Strategic Positioning

David Shifrin: Alright, Lee good to see you again. The story that we’re going to kick this off with is from Healthcare Dive titled ‘On high alert’: Hospitals wary of cyber threats from Russia-Ukraine war.It’s a kind of an odd one because you wouldn’t really necessarily expect there to be sort of a healthcare angle to the cyber warfare that we know is taking place.

And frankly, day to day, we don’t even know where this, where the invasion is going and what’s really happening there. So, there’s so much uncertainty, but we have seen kind of similar stories here and there that, Russia seems to be active and you never know where somebody, whether it’s them or anybody else is going to show up.

And frankly, just a week ago, a buddy of mine who’s a PA and he said, you know, we got a ransomware attack and they’re asking for a bunch of cash and we’re locked down and we’re back to paper. It happens all the time, in peaceful times and in bad times. so what should provider organizations be thinking about when it comes to cybersecurity?

Lee Aase: Yeah. I think it just really highlights that cybersecurity should always be a priority because it doesn’t matter where it came from. The Russia, Ukraine conflict might be a precipitating thing. If the United States is involved on the Ukrainian side and if Russia retaliates or wants to find ways of gumming up the American system then yeah, that could be one precipitating event for why hospitals would be under threat, but there’s lots of other threats. There’s always bad actors that are out there. And I think it just really highlights the importance of good processes, good hygiene, good just taking basic security measures. The key one that I think was highlighted in this article and that I’ve felt is really important as well is two-factor authentication. Because anybody can steal passwords or you can guess a password, but with the two-factor authentication, when you have to have a timely provision of that second code, like within 60 seconds, that’s the kind of thing that’s going to be super helpful in heading this stuff off.

I think the other part is just really good training with staff. Helping them to be alert to phishing scams, for instance. I know back in my days at Mayo Clinic, we would have authorized phishing simulations that would be sent out by our IT security team and, you know, it got to be a game where you’d say, yeah, I think that’s one of those when you had forwarded it.

But occasionally you would forward those suspicious emails and they’d say, yeah, that was a real threat, that was really something. And having people be on the alert for it is really important. And yeah, then just the training, the alerting people that this is something that you have to be aware of and have to be careful.

David Shifrin: So you mentioned, you talked about training, Lee. And one of the, one of the quotes that stood out to me in the article was from a chief technology officer at a cybersecurity company talking about how there’s a huge amount of turnover, which is just not…something that I’m not familiar with, the IT world, but anything there when it comes to personnel?

Lee Aase: Yeah, I think it’s really, I noticed that in the article as well, that when there’s…if you have turnover in your key staff that are responsible for these security initiatives that you do put yourself more at risk. And yeah, I think we’ve seen, whether it’s because of people getting terminated because of non-vaccine compliance or whatever, that there have been various reasons for that. But there was the great resignation that everyone was talking about as well. So I think having some lack of continuity among staff responsible in these areas could also put systems at risk.

David Shifrin: Lee let’s use that to roll into the second section which isn’t exactly a platform, but in thinking about both cybersecurity, but then also reputation and the reputational damage that can occur certainly if a breach happens or any other kind of crisis hits.

And we’re talking about the turnover and just the resources that different organizations have. How do you think about what you keep in house? What you outsource, where you draw the line, how do you manage the limited resources that different organizations have recognizing that this is going to vary if it’s an independent community hospital versus a large national healthcare system.

Lee Aase: Larger health systems do have a lot more resources. They also have a bigger footprint. They also have a lot more angles, a lot more service lines that they’re trying to be ranking highly in and where people are expressing their opinions. So it scales up, the need scales up with the size of the organization as well.

I think for any of them, it depends on their stance toward using one of these platforms or doing it on their own, depends on what other priorities they have, where they need to be devoting their resources and what capacity they have. My general predisposition has been to say that people need to have ownership of their online reputation and that the service line folks or individuals who are concerned about what happens when people Google them that the best thing they can do is…

To have an active social media presence. To have an active digital presence that will tend to be over time ranked highly in Google and will show up effectively. So I guess depending on what resources people are willing to put into this they can either outsource it and try to have things managed that way, or they can take a more active and organic role in managing their reputation.

I am just naturally I guess predisposed to the latter solution and to really authentically engaging in these platforms, but can definitely understand how people say, yeah, I just want to write a check or I want to have somebody else take over that day-to-day responsibility because I have other priorities that I need to deal with.

David Shifrin: For our insight this week, Lee, we’re going to have a two-part miniseries. And in talking to my colleagues here at Jarrard, they sort of flagged that they had some conversations with you about digital ROI. And being the content mercenary that I am, I thought it sounded really useful for our audience.

