Cast & Curious

Blog

  • Part IV: Assigning SMART metrics to social media channels

    Ideally, there should be a standard of metrics to measure each of this social media channels. However, such industry benchmarks have yet to be standardized across a fast changing platform that is social media.  It all boils dow to what or how you (and your advocacy) define key metrics and should be at least “aligned” with your advocacy’s goals. Let me introduce, SMART Metrics.

    • S-SPECIFIC
      At the very least, such metrics should be specific and sensitive enough to detect changes across and within the different social media channels.
    • M-MANAGEABLE
      KISS or the keep it simple and manageable, is all the more important to logistically challenge advocacy group and should be a key factor in choosing which metric demonstrate early success.
    • A-ACTIONABLE
      Of course measuring impact on the different channels is useless if you can’t act on it. A metric should trigger corresponding action to achieve your advocacy/ social media goals. Can you improve on what this metric have measured?
    • R-RELEVANT
      I cannot overemphasize the fact any metric should be relevant to your overall advocacy/social media goals. Does it add value to your advocacy? Will your advocacy group be interested in it?
    • T-TIME BOUND
      I keep on repeating that you choose metrics that demonstrate early success. Giving your metrics “deadlines”. Otherwise, it will just be meaningless flutter of data.

    Here are other goal setting strategies on social media according to buffersocial.com. Note it also characterize key metrics.

    This figure illustrates the social media channels and the key metrics along the social media funnel. Choose SMART Metrics:)
    nk06105categoriesofmeasurement

    I’m not going delve deeper into formulas and calculations for each of these metrics. Suffice to say, there are existing  metrics online to measure social media success. Doing a SWOT analysis of each of your goals and aligning these with whats important for your advocacy help you choose which metrics to use. Once you’ve identified your metrics, finding your formula should be easier than you think.

    For our next activity, identify metrics from the figure above and list it down beside the different segments of the social media funnel. Again, choose one that potentially demonstrate immediate success.

    After this activity, you are ready to monitor performance for each of these segments in the social media funnel that adds value to your social media strategy and advocacy goals!

  • 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.