Entries Tagged 'Social Media Optimization' ↓

An article in Online Media Daily illustrates how privacy illiterate most people are.  Most people are so privacy illiterate they don’t even know that they should care.   In the article, author Nina Lentini discusses Facebook’s Social Ads and notes:

“Natural or not, finding oneself in an ad unexpectedly is a worrisome prospect. I enjoy Facebook and the fun my friends and I have therein. And I have been careful not to join a group that might come back to bite me. Still, I shouldn’t have to worry about my face–or rather the faces of my daughters–ending up in an ad.”

I don’t know how many people have come across these ads yet, but in effect they turn you, the Facebook user, into a product spokesperson.  Ostensibly this happens with your permission, but most people really have no idea what they have agreed to.

Working in this industry and as focused on social media and emerging technologies as I am, the first reports about this issue with Facebook’s Social Ad platform really got my attention.  When I discovered that making myself a “fan” of a company or brand gave them the right to use my face and name in their ads on Facebook - unless I expressly blocked them from doing so — kind of bothered me.

In Facebook’s defence, they have some pretty solid privacy controls for users.   Most people just don’t even know they are there, which benefits Facebook’s advertisers.  I have my privacy settings now to block anyone from using my name and face in their ads.  This is why privacy literacy is so important.  It’s really on the users to make sure they know what is going on, because it benefits companies like Facebook to not really tell you.

Here’s a few recent articles on Facebook’s ad programs and privacy concerns:

• What Is Stuart Elliott Doing On Facebook Shilling For Canadian Club? - Online Media Daily
• MoveOn Launches Privacy Campaign Against Facebook Social Ads - Marketing Vox
• Are Facebook’s Social Ads Illegal? - Bits, New York Times Blog
• Apologetic, Facebook Changes Ad Program - New York Times

Technorati Tags: privacy, facebook, social ads

Originally Posted by Carly & Art on Flickr

A lot of my clients at RTCRM are pharma companies, so I read quite a few Pharma blogs. They are constantly complaining about the lack of Web 2.0 and social Web elements in Pharma marketing. For example this article from World of DTC Marketing touches on many issues that I encounter when working with clients, but never gets to the true issues that we and our clients are dealing with.

Has this blogger and every other Pharma Marketing blogger never heard about FDA regulations? That’s why Pharma can’t move beyond Web 1.0 — they don’t have the technical & legal processes in place to deal with Adverse Event reporting. They are also extremely, and somewhat understandably, risk adverse. The major issue with Pharma marketing is that the lawyers run the show and too few organizations are educating them or working with them to craft processes to mitigate risk.

Another major issue is risk. Getting truly engaged in the social Web can help put a “human” face on a Pharma company if it’s done well, but it opens companies up to more risk and different kinds of risks than they may be used to dealing with. The other question is should they focus their social Web efforts on consumers or healthcare professionals? Direct to consumer (DTC) advertising is something that pharma companies debate the merits of and a lot of consumers think it’s a bad thing. Pharma is making some really interesting inroads to the social Web with healthcare professionals via sites like Sermo.

One last, very ignored issue, is patient privacy. There is a lot of question about how pharma companies getting involved in social media may be a conflict with HIPPA and other privacy regulations. Zack Rodman wrote two detailed posts about privacy issues on the RTCRM blog. These begin to detail how complicated an issue this can be for pharma companies and pharma marketers.

Believe me, I’d like to see more of my clients move incorporate social computing into their marketing plans, but I want them to do it the right way. Set some organizational foundations, test the waters, and determine if there’s a decent ROI before jumping in head first and having an expensive disaster to clean up.

Please, pharma bloggers, find a new drum beat. How about some constructive suggestions instead of just complaints?

Technorati Tags: pharma marketing, DTC marketing, social media marketing, social media, pharma

(x-posted from RTCRM Blog)

Photo Credit: Andy Piper Used via Creative Commons Attribution Copyright

Depending on your point of view blogging is either the greatest thing to happen to marketing in the history of modern marketing, or the most over-hyped channel in history. Like most everything, it’s really somewhere in between. Blogging is honestly a great tool, if you use it well. Fame and fortune are hard to come by via blogging, but building a reputation — that’s a bit easier.

There are two main avenues to go about building your reputation via blogging:

1. Writing a blog
2. Commenting on other blogs

Since most people are familiar with the power of writing a blog — let’s talk about option number two. When I’m working with clients, they are often surprised that I don’t start out recommending that they write a blog. To me this is like trying to run a marathon when you’ve never even laced up your running shoes. It doesn’t matter if you are trying to build up your individual professional reputation or build awareness of your company in B2B or B2C markets. This works for all of them, but there are slightly different approaches. It often doesn’t occur to someone that leaving a comment on a blog can work not only at an individual level, but also have positive (or negative) effects at a B2B and B2C level.

Best Practices for Blog Commenting

Regardless of the reason you are commenting on a blog, if you are doing it for professional reasons there are a few best practices to keep in mind.

