As I’m always ready to embrace the latest and greatest technologies around to expand my reach and assist as many physicians in need of marketing help as possible, I’m now available to consult with you on LivePerson and Ingenio. I recently registered and was accepted as an Expert Advisor in Marketing, with special emphasis on Medical Marketing, by both LivePerson and Ingenio. Please feel free to anonymously contact me with your medical marketing questions on either LivePerson at http://www.LivePerson.com/Medical-Marketing-Maven or on Ingenio at http://www.Ingenio.com/MarketingMaven or 1.888.INGENIO x 03715691. I look forward to sharing and imparting my marketing experience and expertise with you very soon. To learn more about LivePerson and Ingenio, please review the following information listed below.

About LivePerson:

Founded in 1995, LivePerson is headquartered in New York City and is a leading provider of online communication platforms that facilitate real-time engagement and live expert advice. Intelligently connecting businesses and individual experts with consumers seeking help on the web, LivePerson's platform creates more relevant, compelling and personalized online experiences. Every month, millions of people across the world turn to LivePerson to get the information and advice they need to succeed online. More than 7,000 companies, including EarthLink, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Qwest, and Verizon, and 30,000 individual experts rely on LivePerson to maximize the impact of the online channel.

LivePerson's online expert marketplace connects people seeking personalized, one-on-one information and advice with knowledgeable experts in real time. People from around the world can chat live with registered experts who sell their knowledge and advice in more than 600 categories including business, finance, personal coaching & counseling, education, health, and technology. For more information please visit www.LivePerson.com. 

About Ingenio:

Launched in November 1999, Ingenio has helped 10 million members get advice easily through a web site, www.Ingenio.com, or by telephone, 1-888-INGENIO. Once connected to Ingenio, members select the advisor who's right for them by browsing a directory of listings -- from business and finance advice to computing and Internet help. Listings include the type of advice the advisor wishes to provide, his or her per-minute fee, and how Ingenio members have rated their calls with this advisor in the past.

Once they've chosen an advisor, members can simply click the advisor's "Call Now" icon and Ingenio will automatically connect the two parties for a live, anonymous phone call. People accessing Ingenio through 1-888-INGENIO simply follow spoken prompts to choose an appropriate advisor. Advisors can also provide recorded or email advice to members; these other options also protect both the advisor's and the customer's anonymity. Ingenio offers a full money-back guarantee if callers aren't completely satisfied with their experience. 

If word-of-mouth is the best advertising, how can you make sure the word about your practice is positive?

Word-of-mouth works effectively for three reasons, all of which come back to credibility.

1. Friends give recommendations from their personal experience.
2. They do it naturally and sincerely without a sales pitch.
3. They get nothing from the recommendation other than the appreciation of their friends. (In fact, they run the risk of losing credibility with a bad recommendation).

For all three reasons, word-of-mouth has always been a highly credible source of information.

No one will argue that the best way to insure strong, positive word-of-mouth is to provide excellent customer service.

But critical information about managing word-of-mouth, and how it affects your practice, has come from a study of placebos conducted at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Neuroscientist (and radiologist) Jon-Kar Zubieta and colleagues monitored the nucleus accumbens as volunteers were subjected to what appeared to be two, non-related tests.

Subjects were given a placebo “painkiller” before being stuck by a needle.

On a different day, so as to appear to be a different test, they played a game in which they could win money.

Zubieta and his colleagues were surprised to find a strong link between reward processing, evidenced by the placebo response, and simultaneous changes in the brain’s reward center (the nucleus accumbens). Those who most enjoyed the game were also those most affected by the placebo. Zubieta says “If you have the capacity to respond to reward, then you have the placebo effect.”

Because placebos have no therapeutic effect, it’s long been assumed that they work only through the power of suggestion. As long as the individual being treated expects the treatment to provide aid in healing, it frequently does. But Zubieta’s research indicates that placebos aren’t simply the result of “faith.” They appear to work by triggering a specific pleasure response.

The ability to predict which people will react well to placebos is exciting to medical researchers, who see possibilities for new treatments.

Marketers also see possibilities.

