Working Within Social Media Red Tape: 5 Rules and a Case Study

There are many organizations ready to pull the trigger on using social media to connect with the community and start doing business. For some industries, however, there is a lot of red tape. Law offices, medical professionals, and industry regulators share one main concern: How do you connect with the community without sharing too much? Whether coming from HIPPA or Joe Blow, a law suit is always a headache. You can avoid these issues by following a few rules:

1. Start with strategy. Organizing your efforts will make all of the difference. While you should have a method for listening for your brand across the web, focusing efforts on social media websites that are most relevant to your brand’s community will reap the greatest benefits. Outline where boundaries lie.
2. Choose your team wisely. Interns are great for teaching, not for de-facto project management. Avoid traditional PR pros, as they may stifle the conversational-feel, but keep them close by. Those responsible for conversations on behalf of your brand need to be people you would put on your sales floor, manage your press conference, and “live” the brand. These critical thinkers need to understand the boundaries of the industry and of the company. This generally discludes those who use stuffy press releases, RSS feeds, or overly technical jargon to communicate. Remember: Social media is akin to a conference call, not a megaphone.
3. Consider what you CAN share. Consider your everyday offline conversations with potential clients. What do you discuss? How do you engage them? Is it always all-business?
4. Start with which resources you CAN provide. Your business is successful because you provide things your consumers need. This makes you the expert. Take a look around the office for trade publications and books. These topics influence your business for a reason. Check out the content within them and share it.
5. Understand what makes your brand human. Chances are your consumers don’t have particularly fuzzy feelings your brand’s legal team. In fact, those guys have probably never crossed your consumers’ minds. Most of the conversations in social media are topical and resourceful.

CASE STUDY: Hospital system & HIPAA A hospital system I’ve worked with had the same concern:

How do we honor patient privacy (and HIPAA) while connecting with the social web community?

Let’s consult the rules:

1. Start with strategy. We plugged in a few tools to listen for relevant keywords. We identified what types of hospital information we could not go into detail about. For example: No discussing patient-specific care. No mentioning doctors by name without prior consent. No providing specific medical advice.
2. Choose your team wisely. This particular hospital system had a great network of hospital support staff ready to jump in. While a member of the marketing team managed most of the day-to-day engagement, doctors, nurses, and pharmacists took a few hours each month to help out. With the marketing team member guiding things, getting “buy in” from other team members was a breeze.
3. Start with what you CAN share. Just as the hospital had receptionists on each floor the marketing team member could guide the social community around their website and direct to external resources (see number 4). They could talk about and share images from company picnics, published (and exciting!) research milestones, and the latest charity.
4. Consider what resources you CAN provide. Just like major health magazines–and even the government–providing topical health information was very much on the table. For this particular type of information a disclaimer was always required. We chose condition-specific advice (“Cooking for New Diabetics: The sugar exchange”) and general healthy living topics (“Family Health: Exercises every age will love”).
5. Understand what makes your brand human. We took a look at how some members of the community were already engaging with each other. The hospital system was encouraged by budding condition-specific communities such as My Cancer Place and KnowCancer. While they avoided joining communities like this, it was clear the community was actively discussing their experiences online. Listening is an incredible tool for building trust. So we took a look at what causes a community to trust a hospital system. It was clear: The trust fell in the hands of the human element–the staff. Consumers trust doctors beyond their credentials. Consumers trust them because they feel doctors understand their human-needs–and their bodies.

The result was an engaged hospital system. They knew the community unlike many businesses within it. Opening up to the social web community allowed this client even greater understanding and way to connect and share resources in an unprecedented manor. They were able to provide healthy living tips without the exorbitant costs of printing. They were able to follow up on consumer concerns because they were listening. They were able to further the communities’ trust because they participated. YOUR TURN: What red tape has your company run into? How can these tips change your approach to the social web?

Your Blog Is Not a Brochure; Create Inbound Links for Increased Business Leads

If you operate a business, you have a much higher interest in Results than those who do not. Absent Results, the business doesn’t make money and will soon fail. As a business owner, you get to make as many mistakes as you have available capital to fund those miscues. There are a thousand and one clamoring social media marketers with lots of theory, and some of those ideas are good, some not so much. Here at Digital Sherpa, we like to test things, and see what works and what doesn’t. We think that gives our clients an edge when expanding their Digital Footprint. We also like to focus on driving business leads, which is the reason to advertise.

