For the first interview of my independent study, I had the opportunity to interview—not one, but two—communications leaders from the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (BCBSA) in Chicago. Paul Gerrard, Vice President, Strategic Communications, has spent his career working in communications. He’s had extensive experience in almost all marketing communications roles, and has worked in […]
In my final quarter in DePaul University’s New Media Studies MA program, I’m conducting an independent study where I’ll focus on healthcare and new media. I’m hoping to examine new media trends, challenges and opportunities around the healthcare industry—specifically pharmaceutical companies, healthcare systems and hospitals, health insurance companies, medical associations and other healthcare-related businesses. I’ll […]
Our new media team has strategically grown our medical association’s social presence beyond Facebook and Twitter, the two platforms which have become an absolute default for most brands. It can be a difficult task to determine where to go next. My team is exploring visual platforms, audio platforms and many others. Here are a few […]
Health campaigns have worked for decades to get people to quit smoking. Some have been successful and some have not. Campaigns have tried humor, they’ve highlighted future risks, they’ve shocked people, and many use visceral imagery to prompt people to quit. Two recent campaigns caught my attention and both get to the point in very […]
Originally posted on prad515spring2015:
I manage the social media platforms for a medical association and find myself with an abundance of text, data, and complicated health information to share with our community. Promoting text-heavy, clinical content can be a difficult task. However, I’ve found several ways to liven up content, entice others to pay…
In the blog, The Skeptic’s Guide to Low-Fidelity Prototyping, Laura Busche presents the case for building low-fidelity rough drafts of projects from websites to physical consumer goods. The author advocates for low-tech, paper copies for a number of reasons. First, low-fidelity tends to lower stakes in terms of time and effort to create, which allows for a […]
Can I wax mega nerd for a few minutes? Two of my favorite things in life are 1) fun technology, and 2) a great deal. When it came time to get rid of my gas-guzzling mom car a few months back, I started looking around at “regular” cars because I no longer needed a huge […]
September is Sepsis Awareness Month. Sepsis affects over 750,000 Americans each year, and 215,000 die from sepsis—making it one of the most common causes of death. You may have never heard the word sepsis (44% of Americans haven’t), but you’ve likely heard someone “dying of complications of ________” which is often sepsis. Sepsis occurs when […]
This post was written for my Internet and Interactive Marketing course at DePaul University and appeared on my class blog. For our assignment this week, we were asked to identify three social media dashboards for our client. The three tools topping our list were Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Bit.ly. All offer great features for managing […]
This post originally appeared on KevinMD in February 2014. We tweet about births, weddings, first days of school, anniversaries, illness, and mundane things like what we had for dinner last night. One area that seems to send shock waves and launches a thousand Mashablearticles is tweeting about someone dying. Last summer, NPR’s Scott Simon tweeted live from his mother’s […]
