Collaborative Filtering: Lifeblood of The Social Web
By medtouch | July 1, 2008
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Collaborative Filtering is a mechanism used to filter large amounts of information by spreading the process of filtering among a large group of people. Unlike mainstream media where there is either one or very few editors setting guidelines, the collaboratively filtered social web can have infinitely many editors and gets…
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Write “Magnetic” Health Content
By MatthewD | April 29, 2008
Just because it is a hospital web site does not mean that the content has been lame and stale.
Sarah Austin at Search Engine Journal has written a great post about creating magnetic content for your site.
Hands down, content is the most important part of your web site because it’s why visitors stay on your site. They may come to see a great design, watch a new video, or research an idea, but they stay when your content is magnetic. Magnetic content, though, can be difficult to write even if you’re an experienced writer, so what do you do when you’re not a great writer? Write anyway; keep your content strong, tight, right, and easy; and you’ll be writing magnetic content in no time.
It is not quanity, it is quality. The four “writes” according to Sarah are:
- Write strong
- Write tight
- Write right
- Write easy
Topics: Health Content | No Comments »
Can They Trust You?
By MatthewD | April 29, 2008
Is your hospital’s health content trustworthy?
Is the content that you put on your site there to build trust in your patients and their families, or is just some marketing jargon that has been white-washed by risk management? The content that is created on a hospital’s web site needs to be able to build trust and give the patient a sense of confidence in your organization. Can they trust you with their lives? You will need to be able to answer that question when people come to your site looking up information about their most recent health diagnosis.
Here’s a way to test… Would you trust your hospital based on the web site’s content? If not, you may want to rethink how you portray your organization to your patients.
Stop dehumanizing your web site. Open the virtual and real doors to people and let them build a relationship with you through trust.
Topics: Health Content | No Comments »
Engaging Your Visitors with Quality Health Content
By MatthewD | April 24, 2008
True or False? If you are writing health content for your hospital’s web site, your main goal is to write as much content as possible on every service your organization offers.
False.
Hospital health content is not about seeing who can act like they are the smartest and most informed. I do not think anyone has won awards for the amount of pages of content on their site, but I do know that awards have been given to sites that are engaging and improve a hospital’s communication efforts with patients.
People visit web sites looking to be engaged and informed, not to inundated with massive amounts of academic babel that means nothing to them when they are trying to find the best place to take a loved one to be cured, or to healed themselves. Health content needs to be engaging. It needs to reach out to the visitor, and tell them your organization is the best choice and that you will provide the best possible care. You can use video, Flash interactive assessments and even actual textual content to engage these people. Remember, it is most likely a very stressed time of their life, and the last thing they want to do is dig through content that is not relevant or engaging. If your bounce rate (if you don’t know what this is, contact us, it is a very important measurement) on your site is over 50%, most likely you have content that is not engaging and actually pushes your visitors and ultimately patients away from your institution.
Topics: Health Content | No Comments »
Sprout Builder - Sharing Health Content With the World
By MatthewD | April 21, 2008
Sprout Builder is a great tool to interact with your patients. It allows you to develop small interactive areas of content that can be placed on any web site and inform people about what your organization is doing.
Sprout is the quick and easy way for anyone to build, publish, and manage widgets, mini-sites, mashups, banners and more. Include video, audio, images and newsfeeds and choose from dozens of pre-built components and web services.
People are expecting easy access and to be able to interact more closely with healthcare organizations. Tools such as this allows this sort of interaction to happen. As you can see by their description it is more than press releases. You can include videos, forms, audio and maybe even interactive health assessments. These “widgets” can be placed on your site, blog or other sites that your healthcare organization is affiliated with. It can even be given to bloggers, and other industry thought leaders so they can put your content on their site.
The web as it is meant to be…
We created one for our own site:
Topics: Health Content | No Comments »
Health Content is Video
By Matthew Dillingham | April 11, 2008
I have been talking a lot about video recently, because it is huge!!! It is not going away, and it is becoming easier and easier to develop every day. There really is no reason for your organization not to have several videos on your site. It is no longer expensive to create, deploy or maintain thanks to organizations such as Video Bloom. On their site they say that video is the future of online communications. I would have to disagree. Video is now, it is the present, and it will only get more and more prevalent on the web. People not only want video on sites to explain a product or service, they are starting to require it. We have been developing more and more hospital web sites that contain video components. Ranging from virtual tours to patient and doctor testimonials. It is a great way to communicate.
