And changing that is one of the company’s biggest business challenges these days.
Google depends on having its finger on the pulse of the entire Internet, and maintaining its status as the primary entree to the Web. But as people spend more time on closed social networks like Facebook, where much of the data they share is off limits to search engines, Google risks losing the competition for Web users’ time, details of their lives and, ultimately, advertising.
“Google’s made a lot of money helping people make decisions using search engines, but more and more people are turning to social outlets to make decisions,” said Charlene Li, founder of Altimeter Group, a technology research and advisory firm. “And whenever people make decisions, there’s money involved.”
Google has been trying to create social components, most recently with Buzz, a service that gives Gmail users the ability to share status updates, photos and videos. But that, and earlier efforts, have not been hugely popular.
Now the company will try again, with tools to be unveiled this fall, said Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive. Although the details remain murky, Mr. Schmidt and other Google officials sketched a broad outline of their plans in recent interviews.
Some of the tools are still being developed, they said; others will add features to existing products, like search, e-mail, maps, photos, video and ads.
The company plans to “take Google’s core products and add a social component, to make the core products even better,” Mr. Schmidt said.
But some wonder whether Google understands enough about social connections to create the tools people want to use.
“Google’s culture is very much based on the power of the algorithm, and it’s very difficult to algorithm social interaction,” Ms. Li said.
For example, the introduction of Buzz in February caused a wave of criticism from privacy advocates and everyday users, because it automatically included users’ e-mail contacts in their Buzz network. Google quickly changed the service so that it suggested friends instead of automatically connecting them.
Before Buzz’s release to the public, it was tested only by Google employees.
“There is some belief at Google that their DNA is not perfectly suited to build social products, and it’s a quite controversial topic internally,” said a person who has worked on Google’s social products who would speak only on the condition of anonymity.
“The part of social that’s about stalking people, sharing photos, looking cool — it’s mentally foreign to engineers,” the person said. “All those little details are subtle and sometimes missed, especially by technical people who are brought up in a very utilitarian company.”
Google has a social network, Orkut, but that never took off in the United States, although it is popular in Brazil and India. There are also Google profiles, which let people link Google to LinkedIn and Twitter, for example, so that information their friends have published online can appear in search results. Only a small percentage of Google users have created these profiles.
And as Facebook gains in popularity, it grows as a threat. Google sites, including the search engine and YouTube, get more unique visitors than Facebook. But in August, for the first time, people spent more time on Facebook than on Google sites, according to comScore, the Web analytics firm.
Some people are beginning to turn to their friends on Facebook for information for which they had used Google, like asking for recommendations on the best sushi or baby sitter.
Through a new partnership with Microsoft, an investor in Facebook, the things your friends like on Facebook can show up in the search results from Bing, Microsoft’s search engine.
The threat goes straight to the bottom line, too. Facebook is increasing its sales of display ads with images, which Google is counting on as its next big business.
Google has assembled a team of engineers to work on social networking, led by two executives who worked on Buzz — Vic Gundotra, vice president for engineering responsible for mobile applications, and Bradley Horowitz, a vice president for product management overseeing Google Apps.
“Google, as part of our mission to organize the world’s information, also needs to organize and make it very useful for you to see the interactions of your friends, to participate with them and benefit,” Mr. Gundotra said.
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4 Steps to Creating a Great Hospital Marketing Campaign | Hospital Financial and Business News
4 Steps to Creating a Great Hospital Marketing Campaign
As increasing patient volume becomes tantamount to staying financially viable, hospitals must think about how they market their services to potential referring physicians and patients. Dan Weinbach, executive vice president with The Weinbach Group, discusses four steps hospitals should follow to create an attractive marking campaign for a set of service lines.
1. Conduct market research. Before you start deciding how to market your hospital, you need to know what your competitors are doing and who your audience is. For example, if your hospital is located just down the road from Cleveland Clinic, arguably the hospital providing the best heart care in the country, it might be difficult to market your hospital as a cardiology leader. When your board looks at patient volume for a particular service line and feels dissatisfied, they need to benchmark that data against national and local hospital data to determine how effective a marketing campaign will be. "You may discover you have 95 percent of the market in our particular service line, so your expectations for growth need to be mitigated against what you can get out of the market," Mr. Weinbach says.
