How should Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta Use Twitter and Why?
CHOA – or Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta is a terrific organization. We recently spent a weekend there with our son when he had RSV. The hospital is amazing. They make you feel comfortable, they have hundreds of services, they offer room service to the parents, they have educational tv programs for adults, there is a computer lab, they have wifi, they do everything necessary to make a hard and scary time easy for the kids and the parents. Children’s is flat out an awesome organization.
While I was at the hospital I was on my computer and decide to see what kind of social media presence CHOA had. It turns out they really don’t have any social media presence at all. This is a true loss of opportunity for an organization such as Children’s because it is such a cheap and effective way to reach their target audiences both customers and donors. The day we were in the hospital happened to be the day of the Children’s parade in Atlanta. Seeing only five tweets mention the parade or CHOA amazed me and I posted one of them.
Children’s is way too valuable a resource to our community to have such little presence in one of the largest twitter markets in the country.
What would be the objective for Children’s to use Twitter. The number one thing to keep in mind is that social media of all kinds is meant for relationship building and to funnel leads into your sales funnel. So if I were positioning CHOA I would recommend focusing on a major goal of spreading the word for fundraisers and leverage the technology to inform and attract more people to charitable events.
The initial strategy and measurement for this type of work with twitter would be quite easy to implement. A landing page or blog post should be set up specifically for an event. Then a URL shorten-er that tracks click troughs could be used to send tweets about the campaign. That is the simple part, the larger part of the twitter effort would be to capture the brand image of service and provide users on-line the same service they get at the hospital. This strategy can be taken in many directions, such as providing nurses to respond to simple customer questions or having doctors tweet about the benifits of a particular surgery. The possibilities are truly endless.
Encouraging customers to tweet about their experience with CHOA would be another great objective and could be accomplished with a messaging campaing asking for feedback from parents. CHOA could choose to measure the success of this program simply by looking at the increase in tweets about CHOA from non CHOA accounts.
Ideally CHOA shouldn’t have to tweet about their parade on the day of the parade because their followers will do it for them but that won’t happen unless CHOA is out there actively interacting with the on-line social community.
The future of Metzger Business
Metzger business has been used to keep track of my rambelings as an experienced Internet and ecommere business architect who is interested in social media. I am also very interested in small business and my community so I’ve decided to turn this endevor into an experminent. I’d like to help small businesses and my community by making this a platform for publishing. I’ve invited a number of small businesses jnthe community to start posting articles one a regular basis. I hanlve room for several additional business to post as well. On top of that I’ll be doing business reviews of businesses in the Marietta and Roswell comunities. I’ll continue to write about how I think social media can help both small and large business and how this site helps the businesses that participate on it.
You’ll see chAnges in the site Over the coming weeks and months but we are going to start slowly. So please enjoy drop us some comments and tell you friends in marietta and Roswell. If for a business and would like to contribute please feel free to reachout to me. Kevin [at] Metzgerbusiness [dot] com
Response to Reeking of Desperation
An interesting question was raised by Julian Smith about how people spend their time acting desperate to get seen by the big names in Social Marketing. I formatted the following response but then realized it was more the length of a blog then a comment so here it is.
9 months ago I started my blog MySpellingSucs.com – an unedited discussion of my dyslexia and ADD and my daughters Cerebral Palsy. I started it just to start writing something and do it consistently. I wanted to just say what I felt and do it the way I wanted to. I was tired of listening to fast easy money crowd who really didn’t know what they were talking about and I just wanted to do it my way. I write about how I have learned from my children and parenting, specific issues on CP, and I occasionally interview or write about inspirational folks with disabilities. I love writing there and it has brough me great pleasure as well as some recognition. I was awarded 2009 East Cobber Father of the year and this happened when my readership was only from my local network of friends.
Then about 6 months ago I started getting involved in community – twitter, expanding Facebook and LinkedIn, commenting on other blogs and that kind of thing. I found more readers coming to my site and then I really started getting interested in and attaching to people who were leading this revolution. Julien – Yourself included.
