Cast & Curious

Tag: advocacy

  • 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.)