The Web and Social Media: Challenges & Opportunities
Mapping out your mission on the Internet
By Allan Barker, OD, and Russ Tolar, FNAO
No doubt the Internet presents challenges to eyecare professionals. An entire career’s worth of professional labors can be put in question and even jeopardized by poor patient online reviews. Medicare is also expanding into a system of practitioner evaluations made public over its website. There are even sites where one can pay to extinguish negative patient reviews. However, opportunities also abound and often far outweigh the challenges. Everyday, we find new and innovative ways to reach our patients and utilize the Internet to further enhance our patient care and administrative efficiency—it is an interesting time.
BUILDING PERSPECTIVE
A recent evaluation of our social media participation can help put into perspective social media’s impact on your practice today. An evaluation of our new Facebook fans, posts (number of times fans and non-fans have seen a status update), and interaction (likes and comments) revealed an annual run rate of 676 new fans, 197,054 posts, and 1,092 interactions. A similar evaluation of Twitter revealed an annual run rate of 520 Twitter followers and 3,380 tweets.
Eyecarecenter, OD, PA, has 54 offices and sees more than 150,000 patients per year. Reviewing records of the past 3.5 years and considering new and repeat visits, there are approximately 400,000 active patients in our files. We need to keep social media’s impact in perspective. However, we are only on the “ground floor,” and the future may produce much more staggering numbers. Though ECPs should not overestimate the power of the Internet, we shouldn’t underestimate it either. Much insight can be gleaned from the 2010 Vision Council Internet Influence Study. For example, nine out of 10 (92 percent) of your patients use the web. One of every three of your patients are using the net for basic product or vendor research (32 percent) or pricing research (34 percent). This means that more and more patients will come into your office with preconceived notions of what they want. One in four patients (27 percent) are online to research and select products and then purchase these products in person. Thus, even though one in three of your patients is seeking knowledge from the Internet, one in four are then using brick-and-mortar sites to make their purchases. However, before we become too smug, that also means that the difference between one in three and one in four, about one in 12 patients (nine percent), are using the Internet for both the decision making process and the purchase.
Eyecarecenter, OD, PA’s website
Also, we should not fool ourselves into thinking that patients utilizing the web are not happy and satisfied. About 86 percent rated their online contact lens purchases as “excellent” or “good,” while only three percent rated their experiences as “poor” or “very bad.” Those who purchased eyeglasses over the web gave similar responses in the Vision Watch Survey. About 95 percent of these tech-savvy eyeglass purchasers rated their experience as “good” or “excellent.” Though some practitioners contend that their patients will be unhappy with their online purchases due to product inferiority, this would appear to be a lesser number than one might imagine according to statistics. Unfortunately, many patients are also bragging to their friends about how much money they saved.
WHAT’S A PRACTITIONER TO DO?
First, if we want to protect our eyeglass business, we can learn from the contact lens experience. The Vision Council Internet Survey regarding contact lens patients reveals that 51 percent perceived online purchases as less costly. About 14 percent perceived their selection as being better online, even though, theoretically, we are talking about filling doctor prescription where more selection should not be an issue. Around 39 percent perceived the transaction to be easier online. Thus, these perceptions indicate that the eyecare practitioner needs to be cognizant of cost, selection, delivery time, and ease of transaction or they can expect the further erosion of in-person eyeglass sales to mirror what has already transpired in the contact lens market.
Second, we need to provide a website that makes sense. Some eyecare practitioners elect to provide eyeglasses and contact lens selection sites to their patients as a convenience. But, most practitioners have bills to pay and payrolls to meet. If you elect to provide a website, it needs to be treated as a profit center and not a free service.
There are numerous ways to drive patients to and promote your sites, including recall notices, office signage and messaging, prescription pads, bags dispensed with materials, business cards, inclusion in all forms of mass media marketing, websites, web portals, Facebook and Twitter, verbal communications with patients, and designated ordering computers on site within the office.
Next, we launched our first social media campaign to provide valuable vision health education and content to our patient base and to drive new patient traffic to our offices. We also hired an in-house media specialist to manage and monitor our social media accounts and consumer website.
Twitter and Facebook pages help develop connections
We initially selected Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, and 4Square. Most recently, we have narrowed our focus to Facebook and Twitter. In order to keep our fans and followers engaged and interested, we create daily educational content that covers a variety of categories, such as children’s vision, visual fatigue, celebrity and pop culture, and general vision research.
Another part of this involved staff training centered around conveying our social media initiatives to staff. Staff inclusion in goal initiatives is imperative for any office endeavor. Our marketing department has created in-office point-of-purchase signage and social media business cards.
