BJC and social media in 2013
When I look back on my first day at BJC more than two years ago, I recall a social media landscape here that looked much different than today. Many of the hospitals were still just getting their feet wet on Facebook and Twitter. Google+ had yet to be born and Pinterest was unheard of except by a small group of users chosen to test it. BJC had a set of guidelines, but no official social media policy in place.
Since then, BJC has moved beyond that simple set of guidelines to an official policy regarding use of social media by employees. Some BJC hospitals have embraced social media, attracting tens of thousands of likes and followers. They’re developing detailed strategies to use social media to connect with patients and increase revenue.
Bigger and Better
You only have to look at the Facebook pages of some BJC hospitals to understand its growing importance to their overall marketing strategy. Larger hospitals like Barnes-Jewish Hospital or St. Louis Children’s Hospital are interacting with the public on their pages daily.
Barnes-Jewish Hospital puts a lot of hard work into its Facebook page. With the help of well-planned content and a small amount of advertising money, the hospital’s page likes are growing by the thousands almost every month.
Earlier this month, BJH launched a set of custom tabs on the page. They used templates provided by a Google-owned product named Wildfire. Using the tabs you can request an appointment with a physician, get directions to the hospital, search for a physician and much more. This is information that is already available on the BJH website. People searching for that information can now find it in one more place. Another goal of the tabs is to increase user engagement on the page.
You can see a photo of their current tab layout below:
St. Louis Children’s Hospital is BJC’s other Facebook powerhouse. The page is nearing 28,000 likes. Great content and a strong following from the community keep the page going strong. Siteman Cancer Center’s page is also growing quickly thanks in part to great content.
Educating Employees
Like BJC hospitals, BJC employees are more active than ever on social media.
With that in mind, BJC Corporate Compliance is working with the Center for Lifelong Learning and BJC Communications and Marketing to create an online social media orientation course for employees. The course provides basic information about the BJC social media policy and includes everyday scenarios involving patient privacy, improper comments about co-workers or personal activities, etc.
Center for Lifelong Learning staff members have done a great job putting it together. The course is set up to mimic the display of a social media feed and content is presented in the form of Tweets and posts. Look for an invitation soon to preview the course.
Working Together in 2013
My plan is to assemble employees working on social media throughout the system on a quarterly basis to discuss new strategies. I chose quarterly based on the results of a Survey Monkey I sent out last year. Each meeting will feature a guest speaker recruited either internally or externally depending on the subject.
Social media growth is also evident through these meetings. Two years ago, similar informal meetings to share updates on social media projects attracted 10-15 attendees on average.
At our November meeting, which focused on BJC’s new social media policy, there were nearly 40 and it was a challenge to find a meeting room large enough to hold the group. It was great to see employees come from as far away as Alton and Columbia, Mo. I will always work hard to make their trip worthwhile.
This month’s meeting will be on January 25. If you attended the last meeting, you should have received an invitation. If you are a BJC employee and were not part of the last meeting but would like to attend the next one, please send me an email: pdonovan@bjc.org.
Happy New Year everyone!
BJC Adopts New Social Media Policy
Ever think about potential consequences if you send a tweet describing how terrible you think your boss is and your boss finds out? Curious if “friending” patients on Facebook and tagging pictures of them without their consent is wise?
The answers to those questions may be obvious to you. To others, the rules may not be as clear and there are many other situations that fall into a gray area. To help us all understand the rules related to social media for BJC employees, a new social media policy is in place.
The six-page policy, created by BJC Corporate Compliance, applies to employee activity on social media on the clock and off. Do’s and don’ts are clearly stated as well as possible consequences for violating the policy.
The policy also lists contacts for questions about the policy, something that until now was a mystery to many employees outside marketing and communications departments.
There will be a meeting to discuss the policy at 1 p.m. October 10 at the Center for Outpatient Health, open to employees who work with social media or internal communications. If you have not received an invitation and would like to attend, please email Patrick Donovan at pdonovan@bjc.org.
Next week you will have the chance to kick back on your couch or recliner, grab your laptop or tablet, and chat live with a pharmacist. Our next Ask the Pharmacist chat offers the chance to get your medication questions answered during primetime.
Missouri Baptist Medical Center pharmacist Duane Wesche, RPh will be available for questions from 7-8 p.m. Thursday, August 2, in a live chat featured on www.bjchealth.org. For years, Duane has answered questions submitted to the Ask the Pharmacist page of bjchealth.org as part of BJC’s Help for Your Health initiative. He receives and answers hundreds of questions a year, both in text and sometimes through video.
You may remember BJC held its first Ask the Pharmacist chat at noon back on May 10. While there were a lot of questions asked (Duane never stopped typing the entire hour), I think the turnout can be higher. Duane and I pondered what effect an evening start time would have on participation and decided to give it a try. I’ll be posting a follow-up blog entry on the results.
We’ll be using CoveritLive for this chat. In an earlier entry, I espoused the merits of Scribblelive and why it had worked successfully for our first Ask the Pharmacist Chat. After doing some more research and cost comparisons, I decided CoveritLive was a better choice for our needs.
