ANNOUNCEMENT: WordPress Migration…Our New Home

INK WELLness is beginning it’s exciting migration from wordpress.com to wordpress.org.  If you are an INK WELLness subscriber, the transition should be flawless.  If you are not, simply visit inkwellness.com.  INK WELLness will be powering it’s website with WordPress.org to provide better access, information, and a more comprehensive, interactive website.  Our company is growing!  Health communications are growing.  I hope you continue to grow with us.

Join us for our upcoming “house warming” as we move and flow into our new space: inkwellness.com

Series: Free Back Stage Pass: Bring Health Conference Info to your Customers. Bird’s Eye View.

So, now I’ve got you thinking, right?  If you’re not, go on back to my first post of this series and think again.  Health conferences are a hot bed of cutting edge information.  They feature the best and the brightest.  They have that Vegas-like aura that at once sucks all natural air and light out of the conference center and breathes inspiration and renewal into its attendees.  Share this with your clients.  They want to know.  Let’s face it: time, money, travel are all barriers to people attending conferences but why should those things be barriers to receiving the information?   The Back Stage Pass Series is going to outline for you how to utilize written communication to position yourself as an expert who is in the know.

Three Techniques for Health Conference Coverage.

1. Summarize conference session information, on behalf of your organization.  This means you or one of your employees attend a relevant, current, cutting edge, or even controversial session and summarizes the information for your audience.

2.  Interview a “thought leader” in the health industry who has attended a specific conference session.  Get his/her point of view regarding the information’s relevance, potential impact on the industry, and expectations of how the information comes into practice.

3.  Interview the conference presenter.  Most likely a thought leader, eh?  Understand additional insights the presenter has.  Gather his/her thoughts on feedback received after the presentation.

Ready to dig in?  Then hang on.  INK WELLness will cover each of these techniques in-depth.  Can’t wait to hear your thoughts.

In the mean time, here are some overall thoughts about writing health conference coverage:

1.  Be discriminating.  Choose your conferences and conference courses wisely.  The information has to be fresh.  It has to be sought after by your readers.  It should be exciting, inspirational, even controversial and it absolutely has to relate to your brand or product.

2. Be fair.  Give credit where credit is due.  You have to attribute the information to the source.  Who is the presenter and his/her credentials?  What is the exact title of the course?  The exact conference/date?  The resources the presenter cited?  This is especially important if you chose to employ the technique of sharing the actual presentation slides.

3.  Be free.  To avoid ANY copyright problems, the publication should be open-sourced, which means you are publishing the data online or in a print publication that anyone can access without being charged.  And, as a professional courtesy, I personally would notify the presenter that the information is being shared.  They’ll probably like the press.

4.  Do it yourself, or not.  If you’re going to be at the conference anyway and you consider yourself an excellent written communicator…write on!  If not, it’s not a bad way to spend your money to hire a professional writer with experience in conference coverage or your industry to sit in and write the synopsis for you.  If the conference is across the country, hire one is operates out of that region.  It saves you time, resources, and money and gets the word out faster and professionally.

Free Back Stage Pass: Bring Health Conference Info to your Customers

Be in “the know.”

Back in the days when I worked in in-patient rehabilitation, I always took advantage of my yearly continuing education benefit.  Each employee was allowed an annual stipend to further his or her skills, paid for by the department.  In exchange for this free education, each employee attending a conference or course was expected to present the information learned to the rest of the rehabilitation staff within two weeks of completion.  The process integrated learning ingested in the classroom by creating teacher of the student and it extended the “bang for the buck” put out by the hospital’s rehab department because the knowledge was shared with the entire staff for the cost of sending just one.

“Brilliant!”  I thought to myself when I learned from a medical writing collegue that this process is alive and well in the pharmaceutical world.  Independent companies, mostly open- source online, provide blow by blow coverage at relevant conferences keeping their subscribers up to date with the latest research, knowledge, practices, and trends throughout their industry. These companies hire writers to attend the most attractive presentations and pay them to write a report, which appears on their website within 24-48 hrs of the presentation.

