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October 22, 2012

Social Media Helps Doctors Improve Care And Stay Current

Many doctors turn to social media to to stay on top of the information they need to know to provide quality care.

A recent study (Sept. 24) published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research shows that

85% of oncologists and primary care physicians use social media at least once a week or once a day to scan or explore health information.
60% said social media improves the care they deliver.
25% of doctors use social media daily to scan or explore new medical information.
24.1% said they use social media daily to scan or explore new medical information
14.2% contribute information daily
61% scanned and explored and 46% contributed information weekly
58% perceive social media to be beneficial and a good way to get current, high-quality information

Unlike other studies on physician use of social media that tend to lump professional and personal use together, lead author Brian McGowan, PhD, an education technology consultant, and fellow researchers narrowed the focus to how social media can be used for professional development and lifelong learning.

Many doctors prefer closed communities to open social media platforms but according to Bryan Vartabedian, MD, a pediatric gastroenterologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, physicians who limit themselves to closed networks are missing some of social media’s benefits.

“Democratizing media has completely opened my eyes to the experience of the patient,” said Dr. Vartabedian, a co-author of the study. He said his social media connections with patient advocacy groups have given him “a huge appreciation for how they think.”

McGowan said the attention to the dangers of social media and the widespread circulation of a few horror stories have prevented many from embracing it.

20% of physicians think using social media sites is a bad idea
30% think it’s great
50% are undecided and could move toward social media if more studies highlight its positive side

October 19, 2012October 19, 2012

Most top 50 Brands Not Social

Old habits die hard: most top 50 brands not social

The more things change, the more they stay the same, 15 years ago, brands had static websites and a unique way to interact with their followers through email or phone, what did they do? They remove phone numbers, addresses and email from their websites.

Fast forward 15 years, in the social media era, most brands have not changed. reminiscent of their old ways, they block followers from initiating conversations and/or only allow them to respond to posts.

In short, brands are still afraid or at best awkward when it comes to one on one communication. They are still stuck in their old broadcasting ways, using social media as a one way communication tool.

According to an A T Kearney study, out of Interbrand’s Top 50 Global Brands on Facebook,

27 of them won’t even reply directly to their customers
20 of the 50 companies have a 4:1 company to customer ratio of posts on their Facebook pages.
71% of the company posts were promotional
Only 5% of all posts actually sought to create real conversation with their customers
Companies as consumer-facing as Disney, McDonald’s, and Sony only allow posts that were created by the companies themselves
Only one of the Interbrand Top 50 routed fans to an unfiltered Facebook wall, while the other 44 initially choose to show consumers and fans a filtered selection of company posts only.
Of the more socially engaged companies, 25 companies in our study had consumer-to-company post ratios in the 3:1 range—three consumer posts for every one company post. These companies include Coca-Cola, BMW, eBay, H&M, Kellogg’s, Pepsi, Heinz, ZARA, NESCAFÉ, Nintendo, Amazon.com, Nokia, Honda, Gillette, Philips, HP, Samsung and L’Oréal Paris. The remaining 20, however, demonstrated nearly a 1:4 ratio between consumer and company commentary.
Only 5 percent of company-to-consumer posts engaged consumers in discussions, while 71 percent of posts were promotional

Most traditional marketers are still not comfortable engaging consumers one on one and default to their traditional ways. they are afraid to lose control of their message and brand and do not understand the dynamics of social media and as a result, budgets may not be available to hire dedicated social media staff or dedicate employees to interact with consumers.

Most brands consider social media to be exclusively a marketing tool and lose sight of the value social media conversations bring to other departments like customer service, R&D, quality, HR to mention only a few. As such, social media can considerably cut customer service costs, development time, correct product or service defects faster, attract valuable talent in a more cost effective way and fail to include these savings and/or revenue generation in the overall ROI

Can you teach an old dog new tricks, sometimes, but past behaviors and trends are not exactly encouraging most top 50 brands succeed at generating “likes” and followers but fail at social engagement and miss out on the real value of social media.

October 2, 2012

Google+ SEO/SEM tool or social media platform?

Since its launch 15 months ago, a big question still remains: Is Google+ a SEO/SEM tool or a social media platform?

Google+ has grown tremendously in the past year (400M users as of September 2012) but the lack of engagement has led to comparing the platform to a ghost town. Is the comparison fair, if you look at the figures, it certainly seem so.

A study from RJ Metrics shows that

The average post on Google+ has less than one reply, reshare and +1.
15% of users will not post publicly again even after posting publicly five times.
The average time between posts is 12 days for active users.
The average number of public posts per active users declines steadily month after month.

In contrast, a the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 52% of Facebook users and 33% of Twitter users engage with the platform daily and a ComScore survey shows that Google+ users spent an average of 3.3 minutes on the site in January vs. 7.5 hours for Facebook.

