Should your hospital use Pinterest?

Pinterest can help put a personal face on health care—connecting with consumers on health-related matters. While it isn’t where consumers go for serious medical content, users spend time with Pinterest in the same way they read magazines—looking for inspiration and ideas.

With that in mind, here are some Pinterest boards hospitals might consider creating to start engaging consumer networks:

• Popular baby names
• Creative baby announcement
• Best gifts for patients
• Healthy tips
• Healthy recipes
• Healthy snacks children will eat
• Newborns (baby picture, interesting newborn shots)
• Encouraging words
• Healing design (architectural images)
• Recommended books on health
• Hospital gala ideas
• Causes
• Inside the hospital (hire a photojournalist to capture engaging photos of people that depict the messages you want to convey)

For more inspiration, check out how other hospitals, like Rex Healthcare , Baylor Health Care System and the Cleveland Clinic are using Pinterest.

Like all social networks, Pinterest needs to have a steady supply of fresh content. So before adding this to your social media channels, think about how you might engage talent from throughout the hospital. Perhaps you have a creative dietician who’d like to be responsible for healthy recipes, or an OB staff member with expertise in photography.

Before heading down this road, make sure you check Pinterest’s latest guidelines for business—which has ever-morphing rules about self-promotion.

Image Source: www.pinterest.com/rexhealthcare/

Five Ways Good Design Can Make Your Business More Successful: Part 2

In our last blog entry, we talked about how people now expect good design in everything from their consumer goods to their entertainment—and shared two of the five ways good design can make your business more successful.  Here are the remaining three:

Good design differentiates
Find three random Web sites—for services or products you’re unfamiliar with—and spend five seconds looking at each of their home pages. Then determine which company was good, which was better and which was best. You don’t need a degree in art to discern this. While you may not be able to describe why you made the judgment, at the subconscious level you know. Good design immediately telegraphs competence.

Good design can elevate a brand
Good design can imply relevance, savvy, finesse and confidence. It can take a commodity product and make it prestigious. Starbucks is a good example of this. From packaging to place, they use good design to create a brand experience that persuades consumers to pay as much (or more) for their drink as they do for their lunch.

Good design demands attention
Good design can get your product or service noticed. It’s the front door to your brand. No one can appreciate your extraordinary service, your exceptional technology, your innovative prowess—without first visually assessing your product or service through the vehicles that express your brand visually.

You don’t have to be Apple or Target to make good design a competitive advantage. But you do have to make it a priority, commit resources to it and invest in hiring good professional designers—in the same way you’d hire accounting or legal expertise.

Make good design a strategic part of your visual brand—and see how it can transform your image. Your bottom line will thank you.

Image Source: www.starbucks.com

Five Ways Good Design Can Make Your Business More Successful: Part 1

Good design is a competitive advantage.

So if your visual brand—the things people can see about your company like your Web site, advertising, logo and communications—isn’t measuring up, it’s almost certain your reputation and revenues will suffer.

Today’s consumer has very sophisticated visual tastes. We have come to expect good design in everything from our toasters to our entertainment to our vehicles because we can. 

If you’ve always thought of good design as a luxury, or a tool of the select, it’s time to rethink your brand management. Here’s the first in a two-part series about what good design could be doing for you:

Design reinforces your brand message—sometimes delivering it more powerfully than words
Apple has managed to sell a commodity item—the personal computer—to consumers who were afraid of computers. Their design—simple, serene, calming—suggests confidence, accessibility and lack of complexity. It telegraphs “I’m not as complicated as you think.” It breaks down fear. Alas, it allures—before a single word has even been spoken.

Good design pleases
Beauty is an elixir for stress. Bombarded by images all day long, we yearn for something that settles our soul—and often find this yearning tended by visual beauty, whether it’s natural or human-inspired.  Successful businesses know that beauty and good design sells. Target has masterfully understood this, bringing good design to consumer products as simple as desk accessories and spatulas.

In our next blog entry, we’ll share the remaining three ways design can make your business successful. In the meantime, can you add any examples?

Image Source: www.apple.com

For the Love of Letterpress

Perhaps we should thank Martha Stewart for the renewed interest in letterpress printing, since she's been advocating use of this beautiful reproduction technique for wedding invitations for some time. 

It's easy to see why people are attracted to this style of printing: the tactile experience exudes quality.

However, before deciding to use letterpress for your next project, spend a few minutes to consider if it's right for you. Because colors are applied one at time, letterpress printing is best for one- or two-color designs. Using three or more colors significantly increases the cost. Remember too that photographs are impossible to reproduce with this style of printing.

We couldn't resist using this technique for our new business cards—and love the results!

The Secret to Selling: What Great Leaders Know

Why do some companies outperform others? Why do some people achieve things others do not? Why do some leaders inspire, while others don’t?
 
In this Ted Talk, Simon Sinek asserts that all great leaders think, act and communicate differently than others. They stay focused on the question of “Why?”—which engages humans at a deeper level than facts alone.
 
Sinek says that people will buy what you sell if they believe what you believe. As he said, Martin Luther King gave a “I have a dream” speech, rather than “I have a plan” speech. In marketing, this means talking more about why we do what we do than about what we do.  
 
