Conference Buddies

The Value of Blogs To Hospitals, New Organizations, and Industry

Speakers: Gary Schwitzer, HealthNewsReview.org, http://blog.lib.umn.edu/schwitz/healthnews/
Bob Stern, MedPage Today, http://www.medpagetoday.com/Blogs/
Paul Levy, Beth Isreal Deaconess Medical Center, http://runningahospitalblogspot.com
Marc Monseau, Johnson & Johnson, http://jnjbtw.com
10/15/2009, 4pm – 5pm

Notes:

• Represent what you and your institution stands for. Why would anyone not do that?
• People like seeing posts of medical institutions, statistics, new medical breakthroughs
• Everyone else is talking about us, why aren’t we? Large Corporations might have legal & regulatory constraints, but they can give out new info, respond to customers, address issues
• Listen, respond, and develop relationships
• People trust others like themselves rather than large institutions and companies
• How do we ensure that medical information available online is accurate? Reach out to the community by blogging about the topic. Use it as a way to deal with product issues. Use twitter to complement the blog posts
• People were proud of the fact that their boss blogged about them.
• Fosters greater confidence in their organization
• “The Terry Schiavo Case” – Blogging about the case gave people the real world insight into what was going on exactly.
• J & J sued the Red Cross for infringement of their logo, became a big news story. People questioned why anyone would want to sue the Red Cross? J & J saw blogging as a way to address the situation. Detailed reasons for doing so, how the trademark laws work, and opened up the screen for people to see what was behind running their organization.
• “Only a fool has to learn from losing, only a bigger fool who doesn’t learn from it”
• Preview comments before they are allowed on the blog, such as discussions about the off-label uses of certain medications, threats, non-topic related comments
• Tap into resources about healthcare on YouTube
• If people come to your blog, it’s because they care about that topic
• ROI on healthcare blogging? Blogging doesn’t cost anything, just time. Can use tools to chart number of visitors, but the value is more important than dollars & cents.
• What is the risk of not being involved? It is more about trustworthiness and source of good information.
• To get around regulatory restrictions and legal issues, blog in baby steps. Start small.
• Blogging about ways to relieve side effects of powerful meds. Although the medical manufacturers refuse to acknowledge the post, at least the information is out there by people who use those meds.

How Twits Lay Golden Eggs:
The Art of Social Engagement for Business

Speakers: Nicole Nicolay, “Nic Nic“, author: Twitter for Real Estate Twits
Jodee Rich, @wing dude, peoplebrowser.com/wingdude
Chris Brogan, President, New Marketing Labs
Nick Halstead, @nickhalstead, Tweet Meme
Laura Fitton, @pistachio, author: Twitter for Dummies
10/17/2009, 4:15 – 5:15pm

Key Twitter Tips and Advice:

• Put a link to your site on Twitter, put your Twitter on your site so people know that your Twitter account is authentic (one forty.com)
• Look to see what your competitors are doing, see who is following them. Research keywords in Twitter, see who comes up.
• Always follow people back, or they’ll get mad at you
• Listen, learn, care, serve.
• Google: Grow Bigger Ears. Use search.twitter.com
• Use seesmic.com or TweetDeck to manage your account
• If you keep seeing the same question to you more than once, don’t keep tweeting the answer, post the answer on your website under your FAQ
• Where to find good content if you don’t have any? Do searches for tweets that contain links. Rank them by influences. See what those tweets are saying, use the Twitter Advanced Search. Play around to see what you can find
• Don’t think in terms of Google searches, do research on conversational things
• Planning Tweets, is it a good idea? Chris Brogan – this is no place for robot behavior, be human
• TweetMeme: Counts unique retweets, if content is good, it will go viral. Tweetmeme analytics gives you stats
• If there is an ad in your tweet, people are less likely to retweet you
• Using Twitter as a Customer Service channel: It’s not “turn it on and it runs”. Think ahead on how it’s going to work, the size of your company, ability to process the requests, use DM to make it a public message, will your response help more than just that one person?

