So with a little bit of that cynicism, I did land on the Social Media Week’s schedule page and was pleasantly surprised to see actual case studies of reputable organizations in the DC region. Here’s my top three sessions that I would encourage you to attend if you are hard pressed on time and if you are already through the social media basics and advancing to the next level.

1. Unleash the Hidden Power of the Social Customer and Grow Your Business
Location: Ketchum
Monday, February 13 at 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM

Session description: Customers are more empowered than ever – and more vocal. Social media is driving a change in customer behaviors; do you know how to harness it? This talk will help you create winning strategies that leverage social media to grow your business, and that of your clients, through current customers and brand loyalists. Drawing from her book The Hidden Power of Your Customers, Becky Carroll will discuss the mindset of the social customer and share specific strategies to unleash the potential that is hidden within them. For more information and registration: http://smwdc12beckycarroll.eventbrite.com/

I have personally heard Becky Carroll speak at Blog World on the topic of Social CRM. She has a wealth of knowledge and expertise in this area so if you are especially a B2B or are looking for enterprise-wide social media integration to boost customer service and customer success programs, this is a MUST attend.

2. The Value of a Like: Measuring and Reporting on the ROI of Social Media
Location: Holiday Inn Battleview – Manassas, VA
Wednesday, February 15 at 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM

Session description: What’s the value of a “like” or a Twitter follower? What does adding 10,000 more fans really mean to your business’s bottom line? In this session we’ll help attendees identify which metrics make the most sense for measuring, analyzing and reporting on the ROI of their social media efforts. More details on this session at http://socialmediaweek.org/event/?event_id=1176. I am glad to see this session cover the following basics in social media metrics and measurement:
• Identifying your objectives for using social media
• Defining the metrics and KPIs for success
• Free and paid tools to get you started with monitoring/measuring
• How to calculate the value of earned media and reach
• Using Google Analytics and Facebook Insights for analysis
• Creating simple dashboard spreadsheets in Excel for reporting KPIs/ROI

I have been pretty vocal about the fact that the social media honeymoon phase is over and it is not just enough to launch your brand on social channels, we got to start answering the critical ROI questions. So if you are beyond the honeymoon phase, the above session should provide you a good understanding of how to go about defining ROI for your social efforts.

3. Another Social Network? How to Combat Social Media Fatigue in Your Business
Location: APCO Worldwide
Friday, February 17 at 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM

Session description: As more and more social networks are introduced or evolve to mimic other platforms, will social interaction around new social tools and networks continue to rise or will consumer engagement level off? Social media experts from APCO Worldwide, SBNation.com and GetBetterHealth.com will help you:

• Uncover the realities of social media fatigue
• Identify the sectors in which social media fatigue is occurring and discuss how to avoid contributing to 
  social media fatigue in your business efforts.
• Gain best practices to combat social media fatigue and discover implementable tactics for using it to
  your competitive business advantage. Details at http://socialmediaweek.org/event/?event_id=2208

If you are a marketing, PR, communications professional living in the DC area, there is no reason for you to not be involved with Social Media Week. The best learning happens when you get out of your office and meet real people doing real social media work. You can also stay connected to the week’s activities virtually by following @SMWWDC and the hashtag #smwwdc.

Also stay tuned to the CRT/tanaka Buzz Bin next week to hear from us on specific case studies and thoughts from digital experts.

Have fun and let’s keep it real with social media!

By Dave McNamara

With the explosion of the smartphone and the tablet market, a shift known as the second screen is quickly taking over how people consume media.  This phenomenon of the second screen essentially means that while people are watching television in the comfort of their living room, they are simultaneously accessing the web on their laptops, tablets, or smartphones.

According to the Nielsen Company, in figures they released in October 2011, approximately 40% of viewers use mobile devices while watching television. A majority of the activity currently involves time during commercial breaks checking email or sports scores, looking up actor/actress information, or interacting on social networking sites. While this activity would seem disruptive to traditional marketing models, the Nielsen report also discovered that over 1 in 10 of these users checked product information and coupon deals on their devices.

Instead of trying to compete with the second screen, major media companies are seeking to weave the two screens together into a cohesive social television experience. The screens for every major award show and news show are plastered with twitter hash tags to attract live tweets from viewers.  MTV’s 2011 VMA show attracted a record-breaking 5.6 million hits from social media on the day it aired August 28, 2011. With the revelation of Beyoncé’s baby bump during the show, @twitterglobalpr revealed that twitter received a record bump of 8,868 tweets per second. Culling instant feedback like award buzz allows media companies to adjust their content and social strategies according to what attracts enthusiastic attention.

