Part 1 Jim Lefevere: Social Media and Health Care: Why You Need To Create a Crisis?

I am thrilled that Jim Lefevere is willing to write a guest post. He is an award-winning marketing and technology leader for the healthcare, medical device, and consumer goods industries. His breadth of expertise spans traditional marketing and pioneering initiatives that have increased profits, engaged customers, and promoted cohesive brand awareness for start-ups to Fortune 100 companies. You can read his blog on digital strategy, interactive marketing, and connected healthcare at: http://www.jlefevere.com.

Social Media and Health Care: Why You Need To Create a Crisis?

I’ve been a keen observer of health care markets and digital for nearly a decade. Arguably, this has been a decade where technology has made the most advances in terms of adoption to the point of near ubiquity.¬† It is not uncommon to see a healthcare provider with a laptop to input data and sharing Web sites, resources and information with a patient while in the office.¬† I have seen this slow, steady build-up of digital as a tool to facilitate healthcare.

The shift from traditional to digital has been very gradual and the customer is becoming harder to reach.  Because of this, I think there is still far too little focus on digital marketing and social media and pharmaceutical, diagnostics, device companies, healthcare providers and hospital systems MUST move to digital marketing formats and treat this shift as a fight for relevance.

Let’s review the reasons why this hasn’t occurred yet. First, change is hard. Even if you know it’s the right thing to do, change is still hard. There are entire consulting practices focused on change management alone.

Change management is a structured approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations from a current state to a desired future state. It is an organizational process aimed at empowering employees to accept and embrace changes in their current business environment.^[1]. In project management, change management refers to a project management process where changes to a project are formally introduced and approved.

In order to understand why change is so hard in organizations you have to understand that everyone is essentially resistant to change in some way and are motivated to change for only two reasons:

1. Consequence.

If I do this, something good/bad will happen.

2. To Identify

With a group and find commonality in some way; or to not be different.

Part 2 of this post will discuss the 9 ways to create a crisis.