What Worries Compliance Officers?

When it comes to regulated markets, compliance is a major issue, especially when it comes to social media, it worries compliance officers and has held back the use of social media in regulated markets.

So, what keeps compliance officers up at night and what do they do about it.

In short, anything posted on social media is amplified and can have an impact on the brand and the reputation and once the cat is out of the box, getting it back in the box is rather difficult.

As Warren Buffet said:“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”

Of course, there are ways to mitigate risk. For one thing, a social media policy explaining who can post on social media sites, how they post and what they can or cannot say, what requires compliance approval before posting. Yous social media policy should also define the steps to follow in case of crisis

The other challenge is what employees post about the company on their personal social media accounts. Their post can be perceived as representing the views of the companies and can have an impact on the company reputation and/or have repercussions from the regulatory authorities

What makes it even more challenging is that be it in healthcare or financial services there are no set social media rules. The regulatory authorities (FDA, FINRA, SEC, OCC and others) have not created a framework to regulate social media, they have only issued guidance on how to apply traditional communication with the public regulations to the electronic era and social media. The guidance seems to be a lot clearer though in the financial markets; in the medical market, the FDA is still going back and forth and the guidance can be confusing at best.

In addition, social media platforms are diverse and so are the posting modes and the number of character allowed creating challenges especially when it comes to disclosures.

October 15, 2014

4 Reasons Industrial Marketers Should Adopt Social Media

Even if studies have shown that, so far, industrial professionals have been a relatively passive social media audience, their presence and social media usage is far from negligible.

In a recent study, “2014 Social Media Use in the Industrial Sector,” IHS GlobalSpec found that 44% of technical professionals spend more than an hour per week on social media for work-related activities.

The study indicates that technical professionals maintain social media profiles on LinkedIn (74%), Facebook (61%) and Twitter (17%).

In addition, 47% of them spend time on LinkedIn reading product or industry news while 26% research suppliers.

69% of technical professionals with a Facebook profile follow businesses or groups within their industry and 38% research or read work-related content.

These statistics are far from negligible and show that industrial marketers need to take a serious look and consider integrating social media in their marketing mix.

The return may not be immediate and as high as their other more traditional marketing initiative but the potential is there for those who get early on on the bandwagon.

At a time when traditional marketing vectors are crowded and customers/prospects are bombarded with messages and ads, social media is still a relatively virgin territory in industrial markets
Social media allows them to find, identify, reach influencers like industry analysts, consultants and other industry thought-leaders
Through social media they can connect and build relationships with influencers
Social media is the medium of choice of the new generations, reaching them is key to future growth

October 7, 2014

FDA Social Media Guidance Controversy

Under the new FDA social media guidance, manufacturers would be responsible for monitoring their social media platforms for comments considered inaccurate, misleading or related to non approved or off label use.

They would also be liable when third party websites they have collaborated with publishes or do not filter articles, posts, ads or comments considered inaccurate, misleading or related to non approved or off label use.

All three major industry trade associations – the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) and the Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed) warn FDA of significant flaws in the agency’s proposed regulations on the use of social media.

Their contention being that information and comments published online by third party comes under the first amendment and they should not have to monitor, correct or remove them even if they are misleading

The first amendment argument has been widely used to justify misleading information in non regulated industries but in the healthcare industry, misleading information, even by third party can have wide ranging consequences on the health of patients, raise false hope and create undue pressure by ill patients on doctors. Continue reading “FDA Social Media Guidance Controversy”

May 1, 2014

Facebook Cut Posts Reach Now What?

In the past few year we have seen Facebook cut post reach several time. We can expect other companies to follow suit and artificially cut the organic reach of the posts brands and businesses publish on their page.

A couple of years ago Facebook announced that posts only reached 16% of a page followers, last October the average reach dropped to around 8% and it is predicted that before long, 2 to 3% reach will be the norm… Unless brands and businesses start to pay up.

You spent a lot of time, energy and invested a lot of money building a big fan base on you social media pages and now you find out that your fans are not yours but the social media company’s, they have been cutting the organic reach of your posts and now they want you to pay to reach them. It’s called “Pay for Play”.

That’s a tough awakening but not surprising, in time, most of them will become digital advertising platforms and less and less social. The writing has been on the wall for sometime now.

These platform were not purely social, they were tools to collect information and what do you do with information, you leverage it to generate revenue and now that they are publicly traded, they are pressured to generate revenue and profit. It’s business

Facebook has probably been the most obvious but make no mistake, it’s only the beginning, the others will follow

So what do you do?

You don’t put all your eggs in the same basket and when I say basket, I mean social media. As a rule, and that applies to blogs as well, you don’t build a presence focusing on a platform you do not own or control. Continue reading “Facebook Cut Posts Reach Now What?”

November 7, 2013

Mothers With Children Under 5 Most Active on Social Media

A new analysis from Experian Marketing Services found that moms with children under the age of 5, are often more active on social media, more likely to shop using mobile devices and more open to engage with brands across digital touch-points than consumers at large.

Moms with young kids represent a highly active and digitally sophisticated segment of consumers who are eager to connect with brands and share their experiences through multiple platforms Continue reading “Mothers With Children Under 5 Most Active on Social Media”

July 23, 2013

Nine Excellent Free Cloud Generators

Cloud generators can be a fun way to create graphics, they can also help you insure that your content is on target and will be seen as such by search engines.

Cloud generators will transform your text, be it blog post, web page, resume or PR release into a visual image of your content helping you visualize keywords and their weight. and letting you literally see if your content is on target

Wordle

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

ImageChef

With tool, you can create a different styled and shaped word cloud and send to your friends etc as a post card.

