Twitter for the entrepreneurial physician business owner

Okay - I know it's alarming to have to contend having me in your face with Facebook and LinkedIn, so if you are already overwhelmed by that much social networking, it's time to shut your ears or step away from this page right now.

I'm about to tell you about Twitter! So hang in, if you are intrigued by this contemporary marketing and social networking stuff. Otherwise, goodbye - have a nice weekend.

From Wikipedia:

Twitter is a free social networking and "micro-blogging" service, that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them.

At first, I didn't get it. "My dog ate my kid's homework" -- arghhh! "Off to the movies now" -- oh boy. Who cares?

Until I realized that these were phrases snatched from the midst of a dialog between a twitterer and his or her followers.

And that Twitter was where I could get the latest updates on the election or our Southern California fires, or links to top-notch articles of interest to physicians, or information about new technology I was considering using.

As I started to build my small "tribe" of followers, I could ask questions, search for resources ("Anyone know anything about the new google phone? How happy are you with it?") and just reveal who I am and have some fun. I won't say I am addicted and I try to post mostly relevant stuff (like every new blog post!), but my Twitter page is open all day and I refresh it and browse it many times a day. I like feeling connected and discovering all kinds of fascinating information "out there".

As long as I can do it succinctly in 140 characters (including spaces) or less.

I'm not going to do the heavy lifting of explaining Twitter here. Instead, I'm going to let other experts do it for you, via some great resources. Not only will they tell you what Twitter is, but also why you should care about it as a tool to communicate about your business to those who choose to follow you!

This is the ultimate in permission-based marketing.

Here are the best that I have come across:

How to Use Twitter for Marketing & PR

How I Use Twitter to Promote My Blog

How Companies Use Twitter to Bolster Their Brands

Twitter: Use it Productively

Any other good ones to share?

And if you want to send me a tweet, I'm @pippak on Twitter!

(Reminder - here's a "how-to" post devoted to LinkedIn)

What physician business owners can learn from Obama's campaign

Irrespective of your political persuasion or vote, I believe there are inspired business lessons to be gleaned from the highly disciplined and almost flawlessly executed campaign Obama and his team ran for almost two years.

For a couple of years, I have been fascinated by and impressed with 21st century marketing. It is working well for my business and I've had numerous clients "get it" and start to build steady service businesses. How? - by positioning themselves as helpful thoughtful and trusted "Expert Advisors".

This Fast Company article "How Obama Won It With the Web" reveals the thoughtfulness and skill with which the team created an "Obama tribe" (referencing Seth Godin's fascinating new book "Tribes").

According to Rasiej, the Obama campaign's enthusiasm for the Web belied its financial cost. While the candidate's staffers certainly poured plenty of sweat equity into creating Obama's distinctive site and social network, MyBarackObama.com, many of their efforts were low-overhead strategies that utilized free resources. Using open platforms like Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, they honed how they communicated with young voters, and redoubled their efforts. With online campaigning, Raseij says, "you can see where you get traction, and then reinvest, based on data."

That's right: Obama has his own proprietary social network. Hundreds of thousands of supporters have volunteered their information to the campaign by joining the network on MyBarackObama.com, finding local events, signing up to volunteer, and helping coordinate other efforts to get out the vote. While candidates had used websites in the past, it was mostly as one-way fundraising tools. With a two-way network, Obama not only brought in more money, but developed a more robust and informed base. This will be especially true going forward: According to Rasiej, social capital will be increasingly more valuable than fundraising dollars. (emphasis mine)

It seems that this article over at msn.com agrees with me! Or maybe I agree with it.

Businessmen and politicians will reverently study the campaign for years to come as a model of innovative branding and an example for digital sales strategies.

In The 'Obama Way': Seven steps to success, the steps the author describes are:

1. Be decisive 
2. Have a tight circle (your personal "board of advisors")
3. Stick with the plan
4. Sweat the details
5. Understand your brand
6. Go digital (reinforces what Fast Company wrote)
7. Use caution

I couldn't agree more! And it is great to see this "getting slightly famous" stuff in action when it really works.

How does this apply to your business?

BTW - if you want to follow blog posts by having each new post emailed to you (instead of having to use a feedreader), here is the new Feedblitz blog post sign up web page.

Reminder of how to do it:

Simply copy the blog or website URL or RSS URL (the URL that shows up in the address window of your browser for the blog's Home Page) into the box provided on FeedBlitz, (it looks something like the box below - don't use this one as it won't work) and voila! You are subscribed.