One thing we have learned from our own businesses we manage is that when our Digital Footprint expands, our web traffic increases. There is a direct correlation to increased web traffic verses actual, physical traffic, meaning customers in the door. At the end of the day, that IS the result we are all looking for, more traffic in the door, which increases our opportunity to sell more stuff to more people.

Your Business Blog Is Not a Company Brochure

When first starting a blog it is easy to get hung up on all of the details. Notwithstanding, details are important, but we often see clients getting stuck on certain details of the blog that have little to no overall value to what the goal of your business blog should be, which is to sell more stuff. Your business blog does provide an excellent opportunity for Inbound Marketing, which is really no more than providing content that your prospective customer, and customer base find interesting and useful. While it can be about your product, it typically is not.

The good folks over at Hub Spot continue to provide us with excellent case studies on the effects and results to your business when you apply inbound marketing.

Are you sitting on data that might be interesting to others?

Inbound marketing rests on the assumption that people seek out and want to consume remarkable content.  PR, historically, has been about getting a message, remarkable or not, in front of an audience.

Inbound marketing and its opposite outbound marketing have various meanings depending on the context.

Inbound marketing is a style of marketing that focuses on getting found by customers. This sense is related to relationship marketing and Seth Godin’s idea of permission marketing. David Meerman Scott recommends that marketers “earn their way in” (via publishing helpful information on a blog etc.) in contrast to outbound marketing where they used to have to “buy, beg, or bug their way in” (via paid advertisements, issuing press releases in the hope they get picked up by the trade press, or paying commissioned sales people, respectively).

Hub Spot said it well;

If you think your company doesn’t lend itself to creating interesting content, you may be mistaken.  Companies across various industries are blogging, reporting and creating remarkable content that matters to their target market.  Why?  Because it drives traffic and generates qualified leads.

What are some stories that your customers may find helpful or useful, we would love to hear about what is working, and what hasn’t worked so well.

How Are We Measured; Create Return Customers in Your Small Business

Good Morning, Hope everyone had a pleasant Valentine Weekend. We spent the weekend Up North (Northern Michigan) at a B & B in Traverse City. I love the drive up, about four hours, as it provides a lot of time to think about things.

I have been pondering lately the debate I am having in my head about Service verses Product. While I would never debate that customer service is ever so important, but does customer service secure the sale. Does great customer service outweigh deliverables?

One of the bloggers I follow, Jim Connolly who has worked in marketing for 23 years and had his own successful marketing business since the mid 1990’s, is best known worldwide for his ability to help businesses make massively more sales and boost their profits.

Jim’s recent post Superb Service, Average Marketing, strikes a similar cord, although he is comparing service to marketing.

I have lost count of how many outstanding businesses I have seen go broke, simply because they failed to market their services correctly.  They enjoy superb customer retention, because their services are so good that people just don’t want to leave.

However, because they win too few new customers, their revenues and profits stagnate and if they do lose a big account or have a large, unscheduled financial commitment pop up, they can suddenly be running at a loss.  If that loss goes on too long, they are in deep trouble.  If only they adopted better marketing, they could achieve great things.

How Are We Measured

It has always struck me as to why certain brands garnish significantly more money for their product or service than their counterpart. For instance, we were walking through downtown Traverse City this weekend and wandered in a Sun Glass Hut. I wanted a new pair of Oakley sunglasses They were priced at $130, which to me is a lot of dough for sunglasses. Although I am not a bling sort of guy, I made the purchase. However, there were sunglasses that were thousands of dollars, and folks were buying those too,

So how are we measured, what does create a return customer, a renewing resident, a long term client?

We would love to here your thoughts on the topic, and what moves you to renew with your vendor or service provider?

Who Took Away S & H Green Stamps? Is FourSqaure Digitally Recreating the Centennial Tradition?