As already pointed out, excellent customer service is the best way to trigger strong, positive word-of-mouth. Notice how many ads show people in the act of enjoying their purchase. This sets the expectation of positive purchase experience high in the nucleus accumbens potential customers who see / hear / read that ad.

And both medical researchers and marketing professionals understand the importance of doing nothing to contradict the expectations they’ve created in the minds of prospective patients or customers. When the actual purchase experience disappoints the customer, the mental dissonance is comparable to a patient being told the placebo treatment has no value.

Violated expectations lead to negative word-of-mouth. Enough difference between the experience the customer expected, and the one she experienced, can actually increase the perception of bad service. Conversely, the placebo effect predicts that average service, as long as it doesn’t contradict her expectations, may be judged as superior.

How do you apply the placebo effect to the marketing of your practice?

In your ads, tell your patients what to expect. Tell them to call. Tell them when to call (for instance, today during business hours). Tell them why to call (to schedule an appointment for a consultation). Tell them of the benefits of consulting with you. Tell them how they’ll feel.

Then don’t disappoint them.

The good news? You don’t have to be perfect; just better than average! 

USA Today recently published its “Most Influential Physicians” list, aiming to give consumers a source of doctors who are most influential to their peers. 

This list, which features 6,000 specialists in the treatment areas of high cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes and asthma from more than 300 communities across the U.S., was compiled for USA Today by the Santa Fe medical information firm Qforma. Additional specialists are expected to be added to the list in coming months.

USA Today’s “Most Influential Physicians” list is a unique best-doctor list because it is not opinion-based; it aims to identify the subtle differences in doctors' practice patterns that conclude which doctors most influence their peers. Typical consumer research reveals little or no information about doctors’ quality and performance. Basic research may locate academic background and hospital affiliation, but the “Most Influential Physicians” allows patients to choose from a list of physicians who come recommended by their peers, not Google. Which recommendation would you trust? 

To view USA Today’s “Most Influential Physicians” list, go to http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/qforma-most-influential-doctors.htm.  

The meteoric rise of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube has created new opportunities for web-savvy marketers. But seriously, what can any of these social networking sites do for you and your healthcare practice? In order to answer that question, we must first understand how social networking sites work for the end-user. You, for example…

Since Twitter has the greatest “buzz” right now, I’ll use it as an example. Unless you have been locked in a cave for the past several months, you have, no doubt, heard the terms twitter, tweet, tweeting and tweeple bandied about everywhere. TV news, sports and entertainment programs, radio and print media have all been telling us not only who’s tweeting whom, but what they’re saying and why it’s important for us to know about it.

How can Twitter work for you?

Twitter is basically an online community that incorporated itself in March of 2007 in San Francisco, CA. It’s a virtual “place” where people can connect, gather, stay in touch and share their thoughts and ideas about virtually anything. Though it’s called a social network, it’s already being used rather effectively as a business/professional network. Think of it as a virtual water cooler where you have 24/7 access to 15 million (and growing rapidly) potential new patients and professional referral sources – around the corner or around the world. And best of all: so far, it’s free.

Twitter, paired with special electronic sensors (which are already in final development) could be used to alert doctors when a patient’s blood sugar or heart rate climbs too high. Such real-time data streams could also aid medical researchers. Doctors are already using Twitter to ask for help and share information about the latest techniques and procedures.

Twitter makes it easy for people to connect with other people. The site asks one question, “What are you doing?” Answers must be 140 characters long or less and can be sent via mobile texting, instant messaging or on the web. To begin on Twitter, you open an account as you would on any other site. Set up your username and password and once your account is open, spend some time exploring the site to see what opportunities there are for you.

Twitter, like other networking sites, works most effectively as a marketing tool when you link it back to your practice web site. Think of your web site as the hub of your online marketing wheel, and Twitter as one of the spokes leading to it. Your posts on Twitter, called “tweets”, can include your web URL (address), your latest new patient offers, health tips and new service offerings. You can even tweet about openings in your daily schedule, as one med-spa I know did recently. They filled their entire schedule within a few hours of tweeting. On a long-term basis, using Twitter consistently and effectively can help drive your web site up the rankings on Google.