Questions & Answers:

1) The follow back: should you always?
No

2) How do you communicate with people outside your niche? Find out what they are doing?
Ask them about themselves, people like to talk about themselves.

3) How can brands scale their customer service to everyone?
Companies need to invest their money on customer service, the public should demand that and expect great service

4) Managing customer expectations, how can you answer their concern when you might not have the time?
Respond privately, I’ll address you soon, as opposed to trying to solve their issue immediately. (If Zappos can do it, so can you)

Building A Sustainable Online Community: ChicagoNow

Speaker: Tracy Samantha Schmidt
10/16/2009, 3pm – 3:30pm

Tracy Samantha Schmidt wrote for Time magazine. They wanted her to get a student eyewitness at the Virginia Tech shooting. She reached out to people through the Virginia Tech group on Facebook and found a survivor. She beat out 800 other journalists to get an exclusive interview. She believes in using social media to get facts and to reach people.

On Creating ChicagoNow.

The idea behind ChicagoNow is for people to find out what’s happening on their block, things that are happening that affect them, news, and entertainment.

Some key tactics that were used:

• To populate quickly: used an existing community, like bloggers.
• Brought people into the site by funneling all blogs into different categories.
• Hired bloggers by offering them contracts, but the bloggers still owned their content, unedited.
• Remained unnoticed until a massive launch with a marketing campaign.

ChicagoNow has 115 blogs, but no neighborhood blogs. So they created a summary of blogs on paper to distribute to neighborhoods with neighborhood ads.

10 Ways to Build Your Audience
Speaker: Nicole Simon, Social Media Mentor & Consultant, @nicolesimon
10/17/2009, 12:45 to 1:15pm

Four different types of visitors:

• Subscribers, (people who already love you)
• Search engine traffic, (they don’t know you)
• Life stream (people come for specific reasons, people pointed others to it)
• Social bookmarking (people who find you interesting)

Other traffic:

• People who want to contact you (journalists)
• People who want to offer you something (other bloggers)
• People who want information from you

Big Questions:

• What do each of these segments want from you and your site? They are all different!
• What do you have to do to help them get what they want?
• What makes me happy?
• What helps me to get what I want?
• What can I do to make me happy?

Learn and Transfer:

• Switch mindset
• Start thinking, “what can I get out of it”
• Know what you don’t know
• Build a support group
• Use examples from BlogWorld sessions, look through the classes offered, try to guess what would be discussed
• Get inspired: learn from others and take notes

1. Think Professional Media:

• If you write like you are advertising something, no one would read it
• Use an editorial calendar: have a plan that helps you to prepare content
• Can you do partnerships? Do you have something to offer them?

2. Cover the Basics:

• Is your blog in the search engines?
• Use a sitemap, use Webmaster tools

3. Work Like a Professional

• Use tools of the trade
• Research and use what works for you
• Buy books and information to learn in the shortest amount of time

4. Think Work Flow & Procedures

• Make a list of things you need to work through without thinking
• What can be outsourced?
• How much time does it take?
• Can you optimize?
• Which tools work for me? Not all tools work for everyone

The Conversation Prism

• theconversationprism.org, get the rough idea of what others are doing
• Engage with your audience, be where your audience are

5. Think Stumble Upon:

• If I see something for the first time, why should I give you a thumbs up or tweet about you?
• Use other pages to gather what you like when you stumble them yourself
• If people come to your article on StumbleUpon, what do they see? What would they know about your blog? Exponential potential for growth.

