Dental social media for a practice patients reach on foot

Ask the managing agent before you film in the lobby, because none of that hallway is yours

The arrival footage a New York practice most needs is shot almost entirely on property the practice does not control.

Patients get lost here. A ninth floor suite behind a security desk, a garden level in a brownstone, two flights up in a walk-up with nothing on the door. The single most useful clip you can publish is the walk in from the corner.

Most of that walk belongs to somebody else. House rules or a commercial lease can govern photography in common areas, and a managing agent may want notice, a certificate of insurance from whoever is filming, or a flat no.

There is a second problem the trades never face. On a shared medical floor, other practices' patients are in your frame at the elevator and in the vestibule, and none of them agreed to appear in dental marketing. Film before the floor opens, if the agent allows it at all.

The sidewalk carries most of the weight anyway. Awning, address, the nearest station entrance, then a cut to your own door, all of which you can shoot on a quiet morning without asking anybody.

A sidewalk shed can stand over your sign for a season, so film under it

Facade work puts a canopy of pipe and plywood across the front of buildings here for months at a stretch, and it changes what a first time patient is looking for.

The shed goes up, the awning vanishes behind it, the light on the sidewalk turns green, and the entrance somebody was told to look for is now a gap between scaffolding legs. Nobody tells the tenants how long it will be there.

Reshoot the arrival rather than waiting it out. A clip that shows the shed, reads out whatever is painted on the scaffolding and points to the door underneath does more for a nervous first visit than the version you filmed last spring.

Put it in the reminder message too. A patient looking for a blue awning in Astoria or on the Upper West Side will walk past the building twice and call from the corner, if they call at all.

Then film it again when the shed comes down. Arrival footage is the one thing on a New York practice's account with an expiry date, and nothing else you publish goes stale so quietly.

After sedation nobody here is driving home, they are taking the train

Escort instructions written for the rest of the country assume a car in a lot, which is not how a patient leaves your office.

A patient who has been sedated cannot go home alone. In most places that means somebody drives them. Here it means somebody rides with them, gets them up a flight of subway stairs, through a transfer, and then to a door that may be at the top of three more flights.

Hardly anybody plans for that, so the appointment gets canceled the morning of, or the patient arrives alone and insists they will be fine on the train.

Publish the real version. Who has to come, how long they should expect to be there, what the ride home involves, why a car service on its own does not answer it, and what to do about the walk-up at the other end.

Your front desk explains this every week. Say it once on camera, send the link when somebody books, and the Monday morning phone call stops being a negotiation.

Steam heat runs all winter, and January is the month every mouth is dry

A prewar building heated by radiators nobody in the apartment controls produces a complaint your hygienists hear every January and no national account has written for.

Radiators run on the building's schedule rather than the tenant's, and the standard remedy is a window open in February. The air in those rooms gets drier than the air outside, and people sleep in it for months at a time.

It reaches you as morning dryness, cracked lips, more sensitivity than usual, and patients who assume they are imagining the whole thing. Explain what dry air does in a mouth, what a humidifier changes and what it does not, and when dryness is worth a conversation about medication rather than the radiator.

Keep it general. You have not seen the apartment, and a clip that describes the condition and says when to ask somebody beats one that diagnoses a building in Park Slope you have never stood in.

It is also the rare piece of dental content in this city with a season attached. Publish it when the heat comes on, run it again in the coldest stretch, and it will be exactly as true next winter and the one after.

For the parts that have nothing to do with a shed or a radiator, like who belongs on camera and what deserves money behind it, our general dental social media page is at /industries/dental/social-media.