2012 is here! And that can only mean one thing—time for resolutions.

Aside from resolving to become better-looking, healthier, richer and more successful over the next 12 months—while also knocking off a few bucket-list items—January is also a good time to focus on goals for your professional growth.

1. Become more familiar with the latest industry trends. This is a larger task you can’t simply check off a list. It represents continual growth to become better, sharper and more proficient in your role. And with the whirlwind of change taking place in healthcare IT, it’s a definite “must do” no matter what position you hold in your organization. With busy schedules, it’s so easy to get lost in a niche bubble and overlook hot topics that can indirectly affect your business. Take this time this year to read, discuss, ask questions and read some more to gain a deeper understanding of what’s happening around you.

2. Focus on a project that you didn’t have the time for in 2011. Simple enough, right? Looking back over the past year, are there any projects or activities you wish you had taken the time to tackle, but just couldn’t seem to fit in? Make one of those your priority this year.

3. Embrace social media, and set out to accomplish an actionable task from it. Not to sound like a broken record (if you actually know what one of those sounds like!), but social media is transforming the way we interact personally and professionally; the way we get our news; the way we find out about new products, ideas, people; etc. As its uses continue to evolve, make it your mission to evolve with them. Designate 2012 as the year you embrace social media and work toward achieving incremental goals from it. Inspire a journalist to cover a story from a company tweet, set up a meeting with a prospect, make 50 new connections you actually interact with, etc.

4. Take the time to regularly de-clutter your inbox. Seems small, but utterly important. If you have hundreds—or dare I say thousands—of emails lurking in your inbox that you only quickly scan and do nothing with, things can easily get overlooked. Days get busy, but taking the time to organize your email inbox can go a long way. I use flags, folders, categories and the wonderful delete feature for everything, and keep only the emails “in the works” or that need action in my inbox.

5. Expand personal connection networks. Participate in more online groups, social networks and real-life events in the coming year to build your personal and/or professional networks, and individual standing as an industry expert.

6. Rely less on email or texts, and more on phone and in-person interactions. The ease and convenience of typing out your message in a text or email and simply hitting send makes digital the king of communication these days. But I don’t think we should ever discount the importance of actual conversation via phone, Skype or in person. It’s great to put a voice to a name or email signature, a face to a voice—and to just connect with people on more direct level. This is one of the aspects I really enjoy about tradeshows such as HIMSS, AHIMA, MGMA; we get to sit down and see the clients, partners, editors, etc. that we interact with all year long.

These are only a few ideas, but it looks like I’ve got a lot to do, so I better get to it!

Feel free to share any other ideas for business resolutions this year in the comments! We’d love to hear them all.

Two years ago, many of us in healthcare IT were wowed by the creativity found in Ross Martin’s three part “interoperetta.” The video summed up the complexities of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act in just under four minutes through the lyrical mastermix. Check out our blog post “Singing the praises of the HITECH Act” to see the video if you happened to miss it.

While HITECH was the word on the street in 2009, Ross Martin is back again with yet another entertaining and creative video… this time with an edge! For 2011, Martin has taken on Meaningful Use, through his “Meaningful Yoose Rap” and we certainly couldn’t pass up the opportunity to share his unique lessons on how physicians can get yo’ 44 g’s for doing meaning yoose!

Blog. Blog. Blog. Blog. Blog. Haven’t quite wrapped your head around the importance of blogging and social media in healthcare technology? Yet to embrace these outlets as part of your marketing strategy? When others discuss the subject of blogs, does it come across more as the “Wah, wah, wah” Charlie Brown hears when grownups talk? 

These days, it’s misguided not to at least become knowledgeable about blogging and social media as it relates to your business. Blogging can have a measurable impact in both sales and visibility when integrated with the right public relations and marketing strategy, so understanding the benefits of creating a blog is Step One down the right path. Below, I’ve outlined 10 main reasons blogging is a crucial component to the marketing efforts of healthcare technology companies.

1. A blog is just a social media tool, but it is one of the easiest and most effective publishing tools for healthcare technology organizations to share information with customers and prospects. Why? First, because YOU control the content and messaging. Secondly, the cost of maintaining a blog is relatively low. And lastly, the blogging platforms available today make it incredibly easy to post content.
2. Your brand is what your people read and talk about online. If you’re not happy with what’s out there…or not out there…it’s time to look at blogs as a way of enhancing your online marketing strategy.
3. A blog can be the center of your content marketing strategy. It’s a hub of content for you to get out to the world through various outlets. If you’re only using Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn to share information, whose content are you promoting? With a blog of your own, you can create and publish the content where you’ll most efficiently see the results and gain the exposure.
4. Remember that it’s 2010. You can’t be taken seriously as an industry-leading organization if you’re only using the same marketing strategy from 1992. There’s a VERY good chance nowadays that your competitors are delving into social media and blogging, so if you’re without a sound and consistent blog, it’s harder to compete.
5. Search engines love blogs. For many B2B organizations, typical Web site content is rarely dynamic. With a blog, new content is added often, sometimes daily. And because you to create blog posts around important keywords and include additional inbound links to products and services pages on your Web site, it can serve as the core of your search engine optimization strategy.
6. A blog is a great way to differentiate your organization from the rest of the static corporate Web sites. By consistently posting interesting, informative information, organizations will encourage prospects to regularly visit the blog in search of fresh content.
7. Blogging represents a true commitment and passion to your industry. By offering insight on trends and interviews with industry thought leaders, blog content can help healthcare IT companies prove to customers they’re an integral and involved industry player. Presenting this type of compelling content – rather than simply pushing product information – is an effective way to prove that you truly understand your customers’ unique business challenges.
8. If you don’t have anything interesting to say, why would anyone have a reason to talk about you or your company? Every company has a story and a problem that their product or service solves, whatever it may be. A blog is a good vehicle for getting that story out there.
9. Repackaging of blog posts can nourish articles, email blasts, direct mail, white papers, speaking proposals, marketing sheets, and just about all other educational content you’ll need for your marketing, and vice versa. A company isn’t always tasked with creating completely original content, but instead can integrate their blog with other marketing efforts to do more with less.
10. Over time, there are cumulative results from blogging that can be gained. Each blog post continuously adds value to your site as a whole. Blog posts from months or years ago are still found in search results and read, adding traffic and building upon the collection of industry thought leadership your organization represents.

From the ability to interact and prove your industry expertise to prospects to increased search engine visibility, the potential benefits of implementing a company blog are endless. Comment below and share any thoughts or additional benefits you see from blogging!

Social media offers the promise of far-reaching, online exposure at a relatively low cost. And today in healthcare B2B marketing, having a social media program as part as your overall promotional efforts is now more likely the norm than the differentiator. But there are companies that rush into social media marketing programs without a true strategy.  They recognize the value, but  fail to map out the right amount of time, budget and other resources they will need to devote to social media activities in order for such a program to be successful. With such a low barrier to entry, it’s easy for companies to rush into social media and forget that they should still be approaching it with the same considerations that they would with any other marketing method.

BEFORE even beginning a campaign, it is important to:

1. Research the available social media opportunities and spend some time reviewing and discussing best practices for each. A little extra effort on the front end in fully understanding how you would use each tool effectively is the key to not wasting hours upon hours throughout the process with something that ends up offering little value to your objectives.
2. Know what your competitors are doing and how aggressive a strategy they have. Gauging your competitors’ involvement in social media can be a helpful consideration as a baseline when selecting how aggressive you want to be and which tools to utilize.
3. Determine the resources you can devote to cultivating your social media brand in order to see the biggest impact. Social media can only be what you make of it, and an effective online marketing program takes time and effort to build. You should limit your program to only the efforts in which you have enough time to keep up with. Nothing is worse than having a blog in which the latest post is dated several months ago.
4. Evaluate your need for outside resources. When internal time and/or expertise is limited, engaging assistance from an outside marketing and social media agency can help to ensure the process runs smoothly from start to finish. Depending on your program, the need for additional resources such as Web designers and bloggers (if not available through the marketing agency) may need to be evaluated.
5. Select responsible parties to be accountable for the program. Social media should be a focus for the whole organization, but there should be designated people who manage specific functions (e.g. blog administrator, Twitter or Facebook account representative, blog post authors, etc.).

