Energising Word of Mouth through Social Media

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by: Matt Rhodes

We highlighted Mayo Clinic in a recent post of examples of online communities in healthcare. They are doing great things with blogs, podcasts, video and online communities. That’s why this week’s Required Reading at FreshNetworks is a great presentation from Lee Aase, Manager, Syndication and Social Media at Mayo Clinic. He looks at how the use of social media at Mayo Clinic has progressed and, in particular how it has helped to spread word-of-mouth.

Image by djfoobarmatt via Flickr

The presentation highlights an important for those of us who work in social media – technology really should be invisible. Whilst the technology you use must meet your needs and aims it isn’t the most important factor in making your use of social media a success. Of much more importance is how you use it, the way in which you encourage people to engage with you and the quality of the content, comments and conversations that you have on your site.

Whether your technology costs zero dollars, or many hundreds of thousands of dollars, it is the way you use it and the way you manage the conversations and engagement that will make a difference.

 
Some more reading

Original Post: http://blog.freshnetworks.com/2009/05/energising-word-of-mouth-through-social-media/