Facebook Finally Files for IPO
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In case you missed it earlier this week, Facebook has finally filed for their initial public offering. The company filed to raise $5B (as in billion-with-a-B) but optimistically hopes to raise as much as $10B when it IPOs in the next few months. This would dwarf the largest Internet-IPO of all time, which was the $1.9B Google raised in 2004. And, it would give the 7-year old company a value of as much as $100B. (Not bad for the 27-year old son of a dentist!)
In order to file for their IPO, Facebook had to disclose quite a bit of information about their business. The rumors were finally laid to rest about how much money Facebook really makes – over $3.7B in revenue last year, giving them a nice $1B in profit. They also disclosed that they now have over 845M active users. A quick look at their site shows over 155M of these users are in the U.S., meaning that around half of the U.S. population is using Facebook. And they’re not just using it to play games. They’re using it to share.
Along with the 250M photos uploaded daily, patients are making 2.7B comments every day. A chunk of these comments are in the form of recommendations to their friends & family. Facebook, being the bright people they are, realized the potential for this and recently took steps to increase these word-of-mouth referrals being made online. They’ve changed how practices display referrals on their own pages and they’ve launched social apps to drive more patient-to-patient referrals. And, they’re just getting started; because raising as much as $10B from their upcoming IPO will rapidly move them along to becoming the place for online referrals.
Want to be part of the largest patient referral network on Facebook? Claim your free DoctorBase profile and have the Panda automate your word-of-mouth referrals to new patients on Facebook at:
http://doctor.DoctorBase.com/claim
HIPAA with a Capital ‘P’
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When it comes to HIPAA rules and your patients’ information, most of the focus is on keeping this information private and secure from prying eyes. While this is a very important aspect to the law, we sometimes forget what HIPAA actually stands for – both in name and idea.
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Facebook Timeline Imminent
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Facebook announced plans to impose a mandatory upgrade to their new timeline theme to all users within the “next few weeks.” So, by the end of February, your profile will be updated to timeline whether you want it or not. The timeline theme has been available to users since late last year, but it has been an optional upgrade – until now.
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Google+ 90M Patients
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Google recently announced to investors in their quarterly earnings call that they had reached over 90M users on their Facebook-competitor, Google+. They went on to announce that Google+ users “are very engaged with [Google] products – over 60% of them engage daily.” But wait, before you do the math that would lead you believe there are 54M people a day using Google+, note that they stated this number with regard to their products.
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Social Applications for Your Practice
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Facebook just launched new social apps from 60+ companies that will allow users to share their activities with friends via the timeline on their personal Facebook profiles. Facebook had already given us a glimpse of this with the apps they released last year, but now they’ve gone full stream by integrating with sites like the Wall Street Journal, Living Social, and Ticketmaster. Now, by simply logging into to these sites with their Facebook ID, patients are able to automatically post their activities as they occur on other websites. For example, when you managed to score tickets to the NFC Championship game here in San Francisco earlier this week via Ticketmaster, Ticketmaster’s social app would have made it possible to post that achievement directly to your Facebook profile without the need for you to manually submit this update via your profile at facebook.com. (As a bonus, it would also automatically create both widespread jealousy and a sudden influx of ‘friends’ trying to reconnect with you!)
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Groupon Instead of Health Insurance?
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Groupon CEO Andrew Mason was interviewed on 60 Minutes this past Sunday night. He discussed more about how the daily deal website has exploded over the past few years, resulting in their IPO at the end of last year. There was even an example of how doctors are using Groupon to reach more patients. One thing the segment didn’t touch on was how patients are using Groupon when it comes to healthcare.
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Search+ Your Patients
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We reported last month on how Google had begun including Google+ pages in their search results. This week, they took it a giant leap further with the introduction of something they call “Search, plus Your World.”
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Avoiding Practice Bankruptcy
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A recent article from CNNMoney has brought to public light the disturbing trend of “doctors going broke.“ More often than not, the fault is not that of the doctor as cuts to Medicare reimbursements and delays/denials of insurance company payments are two of larger contributing causes of doctor bankruptcy. But, that doesn’t mean that all doctors need to worry about being left high-and-dry.
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Hang Up the Phone & Reply to Your Texts…
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As more of you are coming onboard with DoctorBase, we’ve noticed a trend with how patients are communicating with your practices. While there are always patients who will want to call your office and speak in person to your staff, we’ve noticed growth over the past half year that validates what been expecting for a while now – patients are choosing to contact their doctors via text & email instead of calling your practice by phone.
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Creating a Successful Online Medical or Dental Ad Campaign for New Patients
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Having some lengthy experience with creating online ads for Doctor’s practices and seeing how some offices are advertising online, we thought that we run through some of the fundamentals today. For those of you not familiar with how setting up an online ad in Google works, it is similar to the stock market. Lets suppose you desire to show up for the term “Orange County orthodontics” or “San Francisco rhinoplasty”, well there are a few other offices paying for those terms so it works in a bidding system. Various offices will be bidding for those different terms and if you wish to be seen on the first page, you will need to be bidding high enough to compete.
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2012 Resolutions for Your Practice
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The new year is officially here and with it come plenty of predictions & resolutions. We’ve become a big fan over the years of Dr. Larry Emmott and his blog on technology and we love his delightfully witty post on what (not) to predict for 2012. Having spent the past few years as change-agents in the healthcare space, we recognize these anti-predictions are all too often true. Still, our tireless optimism and careful insight recognizes that more doctors do see the light every year when it comes to using the web to grow their practices. So, here are 5 simple resolutions to get your practice on track for a great 2012…
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Google+ +625k New Users a Day.
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Something interesting is happening in social networking. We all know Facebook is the king of the social networks. It has over 800M users and, when it makes it’s initial public offering in 2012, will likely be the largest IPO since Google. But, don’t count that old-fashioned search-engine out just yet…
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