October 15, 2013
Fred Joyal recently led an AADOM-organized webinar, “Bridging the Gap – Closing the Marketing Gap between Office Managers an Dentists” (read our webinar notes here). At the end, attendees asked Joyal some important questions about managing the gap in an effective way (and avoiding singing “I told ya so!”). Here are his answers:
How do you broach the subject of empowering the dental office manager without it seeming like you’re saying, “I’m right and you’re wrong?”
Show the dentist the survey to open up the conversation. The more decision-making power you have, the more everyone can do their job, and the more successful the practice is. Try saying, “I want to take some stuff off your plate so you can worry about dentistry. I need the tools to make this easier.”
Dental office manager profile: Danielle Dailey
Do we need to hire a media person to take care of all of this? Who has the time?
Office managers know that there’s much more that they have to do, but there’s no more time. I recommend, particularly with social media, to assign it to someone in the office. Fifteen to 20 minutes a day is enough to track and respond to it. It is daily – you have to be on top of it. With ReputationMonitor, you can get an alert when someone posts something about your practice online. There isn’t enough time to do all of this stuff, along with everything you do most of the time. With PatientActivator freeing up 20% of your time, that’s also helpful.
What’s the best content for an office to put on social media?
Put clinical content on LinkedIn or your blog. Otherwise, the experience of being in your practice is what you want to showcase on social media. So post about Halloween, who just had a baby, your patient of the week, contests, redecorating your office, involvement in local events. It gets you in the habit of saying, “We do need to be engaged in our community.” The best practices are always putting up what they’re doing in the neighborhood. ALWAYS get a signed release of videos and pictures you put up of your patients. If they don’t sign, you can’t use it. Remember that they can post whatever they want on Facebook. They can’t violate their own HIPAA. If you show a picture of the patient, don’t talk about the case – that’s a HIPAA violation.
What are the costs of building our website?
A good, dynamic website shouldn’t cost more than $2,500 to $3,000. You can change the look of them easily – seasonally, if you wanted.
How can we become more educated on Facebook?
1-800-Dentist has a whitepaper: Facebook 101. It covers getting your page set up right, getting the day-to-day behavior started properly.
