Some of the photos from my experience this year at the SXSW Interactive 2010 conference.

Some notes from the Social Media Marketing for your Business session on Friday, March 12, 2010 at SXSW Interactive. Hashtag for this event was #socialmediamarketing.

Why get involved in social media:

• Achieve recognition with a wider audience
• Create/improve reputation
• Enhance credibility
• Attract evangelists
  
• Public relations
• Link attraction
• Web traffic

Locate your audience (traffic sources). Where are they coming from?
Check your analytics (how are people finding you?).
Find out where your customers are:

• Ask them
• Trusted ones
• Polls/incentives

Create google alerts
Get a leg up on your competition

• Do the same thing for competitor and you'll discover more about yourself.

Niche social networks
Online video
Components of successful viral video:

• Short and sweet
• Little to no marketing message
• Funny & cute

Forums (overlooked and one of most powerful)
Yahoo! Answers
Social news and bookmarking
Find out actual sites your audience is involved in and get yourself highly involved

Jump on news and trends
What's relevant to current times (recession, saving money)
Create humorous and outrageous content
Use digg, stumbledupon, reddit!

Key takeaways:

• Use social media to obtain visibility.
• Don't use social media just to use social media.
• Understand ROI - you're still a marketer.
• Set goals and create a plan to achieve those goals.
  

It seems like it never fails anymore that when I go to a conference I scramble at the last minute to find some store that I can pick up a quick notebook to take notes. Even though I go through this process, I've also noticed how I don't use that notebook anymore. Everything I'm doing at these conferences, I don't need paper for.

So, I thought I'd share what I do.

It's really simple and easy.

First off, get an Evernote and Twitter account if you don't have these setup already. Evernote is a great tool to have, you can keep all kinds of notes and it stores it on one server that you can access in a variety of ways. There's the web version, desktop client and iPhone app you can keep.

So, here's what I do:

1. While the conference is happening I am taking notes in two places. Evernote and Twitter. I use the Twitter hashtag for the event to live-tweet great key notes from the speaker. I'm also doing this in my Evernote desktop client. I create a new note in there specific to this event so I can easily reference it later and keep it forever. I may use Evernote for longer notes that I write or important ideas from the speaker. And, it never fails, that hearing the speaker always makes me think of additional ideas I could be doing at work as well, I take all those notes in Evernote.
2. Usually, once I am then back from the conference, I write a blog post or two about the conference. Like I did for the last conference I was at, the Mayo-Ragan Healthcare conference. In order to write the blog posts, I then go back to both Evernote and Twitter, compile all the information, and violla, a new summarizing blog post that I'll of course then put on Twitter with the conference's hashtag to share.

That's it, simple as that.

Of course, I'd still recommend bringing a notepad for backup. Sometimes you can't get close enough to a plug to keep your laptop charged or something of that nature.

In the first post of this series I explained how I recently went to the Mayo-Ragan Healthcare and Social Media Conference in Scottsdale, AZ. In continuing on, here are some of my other takeaways from that conference:

1. Blogs: Wonder how Mayo finds out from their patients all those great experiences that they blog about on their Sharing blog? They use a great technique which is to actual give patients that visit physicians for appointments a special card that invites them to visit the blog and contact them to share their story.
2. Blogs: Another great tip from Mayo. Setup a blog that is set to private. Keep it ready to go live in case an emergency happens.
   
3. Social Media: Do you find yourself working for a company (like so many of us) that blocks social media sites from its employees? Visit StopBlocking.org to learn more about this and start getting the ammo you need to combat your company's restrictive policies.
4. Resources: Two more tools out there for you to share documents with others....Slideshare.net for powerpoints and Scribd.com for documents.
5. Resources: Try using Audible.com for audiobooks. There's lots out there to learn and listening instead of reading really helps with time management.
6. Resources: Use DropBox for free online storage of your video or audio files. Under 2 GB is free on this site.
   
7. Podcasts: For iPhone users only...try using Audioboo and iTalk. Audioboo is free and iTalk has a free and fee version. The speaker on the iPhone is great and so easy to use with these apps.
8. YouTube: Check out the When I Grow Up video from Kaiser Permanente. Great video, this had the room cheering.
9. Social Networks: Kaiser Permanente showed off their amazing internal social network that has been very well received. They used Jive Software to create this.
   

I just attended the Mayo-Ragan Communications conference at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, AZ. A great conference with great information. Over 100 folks were in attendance and all in similar situations with their respective healthcare systems. Mostly all Marketing, Public Relations or web healthcare people there.

