field notes

Expect long lines at Apple Stores today for the long-awaited Apple Watch. This year alone UBS expects Apple to sell 25 million of them, with annual shipments reaching 68 million by 2018. Apple has a tendency to swoop in and dominate markets, as it did with smartphones, tablets, and personal audio, so it's not a big stretch to expect the company to accomplish the same thing with wearables. If so, it could open up a major new digital marketing channel uniquely suited to wearable tech.

In the early March demo event, Apple VP of technology Kevin Lynch used his Apple Watch to take a call, watch a video, and open a garage door among other things. And like other smartwatches, it can do things like track your heart rate and tell you when you've been sitting around for too long. An accelerometer measures total body movement, calories burned, and number of steps per day, and there's potential for countless health related applications, which is great news for healthcare digital marketers. Here are 3 reasons why the Apple Watch will be the new marketing frontier in healthcare.

This edition of Rhino Radio is a recap of the 2014 Greystone Healthcare Internet Conference presentation on "What's next in healthcare digital marketing?" 

A recent PwC study quote recently got me thinking: “As ‘patients’ behave more like ‘consumers,’ health care organizations need to deliver a higher level of personalized service, satisfaction and overall experience – or risk losing business to the competition.”

If you’re a hospital digital marketer, you need to be creating online treatment programs. Here are 5 reasons why.

Car websites have cars. Zappos has shoes and product videos. Apple has shiny gadgets beautifully photographed. Amazon has photos of products, the ability to look inside the pages of books and user feedback. Lots and lots of user feedback.

Fear is a powerful motivator. But as Solis Women’s Health found out, it can also be a powerful demotivator.

Studies prove it: people are incapable of making decisions without a little burst of dopamine – the brain's emotional happy juice. Smart marketers know emotion is the key.

Knowing how you stack up against competitors and peers in the healthcare marketplace can be extremely helpful.  You can see who is leveraging which digital tools, as well and who is leveraging those tools for success.  Geonetic recently polled 250  healthcare organizations to see how they use the Web and digital marketing to connect with their patients and communities.