Here are a few *great examples of hospitals using video:
- Brooks Rehabilitation Hospital
- St. Dominic Hospital
- Rehabilitation Hospital of the Cape and Islands
- Southwestern Vermont Health Care
*We don’t want to brag, but these are our clients…
Topics: Health Content, video | No Comments »
Search Engine Optimization Success Pyramid - Matt McGee
By Matthew Dillingham | April 9, 2008
Matt McGee has developed the SEO Success Pyramid, which is a great representation of how the search engine optimization process should work. The theories he puts forth in the pyramid hold true especially for hospital web sites and the development of their search optimization plan.
I like this quote:
What’s all this have to do with SEO and online marketing? Well, the best SEOs don’t talk to their clients about rankings; they talk about the process of making great web sites that earn traffic and convert visitors into customers. They talk about the process of creating great content that attracts links like bees to honey.
That is absolutely true. It is not about ranking, it is about quality content and making great web sites that people want to link to and share with others. If someone is only talking about rankings, they really do not have your best interests in mind.
Topics: Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment »
Types of Social Media Content for Hospitals
By Matthew Dillingham | April 8, 2008
Jeff Quip at SearchEngineWatch wrote an informative article on the types of social media content that can be developed for your site. Though he did not write this for healthcare specifically, the points that he makes are very relevant for hospital and healthcare web sites is valid.
In its simplest form, there are 3 types of social media content:
1. News Content
2. Sensational/Entertainment Content
3. Resources/Educational Content
Most hospitals can develop content for one and three, but would want to avoid two unless you get visits from celebrities.
Once you develop your new content, make sure you “socialize” it by providing social bookmarking options on your site.
Topics: Health Content, social bookmarking | No Comments »
Good Health Content Means Video, Just Ask the People
By Matthew Dillingham | April 6, 2008
Many hospitals still do not understand the importance of video. You can see that by the reams and reams of health content and testimonials they put on their sites. In most cases visitors who come to a hospital’s web site is not looking for a long, drawn out explanation of the greatest technologies, or that they are a smoke free campus. They are there to go real, personal information that is relevant and informative. What is a better way to do that than video? Nothing really.
People are experiencing video on about every site that they go to now, and it has become an expected feature on most consumer driven sites. Here are some stats to back this up:
- Over 9.2 billion video streams were initiated in the month of September in the US – comScore 2007
- 75% of all Americans during that month watched video online.
- Average video viewer watched 68 videos per month; three hours per month
What is the most interesting about this research, is what people do after they watch the video. According to research done by The Kelsey Group, more than half of the people watching video online “ said they engage in some sort of response activity, such as visiting a website, going to a physical location or making a purchase.”
This is a lot of people watching a lot of video. Why would you think they would not want to watch video on your hospital’s site, if they are going everywhere else to watch video? Patient testimonials, doctors talking about research, community interaction all are powerful video sources.
Besides people, Google likes video as well. Especially if it is well tagged, and surrounded by relevant content. We are starting to see more and more searches come up with video results mixed in with the typical results scene when someone searches. Actually, we have helped one of our clients with that very thing. When typing in their organization’s name, their website comes up first followed by a video about that organization. Very powerful.
Hospital’s are in the people business, so it is time to start giving people what they want.
Topics: Health Content, Search Engine Optimization, video | 1 Comment »
Link Structure Matters for Health Content Search Optimization
By Matthew Dillingham | April 1, 2008
Just when you thought that you had your site “optimized” for search engines, there is one more thing that needs to be tweaked. Your URL structure. There are many things that determine your search ranking, and URL structure is one of those. Many content libraries and content management systems default to numeric codes when the URL is created. This is not good when looking at your search engine optimization strategy. Search engine robots look at your URL to help them get a better idea of what your site is about.
A URL that looks like this is not helpful to your visitors or to search engines: www.example.com/body.cfm?id=204
A URL that looks like is helpful to your visitors and search engines: www.example.com/search-engine-marketing
The second URL let’s the search engines and spiders know what your page is about. This information comes up in the search engine results.
Here is an example:
Notice how search engine marketing is highlighted not only in the top link, but it is also highlighted in the URL. This is just one more piece that needs to be considered when developing your health content and search engine optimization strategy.
Topics: Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »
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