I think so.
But I know I’m probably in the minority. Many managers do not approve of employees using their phones for social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) at work, but I am actually okay with it when used with discretion. Unlike computers, with smart phones you do not need to worry about viruses infecting the office network.
Most managers accept and allow employees who smoke to step outside at least twice a day to smoke a cigarette. Doesn’t it seem fair to allow everyone else to take a phone break to check messages, make calls and text a few people?
Here are some objections I’ve heard to allowing staff to use their phones at work, and my answers.
“They’ll never get any work done if you let them play on their phones all day.”
My Answer: I only hire adults. I expect adults to have a reasonably well-formed work ethic that is demonstrated by doing work first, and doing non-work on breaks and briefly other times. If the practice can’t run without me peeking over their shoulders every hour or so to see if they’re working, then I am not a very good manager.
Performance measures are a great way to set guidelines for what work must be done. If the employee is meeting their performance goals appropriately, why shouldn’t they be able to take a micro-break to catch up on life?
“Employees should do work at work and save their home life for home.”
My Answer: Employees are people with busy lives, lots of commitments and lots of responsibilities outside of work. Every single one of us needs to attend to our personal lives for some part of the day. Most of it can be dealt with at lunch or during breaks, but sometimes people need to attend to their lives at work. I want them to be able do that, within reason, because it is a realistic response to life in 2010.
“What if staff using the Internet on their phones puts the practice at risk?”
My Answer: If you have done a good job of educating your staff about confidentiality and HIPAA, you should have no worries. In short, staff should not reveal any patient information (via spoken, written or digital communication) to any third party for any reason besides those dictated in your Notice of Privacy Practices (NPP). Your HIPAA education plan should be reviewed and updated annually to include any policy changes due to the use of social media for personal and practice purposes.
I have been a fan of Chris Brogan’s for quite awhile now. He is a superstar on the social media landscape and I almost got to meet him once when I lived in Seattle (sigh.) Today I came across his post “5 Things That Small Businesses Should Do Now.” Many medical practices are small businesses (privately owned and operated, with 100 employees or less), but may have not considered any of these options.
Here are Chris’s suggestions and my commentary:
- Start a blog – I can’t think of any simpler website technology to start and master, and there are cheap and free platforms readily available. Why a blog? Because they’re easy to create, because they’re easy to update, because they encourage repeat visits, and because you can use them in many flexible ways.
My comment: Most practices have websites and it is easy to add a blog to a website. Some administrators and/or physicians would gladly take on a blog, and if not, there are some great writing professionals who can create and write a blog for you. Professional bloggers get to know your practice and your patient demographic and create a voice for your practice that uniquely fits you. A blog extends and enhances your relationship with existing and future patients. It’s all about the communication.
- Start listening – People are talking about you. Find out where they are and who they are.
My comment: It has been hard for physicians to come to terms with the fact that patients are publicly rating them. In some cases, physicians are requiring consumers to sign gag orders before becoming patients. The truth is, patients will not be stifled and physicians need to monitor the bandwaves for commentary about them and take it seriously.
- Try Twitter OR Facebook – Let’s not rush things. Facebook has many more users, but it’s a bit harder to find customers, prospects, partners and colleagues. Twitter is easier to use and faster to connect with people, but there are far fewer users on there today. I’ll let you choose. If you go with Facebook, make a personal account under your own name, and then start a fan page for your business.
My comment: Does this seem too far out? It’s not! At the very least, practices should be learning about the technology and preparing for the time when they will need to jump in. Businesses (who want customers) can no longer hold themselves aloof. You need to be part of the conversation, or at least know where/what the conversation is.
- Get the word out – If you’re going to spend time building these social sites, let’s presume that you want more people to contact you and interact with you through them. Print business cards with the company name, and/or the request for people to join your fan page or follow you on Twitter.
My comment: Your website and your social sites should be on everything you print that patients take home or receive from you, and can also be communicated to patients via automated communication: appointment reminders, messages on hold, emails, and electronic newsletters.
- Try moving the needle – now lets really get crazy. See if you can fill the place up with social-media minded folks. Okay, this won’t work for every business, but don’t be too quick to count out the idea. Let’s try inviting them to a store-only special event, or let’s give them a discount code. You know, the stuff you already know how to do. Any difference in the results? See if you can do some kind of really special one-day-only push, and what that brings to you.
My comment: This won’t work for every medical practice but it’s ideal for practices with elective services – plastic/cosmetic surgery, allergy, complementary & alternative medicine, sports performance, vision correction, cosmetic dental services, infertility treatment, etc.
Nextgov.com’s Bob Brewin reported June 8, 2009 that the Military Health System (MHS) has added social networking tools to its web portal serving 1.4 million people on active duty. The social networking tools are designed to connect with the 18-24 year-old demographic which makes up a large portion of the active duty personnel.
In addition to MySpace, FaceBook, and Twitter, Brewin notes:
The agency also uses sites such as YouTube to reach to the younger age group with videos on subjects ranging from prosthetic legs to golf therapy clinics for combat wounded veterans to a short profile of an occupational therapist who works with combat-wounded veterans.
The video on prosthetic legs had the most views last month. The second-most-viewed video was a 2008 video on the Bataan Memorial Death March at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., which features Army medic Staff Sgt. Matthew Sims, an indication that troops crave more than just medical information. Kilpatrick said MHS posted 66 videos on YouTube in May, with the top five viewed 3,785 times.
The portal has been available for about two years, but the Twitter feed was just launched in March.