After a few months I found myself backing away from the “Guru’s” and focusing in the “Second Tier.” I do this because they have more time they are just as educated and have as many new and innovative ideas and they communicate more. I know the “Guru’s/First Tier” used to communicate with their audience as much as the “Second Tier” now does but the “Guru’s” don’t have the time to communicate with new folks as much as they would like and they need to keep their loyal audiences loyal so they communicate with as many as possible and are diligent about communicating with the folks that have helped them along the way.
It’s been in working with this “Second Tier” of bloggers that I have found I have the most pleasure and have begun to get the most recognition from the Guru’s. It makes sense.
In any community you want Gate Keepers. A Gate Keeper helps you know who the good and who the bad are when you don’t have the time to figure it out yourself. If the people I trust vet you and say your good than I’ll (as the guru) take a little additional time to find out more about who you are.
I guess what I’m saying is I like the idea of being yourself. That may have something to do with connecting with the crowd but do it your way and find the folks you enjoy communicating with.
This was originally going to be a comment in response to the blog post Reeking of Desperation but was too long. Julien thanks for the inspiration.
Twitter Wiki Pages for Your Business. Is Your company monitoring it’s coversation?
We have a wiki at the office. It’s not used much. There are a few reasons it’s not used. 1) You have to be on the corporate network. Our sales team who is remote is not set up for remote access or they simply don’t know ho to use it. 2) The wiki is dokuwiki which is somewhat easy to consume but a pain to add pages and info to for anyone who is less technical than a tech type user. 3) The biggest reason that the wiki has not been adopted is that the information out there hasn’t been all that valuable to the population at large.
I know #1 and #2 have to be addressed and they will be with an upcoming intranet project. We’re looking at hosting something on the cloud that we can use LDAP or AD to log on and maintain a single sign-on environment. We also want to find something that will be easy for user’s to add pages and intellectual property to. Finally it will have to serve as a platform for communication to the company. I’m very excited about this project but I’m going to have to reserve the rest of topics 1 and 2 for another post.
The third point I made above has been addressed with 2 initiatives I have completed in the last few weeks. The first was a long process of designing integration strategy and documentation including implementation documentation, project plans, risk scenarios, etc. The second was a simple Twitter page. I want to talk about the value of that twitter page today.
What I did:
I built a page on the wiki that consolidated all the current Twitter chatter about our company and all our competitor companies. I also set up a few searches to monitor our top customers and any discussion with those customers that focus on Shipping. I then showed this page to our Director of marketing, VP IT, director Sales Ops and a few weeks later our CEO. We now have a very nice little dashboard of all the conversations that are happening that are important to us.
How I did it:
- Go to Twitter.com/widgets
- Create a search widget for each Company name I wanted to follow, You do this by selection Search widget on the entry screen and filling out Google type search entry form.
- I copied the code created by the widget
- I created an HTML Table and started posting the widgets. I gave a cell in the table for each widget.
Marketing Impact/What we have learned:
- End customers – our customers, customers hate our competitor’s offerings.
- There is not much discussion about our company out there.
- When we found an upset customer, we were able to respond quickly.
- If an upset customer receives their package they probably won’t be upset anymore.
- Most Important: our company needed a Twitter presence. Our customer’s are there and Our Customer’s Customer’s are there. We now have a service presence and I expect we’ll continue to grow from there.
I do want to make one point. The exercise to build this page took about 3-4 hours. It would take a more skilled person about 1-2. I could do it again now in about 45 minutes.
What are some of the ways you’ve used Twitter in your company?
Yesterday’s blog, #NMATL, and @chrisbrogan notes! And Yes Twitter!
Yesterday I wrote a blog on using twitter for notes and used Chris Brogan’s speech at NMATL as an example of pulling twitter data for notes. I also decided to run some stats on the information I found and posted those stats. Quite frankly the stats are meaningless to anybody and everybody other than perhaps Chris and maybe Brad and Matt who organized the event. You can read the entire post here.
