In our last post, we talked about word clouds and their practical uses beyond the blog. This week, we’ll continue that discussion in lieu of our recent discoveries at SHSMD Connections 2011, an annual conference hosted by the Society for Healthcare Strategy & Market Development. The event was a meeting of the minds from all levels of hospital communications, and the word cloud was our way of learning more about what’s on their minds.

SHSMD attendees participated by entering today’s hot topics into our word cloud app. You can view the results here. But what do the results tell us about the directions and challenges hospital marketers face as we head into 2012?

The most commonly used phrase was “physician strategies,” with “social media” coming in close behind. Many hospital strategists are looking for effective ways to engage with physicians and patients. While social media continues to grow as a cost-effective way to expand reach and frequency, strategists are struggling with how to reconcile professional relationships with online social platforms—and even how to get people to “Like” or “Follow” their hospitals in the first place, let alone leverage that affinity. It’s a challenge many of today’s healthcare marketers must untangle, and clearly engagement is the name of the game.

Other issues taking center stage for healthcare marketers include:

• Direct marketing – promoting what works to grow market share.

• Brand building – on-target messaging in the midst of health reform and ACO debates.

• Market-driven plans (and plans that drives markets) – thinking strategically and delivering creatively.

• Better returns – demonstrating improved ROI and ROE as direct results of marketing efforts.

If your marketing initiatives don’t include solid strategic planning in the areas described above, you’re missing opportunities to enhance relationships, grow in volume, improve your brand and more.

What about you—what’s on your mind in healthcare marketing today? If you didn’t share with us at SHSMD, feel free to do so in the comments below. We’d love to hear from you.

Did you know that the average American adult eats 22 teaspoons (355 calories) of sugar a day?  And the average teen consumes 34 teaspoons a day? This doesn’t include any of the natural sugars found in fruits and vegetables. 

These are startling statistics – and no doubt a contributor to the skyrocketing obesity rate in the United States.  In fact, Colorado is the only state that has an obesity rate less than 20%. Obesity can eventually lead to hypertension, diabetes, heart disease and certain types of cancer, totaling to about $95 billion a year in medical spending. 

Will healthcare reform’s preventive programs and focus on wellness help Americans cut back and live healthier?  How do we begin to reverse the trends?

Well to start, we are what we eat. The American Heart Association recently published guidelines  about how much sugar we should consume per day.  Women should consume no more than 6 teaspoons or 100 calories of sugar a day compared to 9 teaspoons or 150 calories for men. 

Even small changes to our diet can make a difference. For example, eliminating one 12-ounce can of soda per day means cutting out 130+ calories (8 teaspoons of sugar) and losing 13 pounds per year. Imagine if we cut out that extra cookie or chocolate bar? We could be on the road to optimal health!

I absolutely agree with the comments in iHealthBeat’s article about the sub-optimization of the White House’s new health reform Web site. Why go to all the work of creating a new media-rich site and not optimize it for the masses to find?

Though the meta keyword tag is not used by the major search engines, a look at the Reality Check site shows that its writers are more worried about nabbing searchers who spell Barack Obama’s name wrong than getting folks who are curious about health reform to the site.  Unfortunately, it’s not clear that the staffers who threw the site together understand SEO – much less SEM – at all. They don’t even have ‘Barack Obama’ in text for the bots to find (the president’s name is only in a graphic and an alt tag).

Our SEO team’s recommendations?  Write a better title. Embed in the content common search terms like  “Obamacare,”  “health care coverage” and “health bill,” as the authors of the article suggest.  Deploy a suite of online analytical tools including AdWords, WordTracker, Google Analytics and others to identify additional popular search terms related to health reform. Create keyword-rich anchor text and cross-link to the various .gov sites.  If that sounds like too much work for our government friends, they could simply hire us to put Reality Check at the top of the search results.