In response to these dismal figures, Google decide to flex its muscle and leverage its strength in searches by weaving Google+ in their search results, forcing businesses in Google+ by shelving Google places and integrating Google+ and +1 in their search algorithm and the approach seems to show some results

According to an August 2012 survey by SEOMoz,

54.9% of online marketers worldwide said Google+ was one of their top five most-used sites for social media marketing, compared to 87.7% who cited Facebook and 82.7% who cited Twitter. Google+ did, however, come in above YouTube, which 48.9% of respondents cited.
63.8% of respondents stated that they had set up a Google+ business profile, compared to 75.8% who set up or ran a Facebook business page.

89.5% cited changes in Google’s algorithm, like Google Panda, and Google+ as likely to make authorship, site and author ownership of content more important in the coming years

56.4% said Google+ was likely to become massively influential in search engine results pages. Adoption and use of mobile and Facebook’s domination were also mentioned by 81.7% and 69.1% of online marketers, respectively.

56.1% use Google+ for SEO
65.9% use Google+ for branding,despite the lack of user numbers and buzz

In that respect, it looks like the arm twisting is working, boosting the numbers in terms of new accounts, but the growth in new account still has not translated into engagement.

The question still is: Is Google+ a social media platform or a SEO/SEM tool

September 12, 2012September 12, 2012

Social Media Customer Service is a Failure- Frank Eliason

My view is that social media customer service is a complete failure due to a number of factors. For example you have companies out there that are focusing on people with the high Klout score. I don’t think that works so well. Look at that concept through the lens of some of the famous instances over the years. I worked for a cable company and at one point there was a video of a technician sleeping. The person who put that video up had posted two videos, ever. Let’s face it, it was just good content. It was just something we enjoyed watching — so we watched it over and over again. I am not a fan of influencer-based marketing, or providing priority service based on someone’s Klout score.

I hear this all the time: “we want to be where our customers are and our customers want social service.” I say consumers don’t want social service, they just want it right the first time, and if it’s not right they’re looking form someone to fix the experience. What’s going on is these companies are doing social servicing because they think their customers want to be serviced that way but, they’re not taking this customer feedback and fixing what is wrong; they’re not using this feedback to bring about true change!

Think about this: everything we do sends a message to people. We need to remember that.

We focus on call centers and we look at things like “call handle time.” That sends a great message to your employees: “get the customer off the phone as fast as possible”; they’re measuring the speed at which the call center rep can end a call, not solve a problem. This sends a message to the customer because, guess what? – they can tell when they’re being rushed off the phone. And on the PR side, for example, what are they listening for? They’re listening for that next PR crisis. But listening is much broader than one little silo. It is taking this information and putting it in the hands of the product people, the sales people, the C-suite, etc. All people should have access to and understand this information because it can drive product and support changes, not just PR wins.

September 11, 2012September 11, 2012

Social Media Influencial in Food Decision

According to a new survey by eMarketer, social media influences purchasing decision when it comes to food: 36% bought a new brand after seeing a close friend’s recommendation, 30% after not so close friend recommended it, 20% after they saw products highly rated by users in their network and 17% after they read highly rated reviews from people they do not know

In addition, the survey shows that when it comes to food, users are primarily sharing two thing: photos and recipes.

A May Blogher survey shows that recipes are one of the most sought-after pieces of food content online with 89% of internet users interested in food content going online for recipes.

Ina another survey, Allrecipes.com found that 65% of females who regularly used recipe sites bought branded ingredients called for in the recipes at least sometimes. 21% said they “usually” did this.

In yet another May survey, Compete found that food was by far the leading topic category for interactions on Pinterest leading to conversion. 25% overall had bought a product after discovering it on Pinterest, and surprisingly, considering Pinterest’s reputation as a female stronghold, 37% of male users were spurred to buy, compared to just 17% of female users.

September 10, 2012September 10, 2012

Small and Medium Size Businesses Struggle to Adopt, Integrate Social Media

Small and medium-sized businesses still lag behind when it comes to using social media and integrating it throughout the business.

In a March 2012 study from SMB Group, only 24% of US small businesses, those with between 20 and 99 employees, said they used social media to engage with customers and prospects in a strategic and structured way. An additional 20% said they used social media, but in an ad hoc, informal way. US medium-sized businesses, with 100 to 999 employees, were slightly more active, as 33% said they used social media in a strategic way and 19% in an ad hoc way.

When it comes to the specific social channels SMBs are using, Facebook, not surprisingly, tops the list, with 26% of small businesses and 38% of medium-sized businesses saying they used a company Facebook page. Additionally, 20% of small businesses and 32% of medium-sized ones said they also engaged and posted content on relevant Facebook groups. Small businesses were least likely to use geolocation services, with only 3% saying they used them. But for medium-sized businesses, only 6% said they used social bookmarking sites like Digg.