Beyond shaping content strategies from twitter streams and facebook comments, the second screen poses an entirely new platform for marketing and connecting viewers to products. Traditional ad spots are becoming less and less significant.  As Game Day for Super Bowl XLVI approaches this Sunday, major companies have been pre-releasing promotions and commercials. Honda has released “Matthew’s Day Off” a tribute to the 1986 film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Not to be outdone, Volkwagen has released “Dog Strikes Back” an extension of their 2011 commercial featuring a pint-sized Darth Vader.

But, in the rapidly-changing online world, pre-releasing commercials to just the second screen is already très passé.  The interaction of the second screen and first screen together is the future, and major companies and advertisers recognize this shift.

For Game Day, Google is customizing their search resources into a microsite where users will be able to search for recipes,  an entire game day site complete with recipes, pre-game trivia, and essential mobile information like the scores once the kickoff happens.

Other companies have also created sites to engage users via the second screen on game day.  Coca-Cola has created a facebook app that features a polar-bear game-watching party.  Pizza delivery chain Papa John’s is promoting their site where users can register for the Papa John’s reward program and pick whether the coin toss for the Super Bowl is heads or tails. If a user’s prediction matches the coin toss on Game Day, she will receive a free pizza courtesy Papa John’s. General Motors has created a Chevrolet mobile app for the iOS and Android mobile platforms to enable fans to interact and possibly win promotions. Fans who registered before January 27 received unique license numbers that give them the opportunity to win one of the cars featured in the Chevrolet XLVI commercials based upon matching a fan’s license number to the license plate of one of the cars.

Even though uncertainty about the future platforms of media and advertising persists, capitalizing on the second screen is a considerable opportunity for advertisers. With a well-thought-out strategy and matching execution plan, a coordinated campaign can unite competing media platforms like television and smartphones. With the added benefit of instant feedback and accurate metrics, the efforts can precisely engage target audiences. The viewers can instantly access timely promotions on their second screen devices, improving response rate to the ads.

By Debbie Myers

My family has been in the naming business of late. Both of my daughters are expecting. Together with their husbands, they have been researching names for the little bundles of joy. Having not named a little one in quite a while, I find that I’m clearly out of the loop on the seemingly endless array of names, many of which I’ve never heard of. Now, I get that John and Mary are just too plain Jane, so to speak, but when my son-in-law proposed the name Link from the video game series Legend of Zelda, I had to say, “Hold on a minute. Let’s think this through.”

Usually I’m in the position of helping healthcare companies rebrand or name new services. So, could the advice I provide clients help my kids through this daunting task? Well, let’s see.

1. The best names are memorable.

A John or Mary could become memorable over time because of their deeds, but we will likely encounter many Johns and Marys in life – what makes one more memorable than the other? A person named Ulysses or Epiphany might do absolutely nothing in life that’s special, but chances are you would remember their names.

Recently, University Health Systems in North Carolina changed its name to Vidant Health. By replacing a very generic name, with a unique name that is distinctive, Vidant has the opportunity to become a more memorable brand.

2. Names should be relatable.

When naming a baby, it’s difficult to know who they will become when they’re grown up. Christening your little girl with a name like Bluebell might sound cute at the time, but ask people to feel confident when Dr. Bluebell is operating on their heart and you’re asking for a leap of faith for sure.

Companies, however, know what they want to stand for and their name should reflect this. Recently, Catholic Healthcare West changed its name to Dignity Health because it ended its affiliation with the Catholic Church. By selecting the name Dignity, the system was able to create a more distinctive name, but one that is still related to its faith-based character.

3. Lean towards timeless over trendy.

Names that endure have a classic value. In addition to meeting the two guidelines above, timeless names are easy to say and spell. They’re not distracting in a cutesy or overly clever way.  Most importantly, some names never lose their luster, because behind the name stands a brand personality that is approachable and respected, while classically modern.

So how does the name Link stand up again these standards? I’ll let you decide. Fortunately for me, the kids have moved on to other choices; ones that certainly will always be memorable to me, but hopefully to others as well.

THE BOOZE BIN

By Emily Valentine (@ebvalentine)

Just before the holidays, I invited a friend over for a glass of wine and asked her to bring a bottle of her choice. When she arrived at my doorstep bearing a bottle of Cupcake Chardonnay, I couldn’t help but smile. This must’ve been exactly what the Cupcake marketing team had in mind when it built the brand back in 2008.

Picture a 20- or 30-something woman browsing the supermarket wine aisle. She wants something tasteful, but she doesn’t have much time or money to spend. Suddenly, her eyes land on a bottle that might’ve rolled right out of an Anthropologie store. It’s elegant, classy, chic … just like the woman she aspires to be. When she picks it up for a closer look, her decision is sealed – and if this wine brings her as much enjoyment as its pastry namesake, she’ll be a very happy customer.

