During nothing more than a standard staff meeting in 2012, a revolutionary idea came to Chrissy Daniels.
Daniels, director of strategic initiatives at University of Utah Hospitals and Clinics in the US, was listening to a doctor complain about a negative review he had found of himself online.
“How are you going to take care of this?” the doctor asked hospital administrators. “You guys need to help me manage my online presence.”
If companies haven’t thought about a digital strategy yet, they are completely late to the game.
Some people would’ve thought about trying to have the bad review removed. Instead, Daniels dreamed up an idea to launch a new website for the group of university hospitals to publish every survey patients filled out about their doctors. It wasn’t just the good ones but everything, boiled down to a five-star rating system for the doctors.
“There was a lot of concern from the doctors and from some administrators,” Daniels recalled. “But being the consumer advocate, we know patients trust online reviews.”
Her hospitals were the first in the US to publish patient surveys. Now, four years later, Daniels’ model has become an industry norm, and many hospitals and major healthcare companies have followed suit.
More and more, creating a strategy for the web is something that’s becoming not an extra but a requirement for any forward-thinking executive.
“If companies haven’t thought about a digital strategy yet, they are completely late to the game,” said Robert Rooderkerk, assistant professor at the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University in the Netherlands.
First steps
There was a time when a company’s digital strategy involved little more than an infrequently updated Facebook page. But in many industries a digital strategy now includes a website with an online marketplace, social networking, search engine optimisation and online ads. More importantly, managers must know how to mine the digital data that can be collected about customers.
A digital strategy is much, much more than having just a Facebook page (Credit: Getty Images)
There’s a dramatic difference in how companies handle their digital strategies, according to Felix Oberholzer-Gee, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Many companies fail to understand how people use social networking and the new ways that people shop and research. They struggle to interact with customers on the web, and that can mean losing out in the competitive online marketplace, said Oberholzer-Gee, who’s leading a five-day executive education programme on digital strategy in April.
It’s similar to telemarketers calling during dinner. Many companies do nothing more than interrupt people online at the wrong times.
“Companies that have a poor digital strategy do nothing more than push customers away,” Oberholzer-Gee said. “It’s similar to telemarketers calling during dinner. Many companies do nothing more than interrupt people online at the wrong times.”
Luckily, it isn’t hard to get started. Rooderkerk said the first step is studying how competitors handle their web presence.
Next, do an assessment of what experts are already available at your company, which may mean figuring out who on staff knows social marketing and who has an understanding of online reviews. Then break off each piece into “bite-sized projects,” like assigning someone to monitor and respond to Amazon reviews, Rooderkerk said.
The key is to think of digital strategy beyond just hiring a marketing intern to monitor social networking. Rooderkerk said it’s about integrating web analytics into every department. For a middle-manager, it’s important to share new findings with other departments.
Keeping other departments up-to-date about the latest digital findings should be a regular part of meetings (Credit: iStock)
“Start small and look at the things that can be tackled fast,” Rooderkerk said. “This will give you momentum to take on the bigger parts of your strategy.”
What to do with the data
The next step is figuring out how to react with the knowledge they’ll be collecting. At good companies, feedback collected online becomes part of product development and improvements, said Kenny Ching, assistant professor of strategy at the University College London School of Management.
The best digital strategists realise this stuff is living and breathing and always changing.
The key to making sure this happens is creating a line of communication between those monitoring customer feedback on websites, like Facebook or Amazon, and the product teams that can react to the reviews.
“It used to be a long process to get feedback from customers,” Ching said. “With data collected digitally, feedback can be collected as soon as a new product is launched.” Maybe that data shows simply the positive versus negative reactions your product has received on Twitter, or perhaps it’s more detailed, like an analysis of suggested improvements from online review sites.
When that data begins coming in, it’s best to have a goal you want to achieve with that data, said Sam Fankuchen, CEO and founder of Golden, a Los Angeles-based company that connects non-profits to new volunteers. Whether it will support business development, partnerships with outside firms, or simply make the company more competitive, “you eventually have to have all three of those goals, but you have to start somewhere and picking one will help,” Fankuchen said.
The company-wide strategy
Once your company has caught on to the need to have a solid digital strategy, it’s then about integrating it across all departments, Fankuchen said. Then, every department head will be working with analytics from Facebook and Google and anywhere else that brings traffic to the company’s website. Weekly or daily meetings ought to discuss these analytics to understand changes in your customer base.
“The best digital strategists realise this stuff is living and breathing and always changing,” Fankuchen said.
When Daniels’ hospitals published the patient reviews, the reaction from patients was “amazing and swift”, Daniels recalled — an article in the local paper snowballing quickly into national coverage.
There was a concern at first that the reviews might unfairly tarnish the reputation of good doctors, Daniels said. Instead, doctors began reviewing their critiques and reacting to them in an effort to have a higher ranking — something Daniels said only made the hospital look better to patients.
Within two months, the patient reviews were dominating web search results for the hospitals’ doctors, beating out other review sites. Traffic quickly grew by 80%. Now, the patient reviews are often the top search result for University of Utah doctors.
One step leads to another
Perhaps the biggest takeaway for Daniels has been the power of online reviews and how they can often dictate decisions. Next up for University of Utah hospitals, she says, is an online scheduling system that patients have been asking for.
“You don’t need to be a web expert to understand your marketplace,” Daniels said. “If you can understand your marketplace, you can come up with a digital strategy.”
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