Staffing Robot - Healthcare Staffing Technology, Design & Marketing Blog

Healthcare Staffing Agency Website Design and Web Marketing Services

Eight years ago I had an idea and saw an opportunity. That idea was ShiftWise and over the last eight years the opportunity was realized. Today, ShiftWise is the largest provider of Vendor Management Services in the healthcare staffing industry, servicing over 1,200 hospital clients and 1,100 staffing agencies all across the nation. 

I'm incredibly proud of what ShiftWise has become and look forward to watching it grow even more successful over the next several years. However, I will be watching the success from a distance, as I have decided it's time to move on to a new venture.

Today I wanted to officially announce the launch of a new company appropriately called - Staffing Robot! The company currently has 5 employees and is being founded by me and my business partner, Ross Barbieri, who also helped me start ShiftWise.

Staffing Robot is a healthcare staffing web services company that provides the following services to hospitals and staffing agencies all across the nation:

• Website design
• Web software application development
  
• Mobile web platform development
  
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
  
• Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing management
• Social Media Marketing (SMM) campaign strategies
  
• Brand creation, rebranding and brand management
  
• Email marketing campaign management
• Traditional print marketing services
  

The Staffing Robot blog will become an extension of our new company's services and the blog posts will continue to provide you with relevant information from the healthcare staffing industry.

It's been great working with so many of you over the last several years and I look forward to working with some of you in this new capacity. If your hospital or staffing agency is looking to rebrand, create a new website, build a web application or improve your web marketing through SEO or social media campaigns - Staffing Robot is open for business.

Check out some samples of our work at Staffing Robot or contact us to get a free quote for your web project. As always, you can follow Staffing Robot on Twitter or call us directly at 971-533-8839.

Is Facebook Optimization the New SEO?

Last week I blogged about the Facebook Like button. Now that people have been using it for a couple of weeks some interesting findings have been uncovered.

Today, CNN had a great article discussing the implication of this new social sharing/linking feature. In the article they explain that Facebook 'Likes' as a form of social links. These links potentially carry more value because they are related to a specific user. In contrast, Google gives value to links based on their connection to sites. Further, Google doesn't have full access to search Facebook and index these links.

Ru oh raggy.  

If Facebook's 'Like' linking system takes off it could mean that Facebook becomes the new keeper of the gates, so to speak, when it comes to ranking and indexing the web. For people doing SEO this could mean that Facebook Optimization is just as, if not more, important than Search Engine Optimization. 

The Facebook Like button is already spreading quickly. Almost every site I've gone to in the last 2 weeks has a shiny new Facebook Like button on it and many people are already figuring out new plugins to optimize its use and data.

Although this is good for Facebook, there are many open web advocates who think this is a bad thing.

With this and some of Apple's recent announcements and products like their IPad, it does spark some cause for concern. Allowing single companies to control the web, set standards for it and collect all of our personal preferences will lead us right back to 1998 when Microsoft controlled everything and the web was not so interesting.

Here's to hoping we don't fall back into that trap.

The New Facebook Like Button

Yesterday, Facebook announced a change to how users promote the companies, news stories and other information around the web that they "Like." Previously, companies could make Facebook Fan Pages to promote their business and users could become "Fans" of those pages. Now, users can simply "Like" your business page.

The change is seamless inside of Facebook. Your Fans have been conveniently converted to "Liking" your page. Outside of Facebook, however, additional functionality has been introduced to allow Facebook users to indicate their Likes all over the web. You can now place a Like button on any website and visitors can click it, indicating they Like your site, blog post, news story, etc. Once a visitor Likes your page their Facebook Icon will appear next to it, creating a social presence on your site.

This data will also be sent back to Facebook and displayed on the visitor's page for their friends and connections to see. Facebook has given some indications that this user data will be made available to you as well.

You can get the code for the Facebook Like Button here. Simply customize the widget at the bottom, click get code and apply that code to the appropriate place on your website. Or, just point your webmaster to this link and s/he will know what to do from there.

This new sharing feature presents great marketing opportunities for hospitals and healthcare staffing agencies by allowing clients, patients and employees that interact with your company to help promote your brand more easily. It also introduces several new social networking opportunities.

So, if you follow this blog and you use Facebook - please "Like" this blog by clicking the Like button toward the top of the page!

Medical Solutions Nurse's Week T-Shirt Design Contest

A few weeks back I blogged about Favorite Healthcare's video contest for Nurse's Week. I thought you should be aware of another staffing agency that is sponsoring another great contest for Nurses's Week.

Medical Solutions and Fibers.com are putting on a contest titled "Give it a Shot!" The contests asks "Nurses and Nurse-aficionados" to create t-shirt designs showing their appreciation of the Nursing profession.

