I sit at our headquarters in downtown Hartford, but our system really spans all across the state. We’re really everywhere in the state of Connecticut. I joined Hartford HealthCare a little over a year now back in December of twenty twenty four. Year and a couple of months now.

And really I’m tasked with overseeing the social strategy for the whole system. Myself and my team, we primarily oversee the Hartford HealthCare channels, which are our brand accounts, but we also assist with all of our hospitals have their own social presence to some degree.

And we have various departments, institutes who are on social as well. Really the first part of, when I arrived, I was just kind of assessing the landscape here, kind of making some changes to our broad strategy and now focusing more on kind of how our strategy spreads across the system. Trying to get, more content throughout our regional accounts and presence. And there’s so many different priorities on a day to day basis.

It’s a lot to manage, but I have three great folks who work on the social team. We sit in the content strategy department, which entails social video and visual content, photography, events and PR. We all work together. We do a lot of events across the system and really focus on that high level system strategy and storytelling.

And underneath me, have Caleb Green, who is our visual or sorry, our creative content manager. He does a lot of the video content that we put out on social.

Really, most of our content we put on social is developed by the social team. We do repurpose some content that our video and media team does, but a lot of it we create specifically for social, which is is really cool and gives us a lot of flexibility and freedom to the content that we’re making.

We also have Shannon who is another visual content creation specialist. She does a lot of videos with our docs. She we send her all over.

She does a lot of educational content and attends a lot of events for us as well. And then we have Hannah and she just joined our team. She’s another social specialist and she’s really hands on in the platforms scheduling. She’s in our Sprout account on a daily basis, kind of managing our community management, our DMs, our mentions, messages, getting those to the right people across the system, and then really managing the day to day of our calendar. When we have content, she’s in there scheduling it, writing copy, sharing drafts, and then doing some reporting for us as well.

Jeremy Berkowitz: Very cool. Lots going on at Hartford.

It sounds like you have really cool avenues to explore, lot of team members taking the lead on certain things. I’m not sure how familiar people are in this audience with healthcare marketing and healthcare creative. Is that typical in the healthcare world to really go all in on social and work with doctors and that sort of creative energy that it sounds like you guys have at Hartford?

Jason Reider: I think you can tell kind of across the industry a lot of, especially a lot of the larger systems are really putting I think resources into it.

Certainly our team here is three of us are started within the last year. It used to be kind of a one man show with Caleb and within the last year or so we’ve really expanded. At Hartford HealthCare, our CEO, Jeff Flax is so supportive and he wants us to be the best at getting better at everything. And social is a piece of that and how we tell our story.

It’s really cool to have conversations with him and see his vision because he totally gets it that, we have to be out there telling our stories everywhere we can. Certainly, speaking on behalf of our system, it’s, they’re very supportive of social media and they definitely wanna see us keep growing. But, I think across the board, at least from my own view, you can see that the content in social and the healthcare world is, it keeps, the level keeps going up and, keeps getting better. I think there’s some, they’re probably behind other industries in general, but I think they’re definitely catching up and you can tell that, a lot of the systems are putting, resources and time into it.

Sure.

Jeremy Berkowitz: Is the leveling up of other brands across the industry inspiring to you and your team?

Jason Reider: Yeah, we definitely keep our eyes on, a lot of things in the house care space, but we also are just looking at social in general. I come from a sports background, I’m always still following sports teams and getting inspiration from there. Caleb on our team actually works for the local minor league baseball team too. He also brings in a sports influence, but we’re looking at everything for many types of major brands. And we don’t like to just kind of get inspiration from healthcare, we like to get it from all over the place and how do things that we see and we enjoy, how can we incorporate that into our storytelling.

Jeremy Berkowitz: Sure. That’s really cool. Yeah, I like that.

You spoke about strategy at the top of the call and I’m curious if you could speak a bit more about what channels you prioritize, how you approach each channel. I mean we’re on Instagram here, maybe there’s a strategy there, but what channels do you kind of focus on at HHT?

Jason Reider: Yeah, we have our big three kind of what we call our power platforms are LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram, which is probably no surprise.

We put most of our time and effort into that. We do, we have a Redds, we have a TikTok, we have an X.

We try to be a little bit more exploratory on those platforms and kind of test the waters. I can’t say that we have found a solid strategy to really get consistent engagement there, but something that we’re always experimenting with. But yeah, with Instagram, would say that’s, from a content perspective, that’s where we put most of our energy into because we really see the return on engagements and impressions and people consuming that content.