And so this is going to be pivoting away from reputation and cybersecurity and everything, but the conversation is about digital ROI. And the first question for today is what your take is on measuring ROI and how that differs between teams, marketing folks at local hospitals versus at larger health systems or different corporate entities.

Lee Aase: Yeah. I was saying, you know, at the smaller health systems or the local hospitals, you typically have marketers who need to be much more of a jack of all trades, need to be much more nimble and resourceful, much more like MacGyver in trying to get results.

And that has upsides and has downsides. The one of the absolute downsides is the lack of, general lack of resources. But the second then is the priority that puts on and the premium that puts on that resourcefulness, on that creativity, on experimentation.

When I was a…so this would be back in 2009, I published a document that I call my 35 theses on social media. And there were three of these that kind of relate here. And I think that’s what I was talking with our Jarrard folks about is that, number 17, social media freedom, in an ordinary sense of the word.

And that was true back then, anyway. Now, you definitely have to have some money to be on these platforms typically to be able to get the reach. But then the second one that was related to that is that I, as in I in the ROI equation approaches zero, ROI approaches infinity. If you keep getting the I smaller and smaller, that means you don’t have to show as much in terms of benefit for it too be, “Wow. That really works.” So the fact that in all these platforms that if you’re trying to MacGyver it, and that was the 19th thesis is MacGyver is the model for social media success, that you have to be creative and you can get the proof of concept really pretty easily, or at least you can experiment with things to say, So does this work or not?” without risking a whole lot. And that’s actually some of the benefit of the smaller organizations, are in the way they can be thinking about this as that, you know, when you’re working on behalf of a large, resourced organization or with the super-strong reputation, there’s more risk associated with it.

The risk/reward thing in the equation is a little bit skewed in those cases, because what if it doesn’t work? On the other hand, if you’re in a smaller organization you have a lot more upside potential, and also because these digital tools have fewer resources needed to do something that’s actually pretty solid that is a reasonably high quality, like these digital mics, these add-ons that you can get for your phone and to be able to really reduce the cost of production. It lets you try things and then prove their benefit, which can help you make the case for more resources.

David Shifrin: Great. Okay. So next time then we will talk about how healthcare marketers position digital programming to justify that ROI, which is a clear extension of this, and you’ve already talked about that a bit, but I’m looking forward to that conversation next time.

David Shifrin: So the headline that we’re going to be talking about this week, the news story is titled, it’s from HIMSS Healthcare IT news, and it says, “Like Banks, Healthcare will become Digital-First in 2022.”

And there’s a comma and the rest of the title is “Zoom Healthcare Lead Says.” So Lee, I saw this, and thought there’s a headline I have seen in some form or fashion, probably every four months for as long as I’ve been doing this, which hasn’t been that long, but it’s been more than 2022. And it even starts with digital transformation as the topic du jour in healthcare today.

So we’re all talking about it. And everybody’s talking about the digital front door and care delivery being pursued through digital means and hospital at home and all the rest. Is 2022 really the point at which healthcare goes digital first, or is this the optimistic view of a guy from Zoom who has a vested interest in that being true?

Lee Aase: Stock options and stuff, right?

David Shifrin: And stuff, trying to boost things after things have come back down to earth after the pandemic, the pandemic bounce.

Lee Aase: Well, so I think digital first is overstating it. I think digital first is, yeah, it is that thing that a Zoomer would say. I think it’s, there’s no doubt that with COVID digital has made huge strides. That’s just clear. Back when I was working at Mayo clinic, we had some goals for digital going into 2020, and then it was astonishing how quickly things moved because they had to, necessity being the mother of invention. The offspring were a whole bunch of innovations that really were, it made a difference. I think the way reimbursements have changed or did change at least during COVID to say that you didn’t have to be face-to-face to get reimbursed at a reasonable level.

And so because of that it made the telemedicine, made the virtual care much more attractive, much more viable, just economically viable for organizations. I would like to say digitally enhanced is the way of 2022 and hopefully beyond, because I think it needs to be human first.

So the analogy that was used in this article was about banks. Okay. People care about their bank. People care about their money. Not as much as their health and it’s not as personal to them. Banking is much more transactional. And for example, I just deposited a check with my mobile app and that’s perfect.

And like the whole thing about not… just before we were on today, ATMs used to be the big thing. Wow, you don’t even have to stand in line at the teller. I mean, so that the convenience of that, and that’s what it really has to be all about, ‘Is it for the patient’s convenience?’

