Cast & Curious

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  • Part III: Building an advocacy marketing strategy using the social media funnel

    Purchase Funnel is a customer centric marketing theory that describes the customers journey towards purchasing a product or service.  Various goals and marketing strategies are working in different levels of that funnel convinces the customer to purchase a product or service at the bottom of that funnel.

    Applying the same strategy on advocacy, the social media funnel works to convince your target population to add “value” to your advocacy at the bottom of the funnel. Value in the case of an advocacy may mean financial, volunteer, or whatever was the desired behavioural change set in the advocacies objectives.

    The path through the social media funnel is illustrated in this diagram. (Hootsuite)

    hootsuite-funnel

     

    Note the different levels of social media goals and their corresponding categories. Social media channels and metrics can then be used to benchmark your work and demonstrate success.

    Exposure is a measure of your advocacy/brand reach. Influence is a measure of how many influencers helped spread your advocacy messages. Engagement is a measure of how many people interacted with your brand. All this fit into the brand awareness portion of the funnel.

    The conversion call to action is generally where lead generation fits. Hard leads are  “converts” that will work directly for advocacy’s goals. Soft leads are those who exchange information on your network that is unrelated to your advocacy.

    Advocate/customer retention is the most overlooked portion in this funnel. It is easier to maintain existing advocates/customers than finding new ones. Retained customers passes through the funnel much faster and they are better benchmarks to gauge your existing strategy.

    For this activity, I want you to identify where your advocacy’s current social media strategy and where they are in the social media funnel.

    BrandAwarenessLeadGeneration-640x480

    We will then identify social media channels or tools to best suit your strategy in the next activity.

  • Part II: Identifying Social Media Goals for Health Advocacy

    Let me make this clear first. I’m not a social media marketer. I’m a healthcare professional with the passion for healthcare social media.  As a healthcare professional, I want to improve healthcare in the Philippines. This is where social media fit in for me. I use social media to empower healthcare stakeholders. I’m making healthcare, social in the Philippines.

    Some of the concepts I’m using in this talk are straight out from social media marketers guidebook. I know these concepts sound  strange to people in the healthcare industry. Indulge me to borrow some terms from the marketers guidebook, if only to elucidate and achieve my goal for this talk- align social media strategy to advocacy goals and measure social media success. I promise to only give you the most basic and practical concept to guide you on formulating your advocacy’s social media strategy.

    Here are the steps:

    1. Identifying social media goals and aligning this with your advocacy goals.
    2. Deciding your niches or target population.
    3. Determining what metrics to use to measure your social media success.
    4. Deciding on what social media tools to use in achieving your goals.
    5. Determining tools to monitor social media success.

    Social Media Goals

    Social media goals can be categorize into three broad categories.  Brand awareness, lead generation and customer retention are social media goals that can be can be aligned with any advocacy goals. Brand awareness is aimed at generating more exposure for your brand/advocacy. The aim is more people recognizing your advocacy. Lead generation is about finding more advocates and opportunities for your advocacy. Its about getting converts to your advocacy. Customer retention is about keeping your present clients/advocates coming back for more. You can use social media to accomplish all these goals but it is difficult to do all three unless you have a large advocacy campaign budget.  My recommendation is to pick one goal to focus in the meantime. Usually achieving one goal leads to another.  Pick one that you know could demonstrate early success for your group and show this to your advocacy leaders. “Success”will encourage leaders to pour logistics to your social media campaigns.

    So how do you choose which one social media goal fits your advocacy? Let’s do the following activities:

    In the first activity, plot your existing social  media strategy inside any of the three circles of social media goals where you think it belongs. If you don’t have one yet, don’t worry. The next activity will help you build one . Note that any strategy may be placed in between circles if they fall for both or all of the three categories.

    SOCIAL MEDIA GOALS CIRCLE
    SOCIAL MEDIA GOALS CIRCLE

    The endpoint is to select one goal as your primary goal for social media. Also note that it is important to start with a goal that could potentially demonstrate early success.

    The next activity is to do a SWOT analysis of each of your advocacy’s  goals. Remember advocacy goals might be different from your advocacy goals

    SWOT Analysis
    SWOT Analysis

    Look at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to all of these three goals. Prioritise your goals based on potential for short or long term success. Then, examine which of these goals would social media make an impact or demonstrate early success. This is basically how to align social media strategy with your advocacy goals

    In the next activity we will further break down these social media goals/strategy in a funnel to add value to our advocacy.