On Instagram, we really like to make it kind of patient consumer centric type content. We found a lot of success in the past year with carousels in educational content. We partner with our digital marketing team and they have a whole new site of just kind of, it’s called the Health News Hub. It’s all educational content, kind of that list format, top five things to, X. We repeat a lot of that content on social.

And while we don’t see, it’s not always the highest engaging pieces. We see a ton of impressions on those. We know that people are, are kinda stopping the scroll and they’re reading through it, which is really what we want people to do. We want them to think of us as a resource for health knowledge, not just coming into our doctor’s office or going to one of our clinics.

Yeah, a lot of patient centric content on Instagram, patient stories, community based events. It’s really what we try to focus in on there. And then Facebook is really a lot of community events does well there. And actually a lot of storytelling on our colleagues who work at the different hospitals does really well there too.

We try to keep Facebook very community engagement.

We do a lot of ton of great work and events out in the community. That’s where we, focus a lot of that content.

And usually that’s on Facebook. It’s more static content. A lot of our videos do best on Instagram, but we don’t tend to see them perform really well on Facebook. A lot of photo heavy posts or, some some posts with just some simple text overlays, things like that is really what we see kind of the format that drives best there.

And then LinkedIn is by far our largest following.

And we really we’ve tried to over the past year really centralize that around colleague specific content. I mean, obviously, it’s professional space. And it’s been twofold. One, we’ve been going out and doing kind of a little roadshow and encouraging our colleagues to be active on LinkedIn and really for them to be an extension of our brand, which we’ve seen a lot of success with. We have a lot of people who are active there.

And then we try to tailor our brand content to colleagues. Things that either our own colleagues, find interesting and sharing their successes, sharing innovation and research we’re doing, but also just across the industry too.

Those are really our major focuses on each of those top three That’s

Jeremy Berkowitz: interesting because it really resonates with me and what I see on social even removed from healthcare right Instagram carousels and videos seem to be it Facebook the kind of localized community seems to be it and then LinkedIn really activating your employees and your colleagues seems to be it it’s interesting to hear that the same is true in healthcare.

Jason Reider: Yeah, absolutely.

Jeremy Berkowitz: Yeah, cool. You spoke about other healthcare brands briefly and kind of seeing what others do. What do you think healthcare brands are getting wrong on social media and how can they kind of turn it around or try other new things that you’re kind of doing at Hartford?

Jason Reider: Yeah, we call it, my boss Rebecca Stewart always says being too chest beaty, kind of speaking to yourselves in a way, just always touting, all different awards and driving everything around the services and service lines and not enough focus on the patient or the consumer.

Actually as an organization, our charge is to become the most consumer centric healthcare system.

That’s really trickled down to our social strategy too, is just trying to make sure everything relates back to consumer or patients.

I think sometimes they just, miss the mark on really that humanization, aspect really telling the stories about the human impact. And, we have forty eight thousand people who work for our system. We try to, as best we can, always feature somebody, that works within us in our content. We love showing faces of people and then obviously telling stories about the impact to our patients. We try to humanize everything as much as we can, but I, you you see a lot of content that’s just kind of news headlines, this system did that, or they’re the first to do this. And while that’s definitely important and a piece of the strategy, really we love to show the human impact about what we’re doing.

Jeremy Berkowitz: Yeah, that’s a great takeaway. Yeah, I think more and more brands need to do that. Humanize, talk to the customer, necessarily tout, accomplishments. Although you’re right, is important to celebrate those every now and then.

Jason Reider: Yeah, absolutely.

Jeremy Berkowitz: In thinking about creating content, certainly in healthcare, the topic of stock photos and stock content comes up a lot.

What are your thoughts on stock photos in healthcare marketing? Can already assume that because you’re so focused on customer stories and real patient stories that you kind of stray away but correct me if I’m wrong.

Jason Reider: Yeah, I, personally I don’t like using stock footage, stock photos as much as we can avoid it. But having said that, I think there is a place or sometimes there’s a need for it when you just don’t have a visual, within your library. And that’s kind of something that we’re focused on too moving forward is how do we continue to build that? We have an amazing staff photographer, Christopher Cozy, who, shoots everything and anything.

But we have so many events and so many, things that we have to shoot that it’s hard sometimes to just kinda take a step back and be like, what do we need from a, creative standpoint?

We try to avoid it as much as we can, but, sometimes there’s just so many different topics we post about or, things that we need to weave into our content that sometimes it’s kind of, the best we can do. But as much as we can, I, I tell my team to kind of stray away from it when we have something that, a shot in house or shot that involves, somebody from Hartford HealthCare or something that’s, true to us and our brand versus, relying on a library?

