The Dirtiest Job in Healthcare Marketing

The dirtiest job in marketing is an Internet Comment Monitor – cleaning up the awful and inappropriate posts, tweets and comments about your doctors and organization. The problem is that few companies, and almost no healthcare providers, are doing a good job of monitoring or cleanup, which means they should find someone to do the dirty work on their behalf.

This is the new “earned media” and is a critical piece to managing reputations. Quit worrying so much about traditional media relations — the real damage and opportunities are occurring online everyday.

Here is an article via BusinessWeek about companies that monitor the Internet for clients at up to  $50,000 a month.

It doesn’t have to be that expensive.

We do it here for large clients for less than $5,000 per month and recommend programs like RepuChek for do-it-yourselfers who only pay $29 a month.

Websites, message boards, twitter feeds, Facebook pages and more can be used to spread false and damaging information and innuendo. The article via BusinessWeek says:

 A lethal combination of anonymity, opinion, and the safety of typing from a remote location all but guarantees that comment forums get out of hand, falling prey to the Hobbesian tirades of the Web’s most nasty, brutish, and vocal denizens—hence, the increasing need for moderators such as Dueck to intervene and sanitize sites’ comment boards.

You must monitor what is being said about your doctors and organization. If you can’t do it, then you must pay to have it done for you. Regular readers know that I don’t try to sell our services on this blog, but bluntly,  some of you need help listening and responding. This important but dirty job is just not getting done. We do Community Management everyday for both physician practices and large healthcare organizations, so please contact us today if you need help.