  • Part I: An Introduction into Aligning Social Media Strategy to your Advocacy Goals

    Social Media Strategy and Healthcare

    There’s no denying social media is here, now. Our society live and breathe social media. In fact, many experts believe social media is the “game changer” in many sectors of our society now and in the foreseeable future. #HealthXPh believe social media is a tool to positively change or improve healthcare in the Philippines.

    Ethical Issues

    Put simply, the use of social media by healthcare professionals is  strictly governed by the same professional code of conduct practiced offline. At #HealthXPh, we believe that our online self is a reflection of our offline self. Thus, #HealthXPh crowdsourced a Healthcare Professional Social Media Manifesto to guide health practitioners on the ethical use of social media. This manifesto should not discourage health professionals from using social media. In fact, health professionals now have a guide walking the path of a tricky social media.  There are numerous examples on the ethical use of social media to improve healthcare. #HealthXPh believe social media democratizes access to healthcare. It provides a venue for healthcare stakeholders to speak and be heard on matters pertaining to health. No other forms of media had this added value of “engagement” between the different stakeholders of health.

    Healthcare Social Media and its “Return on Investment” (ROI)

    One of the more pervasive perception about social media healthcare is that it is just a “waste of time”. Social media is a waste of time if you are using it just to kill time. Our value proposition  for healthcare social media at #HealthXPh is different, positive and complimentary to existing developmental strategies for health. Social media provides an alternative, fast, cheaper, broader reach platform for discussing healthcare issues. Social media demands transparency and accountability to all those who use it. Our long term goal is to democratize discussion in health, by giving the different stakeholders a platform for discussion and effect change by crowdsourcing ideas.  Positive engagement is our key and that is what we set out to ultimately measure our ROI in healthcare social media.

    Lack of ROI for healthcare professionals engaged in social media is the very reason why some called it a “waste of time”. The inability to measure social media’s ROI for health is the culprit. That’s what the goal of my topic today here, in the Second Philippine Healthcare Social Media Summit- Advocacy Track.

    Return on investment (ROI) is a business phrase that describe the benefit to an investor resulting from an investment of some resource (Wikipedia). Allow me to draw the same parallelism in healthcare social media. To clarify, the investment and benefit maybe anything of value to the investor and may not be always monetary. At #HealthXPh, we defined our ROI as the positive engagement we obtained from convening social media healthcare professionals.  This is still a short term goal and is continually evolving until we find our metrics for our ultimate goal- improve healthcare in the Philippines.

    ROI as we defined it, declutters the social media noise and allows us to focus on our social media advocacy goals. #HealthXPh as an advocacy aligned our social media strategy to our advocacy goals. Hence, a method of measuring our social media “success” or ROI, is a measure too of our advocacy’s success. Demonstrating social media success by measuring ROI fine tunes our efforts and streamline logistics to advance our advocacy goals. In other advocacies or companies, demonstrating success by measuring ROI is a way to encourage or gain support from advocacy leaders or executives.  It is thus imperative we measure ROI in social media healthcare. It is not the lack of ROI but the lack of defining our social media ROI for our advocacies. This is the ultimate goal of my talk today.

    To share to you what I’ve learned about Aligning Social Media Strategy to Your Advocacy Goals and developing metrics to measure your healthcare social media’s success!

    So are we ready to dive into social media strategy for healthcare advocacy?

    (This post is part of series on “Aligning Social Media Strategy to your Advocacy Goals“, a presentation by the author Dr. Remo-tito Aguilar, on the Advocacy Track of the Second #HealthXPh Philippine Healthcare Social Media Summit held last April 21, 2016 at the PICC, Manila.)

  • All Set for the 2nd #HealthXPh Philippine Healthcare Social Media Summit (#hcsmph) at the PICC

    We are doubly excited!

    Since #HealthXPh started three years ago, the co-founders have been creating venues for stakeholders to explore the use of disruptive technologies in healthcare. This is our core objective- educate health professionals and patients, let stakeholders explore disruptive technologies such as social media to better healthcare in the Philippines. #HealthXPh took advantage of social media platforms- blogs (healthxph.net), twitter (@healthXPh), Facebook, Google, G Hangouts, Linkedin, Periscope and the like, to achieve this core objective. We’ve spoke and sent influencers to local and international conferences on disruptive technologies. Our engagement strategy included consultancy to health organizations on matters of social media and other disruptive technologies. We even have provided insights on social media etiquettes for policy makers and institutions. Our conversion call to action endpoint is that all health stakeholders will ethically use beneficial disruptive technologies to improve the Philippine healthcare landscape.

