At last month’s ASAPS conference in New York, I was encouraged to see the number of doctors who are coming to understand how valuable social media can be in promoting their practice. Slowly but surely, more and more aesthetic professionals are realizing that engaging with consumers online is the future and that they can do so without fear as long as they develop a plan to ensure that they and their staff do so appropriately.

As we’ve discussed before, the key is to develop a Code of Conduct that governs social interactions before they take place. With a CoC in place, you can tap into the power of social media to manage your reputation, protect patient privacy and introduce yourself to millions of aesthetic consumers.

Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all in the advice I can share on what a Code of Conduct should look like for each practice.  It has to be tailored to fit your brand and the persona you want to represent you and your practice online.  But to get you started, here are 7 best practices I’ve learned from the RealSelf 100:

1. Be Authentic. Remember, social media is a conversation. Talk online as you would talk to real people and patients in professional situations. People are wary of the conversation that’s ‘too polished.’
2. Be Relevant.  Keep the online conversations meaningful and relevant to the community.
3. Be Social.  Encourage your staff and feel comfortable yourself with being social online. In social media, people want to connect with humans.  So have a little fun — it’s ok to blur the lines just a tad between personal and professional.  Grant Stevens, MD of Marina Del Rey, CA does a great job of this balancing act.
4. Be Responsive.  Internet consumers want info free and fast!  And when they don’t get it, they move on to find it somewhere else.  So discuss with your team expectations for response time to relevant comments, questions and patient inquiries.  Remember, time is of the essence on the web.
5. Be Respectful.  You won’t always like what people post on your social pages, but you know as well as I do that people are watching how you respond to feedback.  Discuss with your team the manner in which you wish your practice to be represented when disagreements occur. Everyone needs to be professional, courteous and RESPECTFUL, even when they disagree with what’s being said.  Respond, don’t react!
6. Be Transparent.  And don’t sanitize your pages.  It’s ok to have comments you disagree with on your social media pages.  People do not trust overly sanitized pages where everything is positive.  Welcome all types of conversation – supportive, critical or otherwise.
7. Be Legal.  Don’t break any laws!  All privacy laws followed within the walls of your practice are applicable online.  (Hint: HIPAA)

Above all, remember that social media is organic.  Your CoC doesn’t have to be perfect from the get-go.  As you discover what does and doesn’t work, continue to tweak and iterate on your own best practices to ensure alignment with your values and your practice.  In the meantime, click here to download a customizable template as a starting point for your own Code of Conduct.

As this infographic from NetBase.com suggests, such “social listening” is especially tricky, in large part, because consumers aren’t sure how they feel about it. They want brands to listen to what they’re saying in social media, except when they don’t, and they want to be serviced without feeling that they’re being spied on:

While there are clearly contradictory trends going on here, the data underscore what we see on a daily basis at RealSelf. Aesthetic consumers want doctors to be accessible but they don’t want them interjecting themselves in conversations uninvited. They want to talk among themselves, sharing their concerns, decision journeys and post-procedure reviews, but they also want doctors to weigh in at appropriate points along the way:

The best way for doctors to connect with these consumers is to participate when they are asked to participate, says Jen Longtin, RealSelf’s director of doctor marketing. We see this most often through Q&As but also through the millions of views of before and after photos provided by RealSelf doctor members. If doctors jump in without an invitation, it appears invasive — like having your mother jump in on a call with your boyfriend.

Ultimately, it comes back to the concept of patient-centric marketing, letting consumers drive the conversation, keeping their needs top of mind and fostering the relationships that follow.

As Lisa Joy Rosner, NetBase’s chief marketing officer, says,

It’s really important that marketers consider these findings when developing social media strategies. The companies that take the time to understand what customers are saying, and engage in a way that considers context and builds relationships, are the ones that will benefit from social listening and engagement.

Doctor Takeaway

Don’t just listen, understand

Unless you’re telepathic, social listening represents the best path toward understanding the needs and concerns of aesthetic consumers. Always consider the context — are they seeking support from other like-minded people or specific insights from an expert? — and if you decide to respond, do so in a non-promotional way that sets the stage for building a relationship rather than making a sale.

