Today’s guest post is from Doug Naegele, an avid SmartBrief on Social Media reader and inveterate entrepreneur. His firm, Infield Communications, lives at the intersection of health 2.0 and mobile solutions. Last week, he interviewed Emily Zeigenfuse of The American College of Cardiology.
The ACC is a professional association that serves more than 39,000 cardiovascular professionals. It recently launched CardioSource.org, a revamped organizational website that includes a private social network for users to discuss issues important to cardiology. Much of the content is member-sourced, and the readership is predominately doctors and other heart-centered medical professionals. Zeigenfuse led the social-network implementation of the ACC’s new website. Naegele and Zeigenfuse sat down to talk about the early challenges and successes of the project.
Why did you include a networking component as part of CardioSource.org? What was the need?
Over a year ago, the ACC started with a blog, then added Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We quickly found that our social-media followers tended to be outside our core membership, which was great for recruiting new members but didn’t reach our existing members. We decided that an ACC-hosted social-networking area, which would allow our members to add content and start conversations with each other, would be the best way to serve existing members.
How did you get upper management to sign off on social media?
Our leadership has been very open to embracing social media. It started with the blog and other social media outlets last year. Once leadership signed off on those ideas, they were “in” for expanding our networking efforts to CardioSource.org. Last year’s decision to make Web communication a priority was the big one that allowed us to really jump headfirst into making social networking a large part of the redesigned website.
Tell us about the rollout. And how is it going now?
We went live on June 14, 2010, and we’ve had a few challenges. The website wasn’t 100% perfect, and our readers let us know immediately. The comments box, where we expected readers to discuss medical content, was used instead for help-desk issues, which inhibited the discussion of cardiology topics.
Since then, we’ve added a separate button to report tech problems, collaborated directly with members who left complaints, and took a second look at usability. It’s been a sleepless summer, but we’ve solved a lot of problems quickly by honestly listening to and engaging our readership.
Lastly, what other trends do you see in health care social media? What’s next?
I’m very curious about how mobile devices will fit into a doctor’s daily workflow. We know our members, by virtue of being on their feet all day, spend less time in front of a computer than those of us with desk jobs. We’re also watching how patients with chronic diseases like heart disease use social media to talk about their condition so that we can reach them in those spaces.
To learn more about how your association can benefit from social-media like the ACC, check out our Buzz2010 breakfast series. The final session of the series is this Wednesday, Aug. 18, on social media and return on investment, with Olivier Blanchard. Space is limited, so sign up here.
Image credit, ivstiv, via iStock Photo
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Daniel Pink devotee here… anxious for the healthcare industry to go mobile, curious how it will all layout. Glad to hear the discussion underway in this piece.
Interesting post. I'd be interested to learn what types of content is being posted. The ACC seems to be in a good position to provide a great tool for crowdsourcing feedback for questions and challenges that cardiologists are facing. I also wonder whether the members have the option of anonymity, so that they can discuss questions/concerns openly.
Hi Jeff,
Right now, the content is mostly comments on scientific content, along with pictures in groups, although we hope to expand the range of content in the near future. We don't allow anonymity because certain parts of the online network are open to all registrants of the site (which could be anyone, not just a cardiovascular professional) and we hope to discourage abuse this way. Also, the thought was that by using real names we'd also be able to create an environment that helps these online connections transfer offline.
Thanks for the comment!
~Emily
Interesting indeed. Perhaps a future instantiation of this could allow certain articles to be tagged as public releaseable. This crowdsourced data could then easily be pushed into a wiki-like compendium.
[...] not a ton of content in this blog post from SmartBrief, but the topic of social media and the physician continues to take a foreseat. [...]
My sense was that theheart.org already serves as a major focus for online discussions among US cardiologists. In what way does the ACC hope to position CardioSource.org relative to this existing site?
Hi Pat,
ACC's website has a different range of content than theheart.org, and its discussions expand beyond clinical content. In addition to the latest clinical content & educational programs, we also handle topics like practice management, quality improvement and advocacy, among others.
Thanks for the question!
~Emily
I really like how they went through the usage of existing tools and services first, and then upon evaluation of those programs they then decided to launch their own private social network to reach a different audience and make progress on a separate yet focused goal. My only question is if they asked their membership base whether they wanted a social network and how they might use it. That always helps with adoption of a new tool within a community. Great stuff, though. Good luck on its continued success.
Hi Nicholas,
We heard extensively from our leadership about how they wanted to use the social network before we launched, and had countless meetings where we solicited feedback and ideas from them. We've been using SharePoint to provide a web presence for our committees and other leadership councils, and they wanted a platform that would provide them with more ability to interact with each other. We also had some experience using commenting and forums on our previous web site, so we had some idea of how our membership would use these features.
Thanks for the well wishes!
~Emily
Interesting idea. Is the internal social network exclusive to core members or can your social media followers access it as well? Are they required/encouraged to join as core members in order to view it?
With a registration to the site, anyone can join the private network. We do include links to it in our social media channels that would require people to log in to view/participate. However, there are parts to the private network that are ACC member-only, which we hope will be seen as a membership value.
I'm encouraged that you openly shared there were problems when you initially launched and that your users let you know. All too often I think organizations try to test and identify every single scenario that could go wrong and never launch the product, or launch and are behind the times. Kudos to you and your organization.
I'm curious if you've had to answer the question that physicians ask "Why do I need SM? It's one more profile I have to manage, site I have to log into, and doesn't really meet my needs. Just put me on a listserv and I can check my email".
We definitely find that to be true on the public social network sites. For the private social network though, it's on a site that many cardiovascular professionals already use to access new clinical content, so they already have a profile & log in, and already use it frequently. We see the private network as an answer to those who want more networking, sharing and archival options than are available with a listserv (although we still have many, many listservs). ~Emily
[...] on a greater scale to host ‘private’ social network sites for their members. Recently I read a post by Emily Molitor on the American College of Cardiology (ACC) and its launch of cardiosource.org. The fundamental [...]
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