Integration of social media within company processes is one of the latest trends, as larger companies work to incorporate social beyond marketing and into customer service, sales, and research and development. SMBs are also working to do so, but still have a ways to go. Of those respondents that used or planned to use social media, 37.7% already integrated social media into the company website and 22.2% did so within marketing processes. However, more than half (55.1%) of respondents had no plans to integrate social media into the product development process, and 43.9% said they had no plans to do so within a company mobile-friendly website.

A separate May 2012 study from Constant Contact found the majority of US SMBs (60%) were holding their marketing budgets steady in 2012, and that social media marketing was considered effective by only 49% of US small businesses. These smaller companies are holding out, on budgets as well as social media integration, but they would be well-served to follow in the footsteps of larger companies and get involved.

August 21, 2012

Visual outperforms text when it comes to social media engagement

According to a new study from M Booth and Simply Measured, visual content is not only taking over the digital and social media landscape, it’s also outperforming all other mediums when it comes to engagement!

Videos are shared 12X more than links and text posts combined on Facebook
Photos are liked 2X more than text posts on Facebook
48% of all Tumblr posts are photos.
On YouTube, 100 million users are liking, sharing or commenting on videos every week.
Pinterest refers more traffic than Twitter, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, and Google+ combined

Graphics and videos drive engagement in social media

August 14, 2012August 14, 2012

Moms Trust Blogs

More than two-thirds of mothers consider blogs to be a reliable resource for parenting information

Anxious mothers show a tendency to go online in search of answers to an endless litany of questions about raising and caring for their kids. And mothers who looked to the web for parenting advice considered blogs to be the most trustworthy social media platform, according to a July 2012 survey of US online mothers by blog company BlogHer.

More than two-thirds of respondents said they trusted the information and advice gleaned from blogs. Interestingly, faith in blog posts spiked among mothers ages 28 to 45, at 72%, and was a bit lower among both younger and older moms. After blogs, Facebook was the next most trusted social media network at 64%, followed by YouTube at 36%.
Social Media that US Mom Internet Users Trust for Parenting Advice, by Age, July 2012 (% of respondents)

Mothers are not just reading advice online, they’re also taking it. That can mean that a child-specific product or service endorsed on a blog can soon be in a mother’s shopping cart. The most common purchase made as a result of a recommendation on a mom blog was that of a book, at 63%. But BlogHer also found that 56% of moms had made a food purchase based on a blog testimonial, while 48% had bought a baby product.

August 13, 2012

Google + vanity urls are here… for some

Google+ is finally rolling out custom urls (vanity urls), something that should be old story. Don’t get too excited though, only a few selected verified accounts (read celebrities and big brands) have access to the feature.

Google plans a worldwide roll out, eventually, but no time frame has been announced.

The new url will look like this www.google.com/+your username

August 13, 2012August 13, 2012

Traditional Marketing Is Dead

Traditional marketing — including advertising, public relations, branding and corporate communications — is dead. Many people in traditional marketing roles and organizations may not realize they’re operating within a dead paradigm. But they are. The evidence is clear.

First, buyers are no longer paying much attention. Several studies have confirmed that in the “buyer’s decision journey,” traditional marketing communications just aren’t relevant. Buyers are checking out product and service information in their own way, often through the Internet, and often from sources outside the firm such as word-of-mouth or customer reviews.

Second, CEOs have lost all patience. In a devastating 2011 studyof 600 CEOs and decision makers by the London-based Fournaise Marketing Group, 73% of them said that CMOs lack business credibility and the ability to generate sufficient business growth, 72% are tired of being asked for money without explaining how it will generate increased business, and 77% have had it with all the talk about brand equity that can’t be linked to actual firm equity or any other recognized financial metric.

Third, in today’s increasingly social media-infused environment, traditional marketing and sales not only doesn’t work so well, it doesn’t make sense. Think about it: an organization hires people — employees, agencies, consultants, partners — who don’t come from the buyer’s world and whose interests aren’t necessarily aligned with his, and expects them to persuade the buyer to spend his hard-earned money on something. Huh? When you try to extend traditional marketing logic into the world of social media, it simply doesn’t work. Just ask Facebook, which finds itself mired in an ongoing debateabout whether marketing on Facebook is effective.

In fact, this last is a bit of a red herring, because traditional marketing isn’t really working anywhere.

There’s a lot of speculation about what will replace this broken model — a sense that we’re only getting a few glimpses of the future of marketing on the margins. Actually, we already know in great detail what the new model of marketing will look like. It’s already in place in a number of organizations. Here are its critical pieces: