Download audio file (Jim_Brian_December_2010_Webinar_Interview1.mp3)

Brian explained to me that he covered a lot of ground, but focused on:

• Examples and case studies showing how credit unions and banks are using social media on channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs and Foursquare
• Various social media tactics that could be employed depending on your bank or credit union’s social maturity level
• Recommendations for addressing compliance, ROI and budget questions from your C-suite or board of directors

He also highlighted a question about problems with examiners’ concerns of social media. One tip he provided attendees was to “write down all of the scenarios you believe could occur, then list who is responsible, what is a standard response and how long it should take to respond. If you can present that plan, you can show how you’re in control.” Consider preparing a table, such as what is provided in Brian’s post Example Social Media Engagement Model for Banks and Credit Unions.

If you’re interested in reviewing the slides, you can see them by viewing the presentation on Slideshare below.

If you’re interested in having this program or best practices on another interactive topic presented to your own team, contact Brian. I know he would enjoy presenting and handling any questions you and your colleagues may have.

We would love to hear your social media success stories and tips. Please feel free to leave your comments below.

In a digital world, every brand has the potential to be a global brand because every company is a click away. Our own branding team often finds itself counseling clients on this process. Great brands are not developed in a single weekend. And if collective consciousness or swarm intelligence really exists, (related reading: “The Wisdom of Bees”) you can bet somebody is also thinking of the same brand name at the same time.

Apple vs. Apple

Creating a great brand name is a form of invention that requires trial and error. In the end, it comes down to how good the new product or service is. Apple is one of the most recognizable brand names in the world, but when Steve Jobs thought of it, even he was not the first.

Despite the fact that nobody associated apples with technology, innovation or creativity. And the fact that Jobs knew that he’d face trouble with his trademark if his company became big or offered more than just desktop computers … Apple Computers was born. Jobs was right that he would face trouble. In 1981, Apple Computer was sued by Apple Corps., the record label of the Beatles. The two companies came to an agreement, but Apple Computer and Apple Corps. have continued to fight court battles, including one in 2003 over iTunes.

Obviously Apple Computer has held onto its name, but not without a fight. So when you meet with your branding committee, remember that your new brand has the potential to go global and the product line extensions will inevitably push your brand up against a competing brand. Then you have a choice: fight for your brand or simply create a new one.

If you’re getting ready to tackle a branding/re-branding initiative, our own Kirsten Rhody has put together 5 items you should include in your project.

What challenges have you faced in branding companies and products? Please share below.

Along with a few colleagues from the Priority Integrated Marketing and Dowden Custom Media teams, I heard from many healthcare marketers telling stories of integration, collaboration and even KISS.

Accountability & Integration

Peter Taylor from Sarasota Memorial Health Care System kicked things off with a great overview of a sustainable, system-wide approach to social media. My colleague Brian Bierbaum and I were fascinated by how they build their teams. Each team member is assigned to be “CEO” of a digital channel (i.e. Sarah is CEO of Twitter). What a great way to assign accountability to a technology?!

We enjoyed hearing about the various tools and techniques being integrated into healthcare marketing plans. Since returning, Brian has enjoyed sharing with our interactive teams. The next couple of points are creating a lot of buzz around our offices.

• Marketers are integrating non-traditional tactics to reach members of the community
  • Mobile optimized sites and QR codes tied with highly targeted retail data
    • Example: a free heart assessment coupon on your steak-laden grocery receipt … creepy, but effective
• Marketers are integrating CRM technology with marketing life cycles
  • This is enabling them to truly measure ROI and move toward automation

No, not this KISS!

My colleague, Kelly Tkac sat in on a presentation by Mark Shelley, Director of Marketing at Lexington Medical Center, who reinforced the K.I.S.S. principle for website redesign. He provided a few great tips to help others keep it simple based on his experience.

