Social Marketing and Healthcare Communications
Lessons from Groundswell (Li and Bernoff, Harvard University Press, 2008)
If you are looking to jump-start your knowledge about the new connectivity, how it is reshaping communications among your customers, competitors, champions and adversaries and, more important, how it is demanding that marketers rethink healthcare communications, this is the book for you.
Put simply, open dialogue, enabled by the Internet, is energizing a free flow of information. Happy customers, disgruntled customers, people worried about their health, people reaching out for support, people offering a helping hand–they are all on the Internet, chatting, podcasting, blogging, responding to polls, self-publishing and otherwise making themselves heard, in text, audio or video messages. Against this backdrop of open, uncensored dialogue, how do we as marketers manage our messages? How do we learn from this unfettered chatter? How do we harness the energy of enthusiastic champions? How do we quell dissenters? And all of this applies not only to the external world of customers, business partners, competitors, shareholders and regulators, but also the microcosm within your organization.
Li and Bernoff make learning easy for the reader with their engaging style and case studies from different industry sectors—including oncology and obesity—back by facts and figures. Soon you’ll leave the world of inactives and spectators and find yourself among the joiners, collectors, critics and creators. Read it and let me know if you agree.
Lena, have you seen womma.org (Word Of Mouth Markerting Association)? They have an interesting section on pharma/healthcare, let alone all the other general articles that apply, too.
Thanks for the tip on the book.