    The success of the first #HealthXPh Healthcare Social Media Summit in Cebu last year was proof social media is taking Philippine healthcare in a sweep, whether stakeholders like it or not. As #HealthXPh’s maiden summit, we structured the conference as an introduction to social media health, providing inspiration, stories, education, advocacies and ethical dimensions to a burgeoning disruptive health technology. We’ve learned a lot of insights and opportunities from the first summit, heralding the uniquely workshop styled second summit this 2016.

    In this upcoming second summit in Manila on April 21, 2016, #HealthXPh will be bringing the discussion a step further into the healthcare social media landscape . “From click to brick” (this year’s summit tagline) will teach participants ethical, practical and hands on social media skills to level up their healthcare portfolio. #HealthXPh will hope to teach participants basic social media skill and align it with their healthcare goals. Again, as part of our engagement strategy/conversion/ call to action timeline, we want healthcare stakeholders to be at ease, confident and ethically guided with the use of social media to achieve healthcare goals.

    We partnered with top notch healthcare organizations, providers and stakeholders- DOST-PCHRD, Health Informatics, 101 Health Research, UP Medical Informatics Unit and Philippine Alliance of Patient Organizations, to host this event. We’ve prepared an A-list of speakers, pioneers in the use of social media in Philippine Health. We have pre selected summit participants, key influencers to efficiently deliver summit objectives. We hope to receive feedback and insights into the success of this summit so we can improve on our goals in the upcoming discussion platforms.

    The summit program can be accessed by downloading mobile android app, here. Here’s a preview of the summit program.

    I am inviting all healthcare stake holders- health professionals, patients, advocates, policy makers, ethicist and health disruptive tech influencers to attend this summit. We are still accepting walk ins but you will be transferred to another track if your tack of choice is already filled. So hurry!

    Summit registration is free, but you have to signup and answer questions in this link. Lastly show up early for the summit. If you received confirmation letters to attend and but will not be around before summit tracks begin, we will give the slot to the waiting list for that track.

    We will be live streaming the summit on our different social media platforms- blog, twitter, facebook, periscope and web ex. Follow summit proceedings on twitter by using hashtag #hcsmph and #healthxph with corresponding track subhashtags.  Webex, Google Youtube live,  live streaming will be provided on HealthXPh.net. The summit will be live too on Periscope.

    Disclosure: #HealthXPh is a healthcare startup co -founded three years ago that provides social media platform for discussion and exploration on the use of disruptive technologies to improve Philippine healthcare. The author co-founded #HealthXPh.

  • Illness Narrative and the psychology behind patient stories online

    (This post was written by Dr. Steph Miaco a clinical psychiatrist from UP-PGH practicing in Dumaguete. I’m crossposting it here, from healthxph.net with her permission)

    What is an illness narrative?

    According to a common reference (Blackwell), It is mostly thought of as ill person’s narrative about their illnesses and the effect on their lives. Illness narratives can also include the narratives of relatives about the effects the illnesses have had on their relationships with the sick people and their own lives. They often occur as oral narratives in everyday conversations with family, friends and colleagues. They may also appear as written or published biographical or autobiographical accounts of illnesses and pathographies.

    They can be seen as written and published accounts of illness, in published biographical and autobiographical formats. These forms help articulate experiences and events that change one’s life and its prerequisites as a result of the illness. With the advent of social media and increased print capacities, it is becoming ever more easier to have one’s story for consumption in to a wider audience.

    The medical sociologist, Arthur Frank suggests that ill persons of modern times are more interested in wanting their own sufferings to be recognized as an individual experience. However, this narrative places the individual’s suffering to be placed in an everyday context, quite unlike the medical narratives which reflect the needs of the medical professions.

    Illness narratives can exist in many forms, including that of print media, Television, and cinema, however, for the purposes of this #healthxPh discussion, we will limit our discussion to sharing of narratives through social media, an equally daunting avenue.

    Illness stories have attracted attention in health care research, as it is an avenue where health care workers and caregivers of patients can “look through the world through the patient’s eyes”. It is an extended view for understanding what the patient’s experiences and struggles are, as well as their finding solutions for their common problems.

