Blogging for Your Practice
Posted
Consider creating a blog to promote your health care practice.
By Rodger D. Johnson
Your practice is a business, a company that provides medical attention to the sick. But it is also a tool to engage your community about important health issues. While some professionals are using communication strategies to dialog with clients, you can leverage social media technologies to do the same, and more.
Do you want to rapidly grow your practice? Educate the public about health issues? Inform your patients about new practice procedures? Or, comment on new laws affecting medical care in general? These you can do using a blog. A social media tool many companies are using nowadays, people and organizations use it to communicate with each other. It also has the capability of being a resource to your patients.
While your practice should have an overall communication plan, blogs are a tactic you can use to reach your communication goals. Used effectively, they are tools to promote goodwill, attract new patients and build community relations. Hundreds of companies are already participating in the blogosphere, and there are millions of blogs — thousands started everyday. That said your better blogs could support some overarching goals of your practice.
But don’t blog for blogging’s sake. It should be part of your overall communication strategy, and, as a tool, it may not be right for every occasion. Before developing a communication strategy; however, identify your message first.
Types of Blogs for Your Practice
Doctor’s Blog
Several blog genres are available for your practice. Along the lines of a CEO blog for corporations, you can launch a doctor’s blog. More than likely you’ll want to delegate writing responsibilities to a nurse practitioner on staff — you’re busy with patients and may not have the time to research and crave out time during the day to write. Nonetheless, this genre focuses on issues facing the medical profession that will affect a patient’s next visit. This may include addressing insurance concerns such as the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act.
Health Issues Blog
A blog dedicated to issues such as cancer prevention, nutrition, living healthy or the much-talked-about influenza pandemic on the horizon, are just a few issues this type of blog covers. It provides interested readers with up-to-date information, your practice’s position and reactions to current developments as they go public.
Advocacy Blog
The difference between the health issue and advocacy blogs is that the latter has a much stronger point of view. The author has an agenda and is pushing that into the marketplace of ideas. Say you’re a proponent of universal health care, a hot political topic among presidential hopefuls this go-around, and advocate a better prospective on the issue. Since you’re the doctor who will be dealing with this, you may want into inform your patients about the possible changes to health care government-sponsored universal coverage will bring. Or, you may disagree with current rhetoric on the subject, that’s an opportunity to address larger points of the issue and, as an expert in the trenches, engage the media, which may pressure politicians to listen to you.
Getting Started
If you’ve kept a journal, written notes or jotted a few ideas down, then blogging can be that simple. There are some technical issues we’ll touch on later. Unlike journaling, however, you need to ask yourself these questions:
- Will blogging be a long-term effort?
- What’s the purpose of my blog?
- How much money do I want to spend?
- Am I tech savvy, or do I need something simple?
- What blog platform are others using?
The first two questions are tied to the business strategy of your practice, while the other three questions are not.
Your blogging budget
There are two choices: free or paid. It’s as simple than that. Free, I think is the best way to start. Blogger and Wordpress are to of the better platforms, especially if you’re not too tech savvy. On the other hand, hosting fees are nominal. Typepad, the platform I use, costs about $9 a month.
Of course you’ll find different levels of service depending on how much you want to pay. Quite frankly, that also depends on the flexibility you need. While Blogger and WordPress (Wordpress.com) provide the platform, domain name and hosting for free Wordpress (Wordpress.org) gives you a platform, but you find and pay for hosting services and domain name.
Others like MovableType charge for a license to use the platform. This depends on how the number of blog you want and whether they will have a commercial, personal, educational or not-for-profit use – MovableType also has a free version. You still need pay for a third-party domain name and host.
Tech savvy or not
Of all the platforms available, they are all fairly simple to use. However, Blogger, Wordpress and Typepad are the easiest in my opinion. I’ve worked on all three. Currently, I use Typepad. With any of these, you’re going to get a canned template, which is fine. But if branding is important, then hiring a web design company to develop one for you is best. This will cost, however.
Look at what the competition uses
You can learn much from your colleagues and other blogging professionals. The strategy here is to scan the net for blogs and compare the ones you like against those you don’t like. Make a list of those characteristics. I even recommend contacting those bloggers whose blog you admire. They are surprisingly helpful.
__________
Search this site for other articles on: publicity, public relations, marketing tactics.
Technorati Tags: publicity, public relations, marketing tactics, medical blog.
__________
Blogging for Your Practice copyright © 2007 Rodger Johnson and AdvanceMyPractice.com. All rights reserved.
Rodger Johnson is an expert in social media, public relations, and corporate communications, and manages all facets of marketing and communication for his clients.
Questions about creating a blog to advance your health care practice may be directed to RodgerJohnson@AdvanceMyPractice.com.
Hi Rodger,
This is a very good post about blogging for medical practice! I’ve passed it on to several of my clients and posted a link to it on my own blog.
An additional tip, if I may? Many of my clinic clients protest at blogging because they think it will take too much time.
Shared blogging can be the answer. A great way to “virtually” invite patients into the practice is to have the staff write posts as well. This brings the benefit of post frequency, but more importantly, it enables visitors to form relationships with the clinic (as opposed to just the doctor).
I will frequently advise clinics to include a staff page (with pics and bios) on their websites to “humanise” the practice with real people. Many patients report that this is a page they visit on the website before they come in, and they sometimes go back to it to read more about the staff they met after they have left.
Having staff add posts will not only reduce the burden on the doctor, but will also enhance the image of the practice as a real place with real people working inside it.
A further benefit is that staff feel included in the “voice” of the clinic, which contributes to their sense of inclusion and shared responsibility.
Thanks for the great post!