Market research should also look at the needs of your community. What are the greatest care demands in your community, and how does your hospital plan to meet them? If your community has a high incidence of heart disease or diabetes, you might start a campaign to market your cardiology line or diabetic care program. If your patients are primarily frustrated by their inability to get an appointment, you might market your hospital's "same day appointment" policy. Mr. Weinbach says hospitals often get too caught up in advertising the assets that the hospital values rather than those the customer values. "Your hospital might be proud of a specific clinical technology, but sometimes those aren't the things that matter most to patients," he says.
Your research should also examine how your hospital is currently perceived. "Once you have information on how [the market perceives you], you can start setting goals for messages and decide whether the campaign will repair [negative] conceptions or amplify [positive ones]," he says. If the public views your hospital negatively, you need to either make changes in your hospital or plan a marketing campaign to correct misconceptions.
2. Prioritize marketing goals. Once you have conducted market research, you need to take a systematic approach to marketing as opposed to a reactive approach. "You shouldn't engage in a campaign to promote cardiology services because the chair of the department has asked for a campaign," Mr. Weinbach says. "Marketing service lines should be [based on] empirical studies." Instead of allowing every physician and administrator with an agenda to prioritize for you, base your decisions on tangible factors such as:
• How much capacity does a particular service line have?
• What does the service line contribute to the hospital's bottom line?
• What is the market potential for growth in the service line?
• What technological resources can the service line offer patients?In deciding which service lines to market, Mr. Weinbach says hospitals should look to the advice of David Ogilvy, the father of advertising: "Milk your winners and kill your losers." That doesn't mean eliminating service lines, necessarily, but you should focus on service lines that are generating demand and increasing volume. If you have service lines that haven't received as much attention but have great market potential, those lines are also candidates for a marketing campaign. The lines that you shouldn't focus on are those with little room for market share growth, little contribution to the hospital's bottom line and few relationships with referring physicians. Focus on those lines that can really make a difference to your revenue and physician relationships.
3. Figure out your budget. Once you've decided which service lines you will use for your campaign, you need to plan your budget. This may mean tweaking your service line decision somewhat depending on finances. "You may discover you don't have the budget to market five different service lines," Mr. Weinbach says. "The budget and your priorities are very reliant on each other." When you set the budget, you need to make sure you provide room to market for three audiences: referring physicians, internal audiences and consumers. Prioritize the budget for each audience based on how much volume each campaign might drive. "If you think about it, one healthy physician referrer can translate into literally hundreds of patients," Mr. Weinbach says. "You may determine you can get more mileage out of your budget by focusing on service lines that have a strong physician referral component."
Several decades ago, Mr. Weinbach says marketing budgets were determined based on a percentage of total revenue that was relatively similar from hospital to hospital. Now "the budgets literally cross the gamut," he says. In the recent trying economic times, he says many hospitals have made cuts to their marketing budgets as a way to save money — a move Mr. Weinbach says is a mistake. "Marketing is not any more disposable than human resources, accounting and finance and food services," he says. "Even if marketing doesn't have a direct correlation to patient care, a hospital without patients can't provide good patient care."
4. Create a tactical plan. Once you have a strategic plan in place detailing the service lines you will target, you need to create a tactical plan to figure out the "nuts and bolts" of your campaign. "That tactical plan will be repeatable steps, like print ads, direct mail pieces, TV campaigns and radio campaigns that are influenced by your strategy," Mr. Weinbach says.
This means going back to your budget and deciding how you will target each audience. "The internal marketing team or an outside healthcare marketing firm can determine the best approach for each audience," he says. "You might want to send direct mail, do TV campaigns, do radio campaigns or put up billboards, but it all depends [on how your audiences receive the majority of their information]."
He says the tactical plan is essential for when physicians and other staff members approach you with requests for additional campaign material. "In hospital environments, we're constantly being barraged with requests from departments, physicians and administrators for specific support for programs and doctors and technologies," he says. "If you don't have a plan to wave in someone's face, the more likely they are to yell louder about their needs and the more likely you are to say yes."
Learn more about The Weinbach Group.
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