The world is a noisy place, especially for marketers. Hundreds of traditional media outlets and an endless supply of Web sites answer the questions (right or wrong) of potential patients and customers, making it difficult to achieve a lasting impression. But today many healthcare organizations are joining online conversations about their institutions or areas of specialization through social and new media executions.

Social media is the part of the online world where people interact with each other, often changing roles from reader to author, looking for benefits of social interaction. New media is similar, but is simply a catch-all phrase for means of communication in the digital world. While all social media are considered new media, not all new media executions are considered social media. Some executions in this space are more social than others—for instance Twitter, where conversation flows freely and quickly, is clearly a social media execution. Some new media executions are less social, like podcasts, which don’t garner the same immediate and clear conversation. For the purposes of this article, we’ll be talking about the full gamut of new media executions, from the hyper social to the less social. For simplicity’s sake, the word social media will be used throughout.

Regardless of the execution, what’s most important is that we pay special attention to the goal of social media—that participants are looking for a benefit. In that sense, social media has similar goals to traditional public relations programs. Institutions use both of them to establish and leverage mutually beneficial relationships that could end in increased volume, new organizational relationships and improved image.

Reaping the benefits of social media takes time, and, for institutions that have traditionally taken a controlled communication approach to marketing, it takes courage as well. Yet a number of healthcare organizations are finding success in this space, whether in terms of gaining awareness in its little-known fields of expertise, building patient relationships or making news available directly to the stakeholders in an engaging way.

Individuals at healthcare institutions simply need to look to their peers across the country to find examples of success in this area. Some of the trailblazers include the Mayo Clinic, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Sutter Medical Center Castro Valley and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

Institutions ready to get started in social media should consider a four-step approach: (1) sell management, (2) listen and plan, (3) participate and (4) measure and listen some more.

Sell Management

It’s hard to lighten your grip on your brand identity and venture into a space where conversations flow freely—good, bad or indifferent to your preferred messaging. But realize that such conversations are going to happen with or without you, so don’t wait on the sidelines. Following a little initial discomfort as you explain the benefits of social media to management, you can reap benefits from engagement if you approach social media strategically and carefully.

For marketers, gaining senior management support for a first-time social media program can be a tough sell. But it can be done. Individuals who have never explored social media as a professional tool often fall into two extremes—those who believe it has insignificant or no value (arguments often include "it's for the kids" and "I can hit more people by buying an ad") and those who think it will serve as a panacea, offering salvation to otherwise suffering marketing programs. Both extremes can benefit from a bit of pragmatism and a clear delineation of the pros and cons of a social media program.

Some of the pros include the ability to build meaningful relationships with key organizational stakeholders with a social media presence (the number of stakeholders falling into this category is only going to increase over time); to bypass traditional media gatekeepers to get your message directly to your audience; and to gather data about your products and services from your audience on a continual basis.

Some of the cons of a social media program include the need for thoughtful participation, which can be time-consuming for your marketing team. You’re not going to see incredible results overnight, or even in a couple months. Further (and this is the one that really bothers many in management), you can't control the conversations.

Guidelines for engagement in the social media space are essential for projecting a clear and consistent image. Written guidelines allow you to outline the who, what, when, where, why and how of your social media program and get it approved. Some examples of such guidelines include who has access to social media accounts, what topics representatives are permitted to discuss, what to do when negative comments are received, how often to participate, etc. Setting these guidelines early prevents any confusion down the line if questions arise about the organization’s position on social media engagement or if a regular contributor in the social media space is sick or leaves the organization suddenly.

After setting engagement guidelines, suggest less intimidating executions that simply require the repurposing of existing marketing materials. Organizations can repurpose material in a social way by placing existing video on YouTube, developing podcasts based on existing research or creating an RSS feed for easy distribution of company news. These choices are less social than others, but they also have less risk because they can be shared without necessarily sparking online conversation.

Listen to Your Audience and Plan

Regardless of your situation, start by assessing who your audience is and what social networks they use. This can be done a couple of ways. Survey your constituents or look around social networks to see where your primary prospects are congregating online.

At a minimum, surveys should ask where constituents spend their time online and what online social networking sites they participate in. But surveys also present the opportunity to ask what type of healthcare information they typically look for and what they’d like to see from their local healthcare institutions. Online surveying tools like Surveymonkey.com can make this process relatively painless.

If a survey is too cumbersome a means for gathering this information, just explore the social networks to see what people are saying about you and your areas of expertise and ask these questions:

• What specifically is your audience saying about you on social networks?
• To what networks do your brand evangelists belong? What makes them post about you?
• What are your detractors saying? When? Why?

Some of the social networks to pay particular attention to include Facebook, Twitter and your local blogging community. To find local blogs that may be talking about you, use search tools like Technorati or Google Blog Search. Both make it easy to find when your company is mentioned on various blogs.