]]> http://www.medibeauty.biz/infographic-friday-listen-up-doc-but-dont-be-intrusive/feed/ 0 http://www.medibeauty.biz/go-with-the-flow-3-channels-to-connect-with-aesthetic-consumers/ http://www.medibeauty.biz/go-with-the-flow-3-channels-to-connect-with-aesthetic-consumers/#comments Thu, 16 May 2013 15:58:02 +0000 Rob Lovitt http://www.medibeauty.biz/?p=1422

We spend a lot of time at RealSelf talking about the “consumer decision journey” for a very simple reason: When people begin considering cosmetic surgery, they really are embarking on a journey. It can take weeks, months or years as they consider and evaluate their options and it can extend long after the fact as they share their experiences with others.

Along the way, those consumers’ needs and interests ebb and flow and shift, which is why no single information source can serve all their needs. As Nate Elliott, a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, writes in an insightful post on AdAge.com, the key to successful marketing is to follow those customers as they actually behave:

If you want to support this life cycle, you’ll need to start looking at the world the way your customers do: As an ongoing sequence of reach channels, depth channels and relationship channels.

For doctors, it breaks down like this:

Reach Channels: When consumers begin their journey, they are, by definition, open to discovering new products, services and providers so they turn to channels with a broad reach. Online, that usually means non-branded searches and community-based sites (like RealSelf). As Elliott writes, this is where you need to be to get into the “consideration set.”

Depth Channels: When consumers want to learn about a procedure or service in more detail, they switch gears. Online, they’ll check your practice website; offline, they may call and talk to a member of your staff. Either way, the goal is the same: to give them the detail they seek and set the stage for a deeper relationship.

Relationship Channels: Assuming you’ve consummated the relationship, so to speak, that doesn’t mean the journey has to end for either party. You don’t need an advanced degree in marketing to know that satisfied customers are your best brand advocates and the ones most likely to sign up for your email list, follow you on social media and share their experiences with others.

Which, of course, just starts the cycle all over again.

Doctor Takeaway

The consumer decision journey is non-linear and self-replicating

Monitoring multiple channels can be a challenge but the payoff is engaging with consumers with the right message at the right time. As Elliott writes, no piece of the above model is more important than the others: “Each set of channels — reach and depth and relationship — takes the lead at a different stage of the customer life cycle. If you focus just on one part of the model, you’ll be less able to guide your customers through their journey.”

After our presentation at  the 2013 ASAPS Conference in New York, a doctor came up to me with concern about establishing a Code of Conduct (CoC) for her team.  “My world is already surrounded by rules, policies and regulation.  Doesn’t a Code of Conduct just create more rules for my team?   Isn’t social media supposed to be free-flowing?”

That’s a great question!

First and foremost, your Code of Conduct for social media should not be just a bunch of Do’s and Don’ts.  No one likes to be restricted and told what to do.  Instead, people want a framework to support their creativity and guidelines to point them in the right direction.

When done correctly, your Code of Conduct should not only represent your values but also the core values of social media:  Openness, Engagement and Community.  It will give your staff a set of values to rally around and to guide them in their online interactions.  So as you build your CoC, don’t get caught up in creating just another set of rules.  Ask yourself:

1) Does our CoC encourage openness and connection with our practice?  

Social media thrives on being connected with more than just other people.  It also connects your content and followers with other resources, sites, blogs and even traditional media.  Sites like Facebook, Twitter and even RealSelf all invest tremendous resources to remove barriers in their user experience that might prevent content from being connected to as many as people as possible.

2) Does our CoC allow people to engage with us through conversation and participation, directly or indirectly?

Successful social media encourages everyone to contribute and provide feedback.  Even traditional media (like magazines and TV) realize the limitations of their one-way communication format, so they often connect their audience to social media because that’s where the conversation is taking place and they want to leverage the engagement that’s happening online.

3) Does our CoC help build a foundation of trust that allows my practice to engage and learn from the community?  

Since social media spurs communities around groups of people and shared interests, your social media strategy and the principles used to execute it should not only allow you to engage with your online community but also allow you to learn from them and even ask community members for feedback.

Your Code of Conduct is an explicit message to your staff on what you value.  Align those values with social media and set clear guidelines with your team to ensure your Code of Conduct goes beyond a simple set of rules.

I’ll share some best practices for a Code of Conduct in a subsequent post.

Well, “imagining” pretty much sums it up. Even if you were the doctor who performed those procedures, the reality is that celebrity endorsements are not all they’re cracked up to be. And the same is true for the big names in digital media who have been anointed as “influencers.”

Instead of cultivating influencers, doctors who want to grow their practices should be fostering brand advocates, a distinction that can be summed up in this infographic from Zuberance.com:

As the folks at Zuberance suggest, the problem with influencers is that they’re more interested in growing their brand — more fans, more followers! — than they are in helping you grow your practice. They may be able to spread awareness but that’s a very different thing than driving action.

For that, you need advocates: real people with real stories who share their experiences with other aesthetic consumers. They share, not for the paycheck, but to pay it forward and their authenticity can have a powerful influence where it really matters.

On your bottom line.

Doctor Takeaway

Brand advocates can be a doctor’s best friends

Building brand advocates is an ongoing process. As the stories RealSelf users tell over and over again, aesthetic consumers start sharing their impressions of doctors from the moment they reach out with an email inquiry. Doctors can encourage them to continue sharing by asking them to write post-procedure reviews, by maintaining contact via email and by rewarding them with invitations to special events and other exclusive offers.

In my world, I am in direct communication with doctors every day.  I often get to hear the wonderful feedback from doctors on how their Q&A contributions and positive online reviews are helping them attract new patients and grow their practice.  That’s the fun part of my job.

The other side of the coin is not much fun but very important.  At least once every week I find myself helping a doctor or their staff with some type of ‘reputation management’ advice to help mitigate unfavorable content posted online about the doctor.  Sometimes, this unexpected post is a negative patient review.

More often, though, I get frantic calls from a doctor’s office about an inappropriate comment that a staff member has posted or, worse yet, I get a call from the staff about something inappropriate that the doctor has posted.  I’ll spare you the examples, let’s just say ‘awkward’ and ‘oops’ do not begin to describe some of the snafus I’ve seen doctors get themselves into with inappropriate comments!

In reality, the principles for representing your practice in social media include the same principles, ethics and confidentiality policies expected every day in your regular course of business.  It seems like common sense, but it’s not always obvious to everyone.  For this reason, I highly recommend that every doctor take the time to establish a Code of Conduct (CoC) with their staff to set standards on how they want themselves and their practice represented online and how they will respond to unfavorable posts when they inevitably happen.

One of the best examples of what a Code of Conduct can do for your practice was demonstrated by Johnson & Johnson during The Tylenol Crisis in 1982.  After product tampering led to 7 deaths and a product recall, Tylenol could have easily met its demise if the situation was not handled properly.  Instead, the company turned to a credo that was written in the 1940s on how they would handle a crisis and restore confidence in their brand.  Within a year, Tylenol had regained their market share and they continue to be one of the most trusted brands today.

By taking time to establish your practice’s CoC, if there is ever any question with how your team is expected to behave in the world of social media, proactively or reactively, they can refer to it as a guideline and rule of thumb.   As a result, the clarity of expectations will allow your staff to be better equipped to monitor their own actions within your social media strategy as well as make it easier for you to evaluate the effectiveness and appropriateness of their contributions.

Doctor Takeaways

1. It’s not always obvious

The boundaries of social media are more fluid than offline communication and often lead people to feel more comfortable in how far they can push the envelope.  Take the time to discuss with your staff how you can develop your online voice while maintaining privacy and professionalism.

2. Plan ahead

Don’t wait until a staff member posts something inappropriate or you receive negative feedback online to establish how you will or will not respond.  An effective Code of Conduct can serve as your ‘crisis management plan’ to help maintain your online reputation when unexpected posts happen.

3. Consider your brand

A CoC is not just about a crisis management plan.  It’s also a way to define how you want to be represented online.   Is it fun/social?  Strictly professional?  As an expert in a specific treatment?   A CoC can help align your Facebook page, Twitter feed, etc., with your vision.

When I presented about the social media-empowered patient at the recent ASAPS and ASDS conferences, one statement I made got audible sighs of relief from doctors: “you don’t need to be on Facebook.” That’s right. Doctors aren’t missing out by staying on the Facebook sidelines.*

This counter-trend opinion is based on data we’ve analyzed in conjunction with vendors operating hundreds of websites for plastic surgeons, dermatologists, and medical spas. The research shows that doctors see very little in the way of new patients stemming from their Facebook activity. They get minimal referral traffic to their practice website in return for their posts.

Some practices believe having a page is important for maintaining a connection with patients. Facebook can indeed serve as a dynamic newsletter that keeps committed patients somewhat engaged. But patient “likes” to the practice are super challenging to acquire given people’s desire to keep their cosmetic procedure activities a private affair. Doctors should expect de minimis returns from time consuming Facebook updating efforts.

Doctors who are being pushed into Facebook by their office or marketing vendor should answer one question to do a quick gut check: do you think it’s appropriate for doctors to be directly accessible and “friending” patients? From my perspective, these unprotected exchanges are awkward and fraught with risks of violating patient privacy. Doctors who post in places where they can get into a back-and-forth with a patient could, feasibly, form a patient-doctor relationship. I’m quite sure doctors are incredibly disinterested in this outcome from their social postings.

Doctors can leverage the benefits of social media in a safer and more effective approach then becoming BFF’s with their patients.

Based on millions of social data points we collect each month at RealSelf, we’re seeing empirical evidence that core aesthetic doctors get a positive ROI when they devote time on the social web toward becoming approachable, rather than accessible in social networks. More specifically, being approachable means sharing your expertise in posts to the web with only one agenda in mind: to be helpful and supportive of consumer education.

5 ways you can be approachable and build trust with prospective patients:

1. Answer questions. Q&A services provided by RealSelf or Quora don’t enable a two-way communication that draws you into a place where the conversation is entirely unpredictable. Questions are great because they express what’s on people’s minds vs. what you think they should be told. You can even add Q&A from RealSelf to your own website or blog to demonstrate how you’re centered on patient safety and outcomes vs. selling products and services.

2. Show your human side. Prospective patients can’t get to know you if your tweets are just the quote of the day, or your practice’s Facebook updates are plastered with the latest practice promotion or discount. Putting an emphasis on your connection and activities within the local community is far more effective at garnering attention and differentiating you from others. This is frequently called “cause marketing,” which is a proven way to cut through the clutter to get people to engage and feel they can relate to a practice or doctor.

3. Avoid controversial stands. Keep personal opinions to immediate friends and steer away from religion, politics, and other potentially divisive topics. Enough said.

4. Share other people’s information. Retweet, link to blog posts, and reference other resources that offer good information. Loads of bad SEO advice has convinced many doctors that linking hurts the practice’s website rankings. Linking to quality information is great for consumers and it’s good for rankings. What you choose to share also builds your personal brand.

5. Let others do the talking. Empower your patients to share their experiences. While it may be uncomfortable for a doctor, requesting that a patient post about their outcome is a powerful way to help people understand your expertise as a doctor and how you deliver superb care. When they say you’re great it has vastly greater impact than you saying it.

Social media is undoubtedly a time commitment that is difficult to factor into a busy medical practice or spa. But, most businesses are starting to see social media as the new cost of doing business. As stated by Gary Hamel, an influential business strategist,

To gain influence and status, you have to give away your expertise and content. And you must do it quickly; if you don’t, someone else will beat you to the punch—and garner the credit that might have been yours.

Based on the doctors I’ve met, few would be comfortable with the idea of declining influence and status.

* I’ll hedge my statement Facebook’s relevance to doctors. The impact of Facebook could change down the road as the company tackles search, mobile devices and demonstrates it can be relevant to commerce. At present day, they’ve got a ways to go.

SoLoMo. It’s the connective tissue that’s helping aesthetic consumers navigate their consumer decision journeys and, as this infographic from Geonetric.com suggests, it holds the key for doctors who hope to connect with them along the way:

While it’s entertaining to think that more people own mobile phones than toothbrushes, perhaps the most compelling fact is that 20% of health consumers search for health-related content on mobile devices. When you consider that health-related searches on Google were up 47% last year and mobile Internet consumption is expected to surpass traditional desktop usage by next year, the trend is clear:

More smartphones mean more informed consumers — and more informed consumers are unlikely to find, let alone patronize, providers who don’t utilize intelligent Internet marketing.

Doctor Takeaway

As online interaction evolves, doctors have a choice: Be involved or become invisible

While the SoLoMo movement gives aesthetic consumers unprecedented power to evaluate their options, it can also help doctors position themselves well when those consumers are ready to become patients. By contributing to social media, emphasizing a local presence and enabling a smooth, easy-to-use mobile experience, you improve the odds that those consumers’ searches will lead them to your door.

]]> http://www.medibeauty.biz/infographic-friday-the-search-for-health-info-goes-solomo/feed/ 0 http://www.medibeauty.biz/for-doctors-the-future-of-marketing-is-on-demand/ http://www.medibeauty.biz/for-doctors-the-future-of-marketing-is-on-demand/#comments Tue, 30 Apr 2013 17:06:04 +0000 Rob Lovitt http://www.medibeauty.biz/?p=1313

As the Internet evolves, consumers will demand that marketing messages be timely, relevant and personal (photo by Dan Taylor via flickr).

If you’ve ever found yourself thinking that consumers are just too demanding, brace yourself. According to the folks at McKinsey, you ain’t seen nothing yet as evolving technology and rising consumer expectations are setting the stage for the next great stage in marketing.

It’s called on-demand marketing and doctors who ignore it run the risk of being ignored by the very people who represent the best opportunities for their continued success.

What’s fueling on-demand marketing is the continued, symbiotic evolution of technology and consumer expectations, write Peter Dahlström and David Edelman of McKinsey. Already, search technologies have made product information ubiquitous; social media encourages consumers to share, compare, and rate experiences; and mobile devices add a “wherever” dimension to the digital environment.

Some doctors already understand this: They’re the ones that contribute to social media, embrace online reviews and make sure their websites are optimized for mobile consumers and the multiple devices they carry. When it comes to engaging with today’s consumers, these doctors are the ones who are ready to run, while their peers are just beginning to crawl or walk.

But those same technologies have only raised consumers’ expectations that their needs will be met quickly, relevantly and attuned to their specific concerns and interests:

Building on the vast increase in consumer power brought on by the digital age, marketing is headed toward being on demand, say Dahlström and Edelman. Not just always “on,” but also always relevant, responsive to the consumer’s desire for marketing that cuts through the noise with pinpoint delivery.

To accomplish that will entail digesting the massive amounts of data consumers produce when they post updates to social media, announce that they “like” a brand or company or comment on what their friends are doing online. Coupled with new delivery systems, each of those interactions will create a new datapoint that will help marketers offer more timely, more personal messages to ever-more targeted audiences.

To win over on-demand customers, you must know them, what they expect, and what works with them, and then have the ability to reach them with the right kind of interaction, says the report. Data lie at the heart of efforts to build that understanding—data to define and contextualize trends, data to measure the effectiveness of activities and investments at key points in the consumer decision journey, and data to understand how and why individuals move along those journeys.

And it’s already happening. Between the rise of Big Data and the semantic web, the folks at Google, Facebook and other Internet companies are developing systems that will make today’s analytics look like a Magic 8 ball (Reply hazy, try again). With the pace of change only expected to accelerate, doctors who don’t embrace on-demand marketing won’t be in demand for long.

Doctor Takeaway

More data + better analytics = more effective marketing

Although still in its infancy, on-demand marketing will provide doctors with powerful tools that can help them deliver just the right message to just the right consumer at just the right time. As Dahlström and Edelman put it, “Emerging technologies are poised to personalize the consumer experience radically—in real time and almost everywhere. It’s not too early to prepare.”

The fact is that customer service should be a crucial part of your social media strategy for the simple reason that customers increasingly expect companies to provide it. As this infographic from Zendesk shows, 50% of consumers say they would be deterred from being a customer of a company that didn’t answer questions or complaints via social media.

The flip side is that the simple act of responding to customer complaints doesn’t just provide a way to resolve the issue at hand. It can also provide a net positive as many of those customers will not only retract their initial complaint; they’ll take to social media to share their satisfaction with others in their own social networks, becoming brand advocates in the process.

Simply put, people want to be heard and doctors who listen — and respond — stand to benefit from what they have to say.

Doctor Takeaway

The future of customer service is social

Doctors who ignore social customer service issues risk losing not just the patient who raised the issue but everyone that that patient shares their experience with. The solution is to respond quickly to prevent the problem from spreading, genuinely to avoid the lip-service trap and professionally to avoid violating patient privacy. If you do all that and the issue remains unresolved, that’s a good sign that it’s time to take the conversation offline.

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