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You know there's no doubt about it that social media is revolutionizing corporate communications
and PR. My father started Ragan Communications in 1968 if you can believe that, and back
then communication consisted of basically an employee publication, putting out press
releases, and most importantly, information cascading down from the C suite to the little
people. What social media does is create a conversation with an organization. A conversation
and ideas flowing back and forth from the C suite to front line employees, middle
managers and then back again. The whole idea behind social media is to remove the middleman
so to speak, or the middlewoman, and get everyone to connect in this one huge knowledge base
through conversation, through sharing, through searching, meta-tagging. It's a wonderful
tool, and 5 to 6 years from now, everyone is going to be doing it. A video occupies
an important aspect of social media because let's face it, people just don't read that
much anymore. We see this in statistics all the time. So if you're good at shooting tight
videos, if you're good at making those videos both informative and entertaining. I do believe
there's an expectation of entertainment in social media, then those videos are going
to be cherished by employees. I call it information snacking. You know, little videos here and
there that are either training in nature or communicating missions, change management.
Information snacking, that's the way people like to consume information today. One of
the biggest objections we get at Ragan Communications is this stuff is too hard, it's too much of
a drain on our resources. Who's going to do the work? And the C suite, it's kind of
skeptical. Well what we like to say to those people is calm down, relax, pick one thing
and do it well, and then, take baby steps. Don't try to get everything done at once.
You do that, you're going to sink the ship. So for example, perhaps you want to launch
a blog, a temporary blog that's built around say the company sale's meeting or the global
town hall meeting, and you set up this blog and you write a really compelling, riveting
copy around that blog. Good headlines, everything we were taught in writing school or journalism.
That blog is probably going to be a success. People are going to join the conversation.
They're going to like it. Now with that success behind you, you can reach out now and do other
things. Maybe you create a Facebook page. Maybe you go to Twitter, LinkedIn. But the
important thing is dip your toe in the water. Dip your toe in the water. That's how you
get started, and as far as resistance from the C suite and the executive level, that
temporary blog or that first toe in the water will help them understand that hey, the sky
didn't fall in after all. If you weren't able to attend the Health Care Communicators Summit
at Kaiser in Oakland, it was just an extraordinary experience. One thing I say about healthcare
communications is that if I were working in social media, I would be wanting to work in
the healthcare industry, and why is that? That's because social media, good social media,
is about people and content, and storytelling, and there are few industries that have more
and better stories to tell than healthcare. Think about what you're doing. You're talking
about saving lives. You're talking about heroes on your nursing staff. You're talking about
people trying to overcome disabilities and challenges. All of that makes for good, good
storytelling, and good storytelling makes for good social media.