Jeremy Berkowitz: Sure. That makes sense. How do you go about creating authentic content then when you’re trying to create and tell real stories? Where does the patient storytelling come in? And I know you guys are using PhotoShelter so I’d love to hear about kind of how that tool and the platform takes a role there.

Jason Reider: Yeah, absolutely.

We really start by, trying to revolve the stories around people like I mentioned. Anytime we’re doing something that’s education, we’re talking to one of our experts, it be a doctor, whoever it may be, that’s an expert in the field we’re looking for. We use them to kind of guide what that content looks like. We’ll, pitch things to them and suggest things, but, they kind of are able to tell the story in their own words.

And then when it comes to patient stories, our our media relations team does an incredible job. I mean, they win Emmys, I think, every year on some of the videos they’re doing. They are really, really good at finding those stories and just having, connections and feelers throughout the system.

The biggest thing is really getting our doctors and our people who are, across the system to always think about, how can we tell the stories or relating the stories.

Sometimes it’s hard sitting here in downtown Hartford to just, keep tabs on everything that’s going on across the state because there’s, probably hundreds of stories that we could tell every day.

A lot of things we do is it will repurpose some of the content that’s made for some of our marketing integrations and find a way to use that on social. We’ve gotten a good workflow where our editors who are creating the longer form content that we’ll put on YouTube, that’ll go on TV, that’ll go on, some local news broadcasts and getting them to, as part of their flow, make a cut for social, kind of a cut down of the larger piece where we can tell that story, hopefully in a minute or less. And then we have the full stories out there on our YouTube page or, places where people can find them. We’re trying to do more social first patient stories too.

We were actually at a late night last night. We were in the OR capturing a heart transplant and really showing the POV. We did a day in the life video with one of our cardiovascular surgeons. And it just so happened that the same week we were filming that, a heart transplant, was scheduled, which is unpredictable.

You can’t plan those things out. That was really awesome. And that’s going to be something that’s just for our social channels. We’re really excited about that one.

And we’re trying to find ways to, as a social team, to kind of make those patient stories a little bit more bite size and find the ones that make more sense in a short format versus the longer ones.

And then PhotoShelter, I mean, helps us in so many ways. Our photographer, Chris, anytime we’re doing events or anything that’s really kinda we need quick turnaround, he’ll upload into a live gallery. As things are happening, quickly after we can get a post out on our CEO’s LinkedIn account.

He can tell that story right away. Our our team spends so much time and energy on the media relations side and making sure that media tell our stories. I feel like when you’re watching TV or streaming or anything in Connecticut, you kind of see us everywhere. Kudos to that team because they do an awesome job, but kind of puts the pressure on us a little bit too as a social team because we wanna make sure there’s content out there to consume. If you see something on the local news, that’s a big story that’s, top of mind for us that we’re on social, in a different capacity, but it’s there too.

Not only with the live event, quick turnaround workflow, but just obviously having our whole image library in there and having everything that we can search through when were looking for photos that we don’t have to use stock images.

That’s super helpful. And and Chris keeps it super organized on our end so people can go find and, kind of self serve as needed.

And then the UGC piece has been, a total game changer for us. I think we’ve been using it for almost a year now across the system. And it’s just like I said, when we’re, sitting in a central office, it’s it’s so difficult sometimes to to capture content that represents the whole system. That’s made it, so easy with a few minutes.

We can set up a request. Our internal comms team now knows the workflow. We’ll get, a link out there and people are starting to get the, the rhythm of it. And they know if they send in photos, they’ll see themselves on the social on our social channels.

It’s really great because not only one do we have a really easy way to source content, but our colleagues love it because they know they’re gonna see themselves on social. And those are some of the most engaging posts. Think one, because they’re so authentic.

They’re really they’re real organic photos. And two, our colleagues love to see themselves. They wanna go see it too. It’s that’s been a huge huge get for us to really make an easy workflow.

Jeremy Berkowitz: Super cool. Super cool to hear not only a brand in general taking advantage of Photoshop through CGC tool but also a healthcare brand and someone a team that’s kind of trying new things and getting their community involved so super cool and everybody loves seeing their friend or their their co worker or something on social right I’m sure it trickles down to be hey I see you on that, I’ve talked to other teams where they’re people tag them in the comments and be look who it is, some fun stuff.

Jason Reider: Yeah exactly.

Jeremy Berkowitz: What’s your tactic for using, excuse me, getting the UGC, you said you share links, what does that look like on social or if you do it in public, any of what’s the collection look like?

Jason Reider: Like the content we get from it, you mean?

Jeremy Berkowitz: Yeah. Like when you’re setting up a UGC campaign and you’re hoping to collect content, where does that exist? How do you go about that really?

Jason Reider: Yeah, exactly. We usually it’s something that’s kind of system focused and we started getting requests from now people know we have the tool, they really wanna use it. Sometimes we have to say no because we have other priorities, but we’ll, for example, wear red day was a few weeks ago. That’s a part of heart month. It’s a national day where everybody wears red. That’s a great example where, we know that’s coming up. We’ll create a link within UGC.

We’ll send it. Our Heart and Vascular Institute is really, really good at participating in that. We’ll start with them and they’ll disseminate it via email to their teams and their managers.

And then within our internal comms team, they’ll put it in our newsletter and broadcast it that way.

We have a lot of avenues internally where we’ll send that out to collect it.

And then we’ll get photos from, across all these different departments, across different regions, across the state. And then it’s really tricky on our end sometimes because then we have to narrow down the photos. We can’t show every single photo in our social feeds because we just get so many. But we then try to do our best to pick a representation across, different areas of the state. We’ll put that out. Obviously, a lot of times those end up in carousels on Instagram, certainly Facebook and LinkedIn too.

We’ve gotten pretty creative with it and it’s been, really, really good workflow. And then the other part too is we can send those photos back out too. If local teams want them or if anybody else wants to use them, we can easily put them into Photoshop there and distribute them too.

Jeremy Berkowitz: Very cool. Love to hear it. Is there an avenue that kind of seems the most accessible to you for collecting? Is it through the newsletter or does it change each time?

Jason Reider: Honestly, think one part I didn’t mention was we print out signage too at events with a QR code. And actually, we have these little badges that our social team will wear with the QR code on them. Oh, cool. We can walk up to people if we see somebody taking a selfie or whatever.

We’re hey, scan this and send us those photos. We would love to see them. Don’t know that we’ve, we haven’t really tracked which avenue works the best. We kind of just are putting it everywhere we can think, but I think definitely having it in person because it was top of mind for people, they can easily scan it, upload super quick is probably one of the most important parts of the puzzle.

Jeremy Berkowitz: I love the badge idea. That’s so fun.

Jason Reider: Yeah. Actually, Chris, our photographer came up with that. We we do a Saint Patrick’s Day parade in downtown Hartford every year. And as we’re walking around, he was we should have these on us. We printed them out. Now we use them at other events too.

Jeremy Berkowitz: So cool. That’s such a fun idea. I’m gonna take that and share it with others. Yeah. Besides PhotoShelter or the UGC tool within PhotoShelter, you mentioned Sprout. What are some of the other tools that your teams use and that make your job easier?

Jason Reider: Yeah. Sprout is definitely a big one. We use that really across the board for social, for publishing, approvals, community management. All putting all of our DMs, mentions, messages in in the same feed and social listening too, and then reporting. That’s kind of our one shop stop for social management. And then we just recently started using Airtable, which has been huge.

When I started, we didn’t as a social team, we didn’t really have a system to track what’s being created and when it’s being posted. And as we grew, it was really important to have, some sort of, source of truth where everything lives.

Now Airtable is huge for us. I mean, we do our content workflows and approvals on there. And then we also use it for scheduling our our social posts. We have a monthly content calendar.

Everything kinda lives in there. And then on the reporting end, we put all our links back in there. We can send that to whoever is interested, either one, what are we planning this month or two, what did we do in the past?

Makes it super, super easy to stay organized and and be able to kind of easily show people all the work that we’re putting into social and make, a visualization. Leadership can see what we’re doing and, everybody can kinda stay on the same page.

Jeremy Berkowitz: Very cool. Alright. When you’re grabbing the content for social and making these campaigns and projects and you’re searching within PhotoShelter, how are you collaborating with people your staff photographer Chris or the other social managers? Where does the collaboration happen within PhotoShelter? Even with you mentioned sharing things to media groups and stuff like that.

Jason Reider: Yeah. Not in Photoshop there, but we have a team’s channel where Chris, anytime he uploads a gallery, he’ll put a link in there right to PhotoShelter. That’s a really easy, easy to follow piece.

Within PhotoShelter, we use the the workspaces a lot for approvals. I know even outside of social, there’s a lot of things where leadership need to approve things. And that is really, really huge when it comes to project based stuff.

