It’s Back! Healthcare’s Only Crowdsourced Survey Call for Questions

We are excited to announce the launch of the Second Hospital Industry Crowdsourced Survey on Digital Marketing! If you are a marketer in the hospital industry, you know how important benchmark data is to your peers and executives. Hospitals compare themselves on everything, using data to stay abreast of their performance, competition and customer behavior, and to inform their ongoing marketing strategies.

Here is what we are looking to accomplish this year:

1) Once again, it is free to participate and as a participant you will get the results first.

2) We’ll keep the questions relevant to you. You will help us determine what they’ll be by submitting questions in the comments area below.

3) The report will include a summary of findings, results for each question and relevant charts and graphs illustrating key points to help you make better decisions for your organization.

A little over two years ago, Mike Stutman our SVP of Strategy lead our inaugural survey where you and your peers provided us with your burning questions on digital marketing. We used them to shape the first ever Hospital Industry Crowdsourced Survey and over 100 respondents provided answers. The survey results were so intriguing that it lead to coverage from several organizations including IHealthBeat, Fierce Healthcare, HealthCare ITNews, AMA, and more.

We’re also excited to announce that this year we’ve partnered with eHealthcare Strategy & Trends, which has served the industry since 1999. They’ve been an incredibly valuable partner, helping us guide the initiative from the start.

Here are some general guidelines to submit a question:

• Submit your question (or idea) by leaving it through a comment to this post.
• Any question related to Digital, Integrated and/or Emerging Marketing in the Hospital Industry is welcome.
• Feel free to submit more than one question/idea for consideration, but please understand that not all of your questions may get asked this time. If you like someone else’s comment please let us know and it will have a better chance of making the final cut.

• Please submit your questions and feedback by Tuesday, June 12, 2012.  After that, stayed tuned for notification of the availability of the survey itself and please take the survey when it is sent to you!
• If you have any questions about this survey, please feel free to contact me directly at:  Matthewd@acsysinteractive.com or (832) 449-5755.

Sample Questions (to spur your thinking):

1)      Do you have a site wide content strategy in place?

2)      What is the one thing patients should accomplish when interacting with your organization online?

3)      Does your hospital have plans for mobile marketing?

4)      Do you have a budget allocated to mobile technology for 2012/2013?

5)      How do you plan to measure ROI from your mobile initiatives? What KPIs will you be tracking?

The above questions are only a few to get your thoughts started.  We are far more interested in the burning questions you would like to ask your peers.  Thank you in advance for your participation.

If you missed the results from the first survey, you can check them out here: http://www.acsysinteractive.com/insights/crowdsourced-2010/

LBS and You- Making The Real World Easier to Use

(note- this is blog post #3 in a 5-part series of blog posts focusing on key learnings from SXSW)

The pre-SXSW buzz was all about the new ambient Location-Based applications like Highlight, Glancee and Ban.jo. Did the buzz live up to the hype? Is Foursquare still relevant? What’s next for LBS?  No, Yes, and Read on. Here’s our take:

What makes Ambient Location Based Services (LBS) Apps so compelling?
The value of these LBS apps provides contextual and social relevance while you’re checking in to locations. They are helping to orchestrate serendidipitous meetings with the people around you. We’ll let their descriptions tell the story.

Glancee: a mobile app that helps you discover and connect with new interesting people around you
Highlight: a fun way to learn more about people nearby
Ban.jo: a social discovery app that lets you view people’s social network profiles based on their location

At SXSW, plenty of people were using these apps, but at a conference full of 30,000 techies, is it really helpful to be notified that 370 people are nearby and 47 of them like tacos? Let’s be nicer, and back that out to a smaller case study, say at your local coffee shop. There is indeed value if you discover a fellow pottery enthusiast there,  but is that value worth it Given the privacy/creepiness factor surrounding these apps? Our argument is no. Learning, discovering and connecting with new, like-minded people with similar personal interests in real-time is best left to us humans.

Is Foursquare still relevant?
Absolutely. We had the opportunity to listen to Dennis Crowley during his “Making The Real World Easier to Use” keynote.  Here are some take-aways from the Q&A sesssion with TechCrunch’s MG Siegler.

Q: Why aren’t you engaging with “auto-discovery” and the likes of Glancee, Highlight and Ban.jo, and other “push” technologies based around location?
A:  The batteries simply aren’t there. They exhaust a phone’s suitable life. We’re waiting for the hardware to catch up.

Q: Are you still going with games as an entry point to Foursquare? Aren’t people getting tired of mayorships and badges?
A: There is a big difference between making games and making a utility (like Foursquare) that is playful.  Badges are still the “gateway drug” for new foursquare users and gets people excited. Points may be neat, but the data behind it is really cool. – data will become more powerful as insights are extracted.

Q: Tell us about the value of your data
In time, with more users and lots more data, we’ll be able to serve up relevant, location-based data that can improve the way you experience everyday life.  In three years, looking at a map without any social data will seem silly. When I call up Google maps, I’d like to see what restaurants are recommended to me, what vendors are worthwhile, and much, much more.