Nurse's Week is May 6-12 and this contest ends on May 12th. Here is the link to learn more about and participate in the Medical Solutions Nurse's Week contest.

They've also created a YouTube video to promote the contest:

 

Favorite Healthcare Nurses Week Video Contest

Favorite Healthcare is sponsoring a contest for National Nurses Week this year. They are asking you to submit a picture or short video of you and your nursing friends. From the submitted entries, Favorite Healthcare will create a video and launch it on YouTube for Nurses Week. 

All participants will be entered in a raffle to win one of three Netbooks.

To participate, submit your pictures and videos by April 23rd, along with your contact information, to YouTube@FavoriteStaffing.com.

To kick it off, Favorite Healthcare has made their own video. You can watch it here.

Hospital Social Media Adoption Data Via Ed Bennett

Ed Bennett has updated his hospital social media data on his blog Found in Cache. This time he has dug a bit deeper into the data and produced some interesting findings. He also very kindly provides access to the raw data of US hospital social media use(excel file) to perform your own analysis.

After qualifying the number of hospitals to those over 100 beds and that have open access to social media platforms, Ed suggests that there is now a 53% adoption rate of social media for US hospitals. Without the qualifiers, however, this number is closer to 14% of all hospitals in the US.

Personally, in regard to hospitals embracing social media as a valuable method of promoting and monitoring their brand, we still have a long way to go. If it's true, as Ed suggests, that about 50% of the hospitals in the US are still blocking access to social media there are still some major roadblocks for mass adoption.

Ed also gives some great reasons as to why he believes the adoption rates are higher for larger hospitals.

The disparity should not be a surprise. Smaller hospitals, like those with less than 100 beds, have less resources to invest in most outward facing services. There’s usually only one person responsible for everything – marketing, public affairs, media relations, web development, philanthropy, etc. No wonder social media isn’t a priority.  In fact only 14% (65) of the hospitals on my list have less than 100 beds, and 86% (395) have more than 100.

My Interview on Staffing Talk

Last Friday, Gregg Dourgarian of Tempworks Staffing Software and the blog Staffing Talk had me on his call in show. We discussed several topics such as ShiftWise Healthcare Vendor Management, the current economic state of the healthcare staffing industry, the social media application foursquare, Social Media Marketing (SMM) and staffing agencies and my blog Staffing Robot.

Gregg is an active blogger and continues to try new things. He is definitely helping to further advance the use technology and social media in the staffing industry. Thanks for having me on your show Gregg.

You can watch the show here.

Google Search Getting More "Social"

Seems the rage these days is aggregating content and data from social networking sites. As the web becomes more segmented through various platforms from search to social media, having a single source to search, deliver and index data is becoming increasingly important. Especially when it comes to monitoring and promoting your brand online. Google Social Search is making this easier.

After creating a Google profile and linking your social, blog and other similar sites, you can begin searching your content as well as the content of people to whom you are connected on these sites.

Here's a video that describes this in more detail:

My favorite feature of this new service is seeing the connections and content behind the search result sources. Google lets you drill down into your search contacts and see the various methods by which you are connected to each of them.

Google Social Search will certainly have a further effect on your SEO | SEM campaigns as it puts more emphasis and personalized, social search. More and more, Google is enabling ways for people to search based on their preferences, location and connections as opposed to content in aggregate across the Web.

Google is definitely keeping it interesting.

TweetDeck Launches New Recruiting and Job Service - JobDeck

My favorite social media site is Twitter. Although there are several tools for interacting in different ways with Twitter the best tool out there by far is Tweetdeck. I've mentioned this app several times in previous posts, particularly on how staffing agencies can use Tweetdeck for recruiting and new business leads.

Tweetdeck has now expanded this ability even more. By partnering with TwitJobSearch, a Twitter-based job search engine, Tweetdeck now offers a custom branded interface that finds job and recruitment related Tweets called JobDeck.

Essentially, it's Tweetdeck with two additional columns added by default: ‘Job Search Experts’ and ‘TwitJobSearch’. Add in your own personal search columns, in addition to your Facebook and LinkedIn columns, and you have a fantastic source for online recruiting.

In addition to posting on Twitter, with a few extra steps, recruiters can also have their tweets posted and indexed by TwitJobSearch, helping them to more effectively connect with potential candidates online. You can also post premium job listings, or "Tweetured" (terrible name) as they call it, on the TwitJobSearch site on a Cost Per Click (CPC) basis. 

I'm curious to know if any of you start using this service and what the results are.

