Time 17:44

Who knew that all we needed was a urine cup and syringe mascots with Facebook pages to get people to use the online services of HealthPartners? In this podcast with Larissa Rodriguez, director of care delivery marketing for HealthPartners, we’ll uncover the story behind Petey and Pokey.

First major criteria for healthcare marketing – Accepting that doing what everyone else is doing will not get you noticed.

HealthPartners has a business objective of driving greater usage of its online self-service options. From scheduling appointments to getting test results, and more HealthPartners made a significant technology investment to improve patient services. However, the benefits of that investment are dependent upon patients using the technology. Creating two characters, a urine sample cup named Petey and a syringe named Pokey, allowed HealthPartners a wide range of creative messaging tactics. For starters, a Petey and Pokey websiteand since each character has their own identity Facebook pages for Petey and Pokey you’ve got to see his favorite songs, he’s a Clapton fan, how can you not like him?

Second major criteria for healthcare marketing – In general the more you push the creative envelope, the more receptive the social media community will be. In this case, HealthPartners has a wonderful alignment of business goal (increase online use) and promotion/relationship tactic with Facebook pages (social media users need little education to take advantage of online self-service).

The healthcare profession covers every age group and degree of message. Some messages are serious matters of life and death. In others, the message needs to be crafted so that it breaks through the bias or cynicism of the audience. In the HealthPartners case, they are able to capture attention long enough to deliver the message about its online services. The creativity in their profile pages of the characters allows a reader to spend more time with the message. Extending the characters’ presence with in-person events and billboards captures audience in a specific geography, while attempting to drive to a future online connection.

Third criteria for healthcare marketing – Identify and reward those senior leaders that provide cover for creativity. In my reporting on social media, I’ve found that many successful social media programs are the result of senior level managers giving cover for their teams to innovate. Whether it’s with an in-house skunk works team or an outside group, there is a senior manager willing to test concepts, even pilot programs. This allows an organization to use social media as the ultimate low-cost market research tool, without trying to engineer perfection. The world moves too quickly for yesterday’s creative process.

Fourth criteria for healthcare marketing – The audience is less interested in being marketed to, and more receptive to being engaged. Healthcare is a quality of life issue and as such is about emotion and emotions are engaging. The standard hospital brochure is giving way to human stories, in a variety of formats, audio and video, whether those stories are from a new generation of health related websites like Real Savvy Moms

Hospital sites that feature their physicians talking about a procedure, or websites like www.healthcarescoop.com that provide a patient’s perspective of their own treatment – I was a big baby during my kidney stone surgery at St. Joseph’s Hospital, but they were terrific – thanks for the green tea and warm blankets.

I view it this way, peer group stories give patients comfort, physician stories give patients confidence, you need both.

There is plenty more examples of social media in healthcare that we will cover on future episodes of the Marketing Edge podcast. I’ll also be speaking at the Mississippi Hospital Association Society for Health Care Marketing and Public Relations this week in Jackson, Mississippi.

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