Is it for the good of the patient or is it just to drive profitability and make it more efficient for providers? So I think from my perspective, I know in a future episode we’ll talk about the other little venture that I’m working on right now personally, but really with that, we’re wanting to establish that human relationship and then use digital where it makes sense for the patients.

If it makes sense to do a phone call or a video visit, because it would be inconvenient to bring the kids in for…to be seen, then yeah. But we don’t want to say if you want your lab results, you need to log into the portal and here are the instructions as to how to do that. No, you can actually talk to a nurse. We’re glad to talk, or your doctor who’ll talk to you.

So I think digital can be a, can and will be a huge enabler and can create some huge efficient…in fact, a lot of the stuff that we’re doing with this new clinic that I’m helping my good friend start, my physician friend start, a lot of what we’re doing wouldn’t have been possible without digital, just in terms of being able to get this going. Having electronic medical record that is cloud-based and that we like, don’t have to have the huge IT expenses; it’s pretty astonishing what digital can make happen. But if that becomes first, digital first is a buzzword, and that’s what the HIMSS guys and the Zoom guys are gonna go for.

But if we lose sight of the human relationship then, and if it becomes not just, not a means to the end of more satisfied patients then we’ll be missing the mark.

David Shifrin: Let’s take a look at the platform or the platforms of the week and in the notes I sent over, it’s Parler, but as you’ve pointed out before, there’s a bunch of these, and we’ve some folks ask about quote unquote, that Twitter alternative, which we assume to be Parler, but that could just be a catch all for things that aren’t the Instagram, Facebook, Twitter.

Lee Aase: Yep.

David Shifrin: With a lot of these, and we talked about this in the previous episode, these are coming about because people feel like they don’t have a place to talk about issues that matter to them. So they are highly politicized, and Parler in particular, tend to cater to specific political segments.

And that also does feed into, I think, to an extent into more of a mistrust of institutions of healthcare. I don’t know if you want a say an establishment, but that potentially that’s there too. So, you know, as you look at all, all these upstart platforms, because at one point Twitter was an upstart and Facebook was and everything else – RIP MySpace – do you see any indication that these are places that healthcare providers should be getting involved in? Is it flash in the pan? What are you thinking about?

Lee Aase: I would suggest this is a – to use the medical term – it’s as a watchful waiting approach that you would apply here. But also I’d start by listening. you can create an account personally if you’re a healthcare marketer or communicator. Get familiar with what’s happening there.

You don’t have to speak, you can be one of the lurkers and just see what people are saying. And maybe try some experiments if you think it makes sense, but I think not paying attention to them at all as the wrong approach.

But I also think given the tenor that will likely be there in most of these platforms, running out there with a whole bunch of establishment kind of messages you’re probably getting the equivalent of a ratio there.

David Shifrin: Yeah.

Lee Aase: On those platforms too. But I do think it’s like, you know, in politics you have to get 50% plus one. Marketers are all about tenths of a percent of market share at the lower end of things and making a big difference in their bottom line by how well they’re reaching people. And so, unless you want to say that this segment of the population is just, we just shouldn’t, don’t even want to treat their kind, you know, then you should be paying attention.

You should at least be hearing what they’re saying and seeing if there’s a way that you could effectively communicate there. But I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t rush into it and say okay, everybody has to have a Rumble page, a Rumble channel and put all their videos on Rumble too.

But I think not at least listening is you know, making the problem worse.

David Shifrin: All right. Last one. The tip let’s…we’ve talked about social media policies, and let’s talk here more specifically about good ways for leadership as individuals to use social media. How do folks in leadership positions in the executive suite build trust and credibility and come across as real people while also presenting valuable information about the brand or the organization as they need to?

And I mentioned before we started recording that I’d love to continue on this thread at some point about how almost the flip side of that is how brands can leverage the corporate voice versus the individual voice.

But let’s start sort of if you’re a healthcare leader how do you balance that and come across as a real person?

Lee Aase: Yeah well, I mean I think healthcare leaders who are going to be or have personal accounts on social media need to be engaged with them, need to be paying attention to them. There are certainly…any public figure who has a social media account is having other people help manage the account just because there’s such a volume of messages.

David Shifrin: Sure.

Lee Aase: But it needs to come across as authentic and that there needs to be some level of the person himself or herself speaking and engaging. And that if it’s all, if it’s all managed and not an individual being involved at all, it’s not going to be genuine. It’s not going to feel genuine and real.

