Views From the Cove
It’s inescapable. Someone on your social media feeds is looking for a recommendation. Everyone has an opinion or a favorite to share. No, we’re not referring to the latest fad diet, but rather podcasts. Podcasts continue to pop-up regularly and there are a ton to choose from. One recent survey estimates that there are around 700,000 podcasts in circulation with about 30 million individual episodes floating out there.
This upcoming Saturday is the 144th running of horse racing’s most famous event – the Kentucky Derby. Even for the most casual of fans, the tradition, and pomp of Churchill Downs, combined with the thrill of the “greatest two minutes in sports” make for a must-watch event.
The power of sports is when they transcend beyond a score-keeping, win-loss construct to become a true inspiration for our lives. In 2009, the Kentucky Derby offered just such a moment. That year, on a muddy, sloppy track, a little-known horse, running at long odds to win, made a last-to-first dash into the history books.
When that horse, Mine That Bird, stormed across the finish, it gave all of us a powerful reminder to think about each time we step to the starting gate.
Hint: It doesn’t.
In our digital, post-microwave, post-dialup internet age, we expect ideas to come fast and solutions to come faster. After all, just one search of “going viral” in Google yields a mere 11,600,000 results in just 0.55 seconds.
In many ways, this mindset has carried over into the business world. We put up billboards and expect customers to roll in. One whitepaper will rock the industry. Hockey-stick growth, people.
Everyone’s innovating and everyone wants to go viral.
This phenomenon of the lightning-fast spread of information is beautiful. But, age-old marketing theories and principles still work in 2018. They serve to realign our expectations with reality, while teaching us to appreciate the milestones along the way.
The power of social media cannot be overstated. From overthrowing repressive governments to exposing environmental risks, to helping locate people in crisis, social media has the ability to shine a light on the world.
Given social media’s strength, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it can even help nurture and develop leads in the business-to-business sales process. Eighty percent of leads in the B2B world come from LinkedIn.
Yet, despite the success of social media, and LinkedIn in particular, many businesses and professionals are hesitant to dip their toes in the water. Why? That’s hard to say. But, what we do know is that the more you put into LinkedIn, the more you will get out.
Healthcare is an industry prone to change. Patient populations evolve constantly as new generations bring new habits, values, expectations and needs. For healthcare providers, keeping pace is a challenge.
Whether we like it or not, today’s patients are consumers. Healthcare orgniazations need to recognize this and ask themselves the question: how can we create customer loyalty?
“[I don’t] give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.” Bold, and surprising, words coming from one our country’s most famous writers, Mark Twain. With all due respect to Twain, we disagree. In business, spelling is more than the correct ordering of letters on a page – it’s your credibility, your professionalism, and your brand on the line.
Look above. Is that single line of text the reason you’re reading this? We are bombarded by headlines all day, each one attempting to lure us in, tell us about a hot news topic or convince us to buy something. And a bad headline, frankly, is like beautifully staging a house for sale, but doing little to create curb appeal.