Some key notes I took vary in range from specific social media tools, ideas for those tools or notes in general:

1. YouTube: With keeping regular updates to your YouTube channel usually being a challenge, how about start getting physicians to talk about whatever the theme of the month is for healthcare. Example...this month is Breast Cancer Awareness month, get a doctor to explain some things about breast cancer and mention the services you have available.
2. YouTube: Ensure all your videos you place on YouTube have branding information placed on the video itself. Since someone can use YouTube to embed your video anywhere, it may not always be in context, this at least ensures your brand is staying with the video.
3. YouTube: Check out Henry Ford's YouTube channel, a great one to model yours after.
4. Monitoring: Check out Glassdoor. See what employees are saying about your company.
5. Monitoring: Sites like Vitals do exist, where patients can rate your doctors on their experience with them. These types of sites will only gain in popularity.
6. Podcasts: Check and use iTunes University. MD Anderson has done alot with this.
7. Podcasts: They are not dead as some have claimed, in fact, there are more than 3x the number of podcasts hosted by iTunes then the number of radio stations out there (over 100K).
8. Podcasts: Having podcasts without the blog or way of establishing community is not social media.
   
9. Blogs: There are other lifeforms for this other then the WordPress blogging platform, even though it dominates the market. MD Anderson uses Moveable Type for their internal blogs.
10. For physicians: Promote social media internally to your doctors. One way for them to see the benefit if they are unfamiliar with the tools out there is Sermo, an online community espcially built for physicians.
11. Flickr: For any site that you use to share images, be sure and use the Creative Commons licensing, images you are trying to share should not have "All Rights Reserved".

See also the second post in this series.

Last Thursday (6/18/09), I attended the "Where Social Media and Health Care Meet - Harnessing New Media Tools" conference put on by the Texas Hosptial Association in Austin, Texas. This particular session, Applying Social Media, was put on by Jon Lebkowsky of Social Web Strategies and Jennifer Texada of M.D. Anderson.

From Jon: Jon points out that social media is an investment, it's not "free". It's an investment of employee time, which is the biggest piece. Setting a clear strategy means a better ROI. You need to clarify what your goals are, what your message is and define if your speaking internally, externally or both. Jon speaks also to some points of social medai versus traditional media:

• There is a low outsource investment
• There is a lower cost per communication transaction
• A low to zero cost of technology investment
• Smaller chunks of audience, "long tail"
• Relatively high staff involvement but more distributed (not just Marketing Communications)

He also recommends strategic planning:

• Define your goals so that they're clear (but prepare to be flexible)
• Define and write policy guidelines
• Clarify ownership (probably distributed)
• Identify core messaging

And lastly, Jon has some recommended actions:

• Listen first
• Determine the best platform to match
• Work through existing social networks

On to Jennifer's section: Jennifer is the Digital and New Media Program Manager at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. Her responsiblities include:

• Social media education and training
• Identification of departmental needs and interests
• Multi-departmental buy in for guidelines documents
• Development and ownership of audience based social media content

She spoke at length about the third bullet point above. She tapped multiple departments when they were creating their social media guidelines and says this was very important to the process. They even created a Facebook group and held discussions there alongside the meetings that took place. Ultimately, having many departments have a piece of ownership with the guidelines helped tremendously with implementation of it. For their guidelines she points out three questions you need to ask yourself:

• What are your goals for social media use? They should align with your mission or broader communications/marketing objectives.
• Who is your audience and what do they need? HIPAA protection for patients.
• Are you ready to be transparent? Who are the guidelines meant to protect?

You can find their guidelines on the CancerWise website. Beyond the guidelines, M.D. Anderson is heavily involved in many social media tools. They have six different Twitter accounts, two blogs, six Facebook fan pages, a LinkedIn account, four different video sharing accounts and two podcasts. They also use Yammer for internal communications. You can find some of their accounts listed on the M.D. Anderson website. She also mentions different ways to measure your social media activities:

• Paid social media monitoring services
• Twitter search
• Google Analytics
• Google blog search

If you have the oppotunity to attend a THA conference like the one I did, I would encourage it. Nice little conference with low cost!

Notes I gathered from the Blogging: Communnicating and Marketing to Key Audiences (Healthcare focus) audio conference in Jaunary 2009. This conference featured three presenters and a moderator:

• Lee Aase, Mayo Clinic
• Sarah Brandon, Alegent Health
• Lisa Dombro, Neurologic and Orthopedic Hospital of Chicago
• Mark Gothberg, eHealthcare Strategy and Trends, moderator

