With all the recent and upcoming mergers and acquisitions in the world of healthcare, brand name changes are becoming a regular occurrence. As someone that has experienced numerous brand changes, this is hard work:
I have been telling stories as a profession since 1997 for over 20 years. I started as a photojournalist with the task of capturing daily news stories forced to condense into just over one minute…and now I am breaking free.
For years and years, whether as a journalist, brand journalist, content creator, or even a content marketer; I have been finding and telling stories in a compact, expedient fashion for our audiences to quickly consume and move along.
I have been researching podcasts across the data and insights arena for the last few months as I have really become intentional about content creation. Some of the questions I have are similar to the ones many across the podcasting spectrum have mentioned, and also the advertising industry as a whole is grappling with collectively.
I am interested in a few things, specifically with lots of questions:
Yes, the famous shot in Haiti! We get lots of questions about this amazing shot we captured in Cange, Haiti. That shot was a major portion of our planning for the Cange Municipal Water Project story we created in partnership with Clemson University’s College of Engineering, Computing, and Applied Sciences.
I will always be a journalist, a member of the press; even though my last official assignment was in 2007.
I served three great companies Spartan Communications, Meredith Corporation, and Belo Corporation. Inside these organizations I have served WSPA-TV, WYCW-TV, KPHO-TV, WCNC-TV and the numerous other properties associated with their parent organizations including WVEC-TV, KHOU-TV, WFAA-TV, WGCL-TV, and The Dallas Morning News.
I have walked across the border, the Mexican/USA border so many times…I have lost count. Immigration is very personal to me. I have been called to bring my camera to remote areas outside of Nogales, Arizona…to have my camera ready as Border Patrol open the back of the Ryder trucks; to capture the scared faces of young children and families whose long ride has stopped for us to share with the world.
It has been almost a year and this is the first time in one year that I had the energy to sit-up after putting the twins to bed, watch a game and get a little work done. George and Henry turn one on June 10th…yes! OMG!
For the past year, I have been exhausted…extremely tired. This post-40 life has not only kicked my butt, but having twins has flipped everything upside down. Research shows that men take a huge dip after 40 and is more apparent around 44. No energy, mood swings, lack of drive, and just finding the energy to make it past 8pm is excruciating!
If you look around, Greenville is growing, the Upstate of SC is growing…and growing fast…with tremendous economic development.
With this growth comes the concern, how to fill jobs to meet the demand. Employers can’t find enough employees with a 3.5% unemployment rate and about 10,000 job openings in Greenville County.
In honor of Nurses Week, I thought I would share a list…you know your mom is a nurse when:
1) Your birthday presents are wrapped with surgical tape.
2) You have not gone to your PCP in over two years.
3) You have slept in a hospital bed as a child.
4) You open the refrigerator and their is always a stock of flu shots.
For over a year, I have been working on a project that has truly challenged and stretched my capabilities in new and exciting ways. I was part of a creative team who partnered with South Carolina Hospital Association (SCHA) to launch a national brand…and it was a lot of fun.
The for-profit arm of South Carolina Hospital Association previously known as Healthcare Staffing Services (HSS) was rebranded as Qualivis. This rebrand was necessary to further align the goals of HSS positioning the new Qualivis as a national provider of healthcare workforce solutions.
We have been there before, in a meeting preparing to create a great healthcare communication campaign. We write the strategy and determine the tactics including many visual elements: video, imagery, social media posts, digital billboards. etc. It is time to schedule the video and photo shoots requiring the need to hire and recruit individuals to be featured in the photo and video deliverables.
You can feel it coming, and you have this undercurrent of worry. The photo and video sessions go really well, capturing lots of great content for the campaign. Then the bomb drops, you are reviewing all the great content and a voice in the room silences everyone, “you did not capture enough people of color.”
Facebook just release their new Community Standards outlined here in this link. This is most likely a response to Mark Zuckerberg’s Congressional Hearings early April 2018. One thing that I took away from these proceedings, a critique on the necessity for users to have easy access to their Privacy Settings and also making Facebook’s Terms of Service (ToS) more consumer friendly.
During these proceedings, I called my partner Reed Smith and predicted that Facebook would take their Terms of Service (ToS), rewrite, and make it more consumer facing. Healthcare organizations should be on notice, this is a huge opportunity for growth across the healthcare industry.
A few years ago I began researching health equity and social determinants of health (SDoH) mainly as result of my intentionality to join the diversity and inclusion conversation inside healthcare organizations.
The more and more I have researched, the more conversations I have shared with thought leaders, the more my interest has grown. I have specifically become intrigued by the intersection between SDoH and the use of social media inside healthcare organizations.
Today was a great day…I spent time interviewing Dr. Hai Yao and Dr. Jeremy Gilbert both endowed chairs for Clemson Bioengineering. Both men carrying on the legacy of a life long family friend Dr. Larry Dooley.
This has to be one of the most powerful stories we have captured since I started working with Safe Harbor eight years ago. Each year, we have pushed the boundaries, getting to a place where real, raw emotion translated into such palatable words. Jenita is such an inspiring woman, with an amazing ability to share emotion in a way that we could truly see into her soul.
Ever since Facebook opened up their advertising platform, we have been running ads! We started running ads when we could target individuals in ways will never be ale to now. Before Facebook pulled back the reigns, we talked about the good ole days of Facebook targeting; and now…we are truly exposed.
The public always knew something was weird when they would use their phone to buy something on Amazon then noticed that same product in an ad on Facebook.