Making Doctor Google Work For You: Managing Digital Reputation on Social, Web, Directories, Reviews, SEO, SEM, and Location-Based Media Platforms

Editor's Notes

1. Can be difficult to work out where things are – what should you do? Are you heading in the right direction? etc
2. Physician reputation might look like this – totally undifferentiated
3. Might look like this – aged, decrepit and in need of significant restoration, or perhaps just a mess?
4. We want to be unique – the USP
5. First let’s step back to the big picture: why are you managing physician reputation?
6. Make sure that the clinician is providing good services before you start worrying
7. Your job shouldn’t be to try and sugar coat things or to wrap them in blankets – you need to show them reality, good or bad.
8. And sometimes no matter what, there is only so many sprinkles you can put on a turd
9. Almost invariably, this means google.
10. You need to take them on a journey. This isn’t some kind of magical fix that happens overnight. It takes time and effort, and everyone’s mileage may vary.
11. Your role should be to lead and show them the way, not to baby feed them or outsource all responsibility. You might be wanting to / willing to outsource monitoring, but it should be the physician’s decision / role to respond (with your counsel), and they should be the engine behind the content, not some weird SEO agency ;)
12. And oftentimes for some physicians it feels like they are lost in the universe and they have no idea where to go or what to do (see MCSMN). Make them (the physician) understand the importance of patient feedback irrespective of channel – one of the best ways to keep complaints “out of the spotlight” is to give a clear avenue to complain privately, e.g. through post-consult survey. People who love your services, you can prompt / ask them to provide a review on particular channels. Those who hate, you don’t ask them to blast that on social media.
13. Sometimes we need to just give them the little shove off the cliff to get them to provide a positive comment – less likely to make positive comment than negative without a prompt.
14. In the oldschool world, you controlled the message. You no longer have that ability – when should you delete? Side on the side of never, unless there are significant inaccuracies.
15. Start small, then ‘go viral’. Have a website, have a presence and make sure that you own the properties you an – e.g. google listing, ‘find doctor’ listing (see Chris B), social media profile(s) etc. That’s no longer hard – sites like wordpress or squarespace mean that it’s now easy to build your own site and publish content. The pineapple is unique. Don’t expect someone else to ‘get’ your brand. Outsourcing your reputation is outsourcing core business – dumb idea.
16. Don’t be afraid to experiment