The Merck Manuals, published by Merck for more than 100 years, sought to give a platform to medical and veterinary students to share their educational experience and so created a student-authored collaborative blog project called Student Stories. Like The Merck Manuals, Student Stories has an educational mission and is offered to readers in a non-commercial digital format with no ads or registration.
Objectives also include building relationships with medical and veterinary students and increasing awareness of The Manuals' mission to freely provide accurate, accessible and usable medical information to both healthcare professionals and patients.
Our strategy starts with our bloggers - the heart and soul of the project. In total, we manage a group of eighteen bloggers who collectively write upwards of 90 posts each month. We are careful to select a diverse set of voices that represent students from a variety of backgrounds and at different points in their educational careers. Once selected, students are encouraged to document their educational journey and write in their own voice. Topics covered have included: rotations, study habits and tips, choosing a specialty, and even advice on how to manage a love life (or not!) while in school. Students are welcome to contribute until they graduate. As active bloggers, they serve as brand ambassadors and help by writing content that we feature on our main websites MerckManuals.com and MerckVetManuals.com and that we selectively amplify on our social media channels.
The Manuals successfully manages the first and only collaborative blog project at Merck and Co., Inc. Student Stories blog posts are consistent top performers on social media, often receiving thousands of clicks, shares, comments, and reactions. The Student Stories presence continues to grow each year and gain visibility amongst students, one of our key audiences. The veterinary Student Stories has performed especially well this year and has seen a 90% increase in website sessions year-over-year.
The project has also fostered a unique dialogue between professionals and students. Professionals find the blogs inspirational and have told us how it reminds them of how they felt in school. They will often make comments to the students with advice and words-of-wisdom while sharing their own stories.
Overall, The Merck Manuals' student-authored blogs have proven to be a successful relationship starter with the medical and veterinary student population and has helped to alleviate a disconnect between students today who are digital natives and the trusted medical information provided by The Manuals since 1899.
