Influential Marketing Blog

The Corporate Social Media Summit - All Brand Pros And No Fluff

There is a fraternity of communicators at big brands who are pushing their organizations into adopt more social media, and it is a growing list. Our team is often part of their struggle, and we try to play the role of adviser and cheerleader as they fight the internal battles to do new and more engaging work. As many experiences as we get to have, though, there is no real substitute for the lessons that social media evangelists within large organizations can share with one another. When brand marketers get together to talk about social media then real learning usually happens.

On June 15th and 16th in New York City, we are proudly participating in the Corporate Social Media Summit in New York - a gathering of some of the best minds in making social media work within organizations. Here is a list of nearly 20 of the all-corporate lineup of speakers who are already confirmed for the event:

• Whole Foods Market - Bill Tolany - Head of Social Media
• Adidas - Chris Barbour - Head of Digital Marketing, adidas Originals
• PepsiCo - Josh Karpf - Senior Manager, Digital Media Communications
• Amy Powell - Head of Interactive Marketing and Social Media - Paramount Pictures
• McDonald’s - Heather Oldani - Director, US Communications
• Nokia - Molly Schonthal - Head of Social Media, North America
• General Motors - Connie Burke - Communications Manager
• Intuit - Kira Wampler - Social Marketing Leader, Small Business Division
• Dell - Caroline Dietz - Social Media and Communities Representative
• Citi - Paul Butcher - Head of Digital Media
• Johnson & Johnson - Robert Halper - Director, Video Communications
• Siemens - Stefan Heeke - Director of Online Marketing
• Intel - Suzanne Fallender - Director of CSR Strategy and Communications
• Samsung - Esteban Contreras - Social Media Manager
• Mars - Lisa Foley - Social Media Manager
• Marriott International - John Wolf - Senior Director, Public Relations
• The Rainforest Alliance - Jennifer Bass Vogel - Communications Manager, US and Canada
• The World Bank - Nicole Frost - Head of Social Media
• Virgin Mobile USA - Lisa D’Aromando - Social Media and Communications Associate
• Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence - Rohit Bhargava - SVP Digital Strategy

This is not your usual social media event, and for any of our clients looking to learn real social media lessons from brand marketers who are actively doing it right now - this is one of the best events of the year. Better yet, Ogilvy’s 360 Digital Influence group will be part of the event as I will be moderating one of the panels on employee engagement, as well as running a unique crowdsourced conclusion session at the conference designed to make sure that all attendees leave with an actionable plan to use the information they learn about at the event in their own day jobs.

If you want to register for the event, we have organized a SPECIAL DISCOUNT OF $500 OFF . Just use the code “OGILVY100″ by April 16th and you will get an extra $500 off registration fees. I hope you’ll be able to join us for what will be a very unique event!

Note: This blog post was originally posted on the Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence Blog.

Marketing To The Sadly Underappreciated Email Inbox

Every morning I do something which you will probably find surprising for a marketer: I unsubscribe to emails. More than that, I actively block senders of unwanted emails and routinely delete undesired emails before I even start reading those that I do. You might wonder why it is that I get so much email I don't want in the first place ... and the main reason is that I still actively sign up to try new sites and get new marketing offers by email. Most times it is marketing curiosity rather than an actual desire to get an email which leads me to sign up for something - which means I may be doomed to repeat this morning ritual for a long time to come.

As marketers slowly turn to using social media as a greater part of their marketing, it is easy to think that the importance of email will start to fade. I believe it won't. In fact, I think that social media in many ways is making email even more important because it is the glue that holds much of our personal interactions through multiple sites together. I have set up my email so that I only receive notifications and direct emails for the types of interactions most important to me. In a world where each of us is surrounded by ambient media, email is still the most direct form media (along with text messages).

Here are three reasons why I think the inbox is still the golden choice for not just interacting with people, but also vital to supporting the growing landscape of social media.

1. Email represents a private "home base." On most social networks there are two choices for your profile - you can make it private or public. Email is the one place where you can have both simultaneously, a public email that you can share with people, while still keeping your identity and private details mostly hidden.
2. Notifications & alerts rise above the noise through email. If you use Twitter or Facebook or any other site, you can choose to get an alert sent to your email inbox when you receive a new message. For news topics (or self-Googling) you can set up a Google Alert to send you an email whenever your chosen topic is mentioned online. Together these types of emails successfully manage to cut through the clutter of online conversations and provide a direct path for you to get to the information you really want.
3. It allows you to build a virtual archive of activity. Need to see an old interaction with someone or a product you ordered several months ago? Using email as a way to save all of your activities can be highly useful if you happen to need it at some point in the future. Even more importantly, most people have been using email for this purpose long before they signed up for relatively new services like Twitter or FourSquare.
4. Use email to control content creation and posting. Services like Posterous use email as the central hub for posting content as well, something that is increasingly being used as an easy way to get content posted online. You simply write your content (such as a blog post) into an email and send it to a specific address for it to be automatically posted. This post was written and posted using Posterous for example.

There are likely other reasons why email will continue to be important - but as you build your next marketing campaign, one question you should ask yourself is how your target audience will relate to your message by email. For a base of consumers getting increasing better at ignoring you in all other channels, email may need to be your best tactic.

Posted via email from rohitbhargava's posterous

SBF: How To Promote Your Business On Flickr

Flickr offers one of the largest image archives and communities online and one that is often not targeted because most small businesses aren't yet good at creating the one thing they need to have credibility in Flickr ... high quality non-marketing images.

This is a big deal because Flickr is not just a community of photos, it is a community where high quality photography is appreciated. Sure, people use Flickr to share their point and shoot photos with family, but the power users of Flickr and the communities that you would care about as a marketer are usually looking at very high quality images.

So before you try to use any of the techniques in this insiders guide, you need to make sure your photographs are actually good enough to bother. Assuming they are, here are a few tips for how you might use Flickr for marketing

1. Share quality photos – As mentioned above, the most important tip when it comes to Flickr is to actually share good photography. This doesn’t mean going out and getting a professional photographer. Those images are great for your website, but Flickr works best when you share more authentic “real life” photos. To take great ones, you may want to upgrade your point and shoot to a real Digital SLR camera with a high quality lens. With photography, the quality of your camera can often be the only change you need to make to dramatically improve your photos.
2. Go Pro - Getting a Flickr "Pro" account is like the green fees in golf. Of course, you can upload up to 200 images for free and have an account without paying, but you don't get the "pro" icon next to your name and your account doesn't have the same authority for members of the community. If you are going to use Flickr to do any marketing, put up the 25 bucks and get yourself a pro account. (PS - I'm not getting any commission from anyone for telling you that!)
3. Create Collection homepages - Flickr photos are arranged into sets and collections. Sets are like photo galleries or albums, and collections group various photo albums together. As you organize your photos, think about how to make each set about a certain them, and then group them together into collections. Once you have a collection homepage, this can be the public URL that you send people to. This way, you could use the same URL even while you add new galleries to the collection each day.
4. Think thumbnails - Sets, collections and individual images are represented by thumbnails. These are the visual elements that need to engage someone before they are inspired to click and delve further into your account. When you take and crop your photos, paying attention to how the thumbnails look matters. More importantly, whenever you create a new set the thumbnail is set by the first image. Make sure you change it to the one that offers the most compelling reason to click and see the rest of the set.
5. Tag properly - Tagging sometimes seems like the online equivalent of going to the dentist, you know you should do it but always manage to put it off in place of doing something else first. On Flickr, tags are a big reason that people can find images and tagging yours properly is a necessary step. Use the right descriptive keywords, but also check and see what people are already searching for and see if any of those tags may apply to your images. Aside from direct links, many of your image views on Flickr will likely come from people searching for these tags.
6. Share real time - One of the most powerful benefits of Flickr is that when you are at an event or something current that people are likely to care about in a particular timeframe, speed of getting photos online matters. If you have a blog, configure it to work with Flickr. If you are using a computer, use the Flickr Uploadr tool to get your images online faster. The closer to your event you can get your photos up, the more likely it is that people will use them to refer to, share with others and drive traffic to.
7. Join and contribute to groups - No matter what you are taking pictures of, chances are there is a Flickr group with others who are already sharing photos of it. People who are active in Flickr groups tend to also be some of Flickr's most active (and often influential) members. As a result, joining groups not only lets you be part of a greater community and conversation on a certain theme, it can often give you a direct connection to Flickr users who really matter. Remember, what you post into a group must be relevant and on topic or else you risk alienating yourself and your brand.
8. Actively promote and approve reuse - Lots of services, bloggers and media are now using Flickr images to power their own stories and media. Once you start getting your imagery noticed, you will likely start to receive invitations for permission to reuse your photos. This means your photos are gaining traction. Try to approve the requests quickly and encourage more people to use your images ... and credit you properly for them, of course.
9. Enable stats - Flickr has a great tool which allows you to get deeper metrics on your photos. With these stats, you can see which ones of your photos proved to be the most popular or shared from person to person, and also what sites are driving people to your photo collections.
10. Keep going – Once you start using Flickr to promote your business, the toughest thing can be to keep uploading good content. Doing this means that you need to treat almost every event as a chance to create more images for your gallery, from participating in conferences to everyday life. If you start to use Flickr for marketing, your ongoing challenge will be to avoid having one big spike and then no more activity.

WARNING: It is important to note that Flickr is NOT a tool for corporate use and the entire site has been set up for personal users only. The techniques above are meant to help you get more from your PERSONAL account on Flickr and NOT as an encouragement to break Flickr's Guidelines and create a business account or use it solely for marketing.

NOTE: This post is part of Small Business Friday (SBF) - a weekly feature to share marketing ideas for small businesses and was originally published on the Amex Open Forum site.

How To Salvage Your Brand On Facebook: Lessons For Nestle

If you haven't seen it by now, the Nestle brand* has run into a bit of a brand crisis on Facebook thanks to a combination of a coordinated attack from Greenpeace and missteps from the brand in communicating with consumers through the social media environment (for a good recap of the situation and analysis, read Jeremiah's post here). The negativity is piling on at the moment and the brand is likely getting advice from many different places about what to do next and how to react. Along with this, their following on Facebook is exploding and is now close to 100,000 fans. In my mind, this is another great example of the type of crisis that we have seen in many companies that ultimately helps to awaken their entire teams to the power of social media and how it may require a different type of thinking.

Dell reinvented their social media efforts after a negative experience with a blogger. Comcast did something similar after a negative video. Nestle's current situation may also provide a similar incentive for the brand to start using social media more actively as well. It is easy to pile on to the negativity because no one is yet answering the deluge of comments on behalf of the brand, but from a marketing point of view the approach they should take seems relatively straightforward. If I were trying to help them turn their Facebook fortunes around, here are some initial efforts I would suggest to focus on:

1. Apologize and change their tone. Interestingly, much of the negativity in this case came not from any business practice or specific thing Nestle said, but rather HOW they said it through their Facebook account. Just as emails are open to misinterpretation, many consumers interpreted the written status updates on the Nestle page as rude and confrontational. Thus the uproar about the brand page ensued. To correct this, the brand needs to apologize and change the tone of the page (presumably by putting a different team member in charge of it). In my last post I talked about the importance of the Community Manager. This is the missing link that Nestle needs to find someone to fill.
2. Use employees for more than just HR. There are some great stories from real employees of Nestle about why they work at the brand and how much they love it. The problem is, these stories are currently buried on an HR and recruiting focused tab on the Nestle USA page. This content goes a long way to humanizing the brand of Nestle as a real company with real people working there and is underutilized. One thing they could consider is turning this into a more vocal group of employees and perhaps even having them contribute to the Facebook conversation. Nothing helps to change perception as much as putting a real face behind a faceless corporation.
3. Share positive stories more transparently. You may be surprised to hear this, but Nestle has many great programs they do to help people in need, save the environment and move the overall industry they are part of toward the future. These are great stories that are not being told in a way that people can find or know about. Social media is a great way to tell these stories more powerfully, and using it across the board to become better storytellers could help to counter some of the negativity and (more importantly) give their advocates something positive to talk about.
4. Consolidate branded Facebook efforts. There are multiple Facebook pages for the brand resulting in some confusion from consumers about which is which - particularly when it comes to the brand voice in the USA versus that in Europe. They don't necessarily need to combine all the accounts, but the conversation strategy across the accounts needs to be more coordinated so they can build off one another and send people to the most relevant place for information and to engage.
5. Find and encourage more advocates. Ironically, this dialogue on Facebook has also brought out previously silent brand advocates for Nestle. There are dozens of people commenting about how they like Nestle products, how Nestle is being unfairly blasted, and even that Nestle is better than other companies who are staying under the radar and therefore not seeing as much negative publicity. Whether or not you agree with these people, the point is that there ARE advocates out there and Nestle will need to find a way to identify them and thank them for their support. Long term, it is connecting with these people that will truly help Nestle to turn their reputation around on Facebook and beyond in social media.

* Full Disclaimer: For the record, I am not a Nestle hater and have had the chance to meet several members of Nestle's marketing team in the past year. Though I do not currently work with them [nor have I ever in the past], I do have a more personal experience as I know some of their communications team members personally. I'm not receiving any compensation for this post and no one has asked me to share this opinion - this is my personal take on Nestle's current situation and what a solution to it may be.