6. Think Twitter:

• Think in titles which are re-tweetable
• 120 is the new 140. Stop at 120 so people can retweet you without having to edit it
• Can I easily see your twitter name?
• What is your content about?
• Will others have a reason to point to your blog?
• Think landing page, see what people link to so you know what people are interested in
• Think research, networking, and what other people click on

7. Think Offline:

• Look at people next to you & around you, how can you connect with them?
• Point to offline material

8. Think Newsletter:

• What can you provide to newsletter authors?
• What content do you deliver in exchange for visibility and feedback?
• How can I contact you?
• What are you best articles?
• Search for your niche

9. Think Facebook:

• Doesn’t work for everyone
• Think of it as another professional tool
• Know how to use the Fan Page and how it can connect to the rest of your blog or site
• Put HTML pages and images into it
• FBML pages

10. Stop Thinking A-Listers:

• Like “Dancing with the Stars”, they are not A-Listers, but the show is successful
• Learn mechanisms, they teach you the steps, but you need to learn the music
• Trust in yourself: learn & evolve

Bonus: Pay It Forward

• Get in the habit retweets, relink, & Bookmarks
• Forward interesting information to others
• Honor others who make your life easier
• Give feedback & state what you like and missed
• If I make others happy, they will make me happy
• Think of one person you can send information from BlogWorld, if you can explain it, then you understand it
• Give freely from your heart and not brag about it

Facebook & Twitter Fortunes: How To Strategically Grow Your Business Using the Top Two Online Social Networks

Panelist(s): Mari Smith
@marismith

Facebook:

Facebook Mission: To help the world connect & communicate more effectively.

For social media, it is important to know the difference between a Facebook personal page and a Facebook fan page. Facebook personal pages have a limit of 5000 friends but fan pages do not have such a limitation. Fan pages are also fully indexed by Google. Personal pages do not have any requirements to get a shortened vanity Facebook URL. However, fan pages require at least 25 fans (initially it was 1000, then 100) in order to register for one.

Twitter

When it comes to Twitter, who you follow is as important as who follows you. One rule of thumb to go by is, follow people that have “passion”. Also, it is important to always thank people who retweet your content.

Social Media and What It’s About

It’s about people who are looking for connections. It’s not what you say, it’s the intent of what you say. An important aspect for companies is to remember is to let people be heard, seen, engaged (like Zappos, Comcast, and Virgin).

Changing Interactions

Social media has altered the way companies interact with customers and the community.

1. From : Controlling Our Image” to “being Ourselves”

Personal and Professional lines are blurring

2. From “Hard to Reach” to “Available Everywhere”

300M active members

Facebook = 2nd most trafficked website in the world
70% of FB users are ouside us
Average age of more than 35
50% more active on mobile

90% of social media is about showing up. Make content available to your fans and your fans will do all the rest.

Social Media Barriers

Even though social media has grown signficantly, there are still some barriers for marketing. Mainly, there is a lack of an easy method to measure ROI (from Marking Sherpa).If you can’t measure your Social Media results, you don’ have a proven strategy.

Mari’s Four-Part Formula

Quality NETWORK
High influencial in your industry
+
Quality CONTENT
Relevant, frequency, and focus
+
Consistency

Internet Marketing For Smart People

Speakers: Darren Rowse, Brian Clark, Chris Brogan
@problogger
@copyblogger
@chrisbrogan

Key Take Aways from this Session:

• Learn marketing from anyone, there are always things to learn from people
• Email was “THE” content deliverable (before RSS, etc.) – Spam killed email
• Deliver content that is related to what you sell.
• Community is a privilege not a right
• Find something worth selling, tap the needs of your customers
• Give your members as many places to connect as possible
• Goal is to convert readers to customers
• Treat people so well that they want to go with you
• Position yourself so unique that you don’t have any competitor, that’s where the battle is won
• Deliver exceptional value that makes people raise their hand and want to share
• From Chris Brogan: Selling is not getting more than you give.   It’s giving more than you get.  But not give, give, give, and not get.

Example 1: Darren Rowse, ProBlogger, got a sponsorship from  Canon for his photographer blog, based on his community / tribe getting together on their own and contacting Canon.

