Is your smile gallery worthy?
Friday, March 23rd, 2007
Dear dental professional, there is a big gap in the dental world - and you are likely one of the casualties.
The gap I am talking about exists when dentists, orthodontists, denturists - name your profession - want a well designed smile gallery to show their patients. The crux of the problem is that dentists want to show their before and after photos, but they don’t have the resources to make their smile gallery look good.
Ok. But wait a second. What is a smile gallery? Every dental professional knows that a smile gallery is a collection of before and after photos. The only question usually remaining is “photos of which patients?” Are they pictures of your own patients or generic dental photos. Whether you should use generic photos to represent your dentistry is another important issue that will be discussed in a future post. For today’s purpose, a more pertinent question is “which medium.” Will your before and after photos be printed in a book, added to a website, sent to patients via email, on your laptop for a presentation, or on your reception area TV? The answer is everywhere - your smile gallery needs to take the form that will best attract new patients and convert the right type of patient.
Back to the gap.
The problem is that dental professionals need to show their smile galleries across multiple media - each adding more complexity and more cost. For example, what happened the last time you asked your website company to create an amazing Flash smile gallery with sound and animation? Did they give you some excuse, never got back to you, or started talking about thousands of dollar? OK. Maybe you got your staff to do the work? What was the result? Was it world-class multimedia presentations? Mostly, dental professionals either pay too much money or give up - leaving the best examples of their work unpublished (usually on slides or on their computer’s hard drive).
Call me crazy, but why is there no simple solution where you can keep all your before and after photos and easily create smile galleries for the Web, print, dvd, whatever!
Maybe RMI’s new Smile Gallery Pro product will solve this problem.