Whatever the level of social media program, strategizing beforehand and having the right plan and approach can make a world of difference in maximizing the success of your efforts and achieving your set objectives. Even with a minimal ongoing time and resource investment, your network will grow, your brand will gain visibility, your inbound links will increase and you’ll be leveraging social media as the transformational tool that it truly is.

As the healthcare industry discussions continue surrounding the definition of meaningful use for electronic health records (EHRs), others have been seeking to define meaningful use as it relates to more appealing concepts.

Photo credited to Neil Versel’s blog with the original source as Pat Wise of HIMSS.

That’s right. Social media isn’t a fad, but instead a fundamental shift in the way we communicate in both business and personal aspects. A few months back, I wrote the blog post, “Social Media: A passing phase that’ll never catch on…just like the Internet,” and to that same point, the video below from Socialnomics demonstrates an excellent compilation of striking statistics revolving around the growing use of social media and technology.

“I’ve come loaded with statistics, for I’ve noticed that a man can’t prove anything without statistics.” —Mark Twain

Whether this social media shift is the biggest since the Industrial Revolution is up to you to evaluate and relatively determine, but it is no question that social media is made up of increasingly essential communication tools (like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, etc.) that have altered our relationships and the way we do business even in our B2B healthcare IT environment. The new technology is out there, and those stats give you an idea of the volume of users embracing it and not sitting idly by waiting for the next movement on the horizon.

After watching this video, the important question that I’m asking is “What will these statistics look like six months or six years from now?” Comment and share your thoughts below!

When discussing social media with our healthcare IT clients or industry colleagues that are new to the realm of Web 2.0, the inevitable question we’re often faced with is “how do you find the time to keep up and do all this blogging and twittering?”

Yes, blogs, RSS feeds, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and other social media sites have the potential to be overwhelming and unproductive at first when you’re in the experimental phase, but the art of mastery comes with following your objectives and managing your use of time wisely. After all, when it comes to social media, YOU control the clock on your social media activities.

Here are three quick tips on social media time management to help guide your strategy:

1. Select social media tools that have a large following in your industry. There’s not a need to join and participate in every social media site in existence. Join the ones that make the most sense to your business needs, as well as the markets of your customers and prospects. For healthcare technology, we’ve found blogs, Twitter and LinkedIn to be most useful; so this is where we spend the majority of our social media time. Since many healthcare IT companies and publications are transitioning onto Facebook and similar sites, our presence in that space is becoming a more time-worthy activity in which we will also focus our efforts. Your choices/priorities may be different, and that’s ok.
2. Choose quality over quantity. The people that usually find Twitter or other social media sites overwhelming and stressful to try to stay on top of are the ones who are not judicious in who or what they’re following. It’s impossible to consume all the information out there, so be selective, and try scanning instead of reading every single message.
   
   With Twitter as the example, having a lot of followers can be a good thing; it means lots of people are interested in your content and what you have to say. What some people don’t get is that followers and people that YOU choose to follow should be treated as two entirely different things. Too many connections can be a distraction; only follow those that have valuable content that interests you. Don’t feel that you have to follow back everyone that follows you to be polite or that you can’t “unfollow” the guy that floods your Twitter page with a constant stream of uninteresting tweets.
3. Create a schedule. Finding the balance between too much and not enough is the golden ticket when it comes to social media networking. As you are more familiar with your purpose on the outlets and your objectives, it will come more naturally. But in the beginning, a good way to manage your time is to set regular schedules and block out time for your social media activities. Whether you try to check and monitor everything throughout the day or focus on it in open slots in your schedule, setting a limit on your time allows you to be more conscious of your overall activity in the end.

