We’ll be on the third floor of a building that will look something like this:

Rendering of the new Geonetric building in New Bohemia, Cedar Rapids, Iowa

If all goes according to plan, the new facility should be ready in the Spring of 2014. This is an important move for Geonetric for a couple of reasons:

•  We’re continuing our steady growth and we simply need more room. Our new location will be almost twice as large as our current one, and can accommodate projected growth for the next 10 years, at least.
• We have a creative team. We need access to coffee shops, book stores, restaurants, markets, and beer to fuel all that creativity. New Bohemia is packed with this stuff: everything will be available in a one-block radius of our new location.
• It’s being built on a former industrial site (it was once a steel plant at 415 12th Ave SE). Our project will convert an empty brownfield lot into a state-of-the-art office facility for several progressive companies.
• Our current location doesn’t offer the collaboration space we desperately need. Our Agile adoption has put tremendous pressure on our teams to be flexible and communicate better. The new location will have lots of room for us to easily get together and make things happen.
• The new facility will feature important amenities we don’t have now:
  • Open floor plans for easy pairing (two employees work together on one task)
  • It’s on the major bike path in our area, so employees can bike to work
  • Showers for those who do bike to work
  • A café for serendipitous conversations
  • A room large enough for our all-hands company meetings in which we can sit comfortably as we grow
  • Training lab space for group learning
  • An indoor grill so we can continue our mission-critical provision of meat (or veggie burgers) to our team, even in the winter. Grilling outside in the winter in Iowa is not fun.

In short, the new location will help Geonetric grow and continue to deliver outstanding work for our clients.

When we’re ready, I promise we will throw one heck of an open house party!

The post Geonetric’s New Home in New Bohemia appeared first on GeoVoices.

The video does a great job highlighting was makes Geonetric cool. It could easily have gone longer than one minute. Especially when it listed the part about the employees being what really makes the company rock. Here are some other things that we didn’t have time to include in the video:

• We are all about candid, constructive criticism and praise between peers and co-workers.
• Managers don’t improve team performance – teams do.
• Our company-wide monthly meetings are all about transparency.
• We have a no-hierarchy peer-accountable culture.
• Flexibility in our work hours enables us to produce exceptional work.
• It’s OK to have fun at work.

Sound like you’d fit right in? Check out our current job openings and browse the site to learn more about us. If you don’t see a job that matches your talents, send us your resume anyways! We’re always looking for bright, dedicated employees.

The post What Makes Geonetric a Cool Place to Work? appeared first on GeoVoices.

This week, resident content experts Maggie and Jill joined me at the Confab Minnesota conference. We were among more than six hundred content strategists whose projects run the gamut from global enterprises to two-person Web teams, manufacturing to healthcare, retail to non-profit.

Much time was spent as you’d expect: talking about words. Creating the appropriate voice for your organization, dealing with content overload, and, in general, creating better content experiences.

If you’re a Geonetric client, this would have been familiar ground, thanks to our eHealth Symposium and clients-only webinars. You already know how to create better cross-device experiences through responsive design, why structured content is essential for the future of search, how to find the right voice and tone for writing about healthcare, and how to make smarter content decisions using data. And if you don’t have time to stay on top of it all, you’ve got a team of smart folks backing you up.

For all of the talk about content, in reality, the conference was more about people than words.

Make a Change

It shouldn’t have been a shock. Content, the Web, and marketing all become a focal point for the organization. They are the external proof that great work is being done. That brings a lot of pressure — and a lot of resistance — to the change that is required to improve the content experience for our audiences.

Three tips for making change happen:

1. Talk to People: I’ve been amazed at how many client meetings I’ve been in where the people at the table from the same organization don’t know each other. They’re meeting for the first time because of the change—and you wonder why they’re uptight. So, go find people you don’t normally interact with. Ask them what they’re working on. Tell them what you’re up to. It’s laying the groundwork for collaboration in the future.
2. Celebrate Their Success: Neurology just got a new, non-invasive, uh… laser cat for zapping… yucky stuff and something something. They want a new microsite filled with jargon-y content? How exciting! As you’re talking to people, figure out what they’re excited about. Change and collaboration require shared goals. This is how you get there. Shared goals also help with focus and prioritization – helping you deliver more value, rather than more stuff.
3. Be as Cross-Functional As You Can Be: Nearly every presentation contained a photo of grain silos. The presenters talked about tearing down the walls, and working as an empowered, cross-functional team. Unfortunately, that’s not the current reality for many organizations. You have to be clever. Figure out how to get everyone to the table, open the channels of communication, and use those shared goals to help everyone pull together.