CoveritLive allows you to sign up to receive alerts by email when the chat is going to begin. I encourage you to sign up by visiting the chat page.
Hope you can make it!
Next week BJC Help for Your Health’s “Ask the Pharmacist” will be taking another technological leap forward.
On May 10 at noon, Duane Wesche RPh, will answer questions live in a chat room created on ScribbleLive. The chat will be embedded on www.bjchealth.org.
Originally, I thought we would do the chat using Twitter, but despite its popularity I think that’s too limiting. First, not everyone is on Twitter, so if they don’t have an account they may not go to the trouble to make one, even if they are interested in a chat. If they do sign up, they may not understand how Twitter works (@replies, #hashtags, etc.). Third, Twitter is blocked on BJC computers, and I want this chat to be available to employees.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch uses ScribbleLive, as do a number of other media sources across the country. While working at KSDK, I facilitated a number of chats using a free application called Chatango. I found that you could get more people to participate in a chat if the signup was little more than creating a screen name. ScribbleLive offers that ability to remain anonymous.
There are plenty of other features and I won’t go into them all. You can check out the site for yourself. There is one feature I find particularly helpful: You can sign into a chat with your Twitter account and send pieces of the chat to your Twitter feed. That’s another great way to get the word out about the chat and, hopefully, lure more participants in.
ScribbleLive also offers a decent amount of stats on chats, which can be helpful depending on what results you seek to measure. Unfortunately, anonymous users are almost impossible to track beyond the chat. That’s not a big issue, since our goal on this first chat is simply to educate as many people as possible with questions answered. I’m not concerned about gathering a wealth of personal or demographic data initially.
As far as cost, ScribbleLive is free for a 30-day trial. Afterward, it’s as inexpensive as $19.95 a month.
If you want to check out the Ask the Pharmacist chat page and bookmark it for later, here you go:
http://www.bjchealth.org/ask-the-pharmacist-chat
Click here to check out the Ask the Pharmacist YouTube playlist.
I recently had the opportunity to work with BJC Medical Group and the St. Louis American newspaper on a Twitter chat featuring physician Dr. Aunita Hill. While the chat only lasted an hour, the planning took place over the course of a few months.
We had about a dozen people take part in the chat, which slightly exceeded my expectations. While I was hoping for a big turnout, I also knew the number of people taking part would be limited since we were using Twitter. While it’s among the more popular social media channels, Twitter is certainly not in the same league as Facebook. Unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t work well for real-time chatting in large groups like Twitter, which is what I wanted.
Targeting the Audience
BJC Medical Group marketing and public relations coordinator Julie Jackson and I agreed the American would be a good media partner because of proven success in the paper for Dr. Hill. An ad placed in the paper for Dr. Hill earlier in the year resulted in several referrals to her office. Some patients walked into her office carrying the ad.
We decided to run more print advertising in the paper on the chat, one of them a high-profile banner ad below the fold. Digital ads would run on the home page of their website for three weeks. The American, which boasts a strong social media presence, would also promote the chat on its Facebook and Twitter accounts.
After creating an account for Dr. Hill, @aunitahillmd, we decided on the hashtag #bjcdocchat.
After consulting with The American on what topics would be of the most importance to their audience, we decided to promote it as a chat on diabetes and hypertension.
I also did a survey of what days of the week and what times of day were the most active for our BJC HealthCare account on average and for Twitter in general. Thursday and Friday afternoons were the strongest, so we set the chat for Thursday at 1:30 p.m.
Multimedia
Julie and I shot a few videos with Dr. Hill at her office. In one of them, she talked about how her mother suffered from diabetes and how that inspired her to help others with the condition. I think the video helped personalize Dr. Hill for viewers.
The videos took me less than a day to shoot, edit and publish. We uploaded them to YouTube and shared them across all of our social media channels. The American also embedded one of the videos on its website.
Grassroots
In addition to the advertising, we reached out to some influential Twitter users in the St. Louis area and asked them to help spread the word and take part in the chat. By doing so, their tweets containing #bjcdocchat and @aunitahillmd were seen throughout the chat by thousands of other users. We know this exposure was helpful because Dr. Hill added around a dozen followers during the course of the chat. We even got a retweet by St. Louis’ top Twitterer, @rizzotees.
I used some of my contacts to get word of the chat to select local media. KSDK.com featured an article in the health section of the site and Sunset Hills Patch made it the top story the day before the chat.
BJC Web Services posted a preview of the chat on the home page of www.bjc.org and www.bjcmedicalgroup.com We also posted a story on www.makemedicinebetter.org that included a live Twitter feed showing all of the tweets in the chat as it happened.
The Chat
I huddled with Dr. Hill and Julie in Dr. Hill’s office for the chat. Dr. Hill supplied the knowledge and I provided the technical support. The questions came in fast and while we tried to answer them all, some took longer to get to than others. Most of them were general questions about diabetes or hypertension. We referred one woman to a physician because she said she had a respiratory illness and her medication wasn’t working.
After the chat, I compiled all the tweets into one stream on Storify. It’s a site for compiling stories with social media assets (tweets, Facebook post
s, YouTube videos, etc.). Stories on Storify are sharable and can be embedded on other sites. Also, if you have followers on Storify it’s a good opportunity to share information from the chat with more people after the fact.