I immediately thought of the forrest of booths budding with marketing professionals in khakis and logo golf shirts that crowd the conference hall, that looks like any other conference hall and how their time could be used for things other than re-arranging the give-away key chains.  I began thinking of my conversation with my fellow medical writer and brainstorming ideas about how other health companies could tailor these same methods of sharing employeed by those in the pharmaceutical world.  Everyone wants the latest.  Everyone wants the greatest.  The newest.  The coolest.  Everyone wants to be the first.  How many of us would pass up bragging rights to the coveted “back stage pass?”

What can you learn from this?  How can providing cutting-edge information to  your customers be mutually beneficial?  And what are some strategies to integrate conference coverage into your up-to-the-minute subject matter expert position?  Think blog.  Think website.  Newsletters.  Eblasts.  Yes, you the man!

This week I will follow up with a mulit-part series about specific techniques your health and wellness company can use to capitalize information gleened at conferences and courses to advance your company’s health communications.

You’re already attending the conference, right?  Why not share your experience?  Hand out that back stage pass!

Re-Imagine Health and Medical Communication

What works to engage consumers of health.  Is it fear?  What drives them to make choices and how can your health communication connect and drive them to better health?

TEDMED.

Chose one sample of your company’s health communication and re-imagine it using the principles presented above.

Please share your thoughts on how you might achieve greater engagement.

Contact Ink Wellness health writing services to help you achieve greater connectivity and better patient results.

WordPress Meet Up: 5 Resources for a Better Blog

A blog is a key opportunity for health and wellness companies to build community, share information, and establish expertise.  WordPress is a fabulous (and free) tool, a tool about which I, myself, am in the infancy of learning.  I attend a local meetup for WordPress users, designers, and programmers and would like to share a few resources I found super helpful.  Watch for changes I make in the process and implement some yourself!

1.  If you don’t belong to a Meet up and want to find one in your area, go to meetup.com and find meet ups in all subjects.  In my area, alone, there are several meetups for bloggers, marketers, WordPress users, social media.  It’s a great, and usually free, way to get information and network with people of all levels of learning and expertise.

2.  tentblogger.com is a very useful website/blog for beginning wordpress users.  The founder, our speaker for the evening, has enjoyed wild success blogging and shares very applicable information.  See “series” section, specifically.

3.  Social Triggers  is a website that explains the psychology behind online marketing like what people respond to on web and blog design.  Great, practical informaiton.  Apply it today!

4. wordpress.tv  Videos and webcourses for all things WordPress, including sessions from Wordcamp conferences nation wide.  Beginners-expert.

5. New Tricks  WordPress designer.  Also offers great free information for all levels of WordPress users.

Now, get out there, take 20 minutes and start a WordPress website. Begin blogging content.  Content is the key to every wildly successful blog.  Don’t wait for the perfect design.  Don’t wait to learn everything there is to know about blogging.  Get out there and do it.  Now!

… And send me your link.  I’d love to see what you’ve come up with!

American Medical Writers Association: Statistics Completion

Just finished the AMWA Statistics for Medical Writers and Editors Course.  It was a doozie!

Contact Ink WELLness Health and Wellness Writing Services for your writing and communication needs.

sbaca.inkwellness@gmail.com

Human Subjects and Your Own Internal Review Board

Our subjects in health and wellness communication are humans.  Humans read what we write.  Humans follow what we advise.  Humans buy what we promote.  That is a pretty heavy responsibility.

In his presentation to AMWA-Southeast about the CDC (Center for Disease Control), Dennis Tolsma MPH spoke about one of the CDC’s greatest blunder: The Tuskegee Syphillis Experiment.  Much has been written about it but, to boil it down, the research failed the people, the “human subjects”, involved in the study.

Bringing this blunder down to our own day-to-day functions, let it teach us that what we say matters.  When we communicate health information and education to people, real people, we are responsible for ensuring it is reliable, responsible, and never forget the potential human impact in our quest for sales, money, research.