Unsatisfied with Google’s seemingly widespread domination of all things online, Microsoft reloads with Bing, adding to an already saturated market of search engines. Bing is the replacement search engine for Live Search (also formerly known as Windows Live Search or MSN Search) and the latest effort from Microsoft to compete with tech rival, Google. Microsoft’s many search engine versions never really gained ground on Google, occupying only a relatively small percentage of its market share, as shown in recent comScore stats – likely due to its comparatively lackluster and detached SERPs or search engine results pages. But Bing is a horse of a different color and is on the cusp of becoming a definite game-changer in the ways we conduct Internet searches. The draw for Google has always been the ease of use and instantaneous access to relevant Web pages, blogs, images, videos, among anything else that we may be seeking. Bing brings all of this and quite possibly more with the attractive interface and features, “decision-making” predictive results, and (most-importantly) relevant and organized interactive search engine results. Kudos to Microsoft for seeming to finally getting it right.

Much debate and discussion has ensued in recent weeks on Bing and what it means for Web searching, and will likely continue as everyone grasps the new tool and makes their own judgments on the question “Is Bing the new Google?” From what I’ve seen, it’s not likely that Bing will surpass Google in dominance anytime soon. After all, Google is so imprinted into our systems and our brains, “google” even became a verb in 2006! A majority of Web users turn to Google first when searching, and it will take some incredible features and far-better search results for the world to all make the switch to Bing. But what Bing does bring is a healthy dose of competition and a dependable alternative to Google. This will obviously force both companies to continue to improve in order to thrive in the market, which is definitely a good thing for users of either engine. But if Bing continues to generate interest and gains more market share as indicated by additional comScore stats, in time we might see a more-pronounced switch of key players. 

Now what does this all mean for those of us in healthcare? Over the next few weeks, we’ll be analyzing this technology and sharing important information that is relevant to our industry. Look for our upcoming blog posts exploring the differences between the search engines, how Bing impacts your company’s Web presence and what changes you’ll need to make in your search engine marketing efforts. In the meantime, check out the new tool as a consumer to determine whether you think it’s worth the switch. If you still can’t decide, there’s already a new application that allows you to search and see results from both engines side-by-side so you can compare results between the two. You may be discovering a whole new way to google!

Simple answer – you can!

Longer answer – you can, but with different expectations…

As those of us who have been using social media for awhile know, the true value of social media platforms like Twitter doesn’t lie in the tangible metrics. Twitter’s sole purpose isn’t sales, but active participation in real-time information sharing. But of course, demonstrating value and return on investment of using social media networks as business tools is a concern for many healthcare B2B companies as the movement into new media trends upward in our industry. Is it possible to fill both needs?

In what I deem to be a highly-noteworthy “Twitter Success Story,” Dell, a top PC manufacturer worldwide, has generated around $3 million in the last two years through Twitter. This comes from actively tweeting and offering Twitter-specific discounts, rebates and offers that direct followers to the Dell Outlet Web site. Granted, Dell’s Twitter sales account for less than a sliver of its multi-billion-dollar annual sales, but its success in attracting buyers shows healthcare technology companies that money can be made through the micro-blogging service.

Okay, so now you’re probably saying “I’m not Dell.” Well, even if you’re not a mega-tech-powerhouse and world-renowned brand like Dell, developing and integrating an effective Twitter B2B business strategy is something that any company should be able to do if you have the key components. But to be fair, your goals and plan must align with your own company, brand, industry, product, etc. but most importantly your CLIENTS. Your healthcare clients might not care about news of the new sales director you hired, but they might care more about a discount on your product or service, a Webinar you’re hosting, product demos or a conference you’ll be attending.

And before you embark on your social commerce mission, it is important to define your business goals and what you hope to achieve (maybe not $3 million worth of goals). Do you want to gain X number of followers, expand business network to X number of people, sell $X of product, provide tech support to X number of people, etc.? Or just connect with clients, build your brand and send out real-time information? With an internal and external team put into place to strategically map out your social media goals, objectives and tactics, you may be the company people are soon discussing as a “Twitter Success Story.”

In case you have yet to see Ross Martin’s brilliantly creative YouTube video explaining “everything you need to know about the Health Information Technology for Clinical and Economic Recovery (HITECH) Act in under four minutes” it’s a definitive must-see. Should you not learn anything new, it’s at least entertaining! Check out HITECH: An Interoperetta in Three Acts. You can also read a little background information on Ross Martin and the ‘making of the video’ in a recent Modern Healthcare article.