The 12 Types Of "Social Media Experts" - Which One Are You?

There is a fundamental problem among social media experts today. Some people have argued that the problem lies with people who are rushing to call themselves an expert without having the necessary experience. Others create some sort of artificial metric to try and put some parameters around who should be allowed to call themselves an expert and who should not. The easier way out (which I myself have taken on occasion) is to excuse yourself from the entire debate by saying that no one is REALLY an expert and we are all just people who use these tools and try our best. Since coming back from SXSW, I have been thinking about this and realized that none of these methods really works because they all assume that a "social media expert" is a single type of person.

To be sure, there are some people working in social media who really shouldn't be - but I don't believe this number is as high as others would say. Instead, I think that many people who could be great at certain roles are simply trying to fill the wrong role. So, to help, I thought I would share what I think the 9 types of social media experts really are. And in true social media fashion, since 9 is such an uneven number ... let me know what you think the 10th would be. I will add the best suggestion for a 10th to this list. Thanks to all the great suggestions, I have added 3 more types of Social Media Experts to this post and updated the title to share 12 instead of 9 types. Thanks for all the great comments!

1. The Pretender - This is the person who everyone loves to hate. The newly arrived and minted "expert" who has barely used any tools beyond Facebook and Twitter, has hardly any friends or followers, and bases most of their thinking on what they just read from the dozen or so social media "gurus" who frequently share free advice on their blogs.
2. The Trainer/Teacher - Being a great teacher is a gift, and not many people truly have it. If you are a natural trainer or teacher, you have the ability to make complex ideas that are part of social media easy to understand. After listening to your direction, someone new to using the tools and thinking about social media will feel dramatically more comfortable using the tools and (most importantly) why they should even bother.
3. The Professional Speaker - Popular sentiment is to treat these people as the biggest blowhards in the industry because they get up on stage and get paid to talk about social media. It is the existence of this type of expert, however, that often creates the inspiration and excitement about social media as a whole. Once again, not everyone is necessarily good at taking this role - but listening to a great speaker about social media can create a real impact across the entire industry. Speakers may be the rising tide that can lift everyone else's boats.
4. The Content Curator - I have blogged at length about how I believe content curators will be among one of the most important social media jobs of the future. While some may equate the job to that of a digitally savvy librarian, I see the role of a curator as much more of an editor about a particular topic. The curators are the ones that can help us make sense of the exploding amount of content online. The almighty search algorithm won't be enough.
5. The Event Organizer - In social media, there are lots of great events. From the more official conferences and summits to the less formal meetups and tweetups. If your gift is in creating really engaging moments for people to gather in real life and to facilitate those moments, you might fit this category. The Event Organizer, too, is vital for the social media industry to thrive because they are the ones that drive the real moments where virtual relationships become real.
6. The Community Manager - Having a great community manager may be one of the most difficult roles to fill on a digital team, because the skill set can be quite elusive. A great community manager is dealing with real conversations in real time and reacting to those conversations transparently. If you happen to have these skills and use them well, you could easily grow into the very center of an organization's entire social media efforts (a great place to be).
7. The Content Creator - This is one of the most public types of social media experts because their expertise is on display consistently. Content creators are great at writing thoughts in blog posts, sharing their every thought via Twitter, or creating video. In the right role, content creators can become indispensible assets to a team and generate highly original content to engage an audience.
8. The Marketing Strategist - If I have one intention with this post, it is to point out very distinctly that not every social media expert should automatically be put into this category. If you are a marketing strategist, you know the best way to use social media to achieve a marketing objective such as promoting a product or service. You don't blindly create a "platform" for a client with every social media tool, or consider "start by listening and then engage people in a conversation" actionable strategic advice. Instead, you are able to solve a real business problem with a smart plan for using social media, and entirely capable of admitting which business problems social media may not be the best solution for.
9. The Designer/Builder - In some ways, this is the most important type of social media expert - because these are actually the people who make real solutions. Strategy is great, but at some point you need a real execution plan and these are the experts who can get it done. More importantly, they will also be able to provide advice based on experience for how you may want to implement your plans, and what strategy or tactics you may want to stay away from.
   
