Twitter Archives | G2 Communications Inc.-Medical Practice Marketing

Nov 12 2013

How to Build Trust with a Health & Science Journalist: Insights from Ivan Oransky

Ivan Oransky is VP and global editorial director of MedPageToday, and a former executive editor of Reuters Health. He also co-founded the blog Retraction Watch, founded Embargo Watch, and served as managing editor, online, at Scientific American, and deputy editor at The Scientist.

Oransky gave me his candid opinions on PR professionals, and allowed me to share them with you. The health journalist pulls no punches, while offering constructive advice that may help your pitches make it to a choice media outlet.

Do Your Research

“What bugs me is PR people not bothering to find me and follow me so they can figure out what I’m interested in,” says Oransky. “I have my own blogs and I tweet regularly; it’s not that hard to find me.” The surest sign you’ll be ignored by him? You email him an irrelevant press release.

“I get releases about country music!” he says. “I get about 300 emails a day; 200 are from PR people who send out press releases using the Howitzer approach. They are automatically discredited. They can’t possibly know what I cover if they’re sending me press releases via email that I haven’t asked for; 99% of the releases I get are irrelevant.”

Get Focused

Expertise in one field indicates integrity. In Oransky’s view, “The most credible PR people tend to be the ones who work at boutique firms and have taken the time to figure out what I care about. They tend to only focus on one industry. They’ve taken the time to study me – and therefore it’s worth investing my time. I have relationships with these people and with others at larger firms who’ve taken the same approach.”

“Pitch Less, Tip More”

The best way to develop a relationship with Oransky is to share “a study that really fits with what [I] do that no one seems to have yet.” “Pitch less and tip more” is another way of saying, “Help me out; create some trust there.”

This approach benefits PR pros in the long run: “If a clinical study comes out, provide me with a source who doesn’t have a dog in this fight, even if he or she isn’t a client. It may not seem that it directly helps you in the short term, but it means I’ll take your calls next time, when you have something to pitch.”

Show, Don’t Tell

Oransky hates “when PR people use nonsense words like ‘breakthrough study’.” If that’s true, show him, don’t tell him. Backing up your claims is especially important these days, when so many studies are funded by companies. Want to use hyperbole? Better back it up with evidence and credible sources.

While at Reuters Health, Oransky learned that when “the authors have significant relationships with companies, you’ll tend to see more positive results for the companies’ products.” To battle bias, he and his staff had “to put these studies in context.” They would “talk to proponents as well as skeptics of the study” and “look at similar studies from the past.” The more context you can add to your pitch, the more useful it will be to health journalists like Oransky.

Dare to Be the Skeptic

“Having my staff interview your client as a source only when they’ve published a study is missing the other bite of the apple,” he explains. “You can also be the outside expert. We want sources who are skeptical – not just the experts in your company.”

In covering studies we don’t look at journals as high priests of truth. They’re more useful than scientists shouting their alleged breakthroughs from the mountaintop, but we’ve seen how the sausage gets made. There, I mixed several metaphors!”

Think Before You Tweet

“Do not blindly pitch me on Twitter,” Oransky exhorts. ”Sometimes people don’t realize that Twitter is public, and they send me embargoed press releases.” Do, however, use Twitter to learn what Oransky cares about and connect with him via his interests.

When done right, tweeting can be more effective than email: “People who only know to contact me through my work email with the same press release they’re sending to hundreds or thousands of other reporters don’t know me,” he says. “They are self-selecting themselves out of my source gene pool.”

Put Down the Phone

Oransky is blunt: “Don’t ever call me to see if I got your press release. If you’re calling to do that, I can’t imagine we have a relationship. Not only is it a waste of time, but you’ll get a mini rant. It won’t be pleasant.” If you need more convincing, here’s a preview of just how bad a mini-rant might be.

The Relationship Comes First

Oransky’s recommendations echo the advice of most other health care and health IT journalists I’ve interviewed. Overwhelmingly, they are asking PR people to think like a journalist. Get to know Oransky–who’s made himself highly findable–and send him tips he can use. If you’re consistent, without flooding his inbox, you’ll build trust–and he just might give your next pitch a second glance.

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Photo source: MedPage Today

Jun 05 2013

How to Write Micro Content for a Macro Audience

“Content is King” has been the credo of digital marketers ever since Bill Gates coined the phrase back in 1996. With the battle for top search engine rankings, and the rise of keyword driven SEO (search engine optimization), content has continued to reign. But the Internet of today is a much different place than the pre-Google, pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter, pre-SEO world of the 90s.