In returning home from a recent trip from NYC this week, the driver taking me home from the airport was quite a character. His story was his trek with S & H Green Stamps, back in the day. I remember as a kid my folks glove box of our family car being stuffed with them, and my mom leafing through the catalogs on what the next purchase may be when the stamp books were full.

‘S&H Green Stamps’ (also called Green Shield Stamps) were a form of trading stamps popular in the United States from the 1930s until the late 1980s. They were distributed as part of a rewards program operated by the Sperry and Hutchinson company (S&H), founded during 1896 by Thomas Sperry and Shelly Hutchinson. During the 1960s, the rewards catalog printed by the company was the largest publication in the United States and the company issued three times as many stamps as the U.S. Postal Service. Customers would receive stamps at the checkout counter of supermarkets, department stores, and gasoline stations among other retailers, which could be redeemed for products in the catalog.

Where Do Things Go

So, for almost one hundred years a company and a certain culture, stamp collecting was popular, peaking in the 1960’s and dying out in the 1980’s, a pretty good and long run. So as we embrace this digital age, and Social Media is all the rage, what ideas of the past can we apply differently. Is Four Square today’s stamp collecting?

Our five year old granddaughter can very effectively navigate the web, what does that mean? We laugh about it, but what should marketers be focusing on. The floor is shifting, what are we doing, or not doing to sell to the buyers of tomorrow?

What is the value of Expanding Your Digital Foot Print?

What is the risk in ignoring the digital buzz?

What are your thoughts, or challenges or successes at making sense of the change.

Your Digital Reach; How to Increase Your Social Media Outreach

Good Morning, A few random thoughts of Digital Footprint and Digital Reach

We are pretty excited here at Digital Sherpa as we organize the final details to launch a series of Lab Experiments, for the purpose of helping our clients Expand Their Digital Footprint. It will be a fun time as we drill down into the whys and why not of engagement, metrics, what is meaningful to measure and what isn’t.

In thinking about this, different clients will have different things that are important to them to achieve through their marketing initiatives. Social Media touches a lot of different marketing points across your company.

eMarkter summed it up well in their post titled How Social Media Can Work Across Multiple Parts of Your Business

If you accept that your company needs to be involved in social media—as most marketers do—then it’s important to figure out where social media fits within your organization.

Tempting as it might be to compartmentalize social media, most companies find that it gets assimilated into various functional teams, including marketing and communications, sales, customer service, human resources, IT and executive management. Firms from Ford Motor Co. to Dunkin’ Donuts to Hewlett-Packard describe social media as a cross-organizational discipline that touches a wide range of functions.

What is Your Digital Reach

The ways and means at which Social Media Outreach works is nothing less than fascinating. We have started to track and log most everything we are doing here in the Digital Sherpa Laboratory, starting with our own personal blogs, twitter feeds, facebook profiles and fan pages, blog traffic, web traffic, blog comments and so forth. Some of the stuff likely doesn’t matter, but what really struck me was the significance of Expanding Your Digital Footprint, or put another way, Your Digital Reach.

Shelf Life

The advent of all of the tools allow such a rapid expansion of marketing outreach. But what these tools, platforms and venues also allow is  Infinite Shelf Life. Unlike traditional marketing, the effects of a given marketing campaign had a shelf life equal to or a bit longer than the length of the campaign itself.

In the digital world, your content is out there forever.

So What Does That Mean

Start by Getting in the Game. Your Digital Reach will not expand by itself. Folks say that followers don’t matter, and there is truth in that, sort of. What matters is the engagement level of your Circle of Influence. If you are adding value to your Circle of Influence, your business will drive more leads.

We would love to hear about ways in which you have extended your Digital Footprint, and what your challenges and successes were,

Experimenting With Facebook Fan Page Growth

Corralling facebook fans can be a tough sled. All of our facebook in boxes are inundated with fan page requests, most of which are ignored. Search the web and there are dozens of “How To” guides on the topic

Mashable penned a 5 Elements of a Successful Facebook Fan Page

For many companies a Facebook fan page is an integral part of their social media campaign. But, what elements help fan pages build up large followings and what can brands do to emulate the success of others? I’ve put together a list of specific elements that I believe have helped create fan pages with large, engaged, followings.