What’s Next for LBS?
Picking up on the heels of Reid Hoffman’s talk at last year’s SXSW, big data still rings true. Data gleaned from social platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter will still provide insightful customer data like never before. In the case of LBS applications, here are two examples of how they’re putting LBS too good use.

Partnerships: One of Foursquare’s best relationships is the one they have with American Express. At nearly every restaurant/bar in Austin that week, there was a “spend five-get five” promotion with American Express. If you spent $5, and used your American Express card, you’d automatically receive a $5 credit on your American Express statement. No paperwork to fill out, no survey, just a check-in and a swipe of a card. Now, imagine what American Express and Foursquare can do with that data. Add “location” to American Express’ deep library of cardmember data, and you’ve struck gold- especially with millions more mobile-phone toting consumers.

Sonar: Absent from the Ambient LBS discussion above was connecting people with similar professional (LinkedIn) interests. Sonar is one of the few ambient LBS apps that allow for Linkedin integration. If you’re at a small conference of 100 people, and you’ve checked in via Sonar, you’ll be notified of shared professional connections. Sonar is the “icebreaker for introverts”. Keep an eye out for Sonar in the coming months as they quietly go about their business

What should I do?
-Never underestimate the value of data. As a marketer you know this, but experiment with this using an LBS tool like foursquare. Use foursquare as a reward, recognition AND customer service tool.
-Embrace human nature. No amount of technology replaces the value you get from human interaction. Use a technology to be an ice-breaker and a tool, nothing else.
-Experiment. At the next event you go to, check in using foursquare or sonar and follow whatever path it leads you down.

SXSW Day 1: Google Plus and Google Hangout- via Storify

Guy Kawasaki talks to Vic Gundotra from Google Plus

This year’s ongoing SXSW recap is brought to you primarily through the notes I took on my iPad throughout the conference. And how exactly do you try and blog using an iPad? Well, you don’t. You use a terrific new Ipad App called Storify. It allows you to pull content from many social sources (instagram, twitter, flickr, youtube, facebook) and use that content, well, to Storify your story.

I’ll start off with an initial recap here, then point you over to the storify link so you can see what it looks like…

Day 1’s most compelling session was Guy Kawasaki’s keynote interview with Vic Gundotra, lead engineer for Google Plus.  For the early part of the conversation, he talked about the success of Google Hangout, and how they designed the product around 3 core elements.

1. Make it easy to use. Unlike Skype, Google Plus/Hangout doesn’t involve complicated software to download
2. Make it passive. You can start a hangout when and where you want to- if people want to join in, they can, if they don’t they won’t.

Google Plus allows you to publicly share with your network that you’ve started a hangout. It’s akin to sitting on the porch, reading the paper and having a cup of coffee. You’re giving your neighbors a visual, yet passive cue that you are (probably) available to talk and have a conversation.  It’s behaviorally different than knocking on your neighbor’s door telling him you want to talk (Skype?)

3. Make it public. For those hangouts that are public, everyone is invited to join. And, Vic pointed out, it’s human nature to want to join a conversation-we don’t want to feel left out.

So what does this mean for brands?
For some of the lifestyle brands, a Google Hangout is an easy, fun and creative way to tell your story. Just take a look at The Muppets.

For more traditional and B2B brands however, they aren’t particularly excited about starting a Google Hangout. It scares them. It’s an uncontrolled environment. Step away from the storytelling, and consider using a Google Hangout as a customer service tool, a place to highlight your subject matter experts. or introduce a new product or service. Take a look at what Richard Binhammer from Dell has done.

So, think more about what Google Plus can do for you, and head on over to our Storify page.

Basic human needs: meaningful connection vs. privacy

With the beginning of SXSW, we thought it appropriate to discuss one of the newest trends in social technology. According to the pundits and the press, the hottest technology to emerge in 2012 will be location-aware personal discovery applications. What does this mean? It means that there is technology being launched whose sole purpose is to put you together, in both the digital realm, and more importantly, the real physical world, with others who share your interests.

Apps in this vein, which are already in the app stores and markets, and which are getting great positive reviews by tech thought leaders, include such apps as highlight, Glancee, Sonar and Banjo.

So what does this technology do? How does it work? Once you’ve downloaded the app, it typically asks you to login via facebook. Why you ask? So that the app can scan your friends lists and your interests and then make telling connections between your friend/interests, and others and let you know who’s close by using location-aware services on your phone.

Basically, it will tell you when people are physically near you who share your interests. In some cases, this is pulled from your list of pre-existing facebook friends. In other cases, you’re being introduced to people who you do not yet know, but the software figures you might want to.

If you’re going to a conference like SXSW, or have just moved to a new city and want to meet new folks, it sounds great right? But wait, what about the fact that your socially-enthusiastic teenager has access to this very same person-to-person recommendation engine? Do you want her reaching out to everyone who shares her taste in Eminem? Or even M&Ms? Or even more unnerving to her parents, having her being approached by strangers who happen to be introduced to her via one of these emerging services? Only time will tell if this type of technology has broader application among later adopters of technology

If services like this are to gain traction, privacy concerns will ultimately have to be addressed. Where do you net out? Is privacy worth reducing if it means more meaningful human connections?