Who knew that selling shoes and marketing cardiovascular programs had so much in common?
Inspire, Connect, Entertain and Educate: These are things we all want to do with our patients and prospective patients.
It turns out that Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh strives for the same things with his customers and employees.
I’ve always been a believer that health care marketers can benefit from watching successful brands in other categories. That belief was strengthened after reading a recent interview with Hsieh.
Hsieh is an early adopter and active user on Twitter and has helped pioneer an approach to social media that is informative, engaging, and fun. Here’s his litmus test for how he decides what to tweet.
“I tweet at least once a day and my goal is to have each of my tweets fall into one or more of these 4 categories (ICEE): Inspire, Connect, Entertain, or Educate — all of which I believe are somehow related to happiness. I get a lot of requests from people (including many Zappos employees) to send out a tweet promoting them or something they’re doing, which I generally turn down because it doesn’t fall into one of the ICEE categories.”
More about his four categories:
• Inspire and Be Inspired: You can inspire others through tweets (for example, a great quote or a link to an inspiring article), and you can be inspired by following people that are trying to do the same thing (for example, @theseantourage, @gretchenrubin, @workhappynow on Twitter).
• Connect and Be Connected: In addition to connecting yourself with other people, you can also connect people with each other. There are about 500 Zappos employees on Twitter, and the company has aggregated all their tweets together.
• Entertain and Be Entertained: tweets that make people laugh or smile.
• Educate and Be Educated: Twitter is the source of many great articles and blog posts. It’s a great source for content that can be retweeted used in a variety of ways.
Hsieh also has some interesting thoughts on workplace culture and happiness in general. We all know that a positive attitude is important to patients who are facing cardiovascular challenges.
To see the whole interview, click here:
