Webcast Your Brain Surgery?

Because I am curious to see what others are discovering, I read quite a bit about social media. Though the majority of it looks similar... different industries discovering elements of how to reach and interact with customers, suppliers, funding, and fans... there are some gems out there that remind us that social media isn't just some marketing schlock. It's a tool for industry upheavals.

This New York Times article--Webcast Your Brain Surgery? Hospitals See Marketing Tool--about hospitals learning to use social media as a marketing/communications tool stood out for a number of reasons.

I am impressed that this bureaucracy-laden industry has ventured this far in untested waters.

On the other hand, the untested nature of social media (yes, we’re all still experimenting) makes it a perfect place for the medical world to venture. This is especially true in one particular theme from the article:

Faced with economic pressures and patients with abundant choices, hospitals are using unconventional, even audacious, ways of connecting directly with the public. Seeking to attract or educate patients, entice donors, gain recognition and recruit or retain top doctors, hospitals are using Twitter from operating rooms, showing surgery on YouTube and having patients blog about their procedures.

Market forces are causing the traditionally difficult to navigate world of medical services to open up.

Social media is serving as a significant factor in arming those market forces with better informed consumers. We used to have to accept what doctors and other medical “experts” told us. They were the only ones with knowledge/easy access to the right information. This was agonizing. We felt helpless. Ever spend time with someone who has been diagnosed with cancer? Undergoing treatment? A survivor?

They ACHE for information. For understanding. For connection with others who have undergone the experience. They describe themselves as "students of the disease".

Now we can access the research, other patients, and other medical opinions. We'll go around you if you're in our way.

The hospitals that help us break through these barriers—even if they’re clunky at first—will be a step ahead. They will have a better sense of how to integrate the tools into their internal systems. How to work within ethical and practical considerations. What consumers, researchers, lawyers, and others might do with the information they share. Where to go next.

That step... that willingness to see what can be achieved with the technology now. To figure out how audiences will respond. To listen. That will put them miles ahead in knowing how to weave social media into their integrated marketing efforts. Doesn't matter if they're a huge hospital or a small dermatologist office.

What are you doing?