ABCya

A word cloud is a graphical representation of word frequency. You can type or paste text into the box showing on their home page and press the arrow button to view the word cloud generated. The appearance of a word cloud can be altered using the graphical buttons above the cloud. It is also easy to save and/or print the cloud by simply pressing a button. This is specially designed for school kids.

Tagul

Tagul is designed for web masters who want to place nice clouds on their web pages. Tagul clouds have numerous advantages against ordinary text clouds like custom fonts, cloud shapes, colors, etc. and thus Tagul clouds have much fancier look. Tagul clouds are more entertaining for your web site visitors provide better user experience.

Word Cloud

ToCloud is an online free word cloud generator that uses word frequency as the weight. Hence, the generated word cloud of a page gives a quick understanding of how the page is optimized for certain words. ToCloud is also smart enough to extract phrases and works much better than most other word cloud generators on the web.

WordItOut

WordItOut lets you transform your text into word clouds. You can then save and share them, so everybody can find and enjoy them.

Tagxedo

Tagxedo turns words like famous speeches, news articles, slogans and themes, even your love letters into a visually stunning word cloud, words individually sized appropriately to highlight the frequencies of occurrence within the body of text.

TagCrowd

TagCrowd is a web application for visualizing word frequencies in any text by creating what is popularly known as a word cloud, text cloud or tag cloud. It specializes in making word clouds easy to read, analyze and compare, for a variety of useful purposes.

June 4, 2013June 4, 2013

Social Media For Business Mainly a Brand Builder

Social media for business study

Social media plays a significant role in small and medium-sized businesses’ (SMBs) marketing efforts, providing both free and paid exposure to a wide-ranging—and often receptive—audience.

According to a January 2013 survey from online magazine Social Media Examiner, Facebook continues to be the most important social network for most business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers worldwide, given its enormous user base. However, for business-to-business (B2B) marketers, there is a healthy competition among other

platforms. Among these marketers, LinkedIn tied with Facebook as the most important social network, while blogging followed 10 percentage points behind.

Interestingly, while YouTube was only the most important social platform for 4% of SMBs total, it is where the greatest percentage of businesses planned to make future investments. Nearly seven out of 10 marketers said they planned to increase their use of YouTube this year.

The greatest benefits of social media:

89% increased exposure
75% increased traffic
43% increased sales.

This points to social’s role as a brand builder, first and foremost.

And even as social media may seem like old hat to many marketers by now, quite a few are relatively new to the platforms. About one-quarter of marketers said they had been working with social media for a year or less. And another 30% were 1 to 2 years into their social media marketing tenure. But SMBs have quickly caught on to how important social is as a marketing tool: 79% said they had already incorporated social media into their traditional marketing activities.

April 2, 2013April 2, 2013

2013 Facebook Cover Photo Guidelines Allow Calls-To-Action

2013 Facebook cover photo guidelines now allow calls-to-action in cover photos.

Previously, Facebook did not allow contact information, pricing, discounts, invitations to like and share and calls to action on the cover photo, many learned the lesson at their expense.

Not so anymore, Facebook simplified the rules and removed many of the restrictions as you can see in the 2013 Facebook cover photo guidelines bellow:

All covers are public. This means that anyone who visits your Page will be able to see your cover. Covers can’t be deceptive, misleading, or infringe on anyone else’s copyright. You may not encourage people to upload your cover to their personal timelines. Covers may not include images with more than 20% text.

The one restriction is the 20% text

What does that mean for marketers?

Generate More Leads
Promote More Content
Improve Conversion
Get more value for of your timeline

And if you have not yet customized your cover photo, here is a reminder of the dimensions:

March 26, 2013

Best Social Media Marketing Tactics

Marketers are zeroing in on the best social media marketing tactics to accomplish their goals, what their biggest challenges are and how to most effectively track their performance.

According to a February 2013 survey of marketing professionals around the world by Ascend2, most respondents, both in business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) companies considered customer engagement to be the primary purpose of their social media marketing respectively 43% and 55%). Website traffic also ranked second for both types of marketing professionals.

leading objectives of social media marketing professionals in 2013

Lead generation was more important for B2Bs than B2Cs. Twenty-nine percent of B2Bs used social to generate better quality leads, and 27% sought to get more leads with the tactic.

Search engine rankings remain an important part of businesses’ digital strategy, and social media plays a role here too. Approximately 25% of both B2Bs and B2Cs used social media outreach to improve search rank.

Increasing sales revenue was a goal for over one-third of marketers for both B2Bs and B2Cs (33% and 39%).

40% of respondents cited creating articles and blog post content respondents cited creating articles and blog post content as the best way to achieve their social marketing goals. These tactics fall directly in line with driving the goal of customer engagement. Other forms of content creation also ranked high, including research and whitepapers for B2Bs, and video and audio for both types of companies.

B2Cs found advertising on social networks to be a much more effective strategy than B2Bs did.

The top three most effective social marketing tactics were also the most difficult tactics to execute. These findings mirror growing research that while content marketing is one of the latest and greatest marketing tactics, it is also difficult and time consuming to produce.

As to what obstacles stood in the way of marketers achieving their social goals, the greatest percentage of respondents (42%) cited staff limitations—not having enough personnel to create the content or drive the continuous engagement that powers social.

Nearly two out five respondents, the next greatest percentage, said difficulty measuring the return on investment (ROI) of social channels was a major obstacle in their social efforts.

When marketers do set out to measure social performance, the greatest percentage—over 60% on both the B2B and B2C sides—said they looked at website traffic. This metric may be somewhat basic, but it is also direct and easy to measure. The same goes for tracking search engine rankings, which was the No. 2 response. These responses show that even as marketing tactics have become more sophisticated, marketers still turn to tried and true methods to quantify ROI.

Category: Marketing