Alegent Health, Sarah Brandon

You can see their blogs here, podcasts, RSS feeds and videos from these links. She says blogging can help you bridge employees across the land. This is relevant with Alegent since their locations span over several different communities. Internal Blog. She received support to move forward with blogging by presenting best-case scenarios and showing business value. As well as guiding leadership through blog comment approvals and other initial concerns they had. She enjoys a very supportive IT department who manage the technology side of things through MS Sharepoint, also she involves the internal communications team to actually manage the comments and then they also work with the resident-expert in the hospital to quickly address questions/concerns presented in the comments. Interestingly, she says the team has actually never yet had to not-approve a comment. She also says the most uneasy and hesitant managers throughout the hospital will become it's biggest adovacates once they see the window of communication open up. It's a great way to point out initiatives the hospital is engaged in and it connects the employees directly with leadership! About their blogs:

• 20-30 average comments per post
• Popular topics included: local/national news, organizational news, 'how's marketing doing?', 'why do we advertise?', understanding the marketplace, economic impact on healthcare for us, 'how can I learn about patient experiences in other areas?', recognizing hero's , sharing your story if you've been a patient as an employee and stewardship in your job.
• Some blogs that posted in December were still getting comments in late January

Quick tips for an internal blog:

• Conversational in tone and nature
• Embed content! Include videos, links, etc.
• Ask questions (to engage the conversation) throughout the post
• Managing team must be able to disseminate action items to appropriate personnel and get a timely response to the comments, otherwise employees will become disconnected and lose interest.

Mayo Clinic, Lee Aase

Lee maintains a personal blog and twitter account in addition to his management of the Mayo Clinic Sharing blog and podcasts for Mayo. A couple overall notes from Lee:

• They did, initially, use consultants to get internal buy-in for social media.
• Their expectation internally is that this is something everyone should get involved in, not just their "social media" employees.

Blogging. They created a terms of service and went through the legal issues. For them, the risk was low enough and the reward was high. Thier "community" blog, like the Chicago hospital (mentioned below) is their Sharing Mayo Clinic blog. Lee uses a flip-video camcorder at low-cost to produce some video segments for the blog. This gives sort of a behind-the-scenes and more genuine feel. Their expectation for this blog and their Facebook account is to aide in word-of-mouth mentions. For them, the flip-video camcorder helped reverse their prior decision to not do blogs. The easily done 5-10 minute interview also helped the temptation to ghostwrite the blogs. Also, they do have a group of video editors to help ensure quality. YouTube. Lee says there was a debate about having their own channel in the beginning and that they did do a survey about it. They found an overwhelming majority wanted one. So they now have over 150 videos separated into different playlists and use it as a host for their blogposts as well. See Mayo Clinic's YouTube channel. Podcasts. They started back in 2005, they took existing mp3 files and converted them into podcasts. Orginally, they were just 60 seconds, very short. Now, they are more subject-oriented. Covering subjects that include heart, cancer, mens and womens health, and bone and muscle podcasts. They are roughly 18-25 minutes in length. With these podcasts, they are not targeting a mass audience but a more specific one. As their subscription rate has increased, they have learned that this strategy works very well for the podcasts.

Neurologic and Orthopedic Hospital of Chicago, Lisa Dombro

Lisa mentions a few reasons why they blog:

1. Great SEO benefits
2. Develop an internal community
3. Many physicians want this to be able to see themselves on YouTube, etc...getting featured for the work they do

Their blog is now the 6th top referrer to their own website! They measure web performance by new patients to the hospital and their conversion rate is about 7%! Their community blog (which was built for internal use but now resides externally) highlights special individuals, nurses, local press coverage, new physician announcements and is used as a new resource to practitioners. She has gotten away from the typical internal email blast as this method as become more effecient. How does Marketing support the blog? They try to give food-for-thought to the physicians writing the articles for topics (from newspapers or what is current news on the web). Review? Yes. Review for red flags but resist the urge to wordsmith, she says to let it be transparent. Process? Pretty simple. Physicians email her the article, she copy/pastes into Wordpress. She or her team then set it up in Wordpress with the appropriate tagging, etc...and then publish.

Mark Gothberg, eHealthcare Strategy and Trends, moderator

Mark points out some issues you'll want to consider before starting a blog.

• What's the business value?
• Do you have enough content (don't over think this, if you can up with about a dozen topics then you have enough to sustain)?
• Casual in tone, not overwritten or corporate-talk.
• What's frequency? Once a week at least.
• What individuals will write it? Do they have time/ability?
• How do you host it? Sharepoint?
• Will comments be posted? How to manage them?
• How will it be promoted?
• Generating ROI

Lastly, a recap of the Q&A.