Now patients can connect with us after their visit. Another facet involves responding to consumer questions and comments over Facebook. This includes negative comments that we cannot delete, but at least we can demonstrate our responsiveness. Additionally, we use social media to connect to patients and communities through posting our local awards and charity involvements. EB
| CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES |
|---|
| CHALLENGES Electronic Health Records Electronic Health Records can be challenging to implement. However, these are minor compared with the deciphering of hand-written patient charts. Just ask any staff member interpreting the hieroglyphics in a patient’s chart when trying to order or reorder eyeglasses or contact lenses. In the 21st century, charts must be standardized and legible. That’s not too much to ask 212 years after the Rosetta Stone was discovered! The government views electronic health records as a key to reducing Medicare and Medicaid costs by improving efficiency of healthcare delivery and overall patient health. With that in mind, the government passed the $787 billion dollar American Recovery and Reinvestment Act providing $19 billion dollars to incentivize doctors to adopt electronic health records in their practices. Patients are now even creating their own personal health records utilizing Microsoft Healthvault Personal Health Records and other similar programs. Regulations There are 50 state optometry boards and almost as many optician boards that control professional practices, including marketing and advertising. At one time, state boards disciplined practitioners for such infractions as having letters on their signage that were too large or frames visible from the street. The Internet, however, is almost impossible to control. Patients are being misled and confused on a daily basis by what they see online. Though most state laws contain specific language directed at false and misleading advertising, there has not been much done to enforce these provisions when it comes to the web. One of the biggest challenges is that most state regulatory agencies don’t work on “internet time.” A recent lecturer from the ophthalmic industry was discussing a corporate website coming out this year. The current website, implemented in 2006, was referred to as ancient. The future presents a conundrum between a free market economy and a free-for-all system where patient prescriptions are up for grabs with little regulatory control. Directing Patients to Your Online Optical Many people go to brick and mortar locations (brick) and then order over the Internet (click). Or they shop online (click) and then go to brick-and-mortar (brick) locations for their purchases. Without an Internet ordering site, the eyecare practitioner is a brick with no click. Many independents are embracing their own websites in an effort to capture their patients’ online purchases. In general, it has not produced desired results. While they make the eyecare practitioner feel good about fighting back, they rarely if ever produce sales to brag about. In a perfect world, the independent eyecare practitioner has patients purchasing their materials at the doctor’s office or through an Internet site sponsored and controlled by their doctor’s office. Any other method would result in two negative outcomes: the loss of a sale and the loss of patient control. When a patient selects a competitor’s website, the competitor not only tries to make a one-time sale but also often attempts to redirect the patient for eye examinations, solutions, multiple eyeglass sales, as well as advise on care regimens. Thus the doctor-patient relationship becomes both jeopardized and compromised. OPPORTUNITIES Marketing Social media creates opportunities to market one’s practice. As with any new opportunity, there is no shortage of people waiting to take your money. Eyecare practitioners need to be vigilant and intelligent in allocating their marketing dollars to social media. Internet marketing includes a variety of possibilities: web design, search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click advertising, email marketing, reputation management, business listing management, social media, link building, interactive advertising, high-definition video, blog marketing, autoresponder marketing, and site retargeting are some, but not all, of the potential avenues to market a practice. The primary goal is to grow your practice by interacting with others in a cost-effective manner. There are far more than 200,000,000 people in the U.S. who have access to your Internet marketing messages—99.99 percent will never bring you business. On the other hand, the average practice sees roughly 3,000 patients a year, and this is your marketing target. Just having a website without any specific promotion or search optimization is like having a practice in North Carolina and putting a billboard advertisement for it in Montana. Patient Privacy and Security The Internet has allowed ECPs to transmit data instantaneously. However, this data needs to be professionally handled. That means patient privacy must be respected. HIPPA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliance and encrypted data transmission are essential. Taking ocular photos with a Blackberry and transmitting that data over an unsecured Internet portal does not qualify as professional; nor does it properly respect minimal patient privacy criteria. There is an opportunity to be part of a medical model that allows for the exchange of encrypted data between various providers such as optometrists, ophthalmologists, other physician specialties, and hospital facilities. Included in privacy is also the issue of security, which concerns many. Insecure networks continue to plague independent eyecare practitioners. APPS Apps, short for applications, can be a great marketing tool. We use our QR app, which is personalized with our company mark, to direct people to our website. It’s possible to foresee apps for refractions that can be performed via patients’ phones. This shouldn’t threaten ECPs any more than they are threatened by an auto-refractor. However, if one is merely a refractionist and not a primary eyecare provider, the threat is real. This forward thinking accentuates the importance of the medical model for the future of optometry. |
![]({"src":"/media/u3nlbhdl/32012.jpg","focalPoint":null,"crops":[{"alias":"thumbnail","width":1110,"height":700,"coordinates":null}]})