Health content is essential to the success of a hospital’s Web site. If a patient or user is searching for information on a particular diagnosis or treatment but are unable to find relevant information on your Web site, they will not only visit another site, but their experience may also leave a lasting negative impression of your organization. As

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Greystone is pleased to announce the results of our recent survey on hospital/ health system Web budgets. We sent the survey invitation to more than 100 healthcare marketers, and received responses from 65. (please note:  Greystone’s research panel is made up of hospitals or health care systems with at least one FTE dedicated to the Web, and member

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It seems, especially in health care, that we tend to get wrapped up in our day-to-day duties and the brainstorming and creativity of promoting our organizations online gets lost along the way. That’s why I feel it’s important to keep our eyes open in our everyday life and experiences, and draw ideas from places other than competitors and peers heal

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Three….Word….Taglines Lately, here at Greystone we’ve been talking about updating our printed marketing materials. As I was tossing around ideas for a possible folder cover, I found myself using the dreaded “three word tagline.” My decision came about simply enough. I was thinking of a simple, straightforward design with the possibility of inclu

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Every day people say great things about your hospital or healthcare system. "They saved my brother's life", "They are some of the nicest people around", "We've had our babies there and it was a great experience". They say it in the grocery store, in church, during poker night, and at the salon. But, rest assured, a few people will say things you

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We have recently received inquiries  from several hospital or health systems Webmasters who want to know our opinion about Web sites like Alexa, Compete.com, and Quantcast.com. These  “third party web data providers” use proprietary algorithms to estimate the number of visitors on any Web site, and have become a major resource for many Web marketer

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One of my responsibilities here at Greystone is to assess hospital and healthcare system Web sites. When we complete an assessment, we use a grade system to determine the quality of a Web site. Thirty-one categories are evaluated using a consistent and quantitative scoring system, and we assign grades to each category ranging from an A to a D-.  Yo

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Do your physicians actively participate on your healthcare organization’s Web site? We all know a Web site can be a powerful tool for our organizations. Unfortunately, getting that message across to certain areas of the healthcare organization can be a difficult task.  Even for those who are lucky enough to be working in a Web savvy environment, fi

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Over the last week and a half during the Vancouver Olympics, several of my colleagues here at Greystone and I have been held hostage during our lunch hour watching the unique and exciting sport of curling. If you’ve never watched curling, the sport is very similar to shuffleboard on ice, but with a few interesting wrinkles. A thrower from each team

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At the height of last year’s financial struggles, Greystone.Net sent out a survey to its current and former customers about their budget outlook for the coming year. We certainly struck a chord with our hospital and health system audience, who at the time were wondering if the sky truly was falling. We received a tremendous response, with more than

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Our recent study on social media has generated a lot of buzz from healthcare bloggers. The high level of response is really encouraging, and Greystone.Net will continue to do this type of research in the future. There seems to be a tremendous demand from healthcare marketers for information on current industry topics. The goal of our study was n

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According to our just released research, 9 in 10 hospitals or health systems are currently involved to some degree with Social Media. Other key results from the study: • Only one in three hospitals/health systems has a formal Social Media marketing plan. • Hiring and budgeting for Social Media is rare, but starting to happen more and more. • T

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Recently, Greystone.Net was helping a client hospital with a business plan for its Web site. As part of the arrangement, we designed, launched and managed a web satisfaction study for them. This is something that we are doing more and more these days, as organizations seek to add customer input into their redesign efforts. My background is in resea

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I don’t know if that’s really news, but sometimes you need the data to back up what you know to be true. In this case, a presentation today at Ad:Tech will report the results of a joint study by Performics, the marketing arm of Publicis Groupe's VivaKi Nerve Center, and ROI Research, an analytics and technology firm. Just one glimpse of the resu

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With all due apologies to McGeorge Bundy, considered by many to be one of the architects of the Vietnam War, I’m struck by the fourth of his lessons learned from the book “Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam”: Conviction without rigor is a strategy for disaster. Bundy’s point is that having strong beliefs alone

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"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.” Dickens penned those immortal words a century and a half ago, comparing the cities of London and Paris. These days, things are seldom that cut and dry - especially when it comes to Web Analytics. It is very difficult to compare two Web si

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When I was trying to convince doctors at my last place of employment that allowing secure messaging from existing patients was a good idea, I heard more than once that it would be the “end of modern medicine as we know it.” One of our physician champions found a reference that I’ve never been able to relocate that quoted doctors saying the same thi

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With 185 hospitals using one form of social media or another, I’d say healthcare has clearly gotten the message. But I worry a bit about some of what I’m seeing out there. Let’s just say there’s evidence aplenty that while many have dipped their toes in the waters of social media, few have a real plan in place. So here are five signs that being

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You’ve probably heard the old adage that as soon as you make your Web site “idiot proof” they’ll go and make a better idiot. No offense intended to any user of any Web site, but people do the most amazing things. I’m in the midst of user testing for a client, and again I’m seeing people do things that I never would have expected. Here are some o

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I was part of a presentation recently where one of the speakers made this statement: “When you go to a Web site, what do you do? You search, right?  That’s how everybody finds what they are looking for.” As I was driving to Atlanta, I was thinking about that a lot (two digressions: first, the fact that I spend my time on a long drive thinking ab

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