And I think that’s part of what people are thirsting for, is that there would be that ability to, that this is a real person who personifies the brand who personifies the values of the organization. So I think one way, I mean, a lot of that can be accomplished through video by having just the CEO or other leader talking about things but I would say much more like a livestream and “ask me anything kind of thing” versus a highly produced thing with the drone footage, you know, where they’re, they’re coming

David Shifrin: Swooping into the CEO suite.

Lee Aase: Swooping into a CEO suite. It’s like, I mean, I understand there, are different brands that have the different fields and for some that might be just the, like maybe for Elon Musk.

Well, I mean, just let’s think like Elon Musk, okay. I mean, another good example of someone who you’re pretty sure that that’s authentic to who he is and he’s done okay for himself mostly.

David Shifrin: Yeah, it would be hard to ghost write for Elon Musk, he has his own style. That’s a good example because it does show and he does say some things that you can really “Wow, bro.” But he, as you say, he is incredibly successful and he has built real products and he has advanced his brand.

So it does show that people are interested in the human behind the brand. And in some cases they might be inextricable, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Lee Aase: Yep.

David Shifrin: Okay.

Lee Aase: So that’s what I have to say about that.

David Shifrin: All right. Thanks, Lee.

David Shifrin: Welcome to DigitaLee, the podcast for healthcare marketers, where we look at the digital news, tools, tips and tricks for effective healthcare communications. I’m David Shifrin with Jarrard Phillips Cate & Hancock, and I’m with Lee Aase, digital healthcare pioneer and now healthcare entrepreneur. Today, we’re looking at the Spanish language misinformation crisis, Meta / Facebook’s recent dive and Apple privacy rules.

So for the first section, I wanted to talk about, we’re back to talking about misinformation in the news. This one is a little bit different. A story on Axios about Spanish language misinformation crisis, and I think everybody’s pretty aware of what’s going on. As far as misinformation, it’s not quite as hot of a topic as it was a few months ago at the peak of the vaccine push, but certainly is still an issue.

And I thought that sort of the core point, the thing that really stood out to me in this article, was between the lines and says where platforms are quick to remove misinformation posts in English, some identical posts in Spanish remain online. And just something that I hadn’t really considered is the multi-lingual nature of everything that’s going on and the need to reach out to so many different communities.

What’s your gut when you see this article?

Lee Aase: I have a little bit of a different take and I thought it was actually a good launching pad to be able to talk about some of this. So I think there is a crisis. I don’t think it’s a Spanish language information crisis, and I think it’s a different one. And we’ll get to that in a little bit.

When I started advocating for social media use by hospitals about 15 years ago now, there were definitely a lot of people interested and then I got a lot of objections because people are saying “what about all the bad information on the internet?”

And my response was, there will always be bad information on the internet. That’s just the way it is. If you have a free and open internet, you’re going to have people publishing bad information. So my answer was then if responsible medical professionals don’t engage, we’re ceding the territory to the snake oil salesman and to the people, the charlatans, the people who are putting out bad information.

And so that’s why I was arguing that health professionals had a moral responsibility to put out good information. I have a good friend of mine that a lot of folks listening to this will probably know. Andy was the founder of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, or was the president of that.

Anyway, he founded a group called the Blog Council—now that’s socialmedia.org what it later became—anyway, he had a saying that he said he learned in high school chemistry that the solution to pollution is dilution. You know, that if there’s bad stuff out there, you need to overwhelm it with the good, okay. You need to put out reliable, trustworthy information. And the way that we have thought about it for 15 years in social media is that the good information will drive out the bad, the good information that people like it, they’ll comment it, it’ll get up-ranked. There’s a thing on Twitter called the ratio. The ratio is comments versus retweets or likes, and if your comments are much higher, that’s meaning that people are taking issue with what you’re saying versus what, versus liking it or passing it along.

There’s a quote that’s been attributed to Voltaire: “I may disagree with what you’re saying, but I’ll defend to the death your right to do it.” We’re a long way from that right now. You know, we’re saying, yeah, we need to tamp down, we need to drive out this information.

I think that’s a big part of the problem for the polarization that we have now, is that it is viewpoint discrimination and that opinions that align with the governmental or large entity positions are…are those that are aligned are promoted and others are suppressed.

So, over the last several months, users have been banned from Twitter for messages that today we know are true. Cloth masks don’t work. Posting that previously would get you, could get you banned from Twitter. And if the goal is to prevent respiratory infections, they don’t work.