Put in place your own IRB, internal review board, formal or informal.  Surround yourself with professionals who add expertise and perspective to your communication.  Surround yourself with people who have your clients’ best interests in mind.  Surround yourself with the people you serve to ensure you understand their needs, beliefs, culture, rights.  Never disconnect yourself from the latter group.  Pass your stuff through your IRB on a regular basis.  We all need reviewed, challenged, questioned.  It’s our responsibility to our fellow human beings.

Appropriate or Shameful? Childhood Obesity Campaign. Thoughts?

http://connect.facebook.net/rsrc.php/v1/yD/r/GL74y29Am1r.swf

http://www.facebook.com/dialog/oauth?api_key=79439656165&app_id=79439656165&channel_url=https%3A%2F%2Fs-static.ak.fbcdn.net%2Fconnect%2Fxd_proxy.php%3Fversion%3D3%23cb%3Df2770193717e49c%26origin%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Finkwellness.wordpress.com%252Ff125209b7cff31a%26relation%3Dparent.parent%26transport%3Dpostmessage&client_id=79439656165&display=none&domain=inkwellness.wordpress.com&locale=en_US&origin=1&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fs-static.ak.fbcdn.net%2Fconnect%2Fxd_proxy.php%3Fversion%3D3%23cb%3Df3ae3827b22362c%26origin%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Finkwellness.wordpress.com%252Ff125209b7cff31a%26relation%3Dparent%26transport%3Dpostmessage%26frame%3Df1d5c39d3c4568c&response_type=token%2Csigned_request%2Ccode&sdk=joey

Given the principles posted yesterday, specifically #4:  Drive Out Fear (and tough love), what are your feelings about Georgia’s obesity campaign?

http://www.obesityaction.org/childhoodobesitystigma.php

“All I Know of Health Ed/Communication” 6 Principles:

Attended the AMWA-Southeast Regional meeting.  We were fortunate to have a speaker from the CDC (Center for Disease Control).  Dennis Tolsma, MPH spoke about his career, both with the CDC and Kaiser Permenente to our group of medical writers.  I would like to share his principles about health education and communication that he learned through his storied career.

1.  Don’t expect just 1 message, brochure, newsletter to do the job

2.  Health communication requires multiple messages, channels and times to get your communication across

3.  Say it simply, clearly and do it with a professional polish (it’s gotta look good too!)

4.  Drive out FEAR (and tough love).  Communicating your message through fear tactics and shaming your audience rarely, if ever, works toward real change.

5.  Information should be data driven, not just appealing to emotions.

6.  PSDA – Plan it, Do it, Study it, Act on it

Our job as health professionals is to be familiar with applied research findings in our fields and translate those findings to the bedside through methods, strategies, and programs.

Thanks to Dennis Tolsma for his wisdom and point of view.

What Paula Deen Can Teach Us About Walking the Walk

http://www.fotopedia.com/items/flickr-71922825/slideshow  photo attribution

If you haven’t heard, chef Paula Deen has announced that she has diabetes, a terrible affliction, yet she is receiving much criticism for her butter-heavy cooking.  Though Deen has not spoken of the details of her condition, many believe the “no daa” explanation in regard to her calorie-laden cooking.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/18/paula-deen-diabetes_n_1212614.html?ref=health-news&ir=Health%20News

Why does this matter to those of us who work in the health field?

It’s funny this topic should come about now, after I (and many of you, I assume) have taken advantage of the new year to re-assess and plot our goals.  The thought has crossed my mind that, if I am a health and wellness writer, shouldn’t I be practicing a healthy lifestyle.  Aren’t I a walking billboard for my business and my beliefs?  I think, “yes”.

Though Paula was not out preaching healthy eating by any measure, she is under the microscope and her brand is open to criticism possibly because of her personal lifestyle choices (diet).

My question to you is, are you making choices in your own life that reflect the values of your company, which is undeniably linked to your personal brand?  I’ve seen many a competent nurse who is overweight.  I’ve know many smokers in the health industry.  I’ve worked along physical therapists who rarely exercise.  What are these dichotomies communicating to our patients/clients?  Perhaps it’s time to account for and take responsibility for our most important walking, talking billboards: ourselves.