Extraordinary Online Brands Start with Great Offline Stories

The Secret to Standing out in Social Media is a blog entry that raises an interesting point about success in the social media channel. Specifically, the article states that a successful blog presence is not about what you do on-line, but what you do off-line. For your health system or service line to have an extraordinary presence in the social media realm, you need to have one in the real world!

It is an obvious, but often overlooked truism that health care marketers would do well to heed. Bad or bland programs that simply mimic the market will do no better in a social media forum than they will in traditional marketing channels. With that in mind, we suggest that health care marketers respond to internal pressure to create blogs, Twitter identities, Facebook pages, and Youtube channels as follows:

1. Have a great story;
2. Have an interesting point of view from which to tell the story;
3. Learn to tell it in the audience's language to demonstrate that you are listening.

In essence, the focus of social media is your audience's needs - not your strengths. This is how you build credibility in a social media channel.

For example, if you want to offer a blog about a cardiac program, the focus should not be on how great your doctors and facilities are (save that for traditional media) but about how much better people's health can be if they manage their heart health and conditions. The goal is to create online mechanisms to get the audience to make the "ask" about your offline capabilities.

It is a subtle change in point of view, but a vital one to building a strong health care brand on the internet. Just as in real life people are drawn to people who listen to them; so, too, your blog should emphasize that you are paying attention, not simply talking at the digital crowd.

In recent years most health systems have invested in building a brand. Many have succeeding in creating a stronger corporate identity. Fewer have truly built brands that stir an emotional response with customers. Only a handful has activated a brand strategy to turn those emotions into measurable advantage when competing for patients, talent and resources.

This gap between investments in a brand and realized market return is a source of frustration for senior executives. It is not a gap that can be closed with advertising; nor, can it be resolved simply by improving customer service and clinical quality scores. The industry is rife with health systems with big advertising budgets and rising satisfaction and quality scores that have delivered only incremental market growth.

Today, the field is crowded with consultants offering to help reorganize structure; re-engineer process, re-train people, and redesign facilities. Clinicians have paid handsomely for counsel on “doing better”, prompted by the promise of pay for performance and scorecards that make service and quality seemingly more transparent

In our view, though, it’s not simply about doing better. It’s about doing better by being different. Closing the brand equity gap requires a strategy to align operational inputs – structure, process, people, and facilities – to create an experience that is meaningfully different for customers.

What makes The Strategy Group different is that we align brand strategy and operations not as competing uses of scarce resources but as the inter-dependent means to a common end – activating a core competitive position for market advantage.

If successful, health system executives should be able to report to their boards that “because of our brand strength… we negotiate better contract terms; recruit better talent at a lower cost; and, have patients and employers willing to pay a premium to access our care.”

Imagine that conversation....imagine health systems delivering real value in the form of new products and processes and services that go beyond the clinical expertise provided by the doctors and nurses....in that kind of world maybe there would be fewer poor performers surviving in the market and more value in the services that we receive for an ever growing out of pocket expense.

Enter Tom Daschle

Tom Daschle's book, "Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis", forecasts the mindset of the incoming DHHS Secretary. Many of the ideas in the book frame what is likely to be Daschle's approach to President-Elect Obama's goal of reducing the number of uninsureds. There are three main points from the Daschle book that are key:

First, Tom Daschle is an activist. He wants to leverage government's growing role in health care spending (46%) to reshape the market. Especially in this downturn, with public support for the government to "do something", there is a ripe political climate for an activist agenda and Daschle knows it.

Second, Daschle has in mind the "machinery" for leveraging change. He proposes a National Health Board, which he likens to the Federal Reserve Board, with a role he defines as:

"[T]he Fed Health would ensure harmonization across public programs of health-care protocols, benefits, and transparency. Ultimately, the Fed Health would offer a public framework within which a private health-care system could operate more effectively and efficiently."

Lurking behind the "policy-speak" of that statement is a central idea that the Federal Health Board can leverage a 46% share of overall health expenditures to standardize terms and transactions in the market. Of course, even Daschle acknowledges that by itself, administrative savings from standardization is not enough, thus....

Rationing is needed to deliver both lower costs and better (and more fair) access. In his book, Daschle cites the role of the Britain's National Health system in enforcing rationale use of scarce health resources, with a particular focus on what he considers inefficient spending on technology and medications. In case his favorable citation of Britain's National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) leaves any doubt, Daschle spells out specifically that the Federal Health Board would:

...[T]he Fed Health could set standards for quality and coverage, promoting best practices and identifying the trade-offs on services (emphasis added). It would use information on the comparative clinical and cost effectiveness of different treatment options to set standards for Federal programs."

Third, "trade-offs on services" is the key to Daschle's vision. If Daschle is going to deliver on the twin demands of lower cost and more care, either the Federal Health is going to have to say "no", or consumers are going to have to start making smarter choices on their own so that the market can drive out products, services and providers that do not deliver real value added. Daschle seems to have little confidence in consumers at this point; his focus is on having the NHB make the tough decisions.