Okay. Cloth masks don’t work. And they’re saying, ‘No, yeah you got to wear N-95s or KN-95s.’ You know, some messages that previously came from government or medical authorities have been shown not to be true. Okay, Israel has a vaccination rate of about 95% for those who are over 50 and about 85% have gotten the booster, and as of February 3rd COVID deaths were at an all-time high in Israel, okay.

The president of the United States, the current one, not the previous one, the head of the CDC and a whole bunch of others have previously said, and the tweets are still up, if you get vaccinated, you won’t catch COVID and you won’t spread COVID. And there aren’t any warning labels on those. There aren’t any things saying this may contain misinformation.

So I think those messages are still up, and I think another issue in addition to this alleged Spanish misinformation crisis is if you can’t be heard on the normal platforms where everybody’s speaking, well, if you park your truck on a bridge and don’t move it, and it’s a bridge between two countries, people are gonna pay attention. They’re gonna listen.

David Shifrin: Going to get noticed.

Lee Aase: Yeah.

So I think the fact that things are being suppressed, pushing down on that is kind of why we get, and I know in another…in a future segment, we’ll get into talking about some of these other platforms, GETTR or Parlor and others, but the reason those spring up is because the more mainstream platforms are suppressing it. And I think it’s…so that’s where the problem that I see is the credibility. You know, even if you think it’s harmful, then you should speak out against it instead of banning it, instead of banning individuals and banning and putting labels on that feel like they’re putting the finger on the scale.

So that probably wasn’t what you were expecting when you proposed the top.

David Shifrin: But it’s a good note too, that we have to engage. And to do… and this is something that I’ve been really concerned about for a long time, I’m a scientist by training and we need to do a better job of communicating how science works and how the data is collected and how we analyze it, because it does change.

And that doesn’t mean anybody’s being disingenuous or trying to play rope-a-dope or whatever, but it’s just, this is how science works. It’s complicated and it’s hard. And so the guidance will change. And that should be the message. And that gets to your point about diluting the bad information and just being more clear and straightforward about, ‘Here’s where we are today and here’s how we arrived there and this may change tomorrow.’

Lee Aase: Yeah, science, isn’t a person and it isn’t a noun. The science is a process, it’s a verb, and we need to, yeah, and educating people on the scientific method and what we know because of studies and what they can tell us, and then what the limitations of the studies are. And I realize that you get into a pandemic and people say we gotta get some communication out here because there’s all this bad stuff happening and we gotta give them some clear messages, and they want to give a clear message. And I think the risk of that, and I think what has borne out because of it is that we have people that have much less trust in public health than they would previously.

David Shifrin: Yeah. I love it. Thanks, Lee. Let’s look at the platform of the week. Meta, the artist formerly known as Facebook, the artist formerly known as Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room. A lot of stories going around recently about how the number of active users has dropped for the first time ever, and as a percentage of total users it’s pretty minuscule, but it did drop.

It’s never happened before. Their earnings are down. Their market cap took a hit largely, or at least in part, because of Apple’s privacy rules, which I think a lot of folks listening as marketers are going to be aware of.

It’s something we’re watching here. So is this a big New York Times headline story that’s a big story because it’s a massive company or is this something that digital marketers in healthcare need to be paying close attention to for potential issues?

Lee Aase: Well, I think marketers should always be paying attention to things like that and be looking at performance. So they need to be looking at what’s really happening in terms of click-throughs and business results that they’re trying to accomplish through it. I think being cognizant, at least of the fact that the user base is diminishing a little bit, or at least the active user base, that paying attention to where the attention of users is going is something that just is basic work that marketers should be doing. Marketers, communicators of all types.

I think that, getting back to the previous issue, we talked about when you have the…I think one of the reasons behind, I mean this is a hypothesis, okay? This is a guess even, you know, that 50%ish, maybe it’s 48% of people and maybe 40% that are pretty strongly feeling that way are saying, you know, this is a platform that’s not friendly to me. Or, that is, this is going to put a label on things that I agree with that says this might be misinformation. I think people then maybe hold back and just say, ‘Okay well, I’ll share my family, kid pictures and watch the grandkids.’

But maybe you’re less likely to…it just takes a little bit of the luster off, I think.

David Shifrin: Yeah. And so then if they’re backing away from their engagement, it’s even harder to reach them, obviously, by definition, with good information. So you’re…

Lee Aase: Right. Yeah. And when you’re…I mean the answer isn’t to turn up the volume, okay. It isn’t to turn up the volume and turn down the screws, it’s to engage and to discuss. And I recognize that having been worked in the healthcare system and where you’re posting the messages that you’re, you know, being given to post, and there are definitely, there are unpleasant conversations that are happening there. The way it is right now, for sure.

