I just read this post from Jeremiah Owyang, web strategist extraordinaire, and was inspired to write my own.
As many of you know, I have been using Twitter for some time now to talk with other nurses online, and I use OrientedX3.com to actually find other nurses on Twitter. I search the term “nurse” on all tweets and often find people who are nurses.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about companies using twitter to start conversations about their products. I think this is an exciting concept for companies that need to get feedback from nurses who use their products. Imagine this scenario: You are using a Johnson & Johnson wound care product. Overall, it’s an effective product but there are ways that you see it could be improved. You start a conversation with @MaryatJandJ on Twitter (a fictional twitterer.) Mary listens to your feedback and brings it to the product team. Flash forward to three months later and you have a new version of the wound care product with the improvements that you suggested!
My husband has been in medical sales for awhile and part of his job is to get feedback from the doctors and nurses who use the products he sells. I’ve long tried to convince him to start up some sort of blogging or social initiative in order to be more effective about getting feedback. Unfortunately, most of the companies he’s worked for have either been slow to adopt social networking, or have adopted it in completely the wrong way.
So if this is such a great idea, why isn’t it being implemented?
The answer is simple. There aren’t enough nurses who use twitter. I search for nurses on twitter on a daily basis and I haven’t managed to find more than 100. Also, there aren’t many nurses who read, or are even aware of blogs. Every time I mention the word “blog” to my co-workers their eyes kind of glaze over and they tend to change the subject.
It will be interesting to see how this idea plays out though, 2, 5 or even 10 years from now, as more and more nurses jump into the social swimming pool.
Comments 8
This is a huge opportunity here for the health care to exploit.
Unfortunately, you’re not alone in recognizing just how far behind the industry has gotten with using technology to its benefit.
It’s our duty as health care professionals to improve the quality of care to our patients. Too often, however, our profession appears to embrace fear of the right kinds of change.
You example of using Twitter or blogging for nurses and doctors to provide suppliers with important feedback demonstrates why our industry should be paying attention to what’s going on.
I’m in pharmaceuticals and that industry could benefit enormously from Web 2.0 technologies.
So, you say there aren’t enough nurses using these technologies. Perhaps you have an entire business opportunity here. The needs for the right kinds of technology abound.
Our industry needs aggressive evangelizing. Perhaps the few of us on the cusp of these technologies could start the right kind of health care revolution the country sorely needs.
Spot-on post!
Posted 13 Aug 2008 at 9:58 am ¶In a couple years, the generation that uses Facebook religiously, as well as Twitter and blogs, will be nurses, and then we’ll see an explosion, I think. Until then, we just have to accept our bad selves for being on the cusp of a new era.
Posted 13 Aug 2008 at 11:42 am ¶This is a great point Beth. As a travel nursing company, we have explored some social networking avenues to take our comapny to nurses and have found some to be more beneficial than others. What we have discovered ties into Caroline’s comment, in that the current nurses are not as comfortable in this area as the younger ones will be soon.
Posted 13 Aug 2008 at 1:51 pm ¶This is an interesting point. Talking from a corporate perspective, I think the way of the future for companies is inbound marketing venues like twitter. If you think of it in terms of how people insulate themselves: we have caller id, satellite radio, Tivo, spam filters, and on and on. Traditional marketing is loosing its foothold on how companies interact with their consumers. Consumers are shouting “quit barging in on me, if I want what you got, I will find you”. Blogs, and social media are good outlets to allow consumers to find out what companies have to offer. The problem is that companies have to be willing to be more “transparent” and unfortunately, many are not yet willing to do so.
Posted 13 Aug 2008 at 3:28 pm ¶i know. what is that about?
i told one former nursing school classmate that i had a blog. i never told her what it is because she never asked. then, when we had one of our usual mini reunions, she told our batchmates “and she has a blog!” like it’s some kind of a joke, and nobody got the punch line either.
i agree about what everybody says about blogs: you either get it or you don’t. i don’t twitter yet, but it’s just a matter of time
Posted 13 Aug 2008 at 7:27 pm ¶I still check my twitter every so often. But I cut back because it’s like listening to people talking non-stop about every little thing.
I cut back my follow list to people that only tweet the interesting things happening to them instead of tweeting about anything at all just because they’re bored.
I wonder if companies feel the same way after trying out twitter a few weeks.
Posted 14 Aug 2008 at 8:22 am ¶Here, in the dutch speaking countries (Belgium and the Netherlands), i didn’t found one, -i repeat-, not one nurse who twitters! (Or they don’t twitter about it, could also be true)
Posted 14 Aug 2008 at 3:41 pm ¶Thanks to you, Beth, i found out about getsatisfaction.com. That was an eye-opener!
Beth - Your blog about this very subject is timely. We recently started our twitter profile. I’ve told my company that it’s a new tool that will in time be accepted and used by more and more people. And this includes nurses. In the meantime, I think it’s exciting to be using such a fairly new communication tool and it’s fun.
Posted 14 Aug 2008 at 7:10 pm ¶Trackbacks & Pingbacks 3
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