Today my 2-year "production" finally took the stage at http://www.massgeneral.org/.

The corporate website is the main attraction. Move your mouse around on the homepage visuals of "Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow" and you'll see its story-telling immediately capture you. Hidden inside are features we've taken from best practice websites like Amazon.com such as "faceted-browse" and have applied that to our MD search http://www.massgeneral.org/doctors/.

Do a search for your condition (try "heart attack") in the upper right hand corner of the site and you'll notice the search box begin to offer you suggestions. A "word-wheel" lifted from the best of the best: Google. And once you land on the search results page you'll again see that you can facet (or narrow-down) your results by medical category. (Sorta like filtering an Amazon.com search result for "Harry Potter" by "books," "CDs" and "DVDs.")

Spend enough time on the corporate section and you'll find campus building maps http://www.massgeneral.org/visit/maps/massgeneral_main_campus.aspx where you can select the name of the building where you have your doctor appointment and get info on nearest parking garages, valet services and driving directions. We've used Google Maps and graphic overlays to power this feature. Dig a little deeper and you'll find "Experience modules" in the research section http://www.massgeneral.org/research/experience/ that are filled with audio clips and bold visuals. Soon we'll add video to these Flash tools.

Not happy with YouTube plug-ins, we decided to build our own media players and here's one that's broadcasting Heart Center educational media http://www.massgeneral.org/heartcenter/multimedia/multimedia.aspx?id=31

And while there are clinical departments in "Centers & Services" the real crown jewels of the corporate website -- the stars of the show -- are the five Center of Excellence business priorities of the hospital's strategic growth operations. Full-standing micro-sites with their own global menus:

• Heart Center: http://www.massgeneral.org/heartcenter/


• Cancer Center: http://www.massgeneral.org/cancer/


• Vascular Center: http://www.massgeneral.org/vascularcenter/


• Digestive Healthcare Center: http://www.massgeneral.org/digestive/


• Transplant Center: http://www.massgeneral.org/transplant/

All of the Centers have their own Patient Experience modules like Vascular http://www.massgeneral.org/vascularcenter/experience/ and Heart http://www.massgeneral.org/heartcenter/experience/ ... but it doesn't stop there ...

While the visuals across the site are all custom art directed, the depth of content writing is just as impressive. 90% of the copy site-wide was created completely from scratch from physician interviews. View "Treatment Programs" within the Heart Center http://www.massgeneral.org/heartcenter/services/ and you'll find custom-Mass General tabbed content that describes what makes the hospital the best of the best. For an institution that has been busy "doing" for 200 years, getting it to take a moment and pause to "document" was not a simple task.

For the dozens of clinical departments, we built "model homes" that everyone across the hospital can use to house their new web content. Some entities using them on Day 1:

• http://www.massgeneral.org/psychiatry/
  
  
• http://www.massgeneral.org/neurology/


• http://www.massgeneral.org/emergencymedicine/


• http://www.massgeneral.org/urology/


• http://www.massgeneral.org/surgery/
  

And for the hospital entities that weren't quite ready for the new website, we created 1-page interstitial's that link back to old websites like http://www.massgeneral.org/radiology/ and http://www.massgeneral.org/neurosurgery/.

We even created "mini-model homes" with custom illustrations for the smallest of entities around the hospital when we couldn't budget photography e.g. http://www.massgeneral.org/blooddonor/.

In the months ahead we'll continue to think Health 2.0 by offering patients a myMGH personalized page-login tool where you can create an account and save and make notes on the web pages that are most important to you, family and physician teams. In the years to come as the hospital becomes more digitally-minded, you'll use your myMGH account to pay bills, re-fill prescriptions and make appointments.

This first-phase redesign took roughly 2 years, a core team of 5 web professionals, 12 marketers, 40 web steering committee members, 100 senior administrators, 60 hospital web coordinators, 6 writers, 1 Flash designer, a photographer, an illustrator, 5 software engineers, 2 front-end programmers and a consultant company that staffed 8 employees for 12 months of the project's first half. It's been an incredible learning experience and I thank my team for their dedication, vision and 'round-the-clock-overtime-(and a few sleepless nights) work ethic to get this project complete on budget and on schedule.

And why did Mass General do this? Well it's documented that more than 70% of consumers make their first impression about an organization -- be it a consumer product company, a service, etc. -- through their first impression of that organization's website. The business goal of the new website is to reassure you that if you or a family member need medical care -- there is only one place to go.

This is a web strategy for the informed patient, who in the Information Age, is self-empowered to chose where health care treatments and options are received.

Enjoy clicking around. However, I hope you never have to actually use this website unless you're coming here for good things like delivering a baby or picking me up and getting me out of the office.

The next time you have to explain what "Web 2.0" or "social media" is to someone...just forward them the link to this...

Context is the 800-pound gorilla in every conversation about the value,
effectiveness, and education that a successful online marketing campaign can
provide. It's very important to track how people view something, but you can't
separate the user's eye movement from the fact he's actively pursuing something.
That he's in pursuit is what makes context such a factor in understanding
value.

If you read all the time what other people have done you will think the way they thought. If you want to think new thoughts that are different, then do what a lot of creative people do - get the problem reasonably clear and then refuse to look at any answers until you've thought the problem through carefully how you would do it, how you could slightly change the problem to be the correct one. So yes, you need to keep up. You need to keep up more to find out what the problems are than to read to find the solutions. Richard Hamming, Bellcore, 1986

The reason we hear about google and apple and jetblue and starbucks all the time is that these are poster children for re-architecting existing business models into something very different. The marketing is not slapped on. Starbucks is not Dunkin Donuts with a clever sign. If Dunkin Donuts goes out to hire a "senior marketer" and gives that person traditional senior marketer duties, not much is going to change.

From Dan Pink's (contributing editor at Wired Magazine, author of the best-selling book, Free Agent Nation) 2004 commencement address at the Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida:

" ... A few years ago, a man named Robert Lutz took over a top job at General Motors. Now, Bob Lutz is in many ways a typical auto executive. He's a white-haired, white man in his 70s -- a former Marine. But when a reporter asked him how his approach would differ from that of his predecessors, here's what he said:

'It's more right brain. I see us being in the art business. Art, entertainment and mobile sculpture, which, coincidentally, also happens to provide transportation.'

Let those words settle in for a moment. The art business. General Motors -- General Motors! -- says it's in the art business.

... With applications climbing and ever more arts grads occupying key corporate positions, the rules have changed: the MFA is the new MBA. In a world of breathtaking material abundance, in which General Motors is in the art business, in which what used to be good jobs are going overseas or being done by computers, in which people are yearning for beauty, uplift, and meaning, an arts degree is the most valuable degree a person can have."

Read the whole thing in PDF format here.

(After looking at the new 2005-2006 lineup, GM might actually have their act together. Saturn SKY and Pontiac Solstice are two great examples.)

"First, the students are taught everything they need to know to manage a company from 1990, and second, they are taken out of the real world for two years while the rest of us race as fast as we possibly can."