David Shifrin: Okay, so let’s keep an eye on it and watch the numbers and see what happens next time Zuckerberg testifies before Congress.

For the last piece here Lee, the tip that I want to focus on is Apple’s privacy rules, which I just mentioned. I think, again, I think a lot of folks are aware of this, but the native iOS Apple mail app, which accounts for a huge chunk of email management, somewhere between 40 and 50-plus percent, it now is pre-loading tracking pixels to obscure human opens and geolocation data.

It’s a privacy push. It reduces the ability for us marketers to track engagement and target across different platforms. And again, this bit into Facebook’s revenue. So it’s potentially a problem for pure marketers selling whatever, clothes or widgets. How much do you think this could matter for the types of campaigns that hospitals and other healthcare providers are running?

Lee Aase: Yeah, well, I mean I think the upshot that HubSpot talked about in that article that we, that I think you referenced and you probably put it in the show notes, is just that marketers need to focus on the harder metrics and the ones that are more business-oriented, like click-throughs, like actual, go to the other one we were talking about here, replies. Yeah.

So, I mean, that’s the thing is when people are actually taking some step, you know, I look at shares for instance as well, shares on social, A share is…I used to call it the mother of all metrics, because it’s not just “I like it,” it’s “I want my friends to see it,” and so those are the things that I am typically going to be paying a bunch more attention to.

David Shifrin: This is DigitaLee from Jarrard, Phillips, Cate & Hancock. I’m David Shifrin.

Twice a month, we highlight the headlines, platforms and best practices in digital and social media that healthcare organizations need to keep up and –better yet – get ahead. Today, we’ve got a story on using YouTube to connect with patients to work towards health equity, the value of YouTube as a platform for healthcare providers, and for our tip of the day it’s Twitter and LinkedIn polls.

The news theme of the day is from an article in Business Insider. The title was, “This Doctor Says YouTube Is a Crucial Way That She Connects with Patients, Here Is Why.” So, with that clickbait headline, the point is that Dr. Lisa Fitzpatrick works in underserved communities trying to improve access and health equity and has found that YouTube is a powerful tool for approaching that work.

So, Lee, what was your take when you saw YouTube being considered as a platform for health equity?

Lee Aase: Yeah, I think YouTube is a platform for health equity and just general health information for people, because we’re talking about doctors who are the well-respected voice due to the fact that it says MD behind their name. People are trying to sort out: “What should I believe? What should I know?” What I found in my career at Mayo Clinic was that sometimes even the longer videos that were going into more depth on a topic could be among the most valuable ones because they’re really reaching people at their moment of need. They’re giving them that in-depth information that they really need about their condition. Being able to address commonly held questions and beliefs and being able to address them authoritatively is a great, scalable way to reach a lot more people who maybe wouldn’t even come into the doctor’s office regularly. But they find someone with whom they identify, with whom they resonate and can build up some trust. It’s a great way to get some good health messages to people who maybe otherwise wouldn’t darken the door of a medical office.

DS: Let’s keep going with something that you mentioned: The value of in-depth medical information, because that runs a little bit counter to so much of the marketing, communications, social media and digital principles where everybody’s talking about how attention spans are shorter than ever.

Normally, you have to keep it tight. What are you seeing when it comes to “in-depth?” How far can you go with that before you start to lose people?

LA: Yeah. I mean, attention spans are shorter when it’s something like a public health message because it’s something that’s intended for a mass audience. But, when you get a particular kind of sick, that’s all you care about. It’s something that you’d really like to hear about from someone who knows about it. Say, “How do I deal with acne?” or, “How do I deal with some other condition that’s affecting me?” So, the beauty of YouTube is that is the place where people can have essentially unlimited time to follow a bunny trail of information that relates to what they’re interested in, since YouTube also serves up related videos on those topics.

One of the better videos that we had in my Mayo Clinic days was 10 minutes, it was on a particular kind of cancer, a blood cancer, and it got tens of thousands of views. It wasn’t millions of views – it wasn’t funny cat video territory – but it was the right kind of patients or their family members who really had that as an interest to help them to better understand the condition.

DS: So that’s a perfect segue into the second part of this, which is looking at YouTube as a search engine. It’s about not just thinking about YouTube and kind of the news and trends, but also as the platform that we want to focus on here. YouTube is owned by Google, of course, and it is a massive, massive search engine – I believe it’s the second largest in the world.