Top Healthcare Staffing Stories of 2009 and Predictions for 2010

Over the next few weeks both of my sons have birthdays and I plan on spending some down time with my family for the holidays. Therefore, this will be my last post until the new year.

I thought I'd use this post to highlight some of the big events that affected the healthcare staffing industry in 2009 as well as make a few predictions about the industry for 2010. (is it 'twenty-ten' or 'two thousand ten'?)

What the healthcare staffing industry looked like in 2009:

Major downturn in spending on healthcare temporary staff.

The biggest news in 2009 for the healthcare staffing industry was undoubtedly about the downturn in the economy. My second blog post ever was on the reasons hospitals were spending less on healthcare agency staff. The down turn in the economy even made people start asking the question: "is there still a nursing shortage?" From there, leading economists confirmed that not only was the economy bad but that it will take awhile for it to improve and return the healthcare staffing industry to pre-2009 levels. And finally, the Staffing Industry Analysts informed us that the nurse travel industry decreased by 44% this year and we saw this downturn reflected in the revenue loss reported by major public healthcare staffing companies.

Widespread adoption of healthcare vendor management.

In 2009 hospitals gave a big vote of confidence to vendor management as the preferred model for agency management. VMS has matured in the industry and delivered on its promise of saving hospitals both time and money on their staffing costs.

How healthcare reform will affect healthcare staffing.

The topic of how healthcare reform will affect healthcare staffing couldn't be avoided. Many debates about the pros and cons of healthcare reform occurred on my blog and many of us had the privilege of hearing former Senator Tom Daschle's view on healthcare reform at the healthcare staffing industry conference. AMN even produced results from a poll suggesting that hospital CEO's feel healthcare reform will benefit the healthcare staffing industry.

Technology VMS companies struggle.

Even though some healthcare vendor management technology companies thrived in 2009 as hospitals increased their adoption of VMS, many companies did not fair so well. A few healthcare VMS technology companies had to close their doors this year while some VMS companies struggled to pay their staffing agency partners. Additionally, some VMS companies found acquisition to be the best way to survive the turbulent year.

Increased use of social media.

2009 was the year that many hospitals and staffing agencies began to use social media. Many hospitals, such as Providence St. Vincents in Portland Oregon who found success with their 'pink glove dance video' that went viral, took full advantage of these tools. Some hospitals are still behind when it comes to social media while several hospitals are finding success with tools such as Twitter. Both healthcare staffing agencies and hospitals are now promoting and monitoring their brands online, as the online tools for brand promotion and management are starting to become more prevalent. I've even created some helpful tools for people to search for healthcare staffing industry information and follow companies in the healthcare staffing industry on Twitter.

As you can see, 2009 was a very eventful year for the healthcare staffing industry. So what will the next year bring?

My predictions for healthcare staffing in 2010:

More consolidation of staffing agencies and VMS companies.

After struggling through the economic downturn of the last 1.5 years many companies are now really feeling the effects. I see several staffing agencies closing their doors and many more acquisitions in 2010. I wouldn't be surprised if we even see some consolidation with some of the major players. In addition, I expect we'll see some more acquisitions of healthcare VMS companies.

Continued adoption of vendor management.

Hospitals will continue to choose vendor management for their agency management solution. As the rate of adoption continues to increase, I expect we'll see hospitals still choose vendor neutral healthcare vendor management companies over agency run managed service providers.

New technology players.

The industry has gotten a bit stale in terms of innovation and new technology options. In addition, we've seen a decent amount of consolidation of industry technology companies. Both of these facts suggest to me that new players will enter the market and hopefully they will bring with them some exciting and innovate technologies. As these players enter the healthcare staffing industry I expect we'll see more and more hospitals and healthcare staffing companies embracing technology to improve their staffing process. Stay tuned!

New marketing methods and opportunities.

As budgets tighten many hospitals and staffing agencies will look for more inexpensive and effective methods for marketing their services. Many more healthcare staffing organizations will turn to SEO/SEM and social media for company/brand promotion. 

The market will come back slowly. Kind of.

Even though there are some positive signs for the economy overall and there has been some slight improvements in the healthcare staffing industry I don't see anything that suggests we should get too excited. Earlier this week the Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA) hosted a webinar about the economic outlook for 2010. Their predictions suggested that every industry will improve in 2010 - except healthcare staffing. In fact, they are predicting an overall decline of -1%. Therefore, unfortunately, I believe 2010 will still be a year of struggle. There will be some positive bumps here and there but we won't start fully pulling out of this down turn until early/mid 2011.

What are your predictions for healthcare staffing in 2010? Please share them here if you have any.

I wish you all well - happy holidays - happy new year. See you in 2010!