As we grow our Digital Sherpa Brand and our Turn Key Social Media Product, one of the things we are constantly doing is trying experiments, some of which may seem small, some that don’t work, and some that have an impact to results.

Experimenting With Facebook Fan Page Growth

So we started our Digital Sherpa Facebook Fan Page about 30-45 days ago. Our first exercise was to do like most folks do, which is to invite your friends from our personal profiles, which netted about (350) fans. Next two weeks, hardly nothing, fan adds completely stalled for the next couple of weeks.

Time for Something New

Sometimes to my demise, I am an action oriented guy, and while that doesn’t always work, some of our best discoveries have been from twisting and turning when things aren’t working. So, for the last two weeks, we have been adding three to five articles of interest, our own morning reads to the Digital Sherpa Fan Page, and I have tweeted the article, but linked to the Digital Sherpa Fan Page. The hope was that our Community of Interest found value in the shared, filtered article, and also became a Digital Sherpa fan.

I am a big believer in “borrowing ideas”. Dan McCrthy has blogged about how his blog traffic has increased from his recent, regular Good Reads posting, which is a similar idea on “sharing”

I’m acting as a curator of content that I’m experiencing. I’m applying an editorial filter on that content, and in each summary providing some context for why I think the post is interesting. The blog post itself isn’t strictly original, but it is definitely presenting a point of view that some number of my readers find useful.

Here are Our Two Week Results,

We have added a little over (200) facebook Fans in two weeks. Not bad, and that is helping us move from the staled position. That tact may not work to get us to (5,000) fans, but it has moved the needle for now. I liken this to one of our angles as to how to grow blog followers, is by leaving thoughtful comments on like other blog posts. The point is this is, we are filtering and sharing what we find with our Community of Interest.

So we will keep you posted. What has worked for you in adding Facebook Fan Page fans?

Alone and No Visitors Have Arrived: Creating Engagement in Business Blogging

So you have started your company or apartment community blog, and you are posting away, but you look around only to discover you are Alone and No Visitors have Arrived

Now What

Well, according to the American Marketing Association, you aren’t really alone. When tasked with the question, Are brands providing meaningful and engaging experiences to their customers through their online communities, the answer is a somber no.

Our research on 135 online communities representing 45 major brands indicates that, with few exceptions, the answer is no.

Nearly half of the brands in the study were still in the social marketing experimentation stage, showing fairly robust levels of activity but lacking an integrated strategy across multiple communities and social media. Almost one quarter of the communities were “ghost towns,” mere facades with little or no member participation.

So if big brands can’t get it right with engagement, what doe the small business do who has jumped in with both feet. There is a great discussion going on over at our good friend, Jason Falls blog on a post titled Corporate Blogging Success Starts and Ends With Business Metrics.

The social media purists will tell you that a corporate blog serves as a community hub for your brand. They say it gives your customers a connection point to your company and engenders a sense of community. In some cases that’s true, but you’re going to see me exploring corporate blogging a lot more this year to follow up on a theory that your “community” or “audience” for your blog isn’t what you think it is. That, and the ultimate judge of a corporate blogging effort must be more closely tied to success metrics than making everyone feel good.

Start With a Corporate Blog Purpose

With our blog for our own small business, Urbane Apartments, and our blog The Urbane Life, our first goal was to create SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and web traffic to our UrbaneApts.com web site, for the sole purpose of Renting More Apartments. While there are a lot of little pieces and parts to the puzzle, our blog was and is the highest driver of leads for us. Our combined blog and web traffic for our small business will exceed 17,000 views this month, and 51,000 page views.

We went on to create Engagement next, and have enjoyed the benefits of that evidenced by increased resident retention. But it took awhile to enact engagement, but after 467 posts and 1,851 comments, our blog is humming along nicely.

Tactic Lust Has Little Value

Are you in love with on line tactics, such as facebook and twitter, but are wondering why you only have a handful of followers or fans? It is all the rage today to be a part of this craze we call Social Media Marketing, but if you are just talking to yourself, there is no net effect for your business. Said differently, being on facebook and twitter alone has little to no value to your small business unless you are engaging with your community of interest.