	Start Now! Type the web address to subscribe to:

Update on Thursday, November 6, 2008 at 08:20PM by Philippa Kennealy

Here's another nice analysis of the Ten Marketing Lessons From The Barack Obama Presidential Campaign from a favorite blogger David Meerman Scott.

Could "Empathy" be your medical practice's Unique Selling Point

"At Dr. XYZ's, we ACTUALLY care"!

"Need a doctor that really cares? Come to ABC Practice and find a doctor who is truly concerned about you!"

Far-fetched practice taglines?

Not if a recent study in the Archives of Internal Medicine is accurate.

In a nutshell:

"Researchers assessed transcripts of 20 audio recordings of consultations between men with lung cancer and surgeons or oncologists at a Veterans Affairs hospital. Physicians had 384 opportunities to show empathy to patient comments such as 'This is overwhelming' and 'I'm fighting it.' They missed all but 39 (10%) of the 384 chances."  (from HealthLeaders Media and Chicagotribune.com).

So what exactly is Empathy? And why does empathy matter?

From Wikipedia, empathy is "the capacity to recognize or understand another's state of mind or emotion. It is often characterized as the ability to 'put oneself into another's shoes', or to in some way experience the outlook or emotions of another being within oneself."

Empathy is a key skill in the Emotional Intelligence (EI) toolbox (here is a simple definition of Emotional Intelligence in case you aren't sure what it really is).

Empathy fits in as follows (from a very simplified EI matrix model that I use for teaching):

Effective and productive relationships demand sensitivity about and insight into the feelings and experience of others.

To verify that this is true, I suggest you pay attention to how good it feels when someone tries to understand you!

What this means for the doctor-patient relationship is that you, the physician, will be in far greater demand as that special trusted advisor if you are willing to learn how to empathize sincerely.

How do you show empathy?

The good news is that empathy is a skill that can be learned by anyone. Even an overworked clinician can find the time to say "I'm sorry to hear you are...... feeling that way / experiencing that / having such a tough time. It must be very challenging!"

How about something like "If I were you, I might be thinking ... / feeling upset / angry / frustrated / disappointed"?

Or "I'm wondering how you must be feeling about ... ?"

These little "attuning" expressions are an easy habit to pick up once you commit to creating a stand-out practice - or business!

How far are you willing to go to stand in your patient's shoes, even for a moment, and then share your observations from their soles?

Clever marketing ideas for your physician businesses

I love coming across articles that succinctly convey what I try to teach my clients about contemporary marketing.

What caught my eye with this article on innovative marketing techniques from Forbes.com were the interesting anecdotes of how small business owners are deploying their creativity AND the innumerable modern marketing avenues and methods to garner attention and traffic.

And of course, two of my marketing gurus, Jay Conrad Levinson and David Meerman Scott were mentioned, so that added even more sway to the argument the article author was making.

The article itself is masterful at marketing its own content - telling stories, citing credible reference sources and being provocative in its opening paragraph:

When it came to marketing her Boston-based cosmetic dentistry practice, Helaine Smith chose to marry modern technology with an age-old principle: Sex sells.

The key point is that the marketing techniques available to everyone today are ultra low cost. No longer any real need for a $2500 ad in a magazine, UNLESS you know it has a consistent positive ROI. 

And remember -- stories, humor and sex sell!

How to make fabulous follow-up calls

Quick marketing resource update:

One of my marketing coaching heroes, Robert Middleton, has recently created a new audio program to help those of us who dread making follow-up calls after meeting prospective patients or clients  -- be it a dinner party, a speaking presentation, a Chamber of Commerce mixer, or a professional networking function.

For a mere $29, you can buy his new audio program called The Art and Science of Telephone Follow-up Calls: How to turn the telephone into your most powerful business-building tool (audio plus 76-page transcript) in which Middleton interviews a guest expert, Denise Clancey, on how to make positive follow-up connections with people you meet and need to stay in touch with, to generate revenue for your business!

You can check out this instructive program in the Action Plan marketing Audio Programs section (you'll need to scroll down the page to find it).

To get over that avoidance or that "butterfly-in-the-stomach" feeling each time you need to pick up the phone and make a follow-up call, I highly recommend you make this small investment -- Robert Middleton always delivers very high value for the price!

Can you really afford the luxury of avoiding those follow-up calls?