So, when you’re in it, Lee, you just mentioned the ability to serve up related videos and content to whatever you happen to have pulled up in your initial search. Because it’s such a powerful place for people to go and look for information, what should providers be thinking about in terms of their strategy around using video and YouTube in particular, to make sure that they’re serving up the content that people need where they’re looking for it?

LA: I think one of the keys with YouTube is to be sure that you’re effectively using your titles and your descriptions, putting in captioning as you can, both for accessibility with ADA compliance, but also because it makes it easier. Doing so gives more terms to be found within search – so, titles and tags and descriptions.

It’s important to recognize that it’s the number two search engine owned by the number one search engine. When you’re searching on Google, one of the tabs is “Videos,” and for some things, the first thing that’s going to show up is a video.

It’s often geographically contextualized as well. So, some of the things that may be nearby would show up – there’s some geographic preference with it. I think you just need to be sure that you are not only communicating to humans in the video, but communicating to the algorithm by how you tag, describe and title the videos.

DS: Cool. Okay, thanks. Let’s move on to the tip of the day.

We’re going to switch platforms here and look at LinkedIn and Twitter polls. I’ve been seeing more and more of this. I think maybe it’s died off a little bit over the last couple of months – kind of tail end of the summer of 2021 – but lots of organizations and lots of people have been posting quick polls on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Anecdotally, I’ve seen this coming more from the marketing and businesspeople in my network than from the healthcare provider folks. But that said, I think we all have seen those, and we’ve all probably responded to them. Some of them are goofy, some of them are a little bit more serious.

I guess the simple question is, “Is that a useful tool for healthcare providers to be considering, or is it just yet another social media, digital fad that’s going to be gone in six minutes and we’ll all forget about it?”

LA: It all depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. I’ve seen some people use them for education. For example, where there is actually a right answer to the question and they’ll put up a quiz and then they’ll do a follow-up with the right answer, and then they can use it. That’s the educational perspective.

Now, Twitter does not represent the world, okay? It’s a subset of…

DS: Hold on, hang on, hang on. Whoa. Back up.

LA: Twitter is opinions. It’s especially the opinions of those who are posting. There is a distinct minority of people who do so much of the posting that they aren’t necessarily reflecting the rest of the user base and Twitter users in and of themselves. It’s a distinct subset of the country, of the world. And so, Twitter polls are certainly not a scientific representation of what people really think.

However, probably, you get more engagement among the regular lurkers on social media and on Twitter in a Twitter poll. Because it’s anonymous, people can vote what they really think versus what they are supposed to think. If you reply to a comment, your name can be traced to what you’re saying versus on Twitter the poll, where the responses are anonymous.

I think depending on what you’re trying to accomplish, it can be helpful. I also think that LinkedIn polls are probably more reliable because they’re less susceptible to some kind of an organized, “Okay, somebody put up a poll and I’m gonna torture them with the answer that they didn’t want.”

That has been known to happen definitely on Twitter, for sure.

DS: Alright, I think we’ll call it good there.

David Shifrin: This is DigitaLee from Jarrard, Phillips, Cate & Hancock. I’m David Shifrin. This is our first real episode. So, if you stumbled in here and are wondering what it’s about, please check out the intro, episode zero, on whatever platform you’re listening on now. In short, we’ve got Lee Aase, a pioneer in digital and social media for healthcare who just retired from more than two decades at the Mayo Clinic, among other positions. Every other week, Lee and I will review three things: a trend or headline related to digital healthcare, a social media platform, and then a quick tip for healthcare Marcom and digital teams. Today, we’re covering a story about the use of social media for finding health information, an overview of the audio platform, Clubhouse, and considerations for building a good social media policy.

All right. So let’s kick this thing off with our first news story, an article from Forbes saying that one in ten Americans turn to social media for health information. I’m going to bias the conversation a little bit before I kick it over to you, Lee, by saying that I was really surprised that the number was only one in ten, only about 10%. I would have guessed, I don’t know, 40% maybe? But what’s your reaction to the rise of social media as a health information platform?

Lee Aase: Yeah, well, I think you need to put it in context that in the survey of a thousand patients like me, they found only 16% went to traditional news.

So, if you’re only at 16% for traditional news, the fact that you’re at 11% for social media isn’t that far behind. They did see that Google and disease and condition sites like WebMD and Mayoclinic.org, were kind of in that 30%-ish range, 30, 35%.

So, I think the reality is that people don’t go to social media, they go to their friends. It isn’t like social media in general, but they’re looking at what did the people that they connect with on social media have to say? So I think that’s the question: Who do they really trust?