Example 2: Brian Clark, CopyBlogger does not take any advertising ($10K a month if he were to advertise), $3M in sales this year by having something to sell. 2 years of not making money to build the audience, first and foremost, now makes $3M/yr

Social Media ROI: What, How, Why

Panelist(s): Rob Hahn, Jim Marks, Sherry Chris, Mike Simonsen, Dan Green
@mikesimonsen
@BHGRE_Sherry
@jimmarks
@mortgagereports

What is an ROI?

Traditional ROI = Return on Investment
Social Media ROI = Return on Influence

ROI is a measure on traffic, clicks, and dollars. The basics of ROI is that, how much money you put in is how much you get in return. It can be summed up as such:

Time invested and sphere of influence put into Social Media => Return on Influence => Return on Investment

Time Spent on Social Media

To give a perspective on how social media works, Dan Green provided his background on his foray into social media. When he first started social media interactions, it took 18 months to get the first lead. Now he spends on average: 132 minutes per day or 13.5 hours per week on blog, twitter, facebook (essentially equating to about 1/4 of a week on social media). The pay off is that he’s closed over 100 real estate deals via social media contacts.

Another one of the panelists stated that it took 6 months of blogging before receiving his first lead, and now he’s gotten 4 real estate deals of $300K each.

The success isn’t to say that you make your conversions on social media. It’s a way to market yourself, gain access, garner contacts, and eventually close the deal. Traditional means such as a phone call or a face-to-face meeting are still necessary in closing the deal.

Structure Strategy, and Direction

Jim Marks states that for a successful social media effort, you need a structure, strategy, and direction. If you don’t know the direction you’re going in everyday, you have to change your strategy. Blogging works, since a byproduct of blogs results in traffic and conversions. Aim to bring online clients offline. Create relationships.

Corporate Blogging and Social Media

Sherry Chris says that getting approval for a Corporate Blog maybe difficult. However, the payoff could be substantial. For example: using BHGRealEstateBlog.com and through “tweeting”, it resulted in closing a $13M business deal.

Some tips for Twitter :

• When retweeting, use a teaser
• Give a reason to click on the link
• Lead them towards a means to close the deal

Social Media Success Stories – BlogWorld Expo 2009

Speakers:

Samantha Gammell (Oscar Mayer / Kraft), Justin Levy (Caminito Argentinean Steakhose), Brian Wiegand, Frank Eliason

This session explores Social Media case studies and success stories

Frank Eliason
Comcast Cares

• Twitter handle: @comcastcares
• Passionate not about products, passionate about customers
• Passion is important
• Look at Zappos, passionate about company culture, employees, brand, and passionate about customers!  or Gary V being passionate about wine.
• Tie results to purchases
• One Tweet Resolution = resolve problems quickly

Facebook = great place  to meet with people you already know

Facebook = not a great place to meet people you don’t already know (compared to Twitter)

Samantha Gammell
Oscar Mayer / Kraft

• Better engage consumers and expand customer interaction
• Weingermobile has been around for 22 years
• Using HotDoggerBlog.com as a microsite to engage customers
• 20,000 visitors a month
• 2600 followers on twitter (@HotDogger / @Wienermobile)
• Good traffic to their YouTube page too
• Great sentiment, people love the WeinerMobile!

Justin Levy
Caminito Argentinean Steakhouse

• Partner in a Steakhouse in Boston
• Initially losing 10% to 20% a month
• Justin’s Chef/partner spent 80% on marketing budget on small town newspaper
• Targeted Google = Up 20% in profits (actually up 40% to overcome 20% loss)
• Targeted Google SEO = Up 20% in profits

Brian Wiegand

JellyFish.com

• 18 months only, 100% social media, no paid advertising, sold to Microsoft

Alice.com

• Launched 15 weeks ago
• Sell Toilet Paper and everyday essentials online (You wouldn’t think but there is a lot of energy around these products, but there is!)
• Prices are the same as Walmart
• Always free shipping, combined with a Netflix feel
• Gather Social Data: i.e. She’s a great mother, what type of diapers she uses; She’s beautiful what type of make up does she uses
• Reach out to Mommy Bloggers