From there, look at the conversations and see how they line up or fail to line up with your organization’s marketing objectives. Clear conversation trends often emerge—some in favor of your brand goals and some that are contrary. Once trends are determined, it’s time to set goals.

Are you trying to strengthen and promote positive conversations about your areas of expertise and organizations? Is it more important to correct misinformation and improve the number of negative conversations about your organization? Are you prepared to make the time commitment it would take to manage both ends of the spectrum? Or is your goal simply to build awareness about a charity walk or other event, regardless of larger background conversations?

In short, listen to what your consumers are saying and where they’re saying it. Then develop a plan that aligns your brand’s profile and objectives with existing networks.

Participate

A social media presence is like anything else you wish to grow. To see it thrive, you must tend to it with plenty of time and thoughtful content. And that brings up another essential point related to building your social media program: Participate, but not necessarily everywhere.

Just because your institution’s target audience shows up on 30 social networking sites and likes to get information in 25 ways doesn’t mean you must have a presence on all 30 sites and provide information in all ways at once. It’s easier and less labor intensive to build up slowly.

Understanding and accepting the time and labor component of executing a social media program is critical. After all, simply having a page on a social networking site—no matter how well it is done—will not build valuable relationships all by itself. You must engage the community you're joining—ask them questions, help answer their questions and join conversations about what's important to them.

Social media can become a time vacuum, if you’re not careful. A robust presence on social networking sites like Twitter can easily take an hour more each day, depending on how disciplined you are in your approach to when and how to engage your network. It’s easy to spend hours pondering whether or not to respond to a negative blog post about your organization if clear standards for response are not in place.

It's here when you find out if your organizational guidelines for engagement are doing their job. If they’re too stringent, you probably aren’t building strong relationships. For example, if guidelines don’t permit those engaging in the social media space to respond to questions, and social media tools are simply used to push information out, your organization may not reap the full benefits of the space.

On the other hand, if they're too lax, you may find yourself responding to everything without a defined purpose. For example, many organizations feel the need to respond every single time their organization is mentioned by an individual in the space because clear guidelines haven't been set on what is a valuable conversation in the space and what is not. Defining what positive interaction means is important.

As you engage, remember that fundamental tenet of social media: building mutually beneficial relationships. Depending on budget and time, it may be feasible for an organization to only have a presence on one or two social networks, and that’s fine so long as the program is designed correctly.

Measure and Keep Listening

The fourth step in developing a social media program is where many marketers become particularly flummoxed. Getting buy-in and setting up a social media program can be difficult enough, but, once it’s in place, it’s time to market it back to management and establish the value the labor, financial investment and organizational flexibility has brought to your marketing efforts.

Social media tools have fairly sophisticated quantitative analytics that allow you to track where your visitors are coming from, what they’re looking at and how long they stay—depending on the tool.

It's easy for many marketers to simply “count friends” to prove the value of a social media program. However, remember that social media is about relationships. The organization that has 500 friends will likely be less successful than the organization with 200 friends that took the time to turn community influencers into brand evangelists.

Quantitative metrics will vary across social and new media programs and should be designed on a case-by-case basis around organizational goals. For instance, if a goal of your social media program is to increase registrations for a charity 5K run, tracking the number of individuals who visited the registration site after clicking on a social media site link is a direct means of establishing the social media program's value. Also, counting the number of mentions the 5K received across social networks and correlating with specific organizational activities in the social media space can offer insight into the frequency of communication that offers the most success.

When thinking about quantitative measurement techniques, what’s important to remember is a podcast is not used like a Twitter account; nor is a Twitter account used like a Facebook page, and so on. Each vehicle has some unique benefits that the others lack. A quantitative measurement program should showcase commonality among networks without neglecting each forum’s individual strengths when it comes to communicating your institution’s messaging. And one benefit of many social networking applications is they all have pretty substantial analytics programs that allow you to track who is seeing your message and where they’re coming from.

Qualitative measurement techniques are how your organization can gain detailed insights into its operations, image and customer service. The social media space can serve as an unfiltered focus group, where unsolicited advice and opinions can become a researcher’s gold mine. Look for conversational themes and decide which topics and types of conversation are most beneficial to your marketing efforts. This will allow you to rank the conversation content and see how optimal content ebbs and flows over time. It also lets you facilitate more conversations that fall into your preferred categories. Opportunities to serve patients directly can arise, and successes with individuals can become a marker of success.

As you measure, keep listening to your audience. Social media are fluid. What’s popular today may not be popular a year from now, so it’s important to understand where your audience is going so you can evolve with them. In 2006, few would have predicted that something as simple as answering the question “What are you doing?” would take the social media world by storm. But today Twitter is the focus of many a marketing story.

In the noisy world, where information overload has the average person covering their eyes and ears, the one with the largest megaphone no longer wins. Successful marketing campaigns can be conducted through a thoughtful series of whispers to individuals searching for what you have to offer.