Health Care Marketing
How then do healthcare marketers determine an e-marketing strategy?

According to Daniel Fell in healthleaders.com the key is the organization's specific goals. He lists three defining criteria:

Brand Building - mix of online branding strategies and consumer information services.
Driving Traffic to Physicians - offer referral services and promote the services/practices/clinis of individual physicians
Product-Specific Marketing - - create an interactive channel to draw patients into the service or serve existing patients with health management tools

Interetsing piece ... his article and discussion on six channel strategies is worth reading.

Looking Back: Bayer and Company ... The Way of Vioxx?

A recent book authored by Diarmuid Jeffreys' "Aspirin: The Story of a Wonder Drug" takes a look at what may be a too-sensitive consumer marketplace that could have even aspirin in question. Jeffreys' writes:

" ...imagine that this wonder drug had been introduced today. Would it have been approved? No doubt early testing would have shown the anti-coagulant properties. But instead of seeing this as a benefit (aspirin and related compounds are used to treat heart attacks today) it would likely have been seen as a fatal flaw preventing widespread use – in today’s risk averse climate, you can’t have people getting anticoagulants over the counter, and the idea that a drug with such a side effect might be used very widely would send shivers down the spine of the regulators. Even worse, imagine the discovery a few years after approval that aspirin does increase risks of bleeding. It would have gone the way of Vioxx, a much more specific cox inhibitor than its ancestor...."

As remarked by Diarmuid Jeffreys in his book Aspirin: The Story of a Wonder Drug.

Marketing and PR Blog Examples

By B.L. Ochman

• Loosetooth uses this blog to drive traffic to a Cafepress store, which handles order fulfillment.

• CEO Blogs List

  Actually,
  that's a misnomer. This is a list of weblogs authored by people who are
  in a leadership position in various organizations (corporations,
  non-profit, etc.)

  Hundreds of CEOs are blogging, and the vast majority of their blogs are just plain dull ... as in "who cares?"

• CEO Bloggers Club:

  An international blog dedicated to helping CEOs be better bloggers.

  Membership rules: you have to agree to update your blog at least three times a week.
  

The Online Journalism Review

A web-based journal produced by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. The Online Journalism Review covers the full range of journalistic issues in all media, but with a particular emphasis on the Internet.

Blogging, Citizen Journalism and the Website as Public Square

Jay Rosen a journalism professor NYU, press critic and writer follows the media industry through his blog PRESSthink. Mr. Rosen has a post covering a consultant's report to the Greensboro News & Record editor. The report details how best to take the and "... re-create the print product online... understanding the culture of the Internet, and of blogging in particular ..."

Blogging: Product Spin and Mindware Marketing

Journalist Ian Palmer wrote an article in IT Business Canada about businesses using blogs as an indicator of newfound respectability. IBM, HP, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems are identified as sponsoring blogs, probably a good thing, but phony? Robin Hopper, CEO of iUpload, is quoted as saying his company's high Google ranking came not from its website, but its blog.

iUpload and Mr. Hopper aside, no one looks to business for sincerity. In many ways, ethics has been to difficult to get, so sincerity is way far off. But, business can be critiqued and reviewed for its creativity and you can see that in a new wave of biz blogs.

Sun Microsystems has an employee-driven blog Sun Bloggers where staff chat, vent and pound their chests. They do talk product, but in a developer sort of way.

IBM went into the freeware blog business with developerWorks a portion of IBM.com that allows visiting user/developers to created personal blogs. IBM has this in its "community section" within IBM which features forums, blogs and user groups. Now that spells marketing with "educational" before it and that might not be so bad. Mr. Palmer does not mention Ford, but the automaker had a splendid idea re-introducing its 1960's powerhouse seller, the Mustang, with a concept-to-showroom blog with pictures and commentary from the engineers.

It will be interesting to see how far companies will push a subtle blog-as-product or product showcase strategy. It will probably be for a while. The burgeoning blog sphere reportedly contains consumer/readers journaling and viewing more than 6 million sites.***

** PubSub Concepts Inc. in New York, has said that it’s now tracking over 6.5 million blogs..."