Researchers are testing how helpful social media can be for raising awareness of health care issues or as a tool for prevention.
In a study that hits on both counts, UCLA researchers set out to see if African-American and Latino gay men would voluntarily use health-related Facebook groups to discuss HIV issues, such as stigma and prevention, with a goal of getting them to request an at-home HIV test kit.
Study participants either were assigned to a general health group on Facebook or to an HIV-prevention group. Both groups were created by the research team and not accessible by the general public.
Peer leaders began the conversations to gain the support and trust of members, introducing topics using multimedia methods, said researcher Sean Young, assistant professor at the Center for Behavioral and Addiction Medicine, Department of Family Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. Over time, participants took over the peer leader roles and initiated their own conversations. (read more…)
Social media is one of the most effective marketing channels for any company. Why? Most experts explain away the phenomenon with the how, not the why: “Social is an excellent venue for content sharing and a useful tool for subscribing to news of your favorite brands.” While that is true, it only scrapes the surface. There must be a better answer, and I’ve found it.
Social media is unlike any other marketing channel because it requires the customer to reach out to the brand before the brand reaches out to the customer with a message that leads to customer action. Normally, it works the other way around, but why is it so effective when the roles are reversed? The explanation boils down to a basic rule about relationships between people.
People don’t like to throw away relationships that they have worked to nurture.
A simple trick for making connections is that you should, at some point, ask the other person for a favor if you want them to really care about you. (read more…)
Twitter is growing up, evolving from a simple message system into a public health research tool.
Computer scientists at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore are using Twitter to track fluctuations in influenza activity in the U.S.
JHU doctoral candidate Michael Paul said Twitter will never be able to provide hard and fast statistics the way hospitals do when they report flu admissions to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but monitoring tweets can show trends at a broader population level.
And it doesn’t stop with the flu. Paul said an earlier project used tweets to track seasonal allergies, mapping geographic trends and winter vs. spring. That could evolve into mapping allergy prevalence within a community or state.
Monitoring tweets could also be used to determine how people take medications. “We think it could be interesting to see how people are self-medicating,” Paul said. Are people, for example, using antibiotics to treat the flu, which is a virus and does not respond to them? (read more…)
With the rise of social media, patients are more informed than ever before and coupling that with the federal government’s push for electronic medical records, the power of health care is shifting to the individual, argued MedTouch Chairman and CEO Paul Griffiths during this week’s New England Society for Healthcare Communications Spring Symposium.
Individual hospitals or doctor’s offices will be quickly trending away from keeping paper records while larger organizations will look to fill the electronic void in collecting and storing health data for patients — data that they can choose with whom to share it with.
Though this takes away the ability of the provider to be a silo for each patient’s data, it should increase efficiency tremendously at a time when an increasing shortage of primary care physicians and other health care providers is burdening the system.
“Hospitals are [generally] not ready for the customer’s ability to collect data, but doctors are,” Griffiths said. (read more…)
Paying homage to Revolutionary War hero Paul Revere, Stephen Moegling, Franklin Street Marketing senior vice president of client services, says that today’s health care marketers need to be a connector to both supporters and detractors, old school and new school, and patients and doctors in spreading the gospel of the value of social media.
Speaking during the final day of the New England Society for Healthcare Communications Spring Symposium in Portsmouth, N.H., Moegling said the need for health care marketers — whether they’re in-house or part of a consultant group — to serve as connectors is more crucial than ever.
Moegling said Revere was successful in warning colony residents of the impending British troop movement, because he was well-known and well-connected to the area communities, not because he was the loudest or had the fastest horse. While Facebook, Twitter and other social media tools have the same power to connect people, it is the marketers themselves that must be the nexus in either launching or growing a successful strategy. (read more…)
Twitter
Facebook
Linkedin
RSS
