Jan Jennings

As part of our ongoing series of profiling local healthcare executives and their thoughts on using social media, we recently sat down with Jan Jennings, president and CEO of American Healthcare Solutions (AHS), a health care consulting firm singularly focused on the business of hospitals and healthcare organizations.

AHS helps clients improve financial performance, enhance competitive position, and achieve the most productive organizational alignment among medical staff, management, and trustees to optimize overall performance. Social media has become an integral part of its marketing strategy over the years. In fact, Jennings has a staggering 20,000+ connections on LinkedIn, built up gradually over the past five years.

Jennings spoke with us about how social media has enhanced his business and he also offered his advice for other healthcare executives who are a little shy dipping into the social media waters.

[Read more...]

Facebook marketing expert advises marketers to forget the games and socializing: “Facebook is a serious marketing tool”. Now worth several billion dollars, Facebook has over 1 billion users interacting on the world’s largest social media network. Businesses and brands can have a huge influential power by focusing on their target audiences all on Facebook.

“The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to Facebook Marketing” can be found nationwide at the following stores.

- Barnes and Noble
- Books a Million
- Walmart
- Hastings

“The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to Facebook Marketing” can also be found online on Amazon.com and hundreds of online stores.

Using the latest knowledge and insights, The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to Facebook Marketing is a landmark guide to small, medium, and even corporate businesses. Written by a successful PR leader and an expert social networker, the book offers marketers strategic guidance on how to make the most of Facebook’s marketing tools including:

[Read more...]

A recent survey conducted by the marketing firm, InSites Consulting, polled 1,222 managers and business owners from organizations with 20 or more employees in the United States, Great Britain, The Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and France. One of its key findings was that a digital gap is growing in the corporate world. Companies which are already investing a lot will do so even more in future. Companies which are currently not investing in digital media are also not planning to do so. InSites’ conclusion was that these companies need to engage with their target audiences in order not to miss out on them.

“Even though there is a clear digital evolution and pull among clients, there are still companies that are not convinced that they too have to go with the evolution,” states Prof Steven Van Belleghem, partner at the research agency InSites Consulting.

[Read more...]

Has your healthcare organization been using HootSuite or another third-party app to schedule your Facebook Page posts in advance? If so, you may longer need those apps since Facebook recently made some changes that allow you to schedule posts as well as dole out specific duties to multiple page administrators. You can also allot some of your practice’s marketing funds to promote some of these posts to make it appear more frequently in your followers’ newsfeeds.

But first, let’s discuss how you can schedule your posts weeks and even months in advance. Facebook has made it fairly simple to do this:

• From your Page, first choose the type of post you want to add to your page (status, photo/video, or event).
• Next choose the clock symbol in the lower-left of the sharing box, and select the year, month, date, hour, and minute, when you’d like your post to appear.
• Click schedule.

[Read more...]

Caroline Hagel

By Daniel Casciato

Amendola Communications is a full-service public relations (PR), marketing, and social media firm serving healthcare and healthcare information technology (IT) companies. The company has decades of experience in all facets of the industry and has worked with Fortune 500 companies as well as start-ups, successfully launching new companies and technologies.

Amendola has been recognized as one of the nation’s top five IT industry’s “Best-of-the-Best” small PR agencies by PR Source Code for three consecutive years, for being the most responsive and reliable, and consistently meeting or surpassing editors’ needs. It has had the pleasure of telling the stories and successes of not only technology companies, but also the hospitals and physician practices across the country that are early adopters of technology, helping to shape the evolution of healthcare delivery.

Amendola experiences social media from two different perspectives: how it helps its clients achieve their business goals and how it connects with journalists, clients, and potential clients. Social media helps its clients enhance their brand through search engine optimization (SEO), building thought leadership, and demonstrating how their services and products solve universal healthcare problems.

[Read more...]

Patty Swisher

By Daniel Casciato

IKM is an architecture, planning and interior design firm from Pittsburgh that has been providing professional design services for over 100 years. Its mission is to provide innovative and informed architecture that positively impacts the world through understanding, exploration and decision making. Healthcare-related projects such as the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center, West Penn Allegheny Oncology Network Infusion Centers, UPMC Mercy Institute for Rehabilitation and Research, Allegheny General Hospital Cardiovascular Institute, and WPH Forbes Hospital OR Suite are some of the local projects designed by IKM.

Like other marketing-savvy organizations today, IKM is taking advantage of the opportunities social media offers to connect with its customers as well as potential customers. Western Pennsylvania Hospital News invited Patty Swisher, Director of Marketing/PR for IKM, to respond to some of our social media questions via email. Swisher has been with the firm for 15 years. In addition to marketing communications, she also manages the majority of its social media communication initiatives.

[Read more...]

Jodi McKinney

By Daniel Casciato

Celtic Healthcare recognizes social media as an integral part of their marketing, PR and communications strategy. They know that it is the way people communicate today. Celtic’s mission is Innovative Healthcare at Home—so it is important that they also use innovative ways to communicate and interact with their customers and patients.

For Jodi McKinney, director of corporate communications for Celtic, social media is about sharing.  “We open ourselves up to our customers, and we want to get to know them,” she says.  “Through this sharing, we build credibility and trust. We want to know what our customers are thinking and what they want. Social media is an effective tool for analyzing collective intelligence and understanding our market position and helps us improve and innovate our services.”

McKinney took some time to respond to a few more questions we had about social media, specifically the role social media plays at Celtic, how it raises awareness for their activities, and how to best leverage social media.

[Read more...]

The most effective way to reach your audience is through Social Media. Check out the video below.

Hospitals and social media are a great mix, offering a wealth of opportunities for connecting with the community, patients, and even collaborating across health systems and between different hospitals. Read more.