So why did I run the stats? Well imagine if instead of Chris Brogan’s speech we instead inserted Big Company Name X and looked at the same data. What useful information might we find? How could we use the information to better understand what our customers are thinking of us NOW! How many are tweeting about us? What words are they consistently using? I used a dump of twitter data and Excel pivot tables to come up with the stats I posted yesterday in merely 10 minutes for the fun of it (I’m strange I know) what could you learn about your company’s reputation in 10 minutes.
Social Media options what works
In this series of blogs I will be examining the various social media strategies and the social media tools that support them. I’ll be examining companies that are using the strategies, looking at why a particular strategy might have been chosen and discussing the success of the strategy. All of these companies and strategies are marketing/PR campaigns.
My goal is to write a case study for each of the social media tools and explain what strategies were applied to make the tool successful for the company applying the tool and strategy.
Here are the Social Media Tools we’ll examine.
Blogging
Bookmarking/tagging
Content Aggregation
Crowdsourcing
Microblogginng
Mashups
Online video
Photo Sharing
Podcasting
Social Networks ie. Facebook, Linkedin
VIrtual Worlds
Widgets
Wikis
I’m going to pick companies that have successfully applied these tools and attempt to define and explain the strategies they have applied. Since I want to be impartial I’ll pick the companies from a list that was compiled by Peter Kim in September 2008 of Social Media Examples. The list contains over 300 companies and the tools they are applying. You can find the article here A List of Social Media Marketing Examples.
Look for the first case study early next week.
Google AdWords – On the Radio?
Google has started an add campaign on the radio to encourage people to advertise with Google. I have never previously heard any advertising for Google outside of the web and certainly not for their service. This is likely an early sign that BING is beginning to hurt their ad revenue. Non the less AdWords can be a very powerful tool for a business that does not have front page placement in the natural search results. I’ve put together a short video explaining how to sign up for AdWords and how to use it effectively to drive traffic to your site. The campaign I demonstrate is for local businesses that want to drive local traffic to their sites for advertising purposes.
Sign up Process
Create Local Ad
The remainder of the process simply sets up your billing preferences. Because I don’t intend to create this add I did not complete this process but you have 2 options in the billing process. Option 1 lets you post pay or pay after the ad has run and Option 2 allows you to pre-pay the add. Option 2 was added recently to help control costs. Google will never spend more than what you have in the account if you pre-pay the ads. This second option was added after complaints and law suits because of Google over billing customers budgets.
If you as a business have a web site that promotes your business but you do not rank high in the search engines then running local ads with Google AdWords is an extremely effective strategy.
Social Media part of the College graduate DNA
Kids that are entering the work force this year have been using social media in one form or another since they started high school. They grew up with MySpace always being a part of their vocabulary. The iPhone came out during their freshman year of college. Twitter to this generation is a tool for older folks although I think that’s changing. Theses kids have posted video’s to the web of teachers talking on the phone in class. They have recorded phone calls where parents have lost it and posted the audio. They know how easy it is to use multimedia and integrated it with social media to get buzz, publicity, notoriety, and make things happen. This group completed homework assignments through social network platforms and have even used it to cheat, although cheating will be considered collaboration now that they are in the work force.
So what does this mean for business? The younger workforce will continue to be more and more comfortable with social media, and building online brands, and collaborating together online. While some of the older generation does not feel you get to know people through social media, this generation knows that you are who you project yourself to be. This trait of projecting personalities can be very valuable to businesses if they take the opportunity to cultivate the values they want their employees to project. If your business wants to project honesty, commitment, hard work it’s very easy to do and a benefit to projecting these values through social media is that the values often manifest themselves in real life. It’s hard to project one set of values and live by another. I know personally I’ve become a much better person because of my projections.
The additional value collaborative tools provide is the ability to maximize the employee knowledge base. Collaboration through micro-blogging allows the community to see status on all projects that are currently in progress and provides the opportunity to provide input if the community has expertise to provide. Of course there need to be policies in place so that these tools are not abused but most people at work use the tools for work and if the larger community is using the tools correctly then they will police and moderate the community for you.
