Why More Health Experts Are Embracing the <b>Social</b> Web

Unity Stoakes is the co-founder and president of OrganizedWisdom, an expert-driven digital media company focused on health and wellness. OrganizedWisdom is building the world’s first digital mapping of online health experts to help people easily discover and connect with credible health resources.

Is your doctor easily accessible online, or does he or she believe that the InternetInternet isn’t a resource for accessing health information?

If it’s the latter, it may be time to find another doctor. With nearly 90% of online Americans searching the Internet for health resources, it’s likely you and your friends and family already use the Internet to research health issues. It’s true that the web has a jumble of health information, and engaging online takes time, which most health experts don’t have. The good news, however, is that the increasing number of health professionals now embracing the Internet as an important and useful tool for health and wellness is beginning to change your options as a consumer.

Read on for some ways that social media can help doctors, health experts and everyday users.

An exciting new social media trend is emerging that disrupts the standard view of health care delivery and will have a profound impact on us all. Thousands of doctors, nurses, allied health professionals, and health advocates are publicly engaging with people online. In fact, nearly 40% of Americans turn to social media for health information.

Patients (and a few early adopter health pros) moved online years ago to share health guidance, give support and find answers. But until recently, many health professionals have avoided using the Internet and social media as a way to help patients. This reluctance is changing, as savvy physicians, nurses, dentists and other health pros are realizing that if their patients are online, then perhaps they should be too. Health practitioners who were once too busy, inexperienced or afraid to share their expertise online, now actively share links on TwitterTwitter and FacebookFacebook, blog, write for online medical journals, engage on Q&A sites, or contribute to online health sites and forums.

For too long, health and wellness has been a do-it-yourself proposition for patients online, and people have been left on their own to determine how to effectively utilize empty search boxes. People have great access to lots of information, but they must sort through the billions of articles to determine the credible from redundant health encyclopedias, marketing web sites or sites with potentially unknown sources. Then, the task of deciding the credibility of the sources and articles has fallen on the patient alone.

While the number of health experts interacting with patients online is relatively small, there is a clear trend taking shape. A recent Manhattan Research survey of U.S. physicians shows an increase of Internet usage for professional purposes up from 2.5 hours per week in 2002 to 8 hours per week in 2010. More strikingly, while more than 100,000 doctors are using closed social health networks like Sermo.com and publishing in peer-reviewed journals online, thousands of health professionals are now blogging, using Twitter, and connecting with patients on Facebook in very public ways. So much so that this November, for the first time, the American Medical Association released a set of guidelines to direct physicians communicating and engaging with patients via social media. And earlier this year, the CDC also published its own best practices toolkit for how health professionals should be using social media.

Given that so many people now go to the Internet before, during and after their visit to the doctor’s office, the lack of guidance from credible and trusted health experts online is a growing problem. In fact, Manhattan Research shows that 61% of people now use the Internet instead of visiting a doctor. Thankfully, the tide is turning as thousands of health practitioners move online to do much more than interact with friends, family and colleagues and are instead using the social web to dispense their particular health expertise.

We are standing at the precipice of a new online revolution in health care. As more and more health experts embrace the Internet and increase their social media activity, health information seekers will undoubtedly benefit in profound ways. Based on conversations and surveys conducted with experts and health information seekers, here are some of the benefits associated with a robust online community of active health experts:

Interaction With Experts: In the real world, people seeking answers to important health, financial or legal matters look for guidance from the best experts. With a growing community of health experts participating in online discussions, people have access to more expertise than ever before at their fingertips.

Credibility and Trust: With doctors and other health professionals contributing information online in increasing numbers, it is important for a trust filter to separate credible information and sources from information that is not credible. The community of health professionals that is forming online will act as a system of checks and balances to separate good information and sources from the bad.

Transparency: It’s been a watershed year for increased transparency as government, big business, the financial services industry and other sectors have been shining a light into their operations like never before. Healthcare is taking a major step forward in this regard at the grassroots level, with an expert community being formed online by doctors, nurses and other health professionals across the country. As more doctors view social media as an extension of their professional reputation, you can be sure that they will treat their online interactions with the same care as they do in the offline world.

While the increase in the online activity of health experts is a welcome development, searching for crucial health information online remains an overwhelming and intimidating process for many. In the offline world, people searching for health information seek out the best experts — and now with more health professionals moving online, people will finally be able to connect with credible experts they can trust.

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Image courtesy of iStockphotoiStockphoto, dcdr

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Valley arts embracing <b>social media</b>

by Kerry Lengel - Oct. 1, 2010 01:18 PM
The Arizona Republic

From the top institutions to the grass roots, Valley artists and performers are jumping on the social-media bandwagon, using Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to interact with their audiences, and maybe even to grow them.

But for Jennifer Spencer, marketing director for Arizona Theatre Company, the latter would just be icing on the cake.

"I don't care how many followers we have or how many people 'like' us," she says. "People who are liking us or fanning us on Facebook already know us. They're already interested. So it's not always just a sales message. You want to get them talking."

Conversation is the buzzword. ATC, with nearly 1,200 friends on Facebook, uses the platform to link to videos or photos taking fans backstage for its next show or to invite patrons to chat about news bits from the theater world.

"It's so easy to just throw a generic marketing message up there, but how do you have a presence without being boring?" Spencer says. "It's exciting when this conversation gets going. It affirms the fact that we're doing something that people care about. And we do pay attention to what people say."

That's exactly the right approach, says Lorrie Thomas, CEO of Web Marketing Therapy, a California consulting firm.

"Social media is a way to serve and to support," she says. "You may get some sales off it, but if you enter the social Web with the idea that you're going to push propaganda, you're going to fail. You use the social Web as a way to offer quality information.

"We live in an era of mass collaboration, and we're looking for things that are useful and relevant."

Over at Phoenix Theatre (750-plus friends), public-relations rep Theresa Dickerson agrees that interacting with audiences is key, but she's convinced networking technologies have been gold for good old-fashioned sales as well.

"Word of mouth is one of our biggest tools to sell tickets, and social media makes that so much easier," she says.

The Valley arts group with the largest social-media following has to be the Phoenix Art Museum.

"We had a Facebook page for a while and it kind of sat there," museum director James Ballinger says. "So we went to a much more casual kind of language in our postings. We solicited feedback, so we've tried to have an active voice with our audience on Facebook. We try to change the message every few days, and the result is, over the past 12 or 14 months, we went from over 1,000 Facebook friends to over 16,000."

Furthermore, he's confident that online success has strengthened the institution's bottom line.

"I can't tell you that 7 percent of our attendance last year came from Facebook interaction," he says, "but I can tell you . . . it's clear that we have a much younger audience than we used to. Visibly, on a daily basis, you can tell. And attendance went up 10 percent last year, 10 percent again this year."

Individual artists are having success on social media as well, such as female impersonator Richard Stevens, better known as Barbra Seville, who is on Facebook throughout the day to keep her 3,000 friends amused.

"It's an extension of what I do onstage," Stevens says. "It's entertaining my audience."

Having a sizable online following helped Seville "go viral" with a video spoof of Gov. Jan Brewer last month that has racked up more than 67,000 views on YouTube. And that in turn brought more interest to the Facebook page.

"I was picking up five friend requests an hour for a while," Stevens says. "It was really crazy."

 

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