How social media and humor can help you build your cosmetic medical practice - including tips for Botox; useful for medical spas, medical marketing, plastic surgeon marketing, cosmetic surgery marketing; useful medical marketing ideas!

1. Humor for Cosmetic Medical Procedure Practitioners – or how LOLcats can help you engage
your patients through social media
Laughter is said to be the best medicine, but humor has an important role to play in
healthcare as well. Humor in medicine helps patients to overcome their fears and concerns, and
can also help you, as a doctor, to engage your patients. Yet many doctors fear using humor with
their patients, instead insisting on a dry, “clinical” approach, to avoid seeming frivolous or
because they think that their patients will take offense.
However, doctors should use humor in their interactions with patients, to provide a
warmer experience. Patients appreciate doctors who use humor – positive online reviews and
testimonials for doctors frequently mention their sense of humor. In the cosmetic medical
procedure area, many successful practices use humor in social media – for example on their
Facebook pages – to retain existing patients and to engage potential new patients as clients.
iMedSocial’s recommendations for humor for doctors when engaging with your patients
include a few simple rules:
Never make fun of or humiliate patients – this would seem to go without saying, but
jokes that somehow target the patient clearly need to be avoided (the New York Times ran an
article previously, which showed that even making fun of patients behind their backs resulted in
a lowered standard of patient care).
Evaluate your patient and his/her feelings first – a patient who is in distress may not
be receptive to humor and might even find it offensive, while humor that shows empathy toward
a patient can help bridge gaps.
Find your voice - above all, when using humor (or any other method to better connect
with your patients), find your own true, authentic voice as a doctor. Just because a particular joke
or even type of humor works well for a colleague does not mean that it will work for you. If you
aren’t comfortable with a certain approach to humor – don’t use it!
Humor for Botox – why Botox as an example
We are using Botox as an example for engaging new patients through humor in social
media because competition in this area is so fierce. Although Botox administration clearly
requires significant skill to obtain excellent results (and to avoid “frozen face” effects), there are
many other practitioners out there competing for patients. You need to differentiate yourself in
your cosmetic medical practice, so that you can use your skills to engage and help as many
patients as possible. We used our data driven social media analytics to find out how your patients
– and potential patients – talk about Botox; we found some startling information that can help
you to better engage your existing and potential patients. A small sample of our findings is given
below.
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2. Happiness does not correlate with money for online discussions of Botox - At
iMedSocial, we analyzed social media communications which included the word “Botox” – and
then looked for words that show how patients view Botox. One startling finding is that while
discussions about happiness do not correlate with discussions of money when patients describe
Botox online, discussions about beauty and money do correlate (see our graphs at the end of this
paper). When engaging with your patients and reaching out to new patients through social media,
happiness is a key message, and specifically how Botox treatments will increase their happiness.
Humor is an important tool to provide the key message of happiness to your existing and
potential new patients when communicating through social media. Humor helps alleviate new
patients’ fears and vulnerability in the area of cosmetic medicine – they may fear that you will
judge them and their appearance, which is a highly sensitive subject in any case; furthermore,
since Botox treatment is an elective procedure, patients need to both choose to have the
procedure done – and to choose you!
Successful uses of humor in Facebook pages for cosmetic medical practitioners show that
it works – email us for more information about our upcoming detailed study and tips in this area
(Dvorah – dg@imedsocial.com; or Kate – kl@imedsocial.com ).
LOLcats as an Example of Humor
LOLcats are ubiquitous on the Internet – from their iconic “I can has cheezburger?” type
taglines to their gently amusing pictures of animals, everyone is familiar with these images.
iMedSocial chose examples of LOLcat humor and Botox as illustrations because they are
familiar and comfortable to your patients, but also because such images are typically warm and
noncontroversial. Three examples of LOLcat humor and Botox are given below:
In the first square on the left, the humor might be described as “conservative” because it
doesn’t poke fun at the subject, nor does it include any potentially risky themes or associations.
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3. In the middle square, the image is somewhat riskier, because it associates “Botox” with “failure”
– but the extreme cuteness of the puppy removes the sting from this association. In the third
square on the right, the image includes a gentle caution to patients – make certain that you obtain
your Botox treatments from the best practitioner possible! All of the images and captions are
gentle, and are unlikely to make your patients uncomfortable. For more examples, see
iMedSocial’s Pinterest board on this subject: http://pinterest.com/imedsocial/lol-cats-humorous-
side-of-cosmetic-procedures/.
Of course, these images may make you as a doctor uncomfortable – whether because of
the images or the rather ungrammatical captions, or simply because of the concept. In that case,
these are not suitable images for you, because the most important aspect of using humor is that
you engage patients with your own authentic voice on social media. Patients can see through
inauthenticity and they are then much less likely to trust you as a doctor. Thus, the most
important use of humor in social media to engage your patients is to show them – yourself!
At iMedSocial, we develop social media campaigns and communication strategies for
busy cosmetic medical practitioners. We would be happy to speak with you by telephone or in
person – just email us and let us know of your interest: Dvorah – dg@imedsocial.com; or Kate –
kl@imedsocial.com.
Our data – as mentioned above, we analyzed social media communications since
September 1 2012 which included the word “Botox” – and then looked for words that show how
patients view Botox. Figure 1 shows the lack of correlation between “happiness” and “cost”,
while Figure 2 shows the clear correlation between “beauty” and “cost” when discussing Botox.
Figure 1 – lack of correlation between “happiness” and “cost”
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4. Figure 2 – clear correlation between “beauty” and “cost”
We are continuing to develop and refine our analysis in this area, and plan to publish a
more detailed analysis in the future.
If you are interested in our social media analyses, for Twitter or any other type of social media, please
email us at info@imedsocial.com. We would be happy to discuss such analyses and our tips for successful
social media campaigns, particularly for cosmetic medical practices and cosmetic dental practices.
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