10. The Networker/Connector [Added 03/24] - This additional category, suggested by several commenters, is the person who actively uses social media to make connections with people both online and offline. In some cases these individuals may be HR professionals, but in most instances they are simply people who actively believe in being social online and use their connections to introduce people to one another. In the best case they are the ones that enable real connections between people - but in the worst case they can also be shameless self-promoters. (Suggested by Maxiosearch, Ann Marie van den Hurk, APR)
11. The Evangelist [Added 03/24] - Often in the role of speaking for a brand and putting a human face on an organization, the Evangelist is the person who uses social media to promote a belief, product or organization. For this individual, social media is a way to share content and engage in conversations about something they are passionate about. As some readers pointed out, this could also be someone who preaches the use of social media internally within an organization. (Suggested by Phil Simon, Ingrid Hein, Russell Pearson )
    
12. The Entrepreneur [Added 03/24] - One category that several readers alluded to but no one specifically suggested was the category of innovator or entrepreneur. This is the person who sees everything in social media and decides that their expertise is in creating a new tool or platform to share with the world. The creators of popular services like Foursquare or Twitter might fall into this category, as well as anyone who has ever launched a new service or app to solve a particular need or desire. Entrepreneurs are the ones who use their expertise to create something new in social media and drive innovation.
    

You might be tempted to read into this post that there are certain types of experts that are more valid than any others, but except for the first type I strongly believe that each has an important role to play as organizations and businesses of all sizes get smarter about how and when to use social media.  If you work in the industry or interact with those who do - my simple plea is that we all need to get better about understanding which of these roles we are particularly good at and focus on that.  As a whole I can think of nothing better to help legitimize and grow the entire area of social media and the groups who are able to benefit from using it well.

SBF: How To Promote Your Small Business Online When Your Website Sucks

Ok, so you’ve decided to start using the Internet to promote your business more actively and most people you talk to who know about the web tell you the same thing … you need to redesign your website. The problem for many small businesses is that getting to the point when you actually have the budget or manage to get the right help to do it may take some time.

In the short term, this leaves you with an interesting challenge that there just isn’t much advice for – the moment when you realize that you still need to promote your business despite having a website that you hate and which you know is less than ideal. Can it really be possible to use the Internet effectively for marketing without a good website?  Yes, definitely.  Here are a few ideas on how to do just that.

1. Announce a non-existent redesign. The first thing you need to do with a subpar website is to give customers the impression you are working to improve it (which hopefully you are). The only thing worse than a bad website is one that seems like it will be bad forever. So put a note on your homepage in some way sharing that your redesign is “coming soon.” If you think about it, this is exactly what retail destinations do when they hang those signs saying “please pardon our progress.” Progress takes time, but the first important lesson is that your customers need to know that it is coming ... even if you have no idea when. Just by putting that sign up, you may also find that it helps motivate you to get that redesign done sooner.
2. Create other homepages. The nice thing about the web today is that you can get up and running on a host of other sites to create a branded presence for your business in less than an hour. What this means is that your website doesn’t need to be the only place that you share information about your business.  Need a page telling people where you are located? Populate that information into Google Maps and use that link. Want to tell people about your business and share some images? Create a Facebook fan page for your business. There are lots of sites out there where you can share information about your business without needing to just point people to your site.
3. Fix your homepage first. The homepage of your site is the gateway to your business and the first impression someone is likely to have. While a full redesign may be some time away, getting some help to recreate your homepage can be a good investment to start people with a positive experience of your site and then potentially drive them to other homepages as mentioned in #3.
4. Use more direct communications. When you can’t rely on your website to reach your customers, you may want to consider a more direct model. Email marketing certainly fits into this category – but starting a Twitter account and sharing updates directly can also be a way of offering a more consistent stream of content or information without relying on your website to do it.
5. Leverage your other materials. I have seen more than a few small businesses struggle to create a quality website while at the VERY SAME TIME they have an expanse of good printed materials such as brochures and other collateral they use in the real world to promote their business. If you have these kinds of materials, work with someone (or buy a relatively inexpensive scanner yourself) to digitize some of the best of your content. Then you can upload to your site or post it online in another location to make it available for customers and prospective customers.

NOTE: This post is part of Small Business Friday (SBF) - a weekly feature to share marketing ideas for small businesses and was originally published on the Amex Open Forum site.