Today, PR and marketing are inseparable from social media, and social media is all about short, shareable bursts of text and eye-catching images. That’s why some have begun using a more web 2.0-friendly credo, proclaiming Micro Content is also King.

Micro-content requires a whole different set of skills than long-form copy. To succeed in the era of micro-content, you must be able to craft punchy headlines, engaging tweets and click-worth summaries. Here are 5 Tips for writing microcopy that will stand out:

1. Get Strategic

Before you set fingers to keys, perform a micro content strategy. Who is your target audience? What action do you want them to take? Which social media sites do they use?

Say your audience is urban, 30 to 50 year-old women, and you want them to subscribe to your lifestyle newsletter. With a little research you discover that Facebook and Twitter are most popular with your demographic. Armed with this information, you can now write micro content that is targeted and actionable from the first draft.

2. Craft Stand-Alone Headlines (i.e., Write for Goldfish)

Did you know that the average attention span has shrunk from 12 seconds to 8 over the last decade? That’s shorter than a goldfish, which can apparently stay focused for a full 9 seconds!

Say it Up Front: Tell readers what they need to know right off the bat with clear and captivating headlines. If a headline is so vague or clever that readers can’t tell what you’re about to give them, they won’t bother finding out.
Don’t Rely on Context: Headlines appear differently online than in print. They frequently show-up in a list of other links, in search engine results, or re-tweeted without supporting text.

3. Be Clear

Internet users don’t read, they glance. Make your item brief, clear, and explanatory. As we just learned, your audience is likely to see bits of content out of context before they click through to the web page (if they actually do). Make sure you state the essential information, and make sense to inundated readers.

4. Write Visually: Visual language is engaging and memorable—two objectives all marketers strive for. Don’t mistake visual writing for flowery writing. Too many adjectives make for a slow and clunky read. Instead, use descriptive nouns and verbs to paint a vivid image with as few keystrokes as possible. For example, “Zoo Acquires New Animal” becomes much more click-worthy as, “Baby Elephant Reunited with Worried Mom.” And including actual visuals never hurts. Tack on a twitpic of the elephant’s reunion, or a link to the zoo’s photo gallery.

5. Make it Personal: To get personal, you have to be personal. Whenever possible, give your social accounts a face. Readers trust micro content that is shared by a human with a name, profile picture, title and background story. They are also more comfortable sharing content, commenting and generally interacting with human accounts. Personalize your content and steer clear of empty, mass marketing lingo. You’ll be rewarded with loyal followers.

Bottom line: the micro-content revolution has already occurred. The best way to join in is to spend time in the social media world and see what has traction. Learn the language and identify the key players of each platform, then get in there and claim your niche.

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Apr 05 2013

Storify Your PR: A One-Stop Social Media Solution

Most of what’s said about using social media to promote your brand boils down to this bit of unhelpful advice: You have to use it. That may be true, but it leaves you with little more than trial and error to guide your social media marketing efforts.

While there will always yet another platform everyone says you must use, one shows promise in actually simplifying and enhancing your social media outreach. It’s called Storify and companies big and small are already using it to skip the pitch and publish their own stories using their best curated content.

What is Storify?

Social media is supposed to boost your brand building and customer engagement efforts, but the actual results are diffuse and still difficult to measure. It’s one thing to sign up for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, Tumblr, FourSquare and Pinterest, and quite another to create an integrated campaign that is effective across each unique platform. Storify helps you do just that.

From the user dashboard within Storify you can gather all the content that you have already generated in the press and on other social media sites into one window. From there you can select the best tweets, comments, photos and videos, plus links to PR news stories you’ve generated in traditional media, and package them into a single post. Think of it as designing the front-page layout of a newspaper: you put the best stuff front and center, highlight noteworthy pieces and entice readers to dig deeper.

Become Your Own Publisher

Storify’s own slogan is “Don’t get lost in the noise.” Rather than spewing a fire hose flood onto the Web and seeing what sticks, Storify lets you bring together a multitude of voices into one targeted story. And you can publish as many stories as you like. Use it to support your current marketing strategy, respond to up-to-the-minute trends, or bundle the most useful information on a newly released product.