Consumer opinions on Cupcake’s approach to winemaking and labeling vary, but with a million cases sold in 2011, the brand is no doubt basking in its success. And, regardless of whether you like Cupcake wines, there’s much marketing wisdom to be learned from their example:

1) Know your audience – Cupcake’s first shrewd move was to identify a) the customer group with the greatest potential to grow wine sales and b) what that group wants from a wine. The Cupcake line, says winemaker Adam Richards, is designed to “please the palates of the next generation of wine drinkers” who are always looking to try something new, especially at an affordable price point. In a somewhat miraculous feat, Cupcake has managed to bottle a lighthearted, feminine formula that delights everyday wine drinkers without appalling the wine elite.

2) Differentiate – No other winery before or since has used such sugary terms to describe its blends, but it’s working for Cupcake. The genius of calling a wine Red Velvet, Angel Food or “reminiscent of lemon chiffon” is three-fold: it’s unusual enough to make an impact, familiar enough to stick, and simplifies wine terminology for beginner wine consumers.

3) Appeal to emotion – In 2008, the gourmet cupcake craze had begun to take hold in the U.S., and Cupcake’s founders sought to emulate the emotional drivers behind this trend. The Cupcake brand was crafted to invoke the feeling people get when they reward or indulge themselves – be that with wine, sweets or other “bite-sized bits of fun.”

4) Curate relevant content – Brands that find a way to be relevant to their customers’ lifestyles and continuously offer fresh, useful content are apt to succeed in today’s marketplace. It didn’t take Cupcake long to figure out what occupied its customers’ minds … and how it could get a slice. The brand now has an entire section of its website geared toward brides-to-be. Visitors to Cupcake’s Bridal Headquarters can find advice on everything from party planning on a budget to selecting the perfect wedding wines. (Eat that, Martha!)

As its blue and white wine bottles continue to fly off store shelves, Cupcake has taken its branding recipe to the next level with a line of flavored vodkas that promise to be “as rewarding and delicious as the wines that came before it.”

So, look out … the next thing you know, your millennial friends will be ordering Frosting and soda or Devil’s Food tonic.

by Mike Mulvihill

 As the presidential election season ramps into a full-tilt boogie, energy will be a topic perking toward the top of the national discussion. While the GOP candidates beat up on one another, the incumbent come this November is beating the energy drum.

 While perusing Facebook, I was greeted by an online banner ad for Obama’s campaign touting the current administration’s progress:

• In 2010 domestic crude oil production reached its highest level since 2003.
• In 2010 natural gas production reached its highest level in more than 30 years.
• The U.S. has become a net exporter of fuels for the first time since 1949.
• A five-year offshore leasing plan will make more than 75 percent of undiscovered oil and gas resources off our shores available for development.
• Electricity generation from wind and solar increased nearly 71 and 40.3 percent between 2008 and 2010, respectively.
• The Obama administration issued a conditional loan guarantee for the construction of the first nuclear power plant to be built in the United States in decades, providing enough clean energy for 1.4 million people.

While it is certainly arguable how much of a role the current administration played in much of these accomplishments, I do have to credit Obama’s stated approach, as recently affirmed in his State of the Union address, “This country needs an all-out, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy.”

 Oddly enough, Virginia’s Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell, in his State of the Commonwealth address on January 11, invoked the same “all of the above” energy strategy. (So this approach has a hope of being one of the few bi-partisan initiatives in the country right now.)

 What does an “all of the above approach” include? Coal, natural gas, nuclear and renewable/alternative energy sources such as wind, solar, hydro, geothermal and biomass all fall under this umbrella. While he didn’t say much about coal in his SOTU address, Obama reiterated support for offshore natural gas and shale natural gas exploration, and included a call to arms to not concede the clean-energy race to China.

 While I have blogged about the impact of China’s nationalistic, government funded/protected approach to green energy development, elsewhere in the world business continues to boom in the global clean energy sector: Reuters reported that deals in the solar, wind, and energy efficiency industries netted a record $53.5 billion last year – up 40 percent from 2010.

 The “all of the above” strategy was also reinforced by last week’s Energy Information Administration Annual Energy Outlook for 2012. EIA projects that between now and 2035 natural gas production and natural gas powered electric generation will increase to 27 percent of electric generation from 24 percent. Meanwhile, coal is projected to continue to be our primary source of electric power at 39 percent, but this figure is well below the 49 percent seen as recently as 2007. The balance will be absorbed by additional green power production from wind, solar and other renewable sources. As a result, carbon dioxide levels are projected to remain below 2005 levels through 2035.

 All in all, the body of information would indicate that we are making progress in “turning the QE” of national power and energy consumption to reduce coal dependency, reduce foreign oil dependency, increase use of renewables and hold or reduce greenhouse gas emissions. All in all, I would categorize the “all of the above” approach and the progress being made as pretty encouraging news. Now if we can just get a new tax code put in place.

