Sabermetrics can be defined as the objective analysis of the game of baseball, specifically through the use of advanced statistics. One goal of sabermetrics is to remove certain biases in order to better understand the value each player possesses in relation to his peers. Certain traditional statistics, such as the pitcher win or the RBI, are loathed by sabermetricians because, although they don’t necessarily paint an accurate picture of a player’s skill, they are considered to be very important metrics during player evaluation.

Sabermetrics burst into the mainstream with the publication of Michael Lewis’ Moneyball. This book tells the story of Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics, and how he put together a winning baseball team on a shoestring budget by embracing certain advanced statistics. By determining which player traits were undervalued by the market and creatively acquiring players who excelled in those areas, Beane’s A’s were able to compete with teams whose payrolls were three or four times higher.

Sometimes with social media, we tend to overvalue certain statistics, such as the total follower count on Twitter. This is understandable, as everyone wants to have the highest number of followers possible. Not only does this look nice, but it means we’re reaching a large audience. But if Billy Beane were a healthcare marketer, he’d probably compare the total follower count with a baseball player’s batting average. For starters, these two stats are generally listed first, and thus are thought of very highly when evaluating the player or the Twitter handle that precedes them. But neither tells the whole story. A player’s batting average fails to take into account his ability to get on base using other methods (such as drawing walks), it doesn’t measure how many bases the player gains with each hit (a singles hitter can’t be as valuable as a guy who hits a lot of doubles, triples and homers with the same batting average, can he?), and it doesn’t consider how many times the player reached base when an out should have been made but an error wasn’t charged.

Like batting average, a total follower count on Twitter doesn’t tell the whole story. Here are some tips for evaluating a Twitter account by looking past the number of followers it has:

• Look at the quality of your followers: While it would be nice to have 1,000 followers, what good would it do if 950 of those followers aren’t relevant to your business? Many people follow others in order to boost their own count. Take the time to scroll through your list of followers and see how many of them are your customers, prospects, competitors or industry influencers. If your content is not only solid, but is also being read by the right people, your follower total will continue to grow organically, and you will see more benefits in the long run.
• Measure follower engagement: Twitter is unique in that it can be a venue for either one-way or two-way communication. Unless you are a celebrity whose followers are only interested in the details of your daily life, odds are you want to start some conversations via Twitter. Check out how many times per week your account is either mentioned or retweeted. If you have 50 followers and get 10 mentions each week, isn’t that better than having 500 followers and getting the same level of engagement?
• Keep track of your clickthroughs: This goes hand-in-hand with tracking your follower engagement. When you post links, be sure to use a service such as bit.ly or ow.ly that will measure clickthroughs for each link that you generate. If you tweet one article a day that is relevant to all 50 of your followers and average 20 clickthroughs a week, your business will benefit much more than if you tweet 5 articles a day to 500 followers, but still see the same results.

When evaluating your social media presence, be sure to look past the surface. It may take a little extra work, but applying the methods of sabermetrics to your Twitter account can yield some pleasant results.

For the past 99 weeks, the Dodge Communications blog has served up a new term or phrase each Friday that we thought every healthcare marketer should be familiar with. These “Words of the Week” all pertain to social media or the Web in some way, and many of them have a direct connection to the healthcare industry. For the 100^th edition, we thought it would be fun to take a look at where we’ve been and where we might be going.

The social media landscape is a crowded one. It seems as if for every social media tool out there, there is another tool available to make use of the original easier. Socialmention enhances your ability to search Twitter, and OpenID lets you use one set of login credentials for a multitude of sites. Now that your life is a little easier, let’s make it more convenient. With Digsby, your instant messaging, social networking and email all take place in one convenient desktop client. Excellent! Now let’s do something about your time-consuming daily news search. Search engines are nice, but there’s got to be something out there that will do all the work for you, right? Of course there is. Visit Alltop, an Internet news aggregator, to have instant access to the most recent headlines from the top news sources. For those of us interested in healthcare technology, Alltop’s Healthcare IT page was listed as one of the top three sources for healthcare IT news on the Web. Also in the top three is HITSphere, an aggregator solely dedicated to those in healthcare.

Lest you think our goal here at Word of the Week is to send you on a wild goose chase around the Internet, we also took some time out to simply educate. Terms such as E-patient and mHealth have found strong footing in the healthcare marketing arena. Authority, social bookmarking and API should all be familiar concepts to anyone who spends time online, and meta tags and white hat need to have a permanent place in the vernacular of those who build websites.