The best part of publishing with Storify? Your audience becomes your distributor. Storify was built for the lay person, so it’s accessible to everyone and it’s optimized for sharing across the Web. That means when you create a story it doesn’t only exist on the Storify site; it can be posted to Facebook, tweeted, emailed, and blogged about all with a single link.

Is Storify Right for Healthcare Providers?

Storify is an excellent way to promote medical services and devices. You may have heard the expression, “If you don’t control your image, someone else will.” This is particularly true for the healthcare industry, which frequently has to combat misinformation and bring patients up to speed on medical and technological advancements. Storify lets you decide what information is important and deliver it to patients in a clear and engaging format. Your message is less likely to get muddled by unrelated hashtags and pictures of cats

In a recent twitter discussion hosted by Healthcare Communications & Social Media (#hcsm), they invited doctors, patients, hospitals, and communications professionals to answer the question: “What motivates healthcare providers to use social media?” Once the discussion was over, one participant used Storify to publish the results. The participant archived the most relevant tweets in one easy-to-browse place so others could read it without having to comb the twitterverse.

The archived conversation is one of the most basic examples of what Storify can do. Hospitals and healthcare companies can get much more creative and produce a range of multi-media “stories” like:

Case Studies: Pull in all the tweets, comments, blog posts, and photos you can find on a particular healthcare issue. Discover and highlight patients’ thoughts, questions, and needs to improve product marketing.
Executive Profiles: Collect video interviews, Slideshare presentations, press releases, and tweets on company leaders.
Product Launches: After the release of a new product, gather reviews, briefs, social media comments, press releases, and marketing content into one package. It can become a one-click patient, employee, and sales resource.

Storify returns some of the command social media has taken away by letting you curate the content to create the kind of story that gets shared.

Oct 17 2012

The PR Honeymoon is Over… Now What?

You’ve just completed a successful PR launch for a new medical device that yields faster post-operative recovery for cardiac surgery patients, the clinical trial results have been published in a medical journal and the FDA has approved it for safety and efficacy. Health and science journalists from top media outlets thought it was unique enough to cover. The articles have been very respectable by startup standards.

Investors are delighted and all 20 employees are singing your praises. You’ve had lots to tweet about and post on the company Facebook page and the retweets and comments are rolling in.

But eventually the PR bloom will fall off the rose and the board will be expecting the next wave of coverage. Customers are not quite ready to go on record, nor are surgeons who are trying out the product. What do you do?

While you have focused on generating broad coverage with great success the second wave of brand building requires a new PR strategy to sustain momentum. It’s the right time to narrow your PR focus to reach your target customers – the surgeons who will push their hospitals for acquire your device; the patients who will benefit; the investors who see a healthy ROI. Identify the publications, blogs and other digital destinations where surgeons and post op nursing staff get their medical news and information. Set up specific PR programs to penetrate this second tier media: trade publications, medical journals, blogs, etc.

First, research healthcare and medical publications read by your customers. Check out the magazine editorial calendars which schedule feature stories throughout the year to drive advertising spending. Identify the topics related to your device. Set up a spreadsheet and populate with those publications and topics. Pitch your new device and how it shortens patient recovery times in unique ways. Invite the editor – or assigned writer to interview your company founder.

Develop a thought leadership program for company clinical executives by proposing and ghostwriting articles for those same publications, which are often looking for content, especially for their websites. These articles help position executives as experts who articulate the problem your device solves — but doesn’t shamelessly promote it.

Don’t forget to post and Tweet all PR driven content on Facebook and Twitter. Reshape these articles into blog posts, or add an introductory paragraph with a link to your published article.

Start a speakers’ bureau and arrange for speaking engagements at medical conferences and tradeshows where you’ll be exhibiting your product.

Find opportunities to announce the latest company news [following the initial product introduction]: a new round of funding; new customer; new executive hire; results of a clinical trial; etc.

Set up a mini PR program for new customers with a news release template that lets them announce the benefits of your product to the communities they serve and how they’re securing post-op safety for their cardiac patients.

Develop a story around the company founder for the business media; who she is; what inspired her to create a solution; her unique journey that led to the invention of the device.

Set up Google alerts on cardiology or cardiac surgery. Use headline news stories as angles to introduce your company to the media; pitch the founder as a guest for a radio talk show.

The honeymoon will end at some point so don’t ignore the myriad ways you can use PR to promote your company’s accomplishments.