I often wonder why individuals and organizations in healthcare have really taken to the social media and usually look down on "blogging".  Perhaps it is caused by mainstream media's mentioning of twitter or others promises of what social media will do for healthcare.

If you cringe at the thought of your organization blogging or even raise an eye brow consider this, a blog is simple a chronologically organized content. A blog does not have to involve personal feelings, pointless rambling, or any other misconceptions you might have. In fact there are many reasons that a blog might be the PERFECT fit for your organization. If you want to develop web traffic, keep stakeholders informed of projects, share vision and values, or describe 'things to come' so that people are aware of what you working on then a blog is a great fit.

After a recent search of Canadian nursing organizations' websites I realized very few, if any, had a blog, news or updates section. I have two suspicions why this is, first no one wants to be in charge of the project and second no one wants to great more work for themselves or others. To counter this I would say 99% will not have to do (much) more work. Why? Because every organization is already generating the content that is almost perfect for this.

Walking through hospitals I constantly see newsletters, every few months I get numerous bulletins and magazines, I open my computer I get dozens of updates from organizations, and attending annual general meetings I sit for hours hearing about the things the organization has been working on. Every single one of these things is taking time to share what your organization is doing, and for some reason very few healthcare organizations are taking time to do this online line.

This is costing the organizations in different serious ways. First, for every hour that it might take to develop anyone of the previously listed things it might take a 10 minutes to make an internet posting out of it. Organizations are simply losing out on the chance to get significantly higher return by a small increase of effort into something they are already heavily invested in. The second thing the organization is losing is web traffic. This costs the organization the chance to tell their members and the public what they are doing. Increased content on an organization's website increases the search traffic for the entire website too. So although not ever article will being thousands of readers slowly increasing content helps more people find out about the work they are doing and services they offer.

If healthcare organizations are serious about getting on the web and engaging their members as well as the public they need to increase their online presence. Creating a blog is a simple and easy way to do this. Before beginning to walk you need to crawl, similarly before taking on highly complicated forms of social media healthcare organizations need to start with the basics.