Community relations 2.0

Before the Internet, organizations had far more time to monitor and respond to community activity, but that luxury is long gone, leaving them in dire need of a coherent outreach strategy, fresh skills, and adaptive tactics. Drawing on the authors' study of more than two dozen firms, this article describes the changes wrought by social media in particular and shows managers how to take advantage of them--lessons that Kaiser Permanente, Domino's, and others learned the hard way. Social media platforms enhance the power of communities by promoting deep relationships, facilitating rapid organization, improving the creation and synthesis of knowledge, and enabling robust filtering of information. The authors cite many examples from the health care industry, where social media participation is vigorous and influential. For instance, members of Sermo, an online network exclusively for doctors, used the site to call attention to and organize against insurers' proposed reimbursement cuts. And on PatientsLikeMe, where people share details about their chronic diseases and the treatments they've pursued, charts and progress curves help members visualize their own complex histories and allow comparisons and feedback among peers. As you modernize your company's approach to community outreach, you'll need to assemble a social media team equipped to identify new opportunities for engagement and prevent brand damage. In the most successful firms the authors studied, community management was a dedicated function, combining marketing, public relations, and information technology skills.