 Photo: pokerfanatics.net

By Nikki Parrotte (@nikki_parrotte)

Last Monday, I attended marketing communications and social media conference, What’s Next DC hosted by Green Buzz Agency. The conference attracted public relations and social media enthusiasts alike, offering plentiful speaker sessions and opportunities for networking with peers.

Intended to ignite a social spark, much of the conference tied into strategic planning for 2012. As said by keynote speaker Major George Hood, chief communications officer for Salvation Army, “A river without banks becomes a swamp.” In the spirit of building the most strategic and sturdy of banks, here are my three key takeaways.

Humor = Humanization

Corporate comedian Tim Washer (@timwasher) shared this key to social video success. Contrary to popular belief, there is room for a little humor when it comes to marketing to B2B brands. In order to engage on the social web, a brand must keep in mind the fundamental reasons why social video works. As humans, we’re compelled to share content that is entertaining and relatable, so layer a laugh or two into an otherwise mundane promotional video. Here’s Cisco’s take on humanization through humor.

Click here to view the embedded video.

*Tip from Washer: Test your video concept at different stages of production. What’s funny to you may not be quite so entertaining to someone else.

Facebook Wants to Be Invisible

Well, relatively invisible – throughout the user experience, that is. The social network thrives namely because of the personalization of the user experience. Content strategist Amy Thibodeau (@amythibodeau) shared that Facebook is well aware of this delicate balance. Becoming too visible to users would detract from the experience for which the interface was built.

*To all of you proponents for the introduction of a “dislike” button, you might as well give it a rest. According to Thibodeau, “It’s not going to happen.” This would make negativity far too easy, something Facebook does its best to discourage. 

User-Generated Content is King

At least in the case of extreme fandom empire Dunkin’ Donuts. Public relations and social media manager, Jessica Gioglio (@savvybostonian) admitted that while “America runs on Dunkin’,” Dunkin’ social media is run by the fans. Rather than a continuous stream of branded content via its social channels, she attempts to provide these fans with the tools with which to express their passion. With more than 5.6 million likes on Facebook and high-level engagement to prove it, this strategy works.

*Disclaimer: I am by no means a Patriots fan, in fact, I’m am and forever will be an avid supporter of the Big Blue. One fun fact Gioglio shared with us at the conference is that Dunkin’ sponsors both teams in the Super Bowl this year. Guess they’ve chosen sides…

I congratulate Green Buzz Agency on a successful conference, and the numerous speakers and moderators on thought-provoking discussion. The case studies, tips and tricks that were shared are sure to assist all who attended in mapping out what’s next for 2012.

By Jenn Riggle

One of the best ways to create thought leadership and develop a national reputation is to develop an external blog. Yet only 149 of the nation’s more than 5,700 registered hospitals have a corporate blog.

This is a big issue because some community hospitals are now interested in building national reputation.

Why? Because the healthcare landscape has changed. Today, hospitals are positioning themselves for mergers and acquisitions, joining accountable care organizations (ACOs) and negotiating rates with health insurers. They suddenly care about what people say about them outside their community.

A corporate blog gives hospitals a voice beyond promoting community events and marketing service lines. It also serves as a platform for hospital executives to talk about healthcare issues, discuss what they’re “doing right” and set them apart from other community hospitals.

Hospital blogs will also help drive more traffic to the hospital’s website and improve their website’s search engine optimization (SEO). The same way that hospitals serve as the economic engines of their communities, blogs can serve as the engine for hospital websites. According to the Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors, they do this by providing fresh content that draws people to the site and ultimately, engages them.

With all these positive results, why are hospital marketers afraid?

Blogs are time intensive: Probably the biggest reason hospitals shy from launching external blogs is lack of time. Hospital marketing departments are already short on staff, and maintaining and developing blog content is yet one more job on their to-do list.

They require taking risks: Hospitals are historically risk-averse. Writing a blog and putting news into perspective requires hospital executives to be comfortable taking a stand and possibly saying something that can be seen as controversial.

They require executive buy-in: There is a misconception that a corporate blog needs to written by the hospital’s CEO, like the one written by Paul Levy, the former CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Yet hospital blogs don’t all have to look alike. There are successful hospital blogs that step outside of the box and use photos, videos and bold colors to engage the audience, such as Seattle Children’s Hospital’s Seattle Mama Doc or Boston Children’s Hospital’s Thriving blog.

However, even if hospitals are afraid to make the long-term commitment required to develop their own blog, they can still have a blog strategy. For example, they may develop and place content on major health blogs that already have established audiences, such as Hospital Impact, The Healthcare Blog and KevinMD. This way they’re establishing themselves as thought leaders, without the intense work of maintaining their own blog.

With so few hospitals blogging, there’s a real opportunity for your hospital to be ahead of the curve and establish itself as a thought leader.