A few of the sites we’ve written about have really taken off. Groupon has been a tremendous success, and the group-buying phenomenon is showing no signs of slowing down. Tools such as Evernote, Dropbox and Pinterest continue to rise in popularity, both inside the workplace and out. Their creative concepts and ease of use are what keep people coming back.

Of course, not every good idea turns out to be a winner. And there’s no better case study for this than the Internet’s leading brand. Google may have the best search engine and most popular email platform, but with social media, the company continues to fall short. We wrote about Google Wave before Word of the Week was born, we witnessed the rise and fall of Google Buzz, and we are still watching Google+ struggle to gain traction. (Currently, one scroll from top to bottom on my Google+ feed has updates going back more than two months. That same single scroll on Facebook has updates going back one hour.) Experts can give countless explanations as to why Google’s social media initiatives have failed to catch on, the most common of which being users’ unwillingness to migrate their social (media) lives from an established location to a new site that doesn’t seem to offer anything better. But I personally find it unfathomable that a company like Google continues to fail in this sector of the Web, an industry it otherwise dominates.

So what does this all mean? The Internet is constantly evolving. This is both a good thing and a challenge. For one, we’ll be able to keep publishing Word of the Week posts, but as marketers, we have to work hard to stay on top of not only what’s new, but what is relevant. As the tools we write about come and go, our desire for the functions they perform will always remain. We have to constantly ask ourselves, “How can we best help our clients, and which tools can best help us succeed?”

We’re all familiar with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Dr. Watson, the trusty sidekick of master detective Sherlock Holmes. Now, nearly a century and a half after the original publication of those stories, another Dr. Watson is following in the footsteps of his predecessor. Back in February, Jeopardy! held a special contest between two past champions and an IBM supercomputer named Watson. What was so revolutionary about Watson was that not only could he (it) process information nearly instantaneously and return answers with a high level of accuracy, but Watson was taught (programmed) to understand the nuances of the human language, which is important both in trivia and in everyday life. If you tuned into Jeopardy! on those nights, you know that the humans were no match for their mechanical counterpart.

As Watson’s creators continue to improve the technology, IBM has said it intends for the supercomputer to enter the healthcare arena as a physician’s assistant. This article from Hospitals & Health Networks explains how Watson will be able to help physicians, especially when it comes to the quick and accurate diagnosis of patients.

Your average C-level executive probably still thinks that investing in a social media campaign constitutes thinking outside of the box. Though social media is extremely prevalent, even pervasive, in our everyday lives, it’s still tough to get the higher-ups to buy in. Concerns over ROI tend to add more questions than answers, and when a social media campaign does begin, it’s often very conservative.

 Several brands have shown, however, that if simply creating an online presence is thinking outside the box, then thinking further outside the box can really make waves. A couple years back, Burger King developed an app for Facebook that awarded a free Whopper to anyone who removed 10 of their friends. The catch? This act of defriending would be broadcast on the user’s newsfeed, so that the spurned parties were made well aware that they lost out to a burger. And just this week, Kraft announced its “Mac & Jinx” initiative, where if two people tweeted about mac & cheese at the same time, each would be sent a link. The first user to click the link would receive five free boxes of Kraft’s macaroni and cheese.

 This applies to the healthcare industry, too. While the opportunities may not seem as abundant as for large consumer brands, there is always a unique way to reach your audience. Whether it’s using Groupon to offer discounts to new patients or creating social networks that add an element of fun for diabetic children testing their glucose, the ideas are endless. Sometimes, just thinking outside of the box isn’t enough.

We’ve reached that time of year when trend pieces predicting the next great movement in social media begin to pop up. New concepts such as group buying and social commerce are common throughout these lists, and everyone agrees that our mobile devices will continue to play an increasing role in our everyday lives. There’s one question that’s not so new, but still is important for 2011: Will Twitter finally make the big push towards monetization? (The answer, by the way, is a definite maybe.) Through all this change in the social media landscape, one simple phrase holds true: Content is king.

