Jon Bishop, who helped Netcare tackle new media, is talking about turning your target markets into your audience.

Some of the communication challenges in the group:
- Hospitals are flooded with posters
- Nurses are not PC based
- Nurses are overworked with little time to read posters, memos etc.
Some of the marketing challenges in the group:
- Brand identity and disparity between subbrands and main brand
- Regulations
- No available helath talk show channels on traditional media
- Internal communciation channels
- Specific challenge to engage nurses
Web 2.0 - the internet's effect on healthcare:
- Consumers want to be entertained
- Accessibility means consumers do a lof of research in a short space of time
- Brand messaging can no longer be pushed onto consumers, they must be invited
- Marketing leans more towards communication today
- Consumers choose when and where they want to interact with your brand
- Funny, interesting or controversial
Interesting: "62% of the content consumed by people born after 1980 is created by someone they know" - Shel Holz. Most of these people are reading and viewing content created by friends, friends of friends, colleagues etc.
Jon plays the
"Will it blend" viral video, where a lab technician puts an iPhone into a blender and shreds it to pieces. The audience loves it. Wonder if it makes more people buy these blenders? Not so sure. But it's a good example of the viral potential of video.
What Netcare did: - They redesigned their website completely (to quote Jon, the old one was "a disgrace")
- Follow best practice and create new ones
- First do the basics well, to be able to prove the worth of new technologies to management
- The most popular feature on their site: Netcute babies. Auto refreshing baby pics of newborns at Netcare hospitals. This went viral.
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- Human body procedure map: find out exactly what the surgery procedure will entail, if you're scheduled for an operation
- Online pre-admissions
- Making all relevant data available within 3 clicks
- Audio and image presentation archives available
- Consistent design across all brand sites
- Social bookmarking
- Digital screen networks - plasma screens across 100 facilities - including centralised and targeted messaging, entertainment and education
- MMS messaging to staff cellphones, with groupable messages and response SMS
- Doctors' wiki: doctors share and modify medical info and experiences privately on the Netcare intranet, only available to Netcare doctors
- Snap Comms: an internal communications platform; pop-up alerts, screensavers, quizzes and RSS feeds that operate across internal staff workstations only and can also deliver podcasts and videos. Jon is now a Snap Comms consultant, so it must be impressive :)
What Netcare is planning to do: - Netcare 911 video widget and online Netcare videos
- Intranet revamp with RSS feeds and podcast platforms
- Netcare 911 news alerts Twitter feed
- Netcare 911 story blog