Today’s health care environment is all about outcomes.  Positive outcomes depend on everything from how sheets are folded to how heart attack victims are treated.  It is a system wide endeavor that requires everyone in the system to realize their part in providing positive outcomes for patients.

Bill Leaver, president and CEO of Iowa Health System, put positive outcomes into a mantra for the organization.  He created the vision and slogan of “Best Outcome for Every Patient Every Time” to communicate to the focus to thousands of IHS employees from the maintenance workers to the neuro surgeons.  No small task.

In collaboration with Cheri Bustos, Vice President of Corporate Communications, we developed a strategy that made Best Outcomes for Every Patient Every Time more memorable.  We distilled it into an acronym that sounds like a miracle drug…BOFEPET.

BOFEPET began showing up all over Iowa Health System’s hospitals and clinics with little explanation to generate buzz.  We followed the buzz with videos posted on the IHS intranet.  BOFEPET became part of the language and short hand for a much larger vision.

Cheri Bustos commented on our efforts by saying, “ZLR offers just the right mix of humor, message and strategy to give us what we need.  Humor in health care can be tough to pull off.  ZLR did it masterfully.”

Hardly a day goes by that we don’t read about the marvels of blogs, Facebook pages and other social media sites. Yet a new study funded by the Pew Project for Excellence in Media suggests that these forms of information delivery pale in comparison to Legacy media both in the volume of information and in providing forums for public comment.

Researchers from Michigan State University, the University of Missouri and the University of North Carolina studied more than 350 journalism Web sites in 46 markets – 145 “citizen” news sites and 218 “legacy” sites operated by traditional media organizations. Here are some of the findings:

· Citizen sites, especially blogs, were less likely to allow readers to post comment, or even email their sites than legacy sites.

· Legacy media offered more opportunities to allow readers to download information

· Legacy media also were more transparent on their policies for use and comment.

· Citizen sites excelled in providing links to documentation for stories.

Marketers should strive to embrace the best of both worlds in their social media strategies. Not only will that assure a robust social media campaign, but a campaign that can withstand scrutiny.

The devastation of marketing budgets that has resulted from the atmosphere of fear and uncertainly should change the way you do business in the future but maybe not in the most obvious ways. And while many may feel we are in the depths of the recession, many are beginning to see the recovery. Here are ten telling questions that can give you some direction about where you need to go now.

1. Did you use the recession as an opportunity? And if not, can you now?

2. Did panic cause you make decisions you wish you could have made differently?

3. What kept you up at 3 a.m.? And have you done anything to fix it?

4. Did you make hard decisions that you should have made anyway?

5. Did you find yourself more or less worried about results?

6. Did you do things cheaply that ended up hurting your brand?

7. Did you do things cheaply that cost you more money in the long run?

8. Do you have plans to take advantage of the recovery?

9. Would you change the way you reacted to the recession? If so, what would you change?

10. Given what you’ve been through, what are you going to change in the future?

Advertising Perceptions Inc, released the first in a series of bi-monthly polls tracking confidence of top advertising executives called Advertiser Optimism Reports.

Here’s the surprise.  Cable TV is rising amid the economic uncertainty in the general economy.  While execs are still optimistic about online advertising, significantly fewer of them are predicting increases in spending than the previous survey.  In fact, intentions to increase spend online are declining faster than any other medium.

The report suggests that advertisers are retreating to the safe harbor of TV advertising…particularly cable TV advertising.

Our suspicion is that while all the hype for the past couple of years has focused on online advertising, results haven’t followed as expected.  It’s a truism in today’s society whether you’re talking about Wall Street or Madison Avenue, that bandwagons start fast and drive hard, only to slow when faced with a hill.

If you view marketing as an investment, and we hope you do, then you hold your investment accountable for a return.  Marketers race to the newest best thing, only to come back to the reality that there is no silver bullet.  Only creativity, persistance and intelligence.

Well maybe that’s a little overstated, but a poll conducted for last month’s issue of the National Retail Federation’s Stores magazine reported 81 percent of respondents said that expenditures for Internet service were among the “untouchables” in their household budgets during tough times.   Cell phones garnered 64 percent and cable TV 61 percent.  We may be moving back to a time of long hair as only 40 percent said that haircuts were untouchable.

We are a society of connectivity and we value that connectivity more than we value haircuts, new shoes, vacations, cigarettes and alcohol according to a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll.  Imagine that!  We’ll wear our hair long and dress in last year’s stiletto heals before we lose our high-speed internet connection.

Americans thirst to be entertained and connected digitally to the world around them.  Is it any wonder newspaper and magazine subscriptions are declining?

The ramifications of the Internet becoming a staple are profound.  As we come out of this blasted recession and budgets start to get back to normal…whatever normal is…think about the power of the staple.  The Internet is higher on the hierarchy of needs than alc0hol and cigarettes.  Where should it fit in your planning?