Change is never easy. It requires you to slow down. It necessitates a shift in thinking – rather than focusing on volume, focus on value. Rather than more content, more page views, more Facebook fans, it’s about getting the right content in front of the right people at the right time.

(Not a client? You can still keep up with how these types of emerging trends are affecting healthcare marketing – sign up for Geonetric’s eHealth Spotlight Newsletter.)

The post Confab Minnesota 2013: More than Words appeared first on GeoVoices.

Geonetric approaches marketing differently. We launch Responsive Campaigns ― campaigns that not only help healthcare marketers prove their value, but also solve many of the flaws inherent in traditional campaigns.

With Responsive Campaigns, you begin with the results. The first step is to establish the goal and determine how to measure success. You create value right away ― you don’t waste time planning and brainstorming. You execute an arsenal of tactics in short iterations ― each week, you plan and create new work, immediately test it by taking it “live,” evaluate the results, and make rapid adjustments. You conduct many small experiments and adjust your decisions as new data is available. And your focus always remains on the results and ROI.

To learn more about Geonetric’s Responsive Campaigns, check out our free white paper – Stop Gambling with Your Marketing Dollars: A Guide to Geonetric’s Responsive Campaigns.

The post Stop Gambling with Your Marketing Dollars appeared first on GeoVoices.

Based on the enhancement requests I’ve seen since schema.org was launched by Google, Yahoo! and Bing, I know that a fair number of clients will be excited by this support. If it’s a new concept for you, hang in there: I’m about to give a quick overview describing what it is and why you should care. At the end, I’ll also share some helpful links.

One of the biggest problems faced by search engines today is their inability to understand the content on your Web pages. If you stop and think about it for a moment, it’s easy to see why. Take this sample Provider Details page as an example:

When you or I look at this, we immediately understand the content. We recognize that the big picture of the person is an image of the doctor, and that the images used as design elements on the page are not pictures of the doctor. This ability to understand the semantic meaning of content – something we often take for granted – turns out to be incredibly difficult for machines (including Search Engines) to do.

While we understand that the text across the top of the page is the doctor’s name, Google might not. We know that the phone numbers at the bottom are associated with the doctor, but Bing has to guess that relationship.

Making search engines guess is bad for business.

Think about what happens if Google makes a bad guess about what the phone number is for your hospital, or for a clinic in it. What happens when Bing gets the location of your Emergency Room wrong?

Content structured with schema.org markup helps address this.

It also opens the door to better information returned in rich snippets, and the ability to showcase your information in new applications and services (like Knowledge Graph) that are being built into search engines and the context-aware devices of tomorrow. At the end of the day, well-structured data makes your content more useful to everyone. Today, and tomorrow. On your website, and off your pages.

Schema.org is a joint standard defined by Google, Bing and Yahoo! (and later, endorsed by others) that helps ensure search engines don’t have to guess what your content is. It uses special markup in the page’s HTML to explicitly define your content in ways that ensure search engines understand which image of the 15 used on a page is the photograph of the doctor.

VitalSite begins supporting schema.org by implementing it on two types of pages: provider details pages, and provider search results pages. We use a subset of the schema.org Person object, and do it in core so that you don’t have to muck about in HTML to get it all to work. It’s just there, on all your providers, starting with VitalSite 6.7.

Resources for Curious Webmasters

If you’re interested in learning more about schema.org microdata formats, we’ll be communicating more specifics about how we’ve implemented it as we approach release. Geontric clients, you can keep your eye on GeoCentral for details.

If the world of structured content, the semantic Web, and schema.org microformats is new to you, here are some resources to get you started:

• What is Schema.org? – Schema.org
• Person properties – Schema.org
• Schema.org and Search Rank – Matt Cutts (Google)
• SEOs, don’t ignore structured data – Raven
• Schema.org – Wikipedia
• The Semantic Web – Wikipedia

The post Schema.org, Structured Content and VitalSite 6.7 appeared first on GeoVoices.

We’ve been talking about Responsive Design for a long time. In truth, Geonetric was one of the first healthcare Web firms to promote the benefits of this approach in our industry. With the explosion of new devices, form factors, and formats like Windows 8’s touchscreen computers and convertible laptop/tablets, it’s more important than ever to evolve our thinking from “the mobile Web” to a “Whole Web” philosophy.

The initial goal of Responsive Design was simply to deliver all of the content and functionality on our websites to the mobile audience. And it accomplished that. Adobe Flash® features went out the window. Mouse-over menus were outfitted with touchscreen friendly navigation support. And content was prioritized to keep the most important items visible as screens got smaller and smaller.