What Do I Say or Post

Social Media is outreach on steroids. it is a way for folks to share things of interest with other like friends and associations. Social Media Marketing can be an excellent way to expand your customer base. Master aligning content with your core customer base, and become a source conduit via the various social platforms within your Circle of Influence.

Be a Curator of Content That You Are Experiencing

Dan McCarthy summed it up nicley on a recent comment he left on his blog

The distribution challenge — how do I get the content I want to share out into my social graph as easily as possible — is a technology-standards issue. For Facebook et al to leverage value out of their audience, they need techniques to keep their audience as organized as possible. Ergo, a walled garden of a certain degree. As a marketer or a media player, you want to assess each potential distribution channel in terms of the scale that you can aggregate and the results that you get from distributing content. The equation would be something like: (Size of social graph on platform/click-thrus)+(Redistribution of links)+(Inbound link recognition by Google)=Weighted value of audience.

The broad debate across the social media community about “original” versus “repurposed” content defines the content question in a way that is too confrontational, I think. A good example is the Good Reads summary of things that struck me that I do on this blog. I’ve been fascinated by the volume of upstream click-thru’s I’m driving with those posts. People are reading them and clicking through to the articles that I’m highlighting.

I’m acting as a curator of content that I’m experiencing. I’m applying an editorial filter on that content, and in each summary providing some context for why I think the post is interesting. The blog post itself isn’t strictly original, but it is definitely presenting a point of view that some number of my readers find useful.

That’s the role of curation, and every brand can benefit from it. For instance, imagine posting once a week on your Urbane apartments blog about new reviews of restaurants in the surrounding area. The reviews can come from any number of sources, and you pick out the ones that you think would be the most interesting to your Community. That’s curated content. It’s not original. But it is incredibly useful.

All Blog and No Comment Makes For Slow Growth

When we started our blog at our small business, it didn’t do so well. The fist set of posts went up in February of 2008. We did what we thought you were supposed to do, we provided regular content, (at least what we thought regular was at the time, we since have increased “regular) we posted relevant content to our business, and we had a pretty good writer with a journalism degree doing the posts.

Dribble, Dribble, Dribble

I love to do marketing experiments to test what works and what doesn’t work, and see our own small business as a “laboratory” to test ideas before bringing them to our clients. So, that is partly why we started blogging in the first place, to see what worked. I actually hung with the blogging test with lackluster results for much longer than typical, as by August of 2008, some seven months after the blogs launch,we only had about (35) monthly visitors. Frankly, most of the ideas we test fail, and so I was ready to pull the plug on this one too, as just being some type of fad for folks drinking the Social Media Kool Aid.

It Is All In The Comments

So, in September we made two significant changes to our blogging approach,

1. We added Guest Bloggers, which later became staff bloggers (more on that in a later post)
2. We required the Guest Bloggers to leave 3-5 comments on like other blog posts for each blog post they did for us.

An array of pretty interesting things happened from this turn of events, but the most significant was that our monthly blog traffic took off like a rocket. By March of 2008, monthly visitors to our Urbane Life Blog had grown to over 4,500 unique visitors.

Slow But Steady

Social Media Today penned a post recently titled Comments Have More Value Than Tweets, which tends to support this commenting theory.

If a person blogs and uses a commenting service like Disqus, you’re pretty much guaranteed they will receive your comment. Email gets ignored. Calls go straight to voicemail. Comments get responded to.

Commenting on someone’s blog accomplishes so much:

• you engage someone on their turf and in a very non-invasive way
• comments tend to have a high response rate, it’s likely you’ll get a reciprocated comment back
• comments let you showcase critical reasoning and smarts
• regular commenting is a sign that you value the other person’s opinions; that won’t go unnoticed

But here is the rub, and we speak this from first hand knowledge,  Blogging is Fun, commenting can become work. We typically get push back from bloggers and folks starting out blogging, as everyone wants to create content,which is good, but Social Media at its core is about connections, and leaving thoughtful, relevant comments on like minded blog posts is an excellent strategy.

How about you, what has worked for your blog growth,