Finally on individual projects tools such as wiki’s provide the ability for a team to collaborate on documentation, decisions, and email like communication that should be captured via a company knowledge base. Tracking these communications via a wiki allows for the companies knowledge capital to be centralized and available. Now anyone can see why a decision was made even years later. This process allows future decisions to be better informed and made with all detail necessary. The best wiki tools search all attached documents as well as standard wiki pages and they allow you to convert or attach emails, documents, spread sheets and presentations to the wiki. This provides truly powerful knowledge content management and the new workforce is not only comfortable with it but will demand it from their employers.
Don’t forget that providing these tools helps to raise the moral of your work force by provide better communication and delivering on their expectations. Moving to Enterprise 2.0 technologies is no longer an option but a necessity. It’s only a matter of time if you haven’t started the process already.
Client Integrations
There are many service companies out there that have to do client integrations so that they can best serve their clients. So what should I expect in the way of support as a client and how easy should a company make it for me to integrate?
Let’s start from the beginning. The Sales Process:
During the sales process the service company should know what types of questions to ask so they can recommend the most efficient and effective way to integrate with your company. They should already have a profile of companies that are similar in size, function, industry, technology infrastructure and revenue so they know how to recommend integration. I know I know you’re special and different and so is everyone else. For that matter so is every project I have ever work on yet somehow they always get developed through the same processes even if it’s agile, XP, or some other methodology. In the end the methodology is always get the requirements, design, build and test. So as I was saying the service company should know approximately where you will fit into their integration process. The service company should be able to explain why you fit into that integration level and approximately how much effort it will be to integrate with them based on past experience. Obviously they should also be able to explain the benefits of the integration to your organization.
Once there is agreement to move forward with the service the sales person will begin gathering a pre-defined set of data. Ideally this information will be written down on a nice check list that can be presented to the customer with definitions of the needed information and a short explanation of why the information is needed. If the service company has this information put together in this manor then you know they really have their stuff together.
The next step in the process will be for the sales person to bring back the information collected from the customer to the integration team and review what is needed for the specific customer as well as finalize on the decision of which integration is appropriate for the customer. The integration team will then put together the standard set of documentation pertaining to the defined integration level including project plans, technical documentation, communications plan, and any other supporting documentation.
It is now time to schedule a meeting with the customer and their development team. All documentation should have been provided and reviewed before the meeting begins. The goal of the meeting should be to answer any questions about the integration and build plans for implementation. There obviously may be other meetings and discussions along the way to facilitate the process but this outlines a smooth and well established path to integration.
Look for my next article on how can Social Media and Enterprise 2.0 better faciliate this process.
URL Shorteners: Does it matter which one I use?
There are many url shortening services available on the web. These services allow you as the consumer of the service to view statistics on click throughs. The service also provides an easy way to publish short urls when typing in Twitter or email so that the link will never get broken.
The problem with a url shorting services is what happens when they shut down. Any url’s that you have hosted with the service will no longer work and you will have to either fix the links or have many dead links to you web site. This weekend the URL shorting service tr.im declared that they would be closing. The URLs will be good through December at which time they will no longer work. So what should these users do? Who should they go with? And if you are a new to URL shortening then which service should you choose.
I personally like the bit.ly service. According to Tr.im in their press release this weekend the bit.ly service is said to be “anointed” by twitter as “the market winner.” It certainly has a large number of Twitter users, is easy to use, has been extended to work in word press blogs in conjunctions with Twitter Tools, and provides excellent data on click throughs. Additionally it will be around for quite a while.
Another good and seemingly permanent fixture is TinyURL.com. I have used tinyurl in the past but they do not provide the same statistical data bit.ly does. I like to know how many people click on my links. The other advantage of bit.ly is that when you log in you can see all previously shortened URL’s.
There are other URL shorteners out there but sticking with these two for now should ensure that you will not end up with dead links on your site.
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