But now as designers gain more experience with Responsive Design, they’re not just adapting their design techniques. They’re also adapting their processes to deliver a better digital experience given the new demands of emerging platforms. The mobile first design approach – where you create a design for the mobile site before the desktop site – is an example of this.

Changing our processes requires us to rethink the solutions we deliver. This has certainly proven true as Responsive Design evolves beyond making more usable mobile sites to developing the whole site based on the mobile experience. I’ve heard a lot of hospital marketing executives expressing a desire to have their website “not look like a hospital site.” And let’s face it – hospital websites were starting to look a lot alike. It’s time for change.

The drive to create great mobile experiences has initiated a Web design renaissance. We think not just in the horizontal but also the vertical. Designing “above the fold” is an antiquated concept, and scrolling is no longer verboten as gesture supports – such as swiping and pinching – make it easier for visitors to find information below the fold. Designers need to embrace the new reality – a lack of the type of precision control in how their designs will look to any given user as they build sites that adapt.

The emergence of mobile isn’t an event or a change that happened very quickly. It’s a series of changes that have been happening and will continue to happen. That’s why it’s an exciting time to be working in the healthcare Web space. But, it’s also a risky time for organizations that are resting on their laurels and not being aggressive in keeping up with a changing Web!

To learn more about how healthcare website design is changing and explore some hospitals that are breaking the “hospital website design” mold, join us for our webinar, “Pushing Hospital Website Design” at 3:00 p.m. CT on June 20.

The post Responsive Design is a Journey, Not a Destination appeared first on GeoVoices.

If you’ve worked in the Web industry for any length of time, you’re painfully aware of how challenging it is to plan for, create, and maintain great content. In healthcare, as in many other industries, there is an enormous amount of informational content. It can easily become overwhelming. However, nothing is more central than content to the success of your online strategy and the overall experience of your audience.

Talk with content strategy experts and you will hear war stories about hours spent manipulating spreadsheets. Dozens of articles and blog posts describe in tedious detail how to combine numerous data files into a single view. All of this cutting, pasting, manipulation, and frustration doesn’t leave much time – or energy – for actually  understanding the content or developing a solid strategy, let alone writing anything.

Leave the Spreadsheets to Accounting

It’s time for a new toolset. We’re creating Web-based software that helps Web teams to see all of their content across multiple channels, easily access quantitative metrics, and add insight with hands-on qualitative analysis.

Interested in progress updates, invitations to collaborate, and early access?
Visit blazecontent.com

We’re making it possible to do this in a collaborative, real-time environment – no more waiting for locked files, trying to track down the latest version, or merging sets of changes. We believe that content is the crux of creating great user experiences, and that better tools lead to better content.

Escaping Gravity

You may be wondering how this impacts all of the stuff Geonetric does today. Creating something new is difficult. It’s especially hard to overcome the gravitational pull of what you’ve done in the past. With that in mind, this project is designed to be insulated from existing products and services. We’re operating as a lean startup inside of Geonetric with a small team that will grow if when! we are successful.

Rather than being a drain on the existing organization, we’ve already seen positive side effects. What seems like a tiny shift has thrown open the door for team members to collaborate differently, share new ideas, try out new technologies, and find better ways to solve problems. That’s innovation.

The post An Innovative Solution to the Content Conundrum appeared first on GeoVoices.

The re-branding was done by local ad agency Immortology which did nothing to convince me that the announcement in early April wasn’t just a big April fool’s joke. In fact the announcement included employees unveiling “Cheat Death” t-shirts and signing a pledge to help local residents lead healthier lives.

The backlash from the campaign was severe and the campaign was taken down within a few days — ultimately leading to the dismissal of the CEO two weeks later.

Honestly, I feel bad for the CaroMont team here. They were trying to be bold and a little controversial to get attention. Something that, quite frankly, we see too little of in healthcare marketing. Furthermore, the slogan overshadowed what appears to be a serious program intended to promote wellness and stave off disease. Again, a step that many healthcare organizations know that we need to be committing ourselves to and one that more than a few organizations give little more than lip service.

But it all went bad over two words: “Cheat Death.”

What can we learn from this?

For starters, healthcare is a unique space from a marketing perspective. More and more provider organizations are moving to agencies with big brand credentials over those dedicated to healthcare. But those agencies often don’t understand how their messages will play with a healthcare audience. We have an agency involved here that, according to their website, “…specializes in creating hard to ignore and impossible to forget solutions…” The campaign certainly lived up to their brand promise!

