Social media has been around for about two decades now, believe it or not. The concept of it dates back all the way to 1994, with the now largely defunct GeoCities — which most of the technologically-inclined members of my generation used to build at least one very, very ugly site back in the late '90s. Within the past decade, however, social media as a term tends to be shorthand for more directly engaging things: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google Plus, YouTube, YouGetTheIdea.
The audience for all of these entities is comfortably up into the billions. Moreso than anything else in the history of our species, social media gives you the chance to reach all of the people all of the time — but beware, because you know what they say about pleasing a crowd that big.
And that's where data enters the picture. Analytics. Metrics. The quantitative measurement of things some may have thought unquantifiable: sentiment, interaction, engagement. Here at Penn Medicine, we use analytics to get a look at the bigger picture with regard to our social media presence. What's the size of our audience? What are they saying? How can we better interact with them? Things like that.
At some point, though, the usefulness of these reports breaks down. You can look at all the graphs and charts you like, but they're not going to be of much use when dealing with the day-to-day operations of social media management for a major medical system. It goes without saying that social media is a tremendously useful tool for interacting with patients, patients' families, students, and members of the community on a personal level, so in the end much of our self-assessment in this field doesn't come from a huge PDF of accumulated data — it comes from you.
Last week, Penn Medicine hospitals were ranked #7 in the nation and #1 in the region by US News & World Report. Obviously that's an achievement we're quite proud of, but on a personal level what I found much more exciting was the response the news got on Facebook:
Yes, we liked our own post. We were excited. Try not to judge too harshly.
If that's not the most popular post we've ever made, it's certainly among the most popular — and ahead of the overwhelming majority of our other posts by a longshot. And sure, those numbers are great. No doubt. But the most useful feedback we get has absolutely nothing to do with Likes or Shares or Retweets or Pokes. It has more to do with the actual replies we get, or the messages we receive, or the Tweets directed at us. Those are real voices from real people with real things to say, and even if it's less than 140 characters a single Tweet can tell us more about how we're doing than any spreadsheet could.
Of course, it's not always good stuff. We receive complaints, like any other institution of this size. For some, social media is the best (or maybe even only) way to reach out and get a real answer to their issue, and though not every complaint we receive can be handled immediately, we most definitely do read them all and do what we can to make sure the right people address the concerns being raised.
No matter the nature of an interaction, however, we don't waver in our efforts to continue providing the best services we can. Perhaps it is true that you cannot please all the people all the time, but that doesn't stop us from trying — and social media gives us a fantastic set of tools to make sure we're doing well by that mission.