Eating Left Handed (And 4 Other Tips To Survive A Big Conference)

Every year in March I make my annual trek to Austin to be part of the South By Southwest Interactive show, one of the biggest gatherings of people working in all aspects of the web in the world. For those who have been, they might describe the event as a simultaneous assault of information, networking and back to back parties. It has become the Everest of social media events, and in my fourth year of attending I realized that there are techniques for surviving a large event that I have been using and adding to each year. Here's my list of the top 5 lessons that I would share to help anyone survive SXSW or any other large conference they may find themselves attending:

1. High-res Photo Note Taking - One of the tough things about a big event (aside from choosing which sessions to attend) is how to best take notes to bring information back to your internal colleagues who didn't attend the event, or publish your own take on the sessions. A technique I have started using is taking high-res photos of key slides from presenters. It takes just a second, and it's the easiest form of note taking as the slide becomes a reminder of a key point to write about later. To augment, sometimes I will also think of taking notes in terms of Twitter posts (140 character max). That format forces you to just focus on the key points of a session instead of just trying to capture everything a speaker says.
2. Brochure Collecting - At an event like SXSW, there are lots of sites and new innovations that are interesting and worth looking at ... but time is limited at the event. Instead of trying to write down every URL, I collect their brochures or postcards and save them. That way I have a visual reminder to check out a particular site later when I am back in the office and have a free moment. Last year after SXSW, it took me a few months to get through looking at all the sites I found interesting - but I had a constant reminder of those sites through the stack of postcards and brochures and it helped me to stay organized.
3. Plan B Sessions - Your time is valuable and at a large conference usually you will be drawn in multiple directions. At SXSW a common complaint is that for every timeslot there are several sessions that you might be interested in seeing. Ultimately, you need to pick one, but my long time advice for attendees of a conference like this has been that if you find a session is not useful after the first 10 or 15 minutes, you should feel empowered to leave and go to your "plan B session." For every time you go to a session, you should always have a second option - just in case. That way you can maximize your time and what you learn from the event, and be flexible enough to correct a mistake without wasting an entire hour (or more).
4. Influencer Tracking - When you are not necessarily connected to every event or happening at an event, it can be tough to know what you might be missing. One useful way to track the events that you may want to be part of is by creating your own short list of people who you know will be attending all the best events. If they are active social media users (as they tend to be at an event like SXSW), you can see where they are headed and mirror some of your own choices of where to go based on this information. Even if they are not active with social media, this technique can work by talking to them or others to see where they will going.
5. Eating Left Handed - As promised in the title of this post, the last tip is about eating left handed. Chances are, you just spent a good part of the day shaking people's hands and accumulating some kind of unwanted germs (no offense to the people you met, but facts are facts). We should all get more diligent about using that hand sanitizing stuff - but if you are like me and usually forget to do it, a good technique to teach yourself is to always eat left handed (ie - with your "non-shaking hand").

For those big event or SXSW veterans, feel free to suggest some other tips to help someone survive at a large conference in the comments ... they might help me survive the last day of SXSW too!

SXSH: 10 Ways For Healthcare Organizations To Build Trust

When SXSW, one of the largest gatherings of minds and enthusiasts in the digital world, didn’t feature more than a handful of panels on the intersection between health and social media - an “unconference” event called SXSH sprung up to fill the void. Yesterday that event came together in Austin and included speakers and pioneers in using social media to communicate for health issues in regional hospitals, government agencies, health insurers, nonprofits, epatients and pharma companies. Just about every part of the healthcare world had some sort of voice in the discussion as everyone gathered to share ideas on how the industry as a whole might use social media more effectively by building greater trust.

The day long discussion featured many highlights, starting with a talk from Doug Ulman, CEO of Livestrong about the power of health based communities online and how important real time information is to improving healthcare and the patient experience. Greg Matthews from Humana shared how a health insurer can innovate internally and use that to improve patient relationships and Jenn Texada from MD Anderson shared how she and her communications team use social media tools to interact directly with patients for customer service. David Hale from the National Library of Medicine presented an innovative new database to help identify unknown pills called Pillbox and Fabio Gratton shared how to build a movement through a case study of the success of the #FDASM movement in November of last year around the FDA hearings. In the “unconference” part of the day, companies such as ReachMD and WEGO Health talked about their communities and content and how they help bridge the gaps between patients, doctors and healthcare providers.

In the final session of the day, I tackled the question of trust. A central issue in healthcare communications, the session posed the question: why don’t people trust us? Or more specifically, what creates the culture of distrust online that so often causes negativity towards some companies in healthcare and what could we as an industry do to combat this? Our aim in the session was to brainstorm ways that healthcare organizations could overcome these barriers and build more trust and credibility. The entire room then selected what they felt the strongest ideas were and I promised to compile the results into a single blog post - which you’ll find below. In the spirit of the unconference, all of us who managed to be part of the great discussion would love to hear your thoughts on any other ideas that we could add to this list too …

1. Listen to and implement ideas from the community. Being part of a community or interacting with individuals is a great first step, but the real trust that can be built from this comes when people see some sort of action come as a result of the participation in a community. It is not the act of listening, but the impact of that listening which makes it real.
2. Have shared values on good health. Often the distrust in healthcare organizations stems from a belief that priorities are mismatched. Our priority as a patient is to get healthy, and their priority seems to be offering more medication or delivering care in a more “efficient” way. In order to build trust, it is crucial that people feel our ultimate goals are aligned toward making them healthier. We need to focus on prevention instead of promotion.
3. Answer your patient’s or customer’s concerns directly. With social media tools, people have the ability to broadcast their thoughts and desires. Often they are doing so because they are seeking a response. Having a smart listening program that can help you find these queries and a strategy for responding goes a long way towards demonstrating that you care and truly want to help.
4. Aggregate or curate useful information. Sometimes the problem isn’t a lack of information online, but a dearth of it. When information is scattered all over, it can become very confusing about what is credibile and which things to trust. One of the simplest roles for any healthcare organization to take is that of a curator of great content. By doing this, you can create resources for people that will be useful and demonstrate your commitment to their needs.
5. Serve as a resource or guide for the community. One of the things that many organizations neglect is actively using the experts that you may have internally. When it comes to marketing and communications, part of the role should be to unlock the best voices from within an organization (many of whom may not necessarily be in the marketing or PR departments). By bringing these voices out and encouraging them to share information, you can connect patients and customers to the individuals who can truly bring insight and deliver thoughtful and useful information.
6. Set expectations on what you do and why. Lack of trust can be based on a misunderstanding of motivations. There are times when people may assume that a policy or practice is done simply for financial reasons or because of legal motives when actually there are other concerns they don’t know. Being as transparent as possible about your decision process and thinking can go a long way to remove this misunderstanding.
7. Focus on setting a clear mission for employees. The most trustworthy organizations often are the ones that have a very specific and defined vision that everyone is working to implement. When the message coming from employees is consistent, it goes a long way towards establishing a belief in the organization from outsiders because they know what the group stands for.
8. Communicate results and outcomes. Large organizations in particular are often good about communicating outcomes or results in financial terms on a quarterly basis or some kind of cost related metric, but not as good about communicating impact of their efforts in human terms. To inspire belief, it is often the results in human terms that people respond to far more than the financial ones - so refocusing on how that story is told becomes vital.
9. Recognize both sides of the issue or data. Many people inherently believe that data and reports presented by many healthcare groups (and pharma in particular) is delivered with a strong bias towards whatever is most self serving for the group. When information is not presented in a more balanced way, the likelihood that people will not believe it is entirely credible goes up.
10. Build trusted long term relationships. Beyond all the other suggestions, the one thing that establishes a foundation for everything you do are the trusted relationships with influencers and individuals that you build online. You need a group of people who know enough about what you do and the real philosophy and thinking behind your actions that they can serve as vocal advocates for your brand if needed.

Note: This article and recap was originally posted on the Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence blog. For more pharma and healthcare related posts, check out our Healthcare featured archive on the Ogilvy site.

SBF: The Surprising Gender Difference In Customer Loyalty

Several months ago I read a piece of research in the Journal of Marketing that I found both surprising and believable at the same time. In fact, the conclusion of this research made such an impression, I clipped a report of it and put it on the board beside my desk as a reminder of one important difference when marketing to women versus men that many small businesses completely ignore or forget about.  The research explored the idea of customer loyalty, and uncovered that (on average) men were far more loyal to an organization or group than any single individual within it – and for women this finding was the opposite.

What this means is that for businesses such as a hair salon or barber shop – men are more likely to be loyal to the establishment itself, while women would be more likely to follow the individual stylist from salon to salon. As the research notes, “Women tend to view themselves as being connected with and dependent on a few specific individual others. In contrast, men tend to view themselves as being connected with and dependent on larger groups of people and organizations. Because individual relationships are more important to women, they are more likely to develop loyal customer relationships with individual service providers.”

