Old school veterinary medicine and web2.0?
Someone I am very close to was recently writing an article for a professional journal for veterinarian medicine. She asked me to proof read the article, but was unhappy with my recommendations and suggestions. The topic of the article was the Internet and veterinarian medicine. She presented a couple of angles on the potential uses and misuses of the Internet by veterinarians but failed to mention web2.0, social networking, social media, and viral marketing.
She asked that I help her with some changes, but when I started making suggestions she was reluctant to include my changes in her article because the audience had never heard of “web2.0″ and were more concerned with the loss of prescriptions as a profit center to 1800petmeds.com.
I was taking the angle that the practices, universities, and other vet professions (like drug sales (e.g. 1800petmeds.com)) that aren’t taking advantage of new advertising media (e.g. social networking, viral marketing, etc.) would lose to those that do. I’m not an expert in the field, but even I see the changes that these technologies are causing in my business and my company is trying to find way to use them to our benefit.
Additionally, as clients get younger a yellow pages advertisement just doesn’t go as far as it used to. A friend of mine recently complained that his children couldn’t find something on the Internet when it was easy to find in the yellow pages and they just didn’t even think to look their first (or even second).
I think that most successful practices at this point do have Web sites, but do they allow e-mail appointments or respond to e-mails?
Should veterinarians start Facebook groups for their clients, blog on the latest epidemic in their regions, tweet suggested reading or even reminders for annual vaccines. Better yet, if they don’t will they lose out to those that do? After all, it’s a profession that is based upon a veterinarian-patient-client relationship and relationships are moving into cyberspace whether or not the practicing veterinarians want that or not.
I’d be happy to get some perspective from either veterinarians or cognoscenti in social media and new forms of advertising.
Being married to a retired veterinarian and working in social media, I have to agree with you. I do think that there is going to be a percentage of the veterinary world that “gets it” and those will be the ones that jump out to the head of the pack. Veterinarians, as a whole, are hard working, jack-of-all-trades in their practices and marketing often times gets left on the: “I’ll get to it some day” list. I was recently asked some questions regarding PR by a veterinary task force which resulted in a blog post: Social Media Marketing for Veterinarians. I was amazed when I started researching that very few veterinarians are out there doing ANY social media. Seem that as a profession they pretty much have the “stick up a website and they will come” mentality. I did discovered the American Veterinary Medical Association uses social media fairly well but that was about the extent of it. My conclusion was pretty much yours- you need to be where your clients are and you need to be listening and engaging or you are going to be out dated and left behind.