Social Media Action Plan for Cooley Dickinson Hospital

1. Social Media Action Plan for Cooley Dickinson Hospital Created by: Samuel Butt, Stacy Pease, and Ian Woglom

2. Objective To increase social media integration and use by engaging local community members in their own healthcare while promoting services, specialties, and support services of Cooley Dickinson Hospital

3. Starting Points • Continue with webpage, but focus on enhancing Facebook page with additional content including virtual tour videos of each department and department spotlights. • Create YouTube channel to host videos of hospital. • Integrate the webpage, Facebook page, and YouTube channel by placing very visible links to the other social media venues on each and written encouragement to visit. • At this time, the Twitter account should not be used because the majority of the community population is not using this form of social media and resources to dedicate to this social media campaign are limited.

4. Social Media as Advertisement • Launch advertising campaign to promote webpage, Facebook page, and YouTube channel: • Create posters asking patients to visit webpage and Facebook page and to become fans. Posters should be posted throughout hospital and outpatient clinics. • Add web and Facebook address to appointment cards, paper handouts, and hospital newsletters. • Create and administer patient survey that will gain feedback on why the patient chose Cooley Dickinson Hospital, if they have ever visited the webpage or Facebook page, and of they use the web and Facebook for personal use on a regular basis. • Money will need to be dedicated to make this advertising campaign successful.

5. Continued Growth and Success • Integrate webpage and Facebook with other (currently non-associated) pages affiliated with Cooley Dickinson, such as outpatient clinic pages, support group pages, etc. • Continue posting health tips on Facebook wall, but expand content by asking different departments to showcase their specialties. • Provide forum on Facebook for patient question and answer. • Designate a person either in IT or Marketing who will monitor the webpage, respond to posts, ensure that content is distributed at different times during the day. • Develop social media use policies for both employees and patients.

6. Value Added • Create awareness of different Cooley Dickinson social media outlets and resources • Increase the number of patients and community members viewing resources and actively engaging with them, enhance the brand image of Cooley Dickinson as a leading community hospital in the area • Educate the public about their own health and provide easy access to additional information, and have an outlet for patients to have questioned answered in a timely manner.

7. Potential Risks • Care needs to be taken to ensure it is not damaging to the hospital • Bad publicity could occur if posts are not monitored and responded to in a timely manner. • Patient confidentiality must be maintained at all times, but could be compromised if social media policies are not developed and enforced. • Need to ensure that content does not foster unrealistic expectations of the hospital and its staff • Potential to alienate particular populations of people unintentionally • Waste time and resources if the campaign fails

8. Required Resources • Staff time needed for daily monitoring of Facebook page and YouTube video comments. This does not necessarily require a new position, it could be job enrichment for a current IT or PR position. • Need staff with experience using social media to implement social media and maintain it. • Financial resources and printing resources will be needed to launch advertising campaign. • Legal council will be needed to develop a comprehensive social media policy for both staff and community members.

9. Roles • Designate a point person to monitor and respond toposted content. • Develop a weekly/monthly schedule for monitoring and content posting. • Appoint a content coordinator who will work with various departments and employees to arrange content. • Need to carefully consider the amount of resources available to dedicate to this campaign.

10. Policies • Need to develop social media policies to govern employee posts and commentary and need to develop policies for patient content. • Alert patients that all content they post on Facebook is public and confidential information about particular patients cannot be shared. • Legal counsel should be consulted while writing and implementing this policy. • Recommend looking at Cleveland Clinic’s social media policies for ideas and consult with legal professionals when drafting.

11. Measurements • The use of facebook.grader.com is recommended to measure the impact of the Facebook page. • Google analytics is another tool that should be used to monitor the hospital website in order to determine that the level of awareness of the hospital is increasing according to the recommendations. • A patient survey must be initiated to ascertain whether or not the renewed social media presence has had the desired effects. • The hospital should initiate online and offline surveys. • The online survey should be present on the Facebook page and website. • The offline survey should be conducted in the hospital itself. • The survey will gather information regarding patient channel preferences as well suggestions for achieving the social media objectives of the hospital.