Now, if you’re putting a message out that you intend to be controversial, don’t be surprised that it’s controversial. I think CaroMont could have really embraced the controversy and stood by their decision if only for a week or two. This would have allowed them to use the publicity to push a message about improving wellness and working to reduce the incidence of disease. By caving almost immediately, the team looked incompetent.

Also use the Internet for some quick, inexpensive and very effective marketing research. For example you should Google your proposed taglines. In this case, the slogan wasn’t particularly original. Some of you may recall a similar outcry when the identical slogan was adopted by juice maker Pom in 2010. Certainly a quick Internet search would have turned this up.

Pom was pushing the limits and didn’t immediately back down. It made the short-lived campaign memorable. Maybe a drink maker who is regularly chided for making overzealous health claims about its product can get away with that in a way that a hospital can’t.

But there’s no reason not to think that the tagline would stir up controversy.

Perhaps the campaign was more fundamentally flawed than I’m giving it credit for. We’ve been talking more and more about the inherent risk in investing months and months – along with many thousands of dollars – into big splash branding campaigns.

The new tagline was really for their new wellness campaign. As a campaign message, they could easily have tested the message in the market using online promotion while maintaining flexibility to tweak things on the fly.

In fact, following an approach like Geonetric’s Responsive Campaigns^sm is the best way to avoid this sort of disaster using a very dynamic, results-driven approach that utilizes actual user behavior and feedback in optimizing the effectiveness of the communications throughout a campaign cycle.

I hope that the take-away from this isn’t that we should avoid being bold and memorable. That we shouldn’t take risks in our advertising. Healthcare marketing needs a real shot in the arm. While this effort may have missed the mark, that doesn’t mean that we should step back to only do what’s comfortable and safe.

The post Why Would You Try to “Cheat Death”? appeared first on GeoVoices.

With the dramatic rise of mobile-enabled devices, healthcare marketers are looking for new ways to connect with mobile users. Stand-alone mobile sites and mobile apps just aren’t cutting it.

It’s time to consider a whole new approach to the mobile Web. One that is much more efficient for healthcare marketers to maintain and improves the mobile experience for visitors to your website.

It’s called responsive design.

Responsive design enables a website to automatically adjust to the device being used. Every site visitor has an optimal experience regardless of whether they are accessing the website with a Smartphone, tablet or on a desktop computer.

Geonetric’s Vice President Ben Dillon shares how Cone Health and Rush-Copley Medical Center leverage responsive design in his latest article “Connecting With Mobile Users: Responsive Design Offers a New Approach” which appeared in Issue 2, 2013 of the Healthcare Strategy Alert! published by the Forum for Healthcare Strategists.

Check out the article and see how responsive design helped these healthcare organizations meet their online goals.

The post How Healthcare Marketers Can Improve the Mobile Experience appeared first on GeoVoices.

Anne – Molly – Kevin R. – Kevin S. – Nicole

If you are a non-profit headquartered in Linn County, IA we encourage you to apply for Operation Overnight by July 1, 2013. During last year’s Operation Overnight, four non-profits received brand new websites built by Geonetric’s experienced Web designers, developers and marketers. This year, it could be you we help!

In case you need more incentive to apply, here’s a sneak peak at some of the people who would be working on your site and why they think having a new website would help you.

“Having a presence on the Web is one thing. Having a high quality presence on the Web is another. Our teams will strive once again to build an experience for your site visitors that is better than what you can get elsewhere… and for free!” – Kevin Reiter

“Websites are becoming increasingly essential to the success of your mission. During Operation Overnight we promise to treat your mission as our own. At Geonetric we have experience producing strategic Web communication tools. Results? Ask any of the four non-profits we helped during Operation Overnight 2012. This year will be no different. Now it’s your chance! Apply today! Come October 18, 2013 you might be the one bragging about your new website. Let the good times roll!” – Kevin Stejskal

“It’s a no brainer – if you don’t apply we can’t select you! This opportunity isn’t like playing the lottery. There’s actually a good chance you could get a new website. You’ll find our application process quick and easy. Just tell us things you already know about your organization and how we can help create the website of your dreams.” – Molly Kovarik

“How many more lives could your organization touch and bless through a new website? If chosen, Operation Overnight could be your organization’s opportunity to expand its Web presence at no cost! Take five minutes to apply at www.operationovernight.com and tell us why your organization is the perfect fit for this gift.” – Anne Ohrt

The post Why Non-Profits in Linn County, IA Should Apply for Operation Overnight appeared first on GeoVoices.