But a lot of times, I love using it because in as you know, when people send things through email or text or whatever, photos start to get compressed or, they get smaller and smaller. When somebody’s asking for a photo, I always go into Photoshop there, grab this link where they can download whatever size they need and just send them right there or obviously send them to the gallery so they can see other pieces.

It’s really about, having an easy way to send stuff to whoever needs it. I think anybody with a h h c login can have access to the site. It’s just a huge, awesome place to to store all of our content, keep it super organized.

Jeremy Berkowitz: Love it. Okay, cool. I love that you have the whole community of tens of thousands of colleagues that can kind of access and get what they need in there.

Jason Reider: Yeah. And it’s great for us as a social team because when we’re presenting to leadership or different departments about hey, here’s how you can optimize your social channel. We always include it you can find our image library and photo shelter, if you want access to all these thousands and thousands of photos that we take, you can go in and self serve and grab what you need. We obviously have different levels of permissions and all that as a, safeguard, but we’re always trying to tell people about that, that it’s so easy to find and use.

Jeremy Berkowitz: Yeah, really cool.

Okay cool, before we wrap up Jason, I have two more quick questions for you. You mentioned a couple of the fun things you’re doing on social. I’d love to maybe speak a bit about a favorite campaign on social or something you’re excited about and why it’s special to you. Maybe something coming up or something you just worked on.

Jason Reider: Yeah, at January first of this year we had two hospitals join our system and it was really kind of major news across the state, not only for those local communities, but they were owned by a joint venture situation. It was for profit. It was just a really bad situation for those hospitals in those communities.

And we were able to bring them into our system.

We’re non for profit. We’re really community based. We want to keep all of the care there. We want to make it better. We want to invest money into that. It was a really great story to tell.

And we had, it was exciting because, we had time to prepare for it. A lot of times things come up, whether it’s news that, one of our doctors just did something that’s, the latest in breaking or it’s an event. And there’s certain things where we we, only have so much time to prepare the content for, but this we’ve we’ve had a good amount of heads up.

Of course, there’s regulatory situations and things that could have thrown everything off, but we knew that at least there was a good chance this would happen. we wanted to tell the story about, what an impact this would make for the local communities and for the colleagues who work at those hospitals.

We did a whole bunch of content, but one of the things we went out into each region, had leadership recommend some colleagues who, comfortable on camera and good representation of our values. And we had them read the scripts that was all about what it means to join our system, how excited we are to welcome those folks, those communities in.

And it was just it was really organic and authentic because it came from people. I purposely didn’t want any sort of leadership or executives in this video because they had their own stuff going on.

And I wanted it to come from, frontline workers and people who are really the face of our organization. I was really proud of that piece, collabed with our social team and also our media team on that. It was a lot of work to find the right people to schedule with people’s calendars to get, different locations. But, that one did really well and and engaged really well. But that was just one piece of content in a larger campaign that’s still ongoing. There’s still a lot of stories to tell as theyre new in our system.

That was just a really exciting project to kind of, drive the narrative a little bit, but also just celebrate, what all this means for the local communities.

Jeremy Berkowitz: Sure. That sounds really fulfilling, right? As new things joining, things happening and you getting to really play a part and take a, take a new adventure live essentially on social.

Jason Reider: Yeah, exactly.

Jeremy Berkowitz: Super cool. Well Jason I’d love to end these conversations by asking a bit of advice. If you have any advice for other healthcare creatives and marketers, other people trying to build a brand on social, maybe some healthcare advice could translate to other industries. But if you have any advice for people trying to build their brand on social, maybe what’s one piece that would kind of stick out to you?

Jason Reider: Yeah, think just don’t be afraid to experiment.

I think, when I got here at Hartford HealthCare, obviously there was a lot of things that are set in place and going into the healthcare world, I at first was a little intimidated with, there’s so many regulations and, all sorts of things to think about, but, I was really lucky to have leadership team that allows us to be creative and, think outside of the box and not be your stereotypical healthcare, healthcare style content. We’re always trying to come up with new things and and, find fun ways to tell our story and kind of always continue to innovate with what we’re doing.

I think don’t be afraid to go outside of the box and, look for inspiration outside of, your typical industry. And you can look at any brands for inspiration on on what what’s doing well and what’s engaging. We’re always trying to think of new ways to do things and experiment with different formats, with different styles and we find what works and then we double down on it.

Jeremy Berkowitz: Yeah super cool. I love that advice. Jason this has been really fun. It’s been really cool to learn a bit about go behind the scenes of a healthcare brand building building up on social and to learn about what your team is doing I really appreciate you sitting down with me today.

Jason Reider: Same here thank you so much for having me this was awesome.