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Just this week, hospital public relations professionals were discussing the unwanted attention from bloggers who are regularly negative about their hospitals. They aren’t health-related bloggers; one is an individual who “takes great satisfaction” in the number of hits he receives when mentioning the hospital’s name.
One hospital launched a Facebook page but gained so much unwanted attention from employees during their work hours that executives blocked employees from the venue. As one of the largest employers in the community, this probably turned off the very people the organization needed as its ambassadors.
These types of situations are not social media issues; they are communications issues that hospitals find themselves confronting as new tools become available. While there are 350 hospitals using social media, the United States has thousands of hospitals. At this stage, the early adopters are stepping into messes that the naysayers warned about and everyone was hoping to avoid.
What if hospitals developed a code of participation that provides guidelines of how the hospital and its employees are going to involve themselves into social media and how they are going to relate to the online community? What if hospitals applied the principles of issues management or crisis communications to online issues? In the first scenario mentioned above, the hospital would have guidelines on whether to respond or ignore the blogger.
Social media is a community relations tool - it builds and reaches new communities that two years ago didn’t exist. Not everyone is going to love your hospital, but having a plan for handling attention that is up to no good makes it easier to cope with the stings of criticism and the people who want to jumble your day.
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