Technorati Tags: blogs, blogging, comments, commenting, wom

1. Add value to the conversation. Forget about marketing and be a human being and respond to what you just read. If you are in a regulated industry like Pharma, you need to use some common sense here. Be aware and be very clear if you are speaking for yourself or your company.
2. Utilize the URL or “Website” field. This is where you mention your website. Almost all blogs have a place for commenters to leave their website. If you say something interesting, people will click to learn more about you. If you don’t have your own blog then link to your LinkedIn.com profile, or other appropriate location
3. Use a consistent and appropriate name. Blog comments can appear in search results. Make sure you use your full professional name.

It’s really that simple. Picking the right blogs to comment on to achieve business and marketing goals is a bit more challenging. There’s more science to that to ensure that the blogs have the right type of content, reach and engagement levels, and will allow you to truly build relationships over time. But, a little common sense can also go a long way.

Measuring Success

The last element of this technique I want to quickly cover in this post is measurement. The basics are really quite simple.

1. Website Analytics: If you are linking to your website or blog from your comments, simply check your analytics program to see if people are clicking through.
2. Responses: Are people responding to your comments and continuing the conversation based on what you said? That’s a great outcome.
3. References: Are the bloggers you are engaging with seeking you out in different arenas or referencing things you’ve said in comments in later blog posts? It’s a softer outcome than click-through rates, but it’s a highly desirable outcome.

Here’s one final tip. If you want an easy way to keep track of all those comments you’ve been leaving, you can use a service like coComment. It will track all the conversations you participate in and aggregate them for you.

So get out there and join in the conversation!

Everyone is talking about about social media and word-of-mouth marketing these days and acting like it’s a new phenomenon. When, in reality, it’s the same thing that’s been happening for centuries (if not longer) just now we use fancy technology to do it. Word-of-mouth referrals are the holy grail of marketing. Just how do you convince someone to tell someone else about your product? How do you convince someone to share their opinion on their blog, on your website or in a cafe? Really, it’s quite simple — do something that is actually worth talking about.

Continued at the RTCRM Blog

Technorati Tags: heroes, social media, social networking, community, comic books

It seems like one of the basic tools of search engine optimization (SEO) is falling through the cracks, when it’s become more important than ever. I’m really surprised how many sites, are failing to deploy unique titles and descriptions on every page of the site. While there is debate in the SEO community about how search engines, and Google in particular, make use of the description tag — it’s critical for solid interactive marketing.

Why you ask?

Let’s put the basics of good search engine optimization aside for a moment, and look at the new reason to care: social bookmarking sites. All those sites that you see under the “share this” link on my site and so many others — that’s why you care. When you click on a social bookmarking link, it pulls the page title and description. If it’s blank — you leave it to the visitor to fill it in. If you’ve pre-filled it with helpful, accurate information — most people just leave it be. If you fill it with inaccurate, self-serving crap, a lot of people will change it.

Still don’t think it’s important? Well, here is a screen capture of what I got when I tried to bookmark an article on blogging giant Shel Holtz’s site. Can you tell what article I was looking at? Can you tell what category of the blog I’m in? Me neither? Now, I have to type in everything myself or decide how much I REALLY cared about this article and if I still want to save it for later reference.

Now you may say — who really cares? So, CarlenLea’s bookmarks won’t be snazzy for her. Hmmm…okay. But what about the search and visibility value here? Social bookmarking sites provide those lovely in-bound links we all love. People like me share my links with hundreds (or thousands) of other people. So, do you really want to just let me write my own message here, or would you like to guide me a little? I’m actually really shocked that this fell through the cracks with some like Shel Israel.

Let’s look at Social Media Optimization guru Rohit Bhargava’s site and see if he missed this important little tidbit. I’m actually crossing my fingers here, because I really respect Rohit and he knows his stuff. So I’m going to be happy if his titles and descriptions are really optimized for social bookmarking.

But, sadly — they aren’t. Rohit’s are better than Shel’s but, it’s still a generic description not article specific, and the name of the article comes after the name of the site. Okay — that’s really just personal preference, but I really like to have the post title first on blogs. And very weirdly, some has added additional HTML text to the description which then appears in the description field of the bookmark. I have no idea where that bold and italicized text is supposed to appear.

This makes me very sad, and here’s a frowny face to prove it.

So, now I’m going to put my site up to the test. I’ve installed the “All in One SEO Pack” plugin for Wordpress, so it should be pretty decent. I’m using the last article I wrote, which apparently wasn’t interesting enough to merit any comments — but that’s an issue for later discussion.

Hey look at that! (to the right –>) Custom titles and descriptions on article pages! Now, I know perfectly well that my title is too long by search optimization standards, but I can live with that.

So what have we learned here? Social media optimization and search engine optimization go hand-in-hand. The same rules really apply. Develop high quality content and pay attention to those titles and descriptions. Not only is Google using them as a way to see if you have duplicate content, which is bad, but they also matter because of all those thousands (millions?) of people who use sites like social bookmarking sites like:

• ma.gnolia,
• del.icio.us.
• furl, and
• blink list.

So figure out how to get article/page specific titles and descriptions on EVERY page of your site, and be sure to spend 10 minutes reviewing SEO best practices for title and description tags so you are sure to get the most benefit out of them.

Technorati Tags: social media optimization, social bookmarking, ma.gnolia, del.icio.us, bookmarks, title tag, description tag, seo