The vision for this blog is to create a community of harmonious professionals across the care continuum who encourage each other in exploring digital media as a way to support businesses and families dealing with elder care.
Written on February 23rd, 2010 by tasha
Search engines love blogs. Having a blog means that your website gets updated on a regular basis. It also adds content on topics of interest to your customers. The more useful the content, the more likely it is that others will link to you. With one tool, therefore, you are able to hit three of the top five factors that will boost your ranking in a search engine result.
Blogs are fun and easy. Of all the social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) a blog is quick and casual, requiring very little computer knowledge. If you know Word, you will be able to find your way through a blog application, and can even post pictures and videos if you have them available in your archives.
A blog is not a small project, however. Where your business website is like a fish (set up the aquarium and then it needs relatively minimal maintenance), a blog is like a puppy. It needs to be monitored daily and you need to post on it regularly. (I would say once a week.) Your articles do not have to be long. And they can be more commentary and opinion, rather than a fact-based research article. Still, you do need to have a writer who can take a factoid or two and produce 200-300 words of fairly interesting content on a regular basis. Many hospices have closet writers on their staff. Ask around. You may be surprised.
Because a blog invites comments from readers, you need to be ready with policies in place to address negative comments, and assure that protected health information is not revealed by staff, or by the commenters themselves. (Think HIPAA.) Safeguards can easily be put in place to handle both, but it takes some preparation and forethought before you jump in and start blogging.
If you would like to learn more about blogging (and Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for that matter), please come to the Pre-Conference workshop Social Media and Hospice (PC-05) that I will be co-presenting at the NHPCO Management and Leadership Conference with 3 other in-the-trenches hospice social media folk: David Cherry (of NHPCO); Susan Wallace (of the Ohio Hospice and Palliative Care Organization); and Liza Paul of The Mount Carmel Hospice.
[...] Hospice & Blogging: Why it’s a wise idea [...]
Anything that gets the word out about your hospice is an excellent idea. Research shows that more people are in need of hospices, and the average stay is 14 days. The more information there is about hospices the more we may feel inclined to give back to our community hospices.