    Research on the illness narrative has only started in the 1990’s, but is slowly progressing. It’s potential as a major source of information as to how patients process their illness journey and respond correspondingly to their illness, is only starting to be tapped. To illustrate, I would like to bring to light one study on the narrative typologies of patients with neuroendocrine tumors done in Italy (Miconi, et al, 2015). The study used narrative information from 21 letters of patients with Neuroendocrine tumors , whose specific symptoms varied related to disease pathophysiologies and individual characters. On a daily basis, they would be coping with the symptoms of fatigue, flushing, diarrhea, food intolerance restlessness, dyspnea, fluctuations in mood and pain.

    Currently, the treatment options are surgery and palliativecare however, despite the fact there there is no cure, the majority of these patients live for many years with more or less problems with the symptoms as well as the side-effects of the medications. This is a rare disease which proved to be a challenge for the patients and the hospital staff.

    For the study, they drew upon a book project of 21 letters of patients in different stages of NETs, which aimed to share information about the experiences of the patients and their relatives and how it was to live with this rare illness. The book was grounded on the premise of narrative medicine, and aimed to build empathy (and thus increase understanding) between the physician and the patient, as well as form communities to combat loneliness and isolation.

    Frank’s typology was used in the analysis of these narratives, to make sense of the patient’s understanding and making sense of the events in their lives. He presented three different forms that these illness narratives can take, and these are the following:

    1. The restitution narratives show that someone is sick and gets treated, and then gets restored. In these stories, the patient is almost a passive character, who relies on the doctors to get well.
    2. The chaos narratives are more focused on the characteristic that life never gets better and that the “sufferers” are stuck in a neverending complex situation which blocks movement into a more meaningful response to the illness. The patients tend to feel out of control, and because they are plagued by chaotic perceptions, these stories have no structure.
    3. The third type, quest narratives,which come in three types (memoirs, manifestos and automythology), are the more positive types. They convey that the patient with the illness is moving forward. These are narratives where there is some active acceptance of their illness and prognosis, and that they have undergone a personal change, which offered up insight into alternative ways to deal with the illness.

    In the study, the patients described various ways of fighting with difficult cancer. of the patients studied, there were two who were close to giving up, and they believed that their illness was a sacrifice which filled them with bitterness because of a believed “stolen future”. They believed that it was hard for them to accept the inconveniences of their illness. One female in the study talked about how her hardest burden was keeping it all inside and having anyone to share her suffering to.

    These stories were greatly varied, and their experiences with the illness could not be measured with the usual QOL instruments. However, these narrative examples mirror data from cancer patient’s storytelling in general; that they experience a danger for their future life, that they were fighting a difficult war, and that it was an opportunity for personal growth, which needed to be shared by others.

    The study merely added examples and further knowledge to Frank’s narrative typology of how patients handled their cancer experience. This holds interest for us clinicians because it gives us an understanding of how a patient’s experience with their illness might be a critical factor in their lives as long-term patients. Their coping mechanisms are varied, and they will most likely find way to cope with illness.

    The study concluded with how they highlighted stories focusing on the patient’s imbalance and chaos during the illness experience because they illuminated the patient’s concrete suffering, which provided the clinician about their emotional, physical and spiritual state. Listening carefully to a patient’s story might be a starting point for them to find their own resources to attain balance. Furthermore, learning from quest stories, it seems possible to move forward to acceptance and to develop a model for a way of living with cancer. Nevertheless, they claimed that they were skeptical about an uncritical use of quest narratives as a model for clinical practice because they might contribute to individualistic and heroic prescriptions for life that other patients might find impossible to achieve. They recommended that they needed to do additional research on how to use the narratives to support the patient.

    —

    The study was limited to the patient’s letters, and might have not given as much depth (or amount of data) as an interview study. The letters however, give us a better view of the patient’s character and story in that setting, but do not necessarily apply to the general population, as differences in culture and personalities abound.

    However, as a way of seeing possible ways to approach the problems clinically, and correspondingly, to give patients a deeper insight about their struggles, the illness narrative’s importance is paramount. Giving a “face” to a person’s suffering helps us think of new approaches, and thus, possibly more effective methods of care. However, from our experience with patients, a number of questions have come to light.

    • T1 How and why do patients write their illness narratives
    • T2 How do healthcare professionals react to illness narratives in media?
    • T3 Do illness narratives affect are and policies? How can we advise patients about this?

    Looking forward to yet another productive interaction on tonight’s #HealthxPh chat! Join us tonight Saturday, April 1 2016,  at 9PM Manila time for another very interesting chat