Skip to main content

Marketing's Old Guard...

...in a rear-guard action?  From ClickZ:
"Sure, the old guard (in advertising) may talk the talk, but the numbers seem to say that they don't know what they're talking about. A recent study by Alterian found that seven out of 10 marketing professionals admit to having little or no understanding about how their brand (or their clients' brand) is being discussed in social media. Let me say that again: 70 percent of people who do marketing for a living have no knowledge of what's going on with their brands in the social media space!"
I haven't read Alterian's study in great detail, but neither do I have evidence that a 70 percent clueless estimate is too high, especially in health care.

Is it that they don't know, or don't want to know?   The old guard grew up believing that they were the conversation or, at the very least, were firmly in control.  They talked.  We listened, awestruck.

On some level, they probably knew that conversations were occurring over back fences and in the stands at kiddie soccer.  But without methods to measure or monitor those conversations, it was all too easy to ignore their impact.  Times change but old guards always do their best to preserve the good ol' days.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Michael Porter On Health Care Reform

Michael Porter, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, proposes "A Strategy For Health Care Reform - Toward A Value-Based System." His proposals are fundamental, lucid and right-on, meaning they're sure to be opposed by some parties to the debate, the so-called "Yes, but..." crowd. Most important, in my opinion, is this: "... electronic medical records will enable value improvement, but only if they support integrated care and outcome measurement. Simply automating current delivery practices will be a hugely expensive exercise in futility. Among our highest near-term priorities is to finalize and then continuously update health information technology (HIT) standards that include precise data definitions (for diagnoses and treatments, for example), an architecture for aggregating data for each patient over time and across providers, and protocols for seamless communication among systems. "Finally, consumers must become much mor...

gapingvoid cartoon #378

Buy your own, here.

"An Affordable Fix For Modernizing Medical Records"

...from the Veterans Health Administration and Midland (TX) Memorial Hospital. I know enough about my own strengths and weaknesses to know that I'm no IT expert. But I am acutely interested in examples of people and teams thinking differently to solve long-standing, intractable problems and, for better or worse, there are lots of those to be found in the IT realm. Yesterday, it was a story about a team adding iPhone portability to MEDITECH functionality, delivering to harried physicians better access to clinical data and more productive hours in every work day. (Wow. Apple in the boardroom AND the physician lounge. Has to be an IT traditionalist's worst nightmare. But I digress...) Today, the Wall Street Journal features a story about Midland (TX) Memorial Hospital finding an affordable, open-source alternative to proprietary EMR systems : "In the push to digitize America's hospitals, Midland Memorial faced an all-too-common dilemma: a crying need for information ...