By Julie Russo Carpenter, Associate Vice President

The hospital is almost becoming one big data center. That’s what someone said in a recent internal meeting where we were talking about a technology client’s new focus on the health care market. They’re right, I think, about everything but the “almost” part.

When you think about the fact that for years now, top-tier hospitals have had really futuristic-feeling capabilities - like enabling a surgeon to control a robotic assist device and perform heart surgery from thousands of miles away - I think hospitals have paralleled (and in some cases surpassed) data centers when it comes to the mission-criticality of technology systems.

Health care organizations are increasingly touting not only the technological innovations that help them save and improve lives, but also those that save and improve the time patients and families spend in their facilities. Want internet access at your bedside? It’s there. Tired of being asked to recite your medical history to seemingly every practitioner who enters the room? Health care facilities that enable nurses and doctors to access your records bedside on a laptop are addressing that concern.

And it’s not surprising that technology providers are working to cater to the health care market. The move to electronic medical records is just one example of a game-changing project that requires a strong technology backbone, infrastructure and training.

For communicators, our work with technology clients and our work with health care clients has already begun to overlap in subject matter, audience, media and tactics. And another thing both categories are now sharing in some cases: the battle against seeming cold or “too techy.”

But when you are working in two categories that have changed as many lives for the better as health care and technology, that’s a nice challenge to be faced with.

By Dennis Brown, Vice President

The Atlantic Monthly is known more for its in-depth analysis than for slick marketing. But the title it gave Nicolas Lehman’s article in the July/August issue was all about attracting attention: Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Lehman’s article, which I both enjoyed and related to, actually has little do with Google per se and more to do with the impact years of “searching and surfing” the web have had has on his attention span. Here’s the gist of Lehman’s message: 

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

Marketers have recognized for years that people read differently on the web than in print. Experienced web writers learned to adapt to those differences by shortening paragraphs, sectioning up copy, and using more lists. But if the web is changing how we read everything, not just how we read online, then that style shouldn’t being limited to the web. Maybe we all need to “write for the web” no matter what the medium.

But there is an interesting contradiction to this argument in the world of tech marketing: while we are doing more browsing and skimming, “deeper” pieces of content-white papers and webcasts in particular-have become some of the most effective tools for technology marketers. 

Our clients are continuing to have success attracting readers to 12- and 20-page white papers and hour-long webcasts on very technical subjects. So, while the web may be changing how we market technology, it certainly isn’t making technology marketing any stupider.

I see that as a good thing. How about you?

By Marty McDonald, Vice President

One of the toughest things about working for a PR agency is developing and honing the right daily media diet. In other words, which of the mind-numbing sources of information will I actually take the time to pay attention to each day? 

Generally, my morning includes skimming the Dayton and Columbus daily papers (online versions, of course), USA Today headlines, CNN headlines, a few key trade publications for the clients I serve, and a couple of personal interest blogs just for fun. Lately, however, I’ve started making time to read a few comic strips.

At the top of my list is Dilbert. There’s just something endlessly hilarious about office satire as proven by the success of movies like my all-time favorite Office Space or series’ such as The Office. I mean seriously - just try not to smile when you hear, “It looks like someone has a case of the Mondays.” (I knew you couldn’t do it.)

Anyway, comic strips have always been one of the best reflections of popular culture, but they are easy to overlook - often buried in the back of daily newspapers’ print editions alongside Soduku and Word Search. But more than comic relief, there’s real knowledge to be gleaned from the artistic musings of people like Dilbert creator Scott Adams.

In the PR and marketing field, social media is something we’re expected to understand as a new way of communicating. We’re supposed to know the secret language of tweets, diggs, del.icio.us, widgets, wikis, revver, threads, posts, feeds, forwards and mashups. We’re also supposed to understand the prevailing trends and attitudes the general public holds about this new frontier, and we can take some good cues from comic strips.

When CEO blogs were the “it” thing to do, here’s what Dilbert had to say about it:

Pointy-Haired Boss: I’m starting my own blog.

Tina the Tech Writer: Dear God, no!

Pointy-Haired Boss: Every day I will record my personal thoughts about our business. I need you to write the first one by noon. I can’t wait to see what I’m thinking!

Here’s another clever statement from comic strip Zits on the rising popularity of Twitter.

Jeremy: Did you know that people used to write notes on paper and secretly pass them around in class?

Pierce: What? When did this supposedly happen?

Jeremy: I dunno. But it must have been B.T.

Pierce: B.T.?

Jeremy: Before Twitter.

And another Zits strip about teenagers’ growing addiction to texting:

Connie: How did you drop your cell phone in the toilet, Jeremy?

Jeremy: I dunno… I was just texting and it slipped out of my hand.

Connie: You text while you’re in the bathroom?

Jeremy: Of course! What reasonably cool person doesn’t?

Connie: Well, I don’t. And your dad doesn’t…

Jeremy: You’re not answering my question.

Even Cookie, the daughter of Blondie and Dagwood Bumstead, recently encouraged her father to set up a “MyFace” page in a recent comic strip.

Perhaps one of the best examples of social media done right is Dilbert.com itself. Understanding that one of the goals of social media is to enable interaction with a brand (especially if that brand is beloved), designers of Dilbert.com have created tools to allow visitors to write their own punch lines to popular comic strips; read and comment on the creator’s blog; rate new comic strips; download hilarious widgets; link to videos of actual Dilbert illustrations being created; search archives and much more.

But let’s face it, not all of us are trying to support comic strip enterprises. I work with some people who can make your head spin (in a good way) talking about new media tools and how to apply them to your business in a way that actually makes sense to your bottom line, but it has to start with strategy and plain old common sense. Just because social media references are everywhere doesn’t mean these tactics are right for your business. So don’t be a “pointy-haired boss” when it comes to social media and Web 2.0.  Start with strategy first and add cool factor as it makes sense.

I’d like to hear about anything you’ve learned from the funny pages and in other unexpected places.