The MHS web portal is impressive as is their stated mission: The Military Health System mission is to provide optimal Health Services in support of our nation’s military mission—anytime, anywhere.
Twitter is a combination of two concepts, social networking and micro-blogging. When combined, they create a fascinating way for people to communicate and keep in touch. Let’s explore social networking and micro-blogging individually first.
Social Networking
This is the Myspace, and Facebook you’ve heard so much about. You already know what networking is – you create, build, and maintain personal and professional relationships to meet people, find opportunities, and learn new things. Successful practice managers are constantly networking to be in the know and stay ahead of the curve. Now add the social aspect of it to the equation. Social networking means starting with people you already know, and using that as a jumping off point. Take your existing network of contacts and digitize them to build an on-line community.
Think about your contact list in your address book, email, phone, or Blackberry. You have everyone in there: colleagues, friends, family. What if you also had access to the contact lists of everyone in their contact lists? There would be duplicate entries but there would also be a lot of people in this “friends of friends” list that you didn’t know before. You would probably see a lot of new names and faces, some of whom you might want to talk to about your organization, their organization, your product, their service, their hobbies, even ask out on a date!
When you walk into a room and see a friend talking to someone you don’t know, you go and say hello to your friend, and introduce yourself to the stranger- you are building your network by social networking!
The differences between various social networking sites (see the MMP post on LinkedIn) will be explored in a later article, but all social networking sites have one thing in common – they are designed to help you meet new people through common friends, interests, pasts, and goals.
Micro-blogging
It’s blogging, but smaller. But what’s blogging? ”Blog” is short for “web log”, and it is keeping an online journal of writings, pictures, and other multimedia, as well as news items and content found on the web. Some blogs are just places where people write about their feelings and activities so other people can read them. Some blogs are focused on a topic- like ManageMyPractice.com focuses on health care administration. But all blogs are simply websites that are updated by their authors fairly frequently, around some common theme.
How does blogging become “micro”? By shrinking it down to its bare essence and relaying the heart of the message, communicating the necessary. How could this be of use to you? What if you set up a system where your kids received updates when you were going to be home later than usual from work, telling them they were allowed to have a soda with their homework before TV, and what would be for dinner when you arrived? Or maybe your kids need to update you when their plans change. What if all your colleagues were updating each other about the goings-on at a professional conference so they could decide on the fly which events to attend, and share their experiences, and decide where everyone would be meeting afterwards.
Anything that could be helped by contacting an entire group of people quickly with short message could benefit from micro-blogging.
Twitter puts it all together
Twitter takes these two concepts, and merges the whole shebang with your mobile device. Twitter lets you easily microblog to your social network over your mobile device. You don’t have to use a cell phone or a Blackberry to use Twitter- you can send and receive updates over the web, and through a variety of third party providers.
If you want to get started, go to the Twitter homepage at www.twitter.com, and click the green button that says “JOIN THE CONVERSATION”. You will create a username and password, and get you started adding contacts and you’ll soon be able to make your first micro-blog post (they call them “tweets”).
On Twitter, anyone you want to receive updates from is someone you are “following”, and anyone who is receiving your messages is one of your “followers”. You can also send messages directly to just one user, or set up groups of people to receive certain updates- your co-workers don’t have to see your notes to your kids, and vice-versa. You can also do fun things, like upload a little picture of yourself to be your icon that people wil see when they are on Twitter’s website.
Now it’s time to supercharge your cell phone
But you don’t have to ever go to the site if you don’t want to! The real power of Twitter is that it can let you do all these short internet communications (micro-blogging) right from your cell phone. Basic text messages that you may already use on your cell phone (called “SMS messages“) can be used to send and receive messages from Twitter. Just link your Twitter account to a mobile phone in your Twitter settings, and then you can send your updates as text messages to 40404. Incoming Twitter messages from the users you follow will show up as incoming texts from Twitter, but with labels to show you which user the update is from. You can also customize your mobile updates, so you only get messages from certain users. If you follow some people who are heavy updaters, you might get tired of constant alerts of new text messages. Also be sure you understand your cell phone’s text messaging plan – Twitter is free to use, but if you don’t have unlimited messaging on your phone, it could be easy to run up a big bill.
Once you have your Twitter up and running on your mobile phone things get really interesting, as now you’ve basically turned your cell phone service into an internet chat room. And in terms of business, that gives you near constant connection. Twitter users are often the first people to know the newest information, and love to post updates about it online. It’s an interesting way to see what’s new in the world – finding out what people are talking about literally “right then”. Plus it creates an interesting crowd of which to ask questions: What’s going on tonight? Can anyone recommend good seafood on the north side of town? Is anyone getting anything out of this conference?
The brilliance of Twitter is that it so easily connects people on all different types of computers and cell phone platforms. Twitter can seemlessly create networks of people communicating for mutual benefit, and provides an interesting new way to keep on top and keep in touch.
To Recap:
- Social Networking = networking with your friends’ friends
- Micro-blogging = little missives without all the niceties and all the heart
- Twitter = #1 + #2 (little missives to your friends’ friends’ friends)
- How can you leverage this technology to make your practice more efficient and productive?
Note from Mary Pat: How can Twitter be used in a medical practice setting? Here are a few ways – I’m sure you can think of others. If your doctor is running late, use direct messages to Twitter patients to let them know right away that they can arrive later or reschedule their appointment. Likewise, when an earlier opening is available, Twitter a patient to see if they could fill your appointment time. Twitter your doc to let him/her know about schedule changes that would affect what s/he is doing right now.
And to get you started on Twitter, my Twitter name is “mpwhaley.”
