Live-tweeted surgery shines a spotlight on Sherman Health

Hospitals find innovative ways to showcase live events in social media

Your team finally got approval to use Twitter to interact with your customers and promote your company’s brand. You set up an account, log on excitedly, find a few followers, and start tweeting. The next day you have 12 followers. A month later you have 156. You wonder what all the fuss with Twitter is about, and if anyone is even reading your strategic, well-written tweets.

Sherman Health was once in your shoes. But thanks to the hospital’s strategic use of Twitter, it drew national press attention and watched its followers increase from 600 to more than 1,000 overnight.

On April 2, Sherman Health, in Chicago’s northwest suburbs, became the second hospital in the country and first in Illinois to live-tweet a surgery.

The hospital posted more than 350 tweets, several photos, and had about 100 comments and questions posted during the hysterectomy on a 48-year-old woman.

“It’s a powerful communication tool,” says Josh McColough, Sherman’s marketing communications manager. Twitter “is one of the things we have in our Web marketing arsenal, and it’s grown the fastest over the past month.”