This is especially true for B-to-B healthcare companies. Adapting to the online world is more important than ever. The barriers of social media are being broken down, it is no longer a world of early adopters, and just about every demographic has a healthy representation on the Internet. Being aware of what’s being said about your company and maintaining the ability to drive that conversation are no longer just the perks of being savvy, they are a requirement for success. But the content that you push out to your customers and prospects must be unique and valuable, otherwise your online presence can hurt you more than it helps. Here are a few ways to provide useful content to your audience while staying relevant in the social media world:

• Twitter: Give your audience a reason to follow you by providing information on Twitter that they can’t get anywhere else. Linking to your blog and recent news is important, but your audience can access that without following you. Point your followers to other relevant industry information, and don’t be afraid to throw in some random thoughts of your own.
• Podcasts: Companies love doing podcasts for several reasons. First of all, with a podcast, you are in complete control of the conversation. One big idea and a few minutes of planning lead to uninterrupted thought leadership. While the technology may seem daunting, the execution can be as simple as plugging a microphone into your computer and using standard audio software that comes preloaded on most computers. Uploading the audio file to your company’s blog is just as easy as uploading a photo.
• E-newsletters: Company newsletters are not a new idea, but the simple act of publishing these online and distributing them through email can change the perception of your company from being stuck in the past to embracing technology.

There are couple things to remember when creating content for public consumption. First, don’t be too self-serving. If your content comes across as a sales pitch, it’s time to rethink it. Second, be thought-provoking, give bold predictions, give unique analysis, but never give away your secrets. Keep your prospects coming back for more, and don’t give your competitors any insight into your own success.

The Fifth Annual National Health IT Week is being held June 14 -18, 2010 in Washington, DC. Join us for this collaborative forum where public and private healthcare constituents will work in partnership to educate industry and policy stakeholders on the value of health IT for the US healthcare system. Now, with the enactment of economic stimulus and healthcare reform legislation, there is no better time for the health IT community to come together under one umbrella to raise national awareness!

As marketers, we try our best to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to social media, its tools and its practices, and we do our best to communicate the advantages of a strong online presence to our clients and our bosses. In healthcare, we often take for granted how the Web is being used by consumers. Sixty-one percent of American adults use sites such as WebMD to find healthcare information, surgeons tweet from the OR to update concerned family members, and “e-patient” is a term with its own Wikipedia entry.

So imagine my surprise when I came across this article from Healthcare IT News on “ePediatrics.” This article references two surveys, each concerning trends in the desire and ability of parents to communicate electronically with their children’s doctors. The first poll, conducted by C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital in Ann Arbor, Mich., and Knowledge Networks, reports that approximately 50 percent of parents believe e-mail or online communication would be useful for tasks such as requesting prescription refills or medical records. However, the same poll reports that less than 15 percent of parents are currently able to communicate online with their children’s healthcare providers. In a similar study by Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, 90 percent of parents said they would like to be able to e-mail their pediatrician, but only 11 percent can currently do so.

Healthcare providers have two main concerns when it comes to electronic communication. The first is reimbursement for electronic services that require staff time. A doctor’s office, after all, is a business. While e-mail seems quick and easy, from the doctor’s perspective, it can be tantamount to a free consultation, as many insurers will not pay a doctor for these virtual visits. This trend is beginning to be reversed, however, led by Aetna and Cigna, who in 2008 began reimbursing doctors for online consultations. As a result of this, services have been developed to help the doctor manage the virtual appointment process, and the fees charged by these companies are paid for by the patient. 

The second concern shared by many healthcare providers is that an online consultation or e-mail response is not an adequate substitution for a doctor examining a patient in person. This concern extends to the possibility that doctors who provide advice through e-mail could face medical liability if that information is inaccurate or lacks the standard of quality that their patients have come to expect.

While I am sensitive to these concerns, I believe that there can be compromise when it comes to a patient or a parent being able to communicate with a doctor over the Internet. If policies are put into place with strict guidelines for what activities may take place via e-mail and other electronic communication, providers can work to alleviate these concerns, instead of feeling pressured to engage in an activity that they aren’t comfortable with. As consumers, we need to demand the ability to communicate electronically with our doctors, and the insurance industry needs to recognize the importance of this in improving healthcare delivery, maintaining accountability and controlling costs. Personally, I would love to see a deadline for the meaningful use of e-mail, to go along with the deadline for EHR’s.