Panel Q&A:

• Be the first, the leader of an industry
• Comcast, Dell, Cirque = great examples
• Social Media = Humanize your brand
• Don’t just create corporate policies, but also provide tools, rules and methods for your employees to deal with Social Media
• My job isn’t to build Twitter – My job is to meet customers where they already are
• Go to where your community is already are

If you could do over:

Brian Wiegand:

Hire a little better, who already understand social media (more experience and knowledge – not everyone is a fit, don’t force it.)

Samantha Gammell:

Make sure you have the resources and people.  If you start, you can’t stop.  Make sure you have the time and money to staff it.

Justin Levy:

Wished we used Twitter, like KojiBBQ, tweet events, locations, drive customers

Frank  Eliason:

Frank’s only statement was to ask everyone to use  the #beatcancer hastag 6pm today to support the cause.
[Note: as a result of all the organizers, speakers, attendees and supporters of BlogWorld Expo, the hash tag #beatcancer not only raised money but also helped make this initiative reach a world record at #bwe09 for largest social media push in in a 24 hour period!]

SESSION LEADER:
Shelly Palmer, Managing Director, Advanced Media Ventures

Propagate your intellectual property = more value

Currency/Value:

• self-selected groups (subscribers)
• attention
• passion
• fame
• intention (Google profits from visitors intention to find/search)
• respect
• things that make your quality of life better

Translate Value Into Wealth

The speed of information is directly related to economic wealth

Social Media

• MySpace = Good for music business, bands
• LinkedIn = don’t put pic if you want to be hired, too much legal liability
• Twitter
  • mico-blogging generating micro-fame
  • a tweet is a blog post
  • tweet value and make it personalized

Social Bookmarking: Turning monetize information into knowledge

Digital communication is faster, not more effective – Quick does not mean good

Websites should be straight forward on your purpose and self-persentation without many clicks deep.

SESSION LEADER:
Paul Pangaro, Ph.D., Co-Founder and CTO, CyberneticLifestyles.com

Conversational Marketing/Media

How do we design for conversation? By Applying Cybernetics:

• Science of “getting what you want”
• Helps us to understand, navigate & regulate complex systems
• encompasses individual, social & technical aspects includes a branch called “conversation theory”

1. What are the goals?
2. How do we measure if we’re on course?
3. What are the levers?

Context (Advertising Media) > Shared Language > Action > Reaction > Action > Exchange > Agreement > Transaction

These fundamentals will not change:

• Brands want consumers to buy
• Consumers need to believe by buying they will get what they want

1. Join the converstaions
2. Understand which conversations can be influenced
3. Facilitate productive conversations

Customer terms/language: consumer need-states, wants & desires

• then can communicate want to brand, want experience

Enticement to be engage: collaboration, voting, commenting

Agreement = common history, trust built, beliefs are validated or changed

P2P (Person to Person) + Internal Conversations are needed to ensure beliefs are shared

Trust is Established:

• History ensures compatible goals
• Sets expectations for future conversations
• Trust is powerful – it lowers risk & saves time

Transactions:

• Ability to coordinate beliefs with customers in order to lead to actions/transactions

Conversation Relationship Management – Relationship History Trust > Lifetime Value > Infrastructure of Commerce:

1. Context
2. Language
3. Exchange
4. Agreement
5. Transaction

How to find the right moment to present & engage?

All successful evolution is co-evolution: each participant must change in response to the other

• Conversation is the most efficient means to co-evolution
• Design for conversation = viability today & tomorrow

Are you sincere in your message? Truthful?

Conversation Engagement Other Than Twitter, Facebook, etc:

• Suggestion Box
• Widget Platforms