Social media for healthcare makes sense.

MY EARLY MEMORIES of hospitals included scary emergency rooms and sharp needles - I was pretty sick as a kid. At 18, I nearly died and spent two weeks in the hospital (over Christmas, New Year's, and my birthday). I vaguely remember the nurses and doctors being kind and compassionate and honestly trying to help me and my parents understand what was happening. But I was sick and scared, and the experience was bewildering. When I left the hospital feeling better, I tried hard to forget my time there and do whatever it took never to go back into a hospital again. Except for the fact that I now work for a hospital, my experience is not unique. Most people don't think about hospitals until they absolutely have to, at which point they are filled with fear - about their health, their future, and their impending hospital experience. Many people don't like hospitals. What does this have to do with social media? Before social media became popular, hospitals approached communicating and marketing traditionally: through broadcast, one-way messages. And the patients and community were forced to accept the messages being fed to them. This approach wasn't natural. Health is personal, something in which each of us is individually invested. We patients were scared of our health statuses, unprepared for hospital experiences, and lost in the confusion of healthcare, grasping at the information healthcare marketers pushed at us. No wonder the approach wasn't working - traditional marketing doesn't fit in healthcare. Social media has leveled the playing field. Now patients can communicate about health at any time. They can share fears about diagnoses with distant friends and families. They can connect with people across the world who struggle with similar health conditions, finding support and companionship. They can question whether the doctor gave the right diagnosis or express displeasure with a recent emergency room visit. Social media is natural for patients. IT'S A TWO-WAY STREET It's dangerous - and inaccurate - to view social media as another way to broadcast one-way messages to the community. Marketers who see social media as a way to talk at, not with, their followers are not fully engaging them. Angelle and Rose state that their social media strategy is "to participate in any conversation about Methodist and its services" and rightly concede "we cannot hope to control such conversations." The authors reference the guideline that 30 to 50 percent of posts address patient health rather than promote the hospital. My philosophy is that the majority of posts on a hospital's social media sites should be patient centered. The last thing patients want when following a hospital on social media is marketing; they are seeking content that applies to themselves. At Inova Health System, we strive for 80 to 90 percent of our posts to center on our audience's needs, not our own promotion. Thielst provides an example of an organization whose effective social media strategy embraces two-way communication. Torrance Memorial Medical Center (TMMC) "receives increasing feedback on what people want to hear about .... Social media humanizes TMMC and lets the organization offer what people want." But what do they want? THEY'RE JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU No matter how well-executed, a hospital's social media presence can't make people care. Consumers use the Web to search for health information, but they usually find that information on other sites, such as WebMD, about.com, or Wikipedia. People today use the Internet to find answers to their medical questions, but few of them expect to purchase surgical services or have their cancer tumor diagnosed online. Healthcare is still practiced face-to-face, and a comprehensive marketing strategy should include multiple ways for the community to engage with the hospital. Providing clinical content that's already available online should not be the focus of hospitals' social media plans; offering wellness, general health, and communityspecific information is a better approach. …