I remember my first experience with a URL shortener. While browsing a thread on a popular forum about Ultimate Frisbee, my sport of choice during college, I came across a post linking to an older discussion on the same topic. But I hesitated when I noticed the link was to something called TinyURL.com with a few numbers and letters after the slash. Where is this going to take me? I hope it’s not spam, I thought before I clicked through. When I landed safely on the old thread, I quickly put two and two together: this is some sort of service that makes http://groups.google.com/group/rec.sport.disc/browse_thread/thread/c0fa74cf7c46cd57# appear as http://tinyurl.com/2ace2bt. But why?

Just a few years (and over 100 different URL shorteners) later, there are more answers to that question than most healthcare marketers can keep up with.

For the average consumer, the most popular and practical use for these shortening services is to fit links into Twitter posts. With a 140 character limit, posting a link with 80-100 characters seriously handicaps the tweeter’s ability to post his thoughts. The improved aesthetic quality, as demonstrated above, is another popular reason to shorten a URL. When posting on a forum or in the comments section of a blog, where in-text linking is often not available, using a shortened URL gives your post a cleaner look that is more pleasing to the eye of the reader.

But what separates the different shortening services, and why is it important for healthcare marketers to choose the right shortener? The number one thing that public relations professionals have to answer for with any social media campaign is still ROI. The popular Twitter client HootSuite provides stats through its proprietary short link ow.ly. Any link posted with HootSuite is automatically converted to the ow.ly format, and stats are kept for each tweet that is sent out. Bit.ly, the most popular service with 3.4 billion links created in March of this year, has developed a fairly robust measurement system. As discussed in a past Word of the Week feature, with a free account, bit.ly users can keep up with the number of clicks that each created link has received. The service is also integrated with Twitter, which allows users to see each time the link is tweeted and retweeted. Your boss is bound to be less skeptical about Twitter when you let him know how many page views one tweet can generate, in addition to regular traffic.

If a company can successfully carve out a creative niche on the social Web, it immediately has a leg up on the competition. TinyURL gives users a simple way to achieve this. Instead of using the randomly generated sequence of numbers and letters, users can create a custom name for their link. For example, check out http://tinyurl.com/dodgepr!

Some companies have taken the next step when it comes to URL customization. If you follow the New York Times Twitter feed, you’ve noticed their custom nyti.ms URL format. Companies such as Amazon (amzn.to), YouTube (youtu.be) and CNN (on.cnn.com) have also taken the leap into URL customization. In addition to the obvious advantages in integrated marketing and branding that this presents, it is also a way to reduce the creation of spam links. While a bit.ly link could take a Web surfer just about anywhere, you can be confident that a nyti.ms URL will lead to a safe destination and an interesting piece of news. There are a couple services out there that allow anyone to get in on URL customization. Awe.sm can be used for free as a traditional shortener, but starting at $99 a year, the service also hosts custom URLs and provides stats through Google Analytics. Bit.ly is also getting into the custom URL business with bitly.Pro, which is still in beta.

Regarding the title question, it appears that the revolution is still going strong. As long as Twitter keeps growing, the demand for short links will continue to exist. But the folks at Twitter recognize this, as evidenced by last month’s announcement that the company will be launching its own URL shortener. According to the company, “forcing [users] to leave twitter.com to shorten a link is absurd.” Some speculate that bit.ly could be acquired by Twitter, while others feel that the most likely candidate for the job is Twitter’s own twt.tl, which is currently being used to secure links sent via direct message in light of recent phishing scams. Could this signal the end of an apparently thriving revolution?

Once this transition is complete (and assuming that Twitter stays in-house with its choice of link), it’s likely that only a handful of other shortening services will survive. Bit.ly, with its popularity and upcoming Pro offering, ow.ly, with its inclusion in the popular HootSuite client, and TinyURL, with its reputation as the original, all stand a good chance of survival, but the hundreds of other services out there may have finally met their match.

For the last three weeks, the tragic earthquake in Haiti has been top of mind for citizens of America and the world. As aid continues to pour in to Haiti, we’re beginning to see innovative ways in which medical treatment is being given. As we recently wrote, mHealth applications are making it easier to administer healthcare in remote areas and developing countries. The video below shows Dr. Elizabeth Cote, of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, collecting patient information in Haiti using an iPhone. The program she’s using is called iChart, and the developers have customized the software on short notice in order to comply with international disaster data collection standards.