• External blogs: How do you really get a conversation going without being controversial? Try being inspirational.
• What about legal concerns over physicians blogging and giving health advice? Sometimes the patient commenting is seeking advice, they don't post those, but do respond to them privately via email. Even then, they just recommend the patient call the appropriate person.
• Re: internal blog for CEO, one organization is getting requests from employees to make their comments/suggestions confidential, what about that? Don't do it, if they post it, they must own it. This defeats the transparent culture you are trying to cultivate.
• Patients blogging on your behalf, should you pay them? Probably not, will affect quality and tone most likely, however, it is tough to find the right person.
• Difference in utilization of Twitter versus blogging? Mayo - currently use Twitter to feed out news releases and blog posts, but will eventually use it for more community building. Alegent - they feel Twitter is a more professional audience, so use it more to speak about conferences, health 2.0, new technologies, etc.

So many of us in the web field experience the rift that tends to develop between designers and developers. Some companies actually have a strong relationship between the two groups. Digg.com spoke about this (along with some other panelists) at SXSW Interactive this year. Here's the quick overview. Ultimately, you have to get to a place of mutual respect and trust.

• Statistical approach is well-received by developers.
• Involve IT in focus groups.
• Communicate the problem you are trying to solve, as a designer, with the developers. (Here's the problem and here's the solution I see...)
• Bring as much knowledge as you can, but developer should explain why.
• If the developer can’t explain what the issue is in a language that you can understand, he/she is either lying and doesn’t want to do it or is a crappy developer.
• If the developer doesn’t want to learn new technologies (because it's hard or new), fire that developer!
• Try to understand the others discipline as much as possible.

The biggest reason answered by both sides as to why they don't get along...if one is against user experience. Broader communication seems to be commonplace in repairing the relationship. Eventually, if this high-level of communication continues, the two sides should begin to trust again. And that lays the groundwork for a better relationship.

This post stems from notes I gathered while attending the session "Selling Social Media to the Man" at the SXSW 2009 Interactive conference. The panel consisted of Peter Kim of beingpeterkim.com, Miles Sims of communitymetrics.com, Small World labs VP of Product, Rebecca Caroe of creativeagencysecrets.com and Christian Caldwell of heart.org.

Q. ROI metrics for social media? Use ROI to help build your case. Although, ROI and social media have a rather ambigious relationship. But do try to use case studies and examples to help. From there, develop your own, including projections. One of the keys to social media is that it, in itself, should help drive other bottom line metrics (but you must show that connection). Impressions, digital advertising, cost-effectiveness ('how much did we save?' compared to other tools), brand awareness, lead generation and customer acquisition are good examples of these metrics that could be used. The answer to the ROI question is "it depends", depending on how your organization is setup, ROI though, is always moving.

Q. What can it do for us or our customers? Spreads brand awareness and creates another way for that connection to happen. Although this being said, your company must be ready for real customers with real feedback. You must plan and have the resources to handle this. It could potentially be overwhelming.

Q. What if we fail? Most attendees agree that they have experienced, within their organization, some sort of fear climate in their management, they tend to fear a failure or loss of control in some sense. Don't succumb to this, keep pressing on, don't fear failure. Show successes and failures, embrace them all. That type of transparency is what can aide a culture change within your organization. Be the catalyst for change! If you don't want to fight the good fight, then move on.

Q. How do we ensure success on our first social media attempt? It's an evolution, not a campaign that stops and starts. You're doing something bigger here, your helping create a change, a culture change. What social media is doing is helping build communities and reaching out to information seekers. Social media is a different channel but does not live on it's own island. It should be part of your marketing strategy; set expectations correctly and demystify those negative rumor mill stories your management has heard. For your first one:

• Be realistic
• Ensure it fits into what you're doing
• Keep it simple
• Show business value
• Make sure you can answer the question, "How does this help our customers?"

Understand your customers, show successes and failures, engage in conversation and articulate metrics. One of the advantages about social media is that you can immediately gauge how well you're doing.

Q. What about legal?

• Involve legal.
• See if you can get some leniency to have experiments and test/gather the concerns.
• Create common sense guidelines, e.g. “Don’t do anything stupid."
• Show that competitors are active in the space, this can motivate execs and even legal to take a few more risks.
• It’s a myth that entering social media means completely giving up control. Yes, this happens to a certain extent, but you can still control many aspects of your message and brand.

Q: Which departments are more or less supportive of social media? Evangelists can come from all departments. There aren’t particular patterns to support or blockages from different people. It’s more about attitude i.e. control freaks. Don’t assume that the younger folk will necessarily be more savvy to social media. There are some CEOs who are fired up and ready to go. Q: Best way to achieve success?

• Planning.
• Sharing success and failure with the organization.
• Define up front how you will evaluate success.

Q: Using things like Facebook or Twitter at work: productivity drain or worthwhile? Execs fear social media will be a big distraction. No different to when the web first came into the office. And no different to when computers were first installed (“oh no, people will play solitaire all day”). The key here is to prove it's value and worth. Then watch the resistance fade.