And I think we’ve seen a declining trust in some of the various news outlets that has probably brought that down. I probably would have been predisposed to think it would, that number would be for social media going in, but I think what we’ve kind of just generally seen in society is kind of a breakdown in who your trusted source is.

DS: The participation versus trust gets to another finding in there, where they found only 2% of people actually trust social media. Nine or eleven, depending on which number you’re looking at, go to social media for information, but only 2% trust it. So, that implies that it’s exploratory.

All right. Let’s turn our attention to the platform of the week or whatever we want to call this thing. There’s a new-ish, I guess it’s really not that new at this point, but still, a relatively obscure platform called Clubhouse, which is essentially live audio rooms. And I think it’s become more popular among business types over the last year or so, it’s a different way for folks to engage.

But because we are starting to see more folks bring up the idea of this interactive audio approach rather than either live chats or text-based social media. Should healthcare providers be paying attention to Clubhouse? And if so, why?

LA: Yeah, Clubhouse is a really neat platform. Twitter Spaces is an analogous platform within the Twitter universe. The whole idea behind it is it’s live interactive audio chats that instead of just listening to a recording (for the most part), you’re able to interact directly with people. Compared to regular, old-fashioned Twitter chats where people are texting, where anybody can run into the conversation, they’re much more moderated and orderly. I think there’s been a lot of growth. I think Clubhouse had a good strategy when they made the platform invitation-only at first to give it a more consistent user experience and make it feel somewhat exclusive.

That way, people had to get an invitation to be able to join, and so they perhaps valued it more.

DS: So, my first Gmail address.

LA: Like that! Or, The Facebook back in the day, you know? Because it was somewhat exclusive, it was kind of a cool thing to get an invitation, to be able to participate in it.

I have found for a lot of the same reasons that people use podcasts, and where there’s been this resurgence in podcasts as led by Joe Rogan and then so many others after that, where the fact that you can multi-task by listening and driving is a great advantage. Also, you can listen to a podcast on something of very personal interest and go into it in great depth. Likewise, some of these Clubhouse chats can go on for half an hour, forty-five minutes, maybe even an hour where you’re having a conversation and it’s moderated by leaders who are inviting people in to share their perspective.

So, it isn’t as noisy. It’s got audio, but it’s not as noisy as a Twitter chat where anybody can use the hashtag and jump in with a point.

DS: Should providers be considering using this for, a weekly health chat and getting their physicians out in the world? Or is there relevance for Marcom teams?

LA: I think there’s something to be explored there to at least test it, to see how it works in your particular context. One of the beauties of it is that, unlike Zoom, Facebook Live, or some of the other platforms that include video, there just isn’t as much production.

It can be much more informal. You can just do it with a smartphone because that’s the only way you can do it. You don’t have to be worried about hair and makeup and lighting; you can be focusing much more on the nature of the content of the conversation without having to worry about some of the aesthetics. It’s kind of like video killed the radio star, you know, back in the day.

This is sort of like the radio stars’ revenge.

DS: All right, let’s move on to the final section. We’ll get better titles for each of these sections. Tip of the day. With so much happening around nurses and doctors getting more involved in talking about their field, work, and what they’re seeing within the four walls of their facility, there is much more noise and, frankly, anger on social media, on all sides.

Consequently, it’s a really good time to be evaluating your social media policy.

What are one or two key tips for a good, strong social media policy for a healthcare provider when they’re looking to ensure that their employees are staying in line without stifling the conversation?

LA: I definitely agree with wanting to facilitate it and make it encouraging, and putting up guardrails instead of roadblocks. I think the other one of the other elements is just to make sure that you’re legal with it. A lot of times people will want to put in a policy that says, you can’t say anything bad about our organization online that reflects poorly on us. The National Labor Relations Board has said that concerted efforts and discussions around wages, hours, and working conditions are protected speech and you need to guard people’s ability to do that. So, you have to realize that there will be the good with the bad, but that you can have standards for professionalism and for mutual respect.

That rule applies whether people are on duty or off. I think the other part of it is effective communication of the policy, and that the idea isn’t to be a “Gotcha!” thing. It isn’t, “Oh, good, we can fire you.” It’s, “How do we keep people out of the ditch. How do we keep people from doing things that will reflect poorly on the organization?”

It just isn’t good practice – they get into a heated discussion and they kind of spout off on something. It’s important just to be in front of people, to be giving them guidance with examples of the kinds of things that they can do and should do, then the things that they would be best to avoid. Training and education, I think, are the really key elements.

DS: Alright, well, thanks. First episode, first conversation, in the books.

LA: Magically edited to sound super smart!

DS: You know, that’s what I do.