If you believe in this research, then it has obvious implications for your small business no matter what industry you are in. Here are a few practical tips and advice that you may want to consider to take advantage of this knowledge of the gender difference in loyalty:

1. Rotate your employees – If you can make it work for your business, there may be a large value in rotating the employees that your best customers deal with on a daily or weekly basis. For men, this may be easier – but in either case having a range of employees working with any customer (male or female) can help insulate you against one employee leaving, and taking your customers with them.
2. Establish two methods for referrals – Knowing that referrals are often the lifeblood of many small businesses … this study also offers a clue to how you might want to slightly modify how you pursue getting referrals from a client based on their gender. For female customers you may want to encourage the main employee who works with them to ask for referrals – whereas for male customers, you might ask more on behalf of your company.
3. Balance your recommendations – When online reviews or ratings are a part of your business, you may find that they go in one direction or the other in relation to talking about your people versus your business as a whole. To get a better balance, try to illicit these reviews from a more even spit of male and female customers and you can add more balance to the reviews and ratings about your business that are appearing online.

NOTE: This post is part of Small Business Friday (SBF) - a weekly feature to share marketing ideas for small businesses and was originally published on the Amex Open Forum site.

5 Ways To Make Your Business Easier To Recommend

This post is part of Make A Referral Week - an innovative project from John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing to generate 1000 referred leads to 1000 deserving small businesses.

If I were to ask you what the secret was to getting someone to recommend and refer your business, what would you say? Perhaps you might focus on the experience that you provide. Or you might believe that this is a behaviour that you should focus on illiciting from only your best customers. Now what if I told you that the single biggest reason someone chooses whether or not to refer your business has very little to do with their experience with you? That seems counter intuitive. Yet if this were false, then everyone who had a positive experience would share it with someone else. And everyone who had a negative one would do the same.

The point is, people don’t inherently share positive or negative experiences – they need an incentive to do it. The main problem is that anger or frustration IS an incentive. That’s why you hear the often repeated adage that it is much easier to get a customer to post a negative review than it is to post a positive one. Satisfaction, apparently, is not as powerful of a motivator as dissatisfaction. Yet despite this behaviour, there are ways to stack the odds in your favor. You probably already know that online opinions make a difference for your business. So the question you need to ask yourself (especially for Referral Week) is how you can make YOUR business easier for someone to share with a friend, family member or colleague. In other words, you need to be easier to recommend!

Here are 5 tips you should consider to help you achieve that:

1. Ask at the right moment. There is one moment when your customer is likely to be happiest of all, and that is the moment right after they buy something. The decision has been made, and anticipation is likely to follow. Why not ask them to share their experience with a friend right in that moment? Use a post-purchase survey online or encourage your customer to write a review or even take some extra business cards with them as they walk out of your retail location. The more you can do to get someone to recommend your business right after purchase, the more referrals you can generate.
2. Create different levels. It is tempting to think of recommendations and referrals in strict terms. Say online review, and your mind probably goes straight to the sort of review you might find on Amazon or TripAdvisor. In reality, there are many different levels of engagement when it comes to online reviews, and hand written experiences are the most extreme. A much simpler style is what you may have seen on Facebook … the simple thumbs up or thumbs down. Star ratings are another easy method. The lesson is simple … to create more likely situations where people will share their opinion, try to accommodate for different levels of effort and complexity.
3. Let them save your details. The magnet for your fridge that your real estate agent always gives you is the prime example of this idea. The opposing idea to #1, the philosophy behind letting your customers save your details easily is that you want to be there in the moment when they do get asked by someone to refer a business or service. Aside from fridge magnets, for the growing digital savvy customer, another way you may be able to stand out is to always include important keywords in your email communications (and always send email receipts). Then your customer can search their email account and even if they don’t remember your business name or have your card handy, you’re just a simple email search away.
4. Have a personality. The basic fact is that people don’t generally remember businesses, they remember other people. For this reason, having a personality is of paramount importance. When you can foster a personal connections with your business, you give them a reason to remember and recommend you to others. This is the power of word of mouth referrals, that we will remember working with someone who we respected and will be more likely to actively recommend that person and their business in any relevant situation.
5. Admit failure. This last tip will seem like an odd addition to the list. After all, we are generally taught to hide (or at least never admit) our failures for fear that it may make us or our businesses appear vulnerable. The surprising fact is that admitting a mistake can be one of the unintentionally best ways to humanize your business. We all make mistakes, but how you deal with them is the real question. Nothing can endear your business more to a customer than making a mistake an going overboard to correct it (and not making the same mistake again, of course). So the next time you or one of your employees makes a mistake, own up to it and actively fix it. You may find that in the process you converted an unhappy customer into a brand evangelist for life.