What’s the why behind your business? And how might that inspire others to buy what you have to sell?

15 Year Anniversary: New Ways of Helping You Succeed

In response to this changing landscape, we’ve been thinking about what will make you more successful. Out of this has grown the addition of several new services—and enhancements of existing services.

Video

We now have regional videographers in several major markets where we conduct a lot of work, so are able to compete even more competitively on the price of developing video productions. Consider us if you need:

• Simple, affordable mini-documentaries that feature high quality interviews and b-roll. Video is now a medium of choice if you ask many consumers how they want information, and a must have for any progressive organization’s Web site. See examples. 
• Creative, emotive pieces that reinforce messages, mission and culture or inspire people to buy, give, support, join or advocate for your product or service. See examples. 
• Fun, entertaining, or reality-type videos that convey a message in unconventional ways. Remember that consumers are now looking for entertainment in advertising messages.  

Motion Graphics

These are perfect for stimulating Web traffic and delivering a message with words, photos, music and animation—without the cost of video footage. They can be produced quickly and affordably, and amp up the effectiveness of your message—making it more likely to be shared via social media. See examples.

Web Messaging

With Web moving to the center of all of our lives as a primary repository of communication, we can bring together all the tools needed to create a powerful presence for you—either by creating your Web site or by providing messaging and images for a particular product or service on your existing site. We can help you determine what your site should say—as well as do the writing, design and development. See examples.

Proprietary Marketing for Physician Practices

With decades of combined experience helping hospitals and patients launch new services and practices, our proprietary marketing for physicians can jump start your physician practice. If you’re paying a physician’s salary and he or she isn’t seeing many patients, this becomes a very smart business move that should easily justify its costs.

We continue to offer the services we have in the past—but with these new and enhanced services, we now offer more ways to help you tell your story, drive business, and drive revenues to your bottom line.

15 Year Anniversary: It’s a New Year, and a New Us

This year marks the 15th anniversary of CMBell Company—a milestone in our dream to create a workplace that allows us to do work we care about with people we respect—for companies and causes that matter to us.

We’ll be reflecting on this from time to time right here on our blog, starting with today, where we officially roll out our own new corporate identity—and the second logo in our company’s history. It’s an act that signals new directions for our future—while acknowledging the many who have made the journey possible.

At the center of our logo is the fleur-de-lis, one of the most recognized symbols in the world and one that is rich in history and legend. Although used by monarchs throughout history and used to represent perfection, light and life, its own origins are unknown. Besides loving its visual beauty, we think it represents the pursuit of perfection and excellence that has characterized our firm from the beginning. Paired with typography that is both strong and stately, the logo suggests the unique trio of discipline, purpose and creativity required to run a firm like ours.

How to Avoid Death by PowerPoint: Rule 1

Keep it Simple

PowerPoint slides shouldn't steal the show—nor should they be a complete script for the presenter. They are meant to emphasize your key points in a visual way.

To give your point emphasis, float it in a sea of white space. Remember that the less information you put on your slide, the more clearly your message will come across to your audience.

Resist the temptation to resort to slide after slide with bullet points, also—since studies suggest that this format is one of the fastest ways to lose your audience.

For example,  look at these two slides from a presentation by João Paulo Alves on simplicity:

See how powerful white space can be.

If you are trying to communicate too much visually, simplify your message in order to communicate your key points.

 

We'd like to hear your thoughts on great presentations you've seen—or on how you're improving your own presentations.

Color Shift and New Design Directions Characterize 2011 Logo Trends

Like fashion, design trends are dynamic. Logolounge.com lists these trends in their 2011 report on logo trends:

• Soft gradients 

•  Monoline

• Series Logos

• Brown and grey are being seen more frequently as replacements for the neutral black.

• Loopys

For the full report, click here.

Sometimes change is an improvement, and sometimes it's a step backwards. Which of these trends do you think work best?

Client Showcase: Tips on Conveying a High Tech Image

When Littleton Adventist Hospital installed one of the first 13-second Stat Scanners in the country, they asked us to incorporate this message into a series of ads that helped position their emergency center as high tech. By mixing a re-enactment with a brief description of how the equipment benefits their patients, the ad depicts how the hospital is leading the way in bringing innovative technologies to the community.

 

It's not always easy to convey a "high tech" message in health care. Here are some tips:

1. Don't include visuals that are unsettling for consumers. By and large, people don't want to see themselves in typical health care settings—having procedures done, blood drawn, surgery or tests.
2. If you are promoting technology, make sure to make the prevailing message one of how it benefits the consumers. Most people don't want to hear about the bells and whistles of a new piece of technology, but are interested in what it can do for their condition or disease.
3. Engage the power of story. Real stories or possible scenarios, told in language people can understand, are almost always effective.

Health care organizations sometimes err on the side of conveying too much technical information, or too much of the softer side. Either one has its risk. We recommend balancing these messages, and making sure that you look at them from an "outside" perspective.

Do you see examples of hospitals that are positioned as high or low tech? High or low "touch"?