What Next?
Overall, I’d say this went pretty well. While I don’t know when we will do another chat with Dr. Hill, I plan on working with her on keeping her Twitter account active and growing. It’s a non-stop marketing tool.
If you have any tips on how to run an effective Twitter chat, please share them below.
The time’s almost up to switch to a Facebook timeline
Ready or not, here comes your Facebook timeline.
By March 30, all of our Facebook pages will switch over to the new timeline format.
Many of you have already become accustomed to using timelines on your personal page. You may have already made the switch on your fan pages.
While some strategies for Facebook fan pages are going away with the redesign, new ones are emerging.
Cover Photos
Let’s start at the top. As you see in the example below, the timeline features a spot for a cover photo. This is a great opportunity to grab visitors to the page with a big, colorful, compelling image. I think it’s best to include something showing human emotion, like cute babies smiling or a happy patient interacting with staff.
I would recommend using a picture that can stand alone without context. You could always add some text to the picture with Photoshop, but I believe it’s sometimes best to let the viewer interpret for themselves what they’re seeing.
The image you place in the spot has to be at least 399 pixels in length. Of course, that will get stretched to fit the space and won’t look great. Ideal dimensions are 851×315.
I would recommend using different images for your cover every few weeks. I think it gives people another reason to come back to your page and it keeps it looking fresh.
Facebook has a list of rules in place for your cover photo. It can’t include price or purchase information, contact info, calls to action or references to Facebook features such as Like or Share. You can read more in Facebook’s Page Guidelines.
The Timeline
You can now add milestones and other events to your timeline to give a more detailed look at your hospital or service line’s history. If you have a picture from 20 years ago you’d like to post, you could date it 1992 and it would show up on your 
timeline on that year.
Clicking the star button on the top right of a post will make it larger than others. Clicking the pencil button allows you to hide, edit or delete a post. Page owners can pin an important post to the top of the timeline, so it’s sure to be seen by visitors to your page. The pinned posts can stay up for up to seven days.
Statistics show that image-centric posts get more engagement than status updates, video posts or links. Lately, I try to find a good picture to include with all my posts, and make the links a secondary element.
Statistically, links by themselves do terribly for engagement on Facebook fan pages. Frankly, people don’t like to have to leave their news feed for another site. They have too many posts from their friends to catch up on. Include a summary of what clicking the link offers with your picture so users can still get something out of your post.
Fan Gates/Landing Pages
The days of fan gates are gone. BJC HealthCare’s fan page made the switch to timeline view a few weeks ago. As a result, I had to say goodbye to my landing page that encouraged first-time visitors to like the page.
Other pages within BJC, like St. Louis Children’s Hospital and Missouri Baptist Medical Center, will also lose their customized landing pages when Facebook flips the switch on everyone March 30.
Facebook recommends that you post a pin that links to a particular tab as a substitute to a landing page.
Apps Are Moving Up
Left-side navigation tabs are also going away. In their place are tabs along the top below the cover image.
The page tab apps you have now will still function when you switch over to the timeline. Instead of tiny 16×16 images and text, the tabs are now 111×74 pixels and have a spot for a picture. It’s one more change that’s making Facebook more picture-oriented.
Apps can now be 810 pixels wide instead of 520 pixels. When you make the switch to timeline, you may notice a lot of whitespace around your app content. If you plan to keep those apps, you’ll want to redesign them to better fit the 810 pixel space.
The Admin Panel
A button at the top of your timeline page will open an admin panel. Inside are some fairly robust stats on what content users are clicking on, what they liked and what they commented on.
There are also tips from Facebook on best practices for pages, as well as a list of recent interactions on your page.
Wrapping Up
What I’ve provided is a brief summary of what’s changing. You’ll want to play around with the new layout a bit to figure out what works best for you. You can move things around in a preview mode, but only until March 30.
If you’re doing something creative or unique with your timeline, let me know so I can share it with our social media group.
Pinterest and Copyright Concerns
I wanted to post a short addition to last week’s blog entry on Pinterest. There are some concerns arising regarding copyright that you should be aware of before you begin pinning.
Pinterest has a strict policy stating that users are not to use third-party content for anything but a personal content collection. In the site’s Terms of Use, it states: “You acknowledge and agree that you are solely responsible for all Member Content that you make available through the Site, Application and Services. “ This means that you must have explicit permission from the owner of material that doesn’t belong to you to post it.
The San Francisco Chronicle published an informative article on the issue that included why one photographer stopped using Pinterest immediately after taking a closer look at their Terms of Use and copyright law. You can read it here.
Pinterest offers a fairly straightforward method of reporting any copyright infringement on its site.
A Safe Strategy for BJC
Despite these concerns, there’s still a good reason to keep a presence on Pinterest to promote ourselves. It’s too popular not to.
On BJC’s Pinterest boards, we only use our own content. As stated in the previous blog post, we are creating videos specifically for Pinterest’s mostly female audience. Making sure you only use your own material or something generated by another hospital within BJC is a safe strategy that should keep you in compliance with copyright laws.