• Define the Mission Statement and ensure consensus from the executive team
• Focus on delivering that message throughout the site
• Make a realistic assessment of your staff’s capabilities and resources
• Create a short list of objectives to accomplish … prioritization is key
  • The initial phase of development should concentrate only on the things that can be done well
• Don’t get caught up in what your competition is doing, the latest trends and new buzzwords
  • Remain focused on your core objectives and the features that can be well executed well in the initial phase
  • Tackle additional initiatives in future phases of development

KISS … Ahem … Content Remains King

According to another colleague, Christian Twiste, like KISS (who remain popular despite major changes in the music industry), content remains king when it comes to launching and supporting successful online and new media campaigns. Even the best-laid plans will under perform without proper attention to the compelling content streams that engage patients and visitors. According to Christian …

• The good news for the healthcare industry is that marketers seem to recognize the importance of robust SEO, social media and e-newsletter campaigns to overall marketing initiatives.
  • Tactics considered ancillary just a few years ago have become fundamental parts of a hospital’s communication strategy.
• The bad news is that many organizations still struggle with the intensive task of generating enough quality content to properly support their campaigns.
  • Several attendees remarked to him that they feel confident about their strategy, but feel they are still lacking content.
• Fortunately, today’s healthcare marketers have a wide range of options to choose from to meet their content needs.
  • From complete consumer health libraries to fully custom content, help is available from trusted partners like Priority Integrated Marketing and Dowden Custom Media.

I hope you enjoyed hearing from me and a few of my colleagues who were lucky enough to enjoy some great conversations, presentations and a little Florida sun earlier this week. Have any other takeaways to share? Please comment below.

One trend I’m spotting, regardless of industry, is the interest in gaining a greater “share of wallet” from consumers. Mobile is playing a big role in growing “share of wallet,” and I am excited to see that it’s featured topic at our next conference, the upcoming 2011 Greystone.Net Healthcare Internet Conference in Orlando, Fla.

Healthcare marketers are planning to build Web portals for easy access to electronic medical records (EMRs) and online bill pay. Financial marketers have already pushed the digital envelope with mobile Apps, mobile payment systems and more. My guess is that healthcare marketers won’t be far behind them.

Today, to gain a greater “share of wallet” – to be the consumer’s preferred choice for your services, you need to think about the mobile consumer. Even Google is thinking about the mobile consumer with Google Wallet.  To own the customer, you need to own their preferred method of payment. Nowadays, if you can get into their phones, you’ll be much closer to their wallets.

If I were a marketing director today, struggling with a long-term marketing strategy, I’d leap frog the competition and focus on mobile messaging. The purse strings are about to become even  more digital.

If you’re attending the 15th Annual Greystone.Net Healthcare Internet Conference in Orlando, stop by and say hi. I’ll be with the Dowden Custom Media team at booth #35. We’ll be giving away an iPad to one lucky conference attendee and discussing the latest interactive marketing strategies for healthcare.

If you were a college student today, you might look for a magic pill like Ritalin to help you focus on your tasks. While I wouldn’t recommend that approach without a doctor’s approval, wouldn’t it be great if there was a pill specifically designed for marketing directors? What if there was a drug that would make our jobs easier? See our parody below of Markenacea, the wonder drug for marketers.

After previewing our video one person jokingly commented, “Glad to know I’m not the only marketing director with this problem.” She’s not alone, many others feel the same way.

What’s the Solution to Multi-Channel Marketing Stress (MCMS)?

If I were Jedi Master Yoda I might advise, “To control your marketing, hold tightly you will not.” Which is the same as saying, “Let go.” (Easy for him to say, he lived alone on Dagobah!!) One of the hardest things for people to do, is to stop doing. This is especially true for marketers who are naturally task oriented. We set deadlines, we beat deadlines and we repeat.

As the saying goes, “Do What You Do Best and Pay for the Rest.” I’m not sure who said that, but I bet she got a lot done every week and kept her life in balance at the same time. In a business context, letting go is getting approval or giving yourself permission to outsource your marketing. And if you can’t outsource all of it, at least outsource the parts you’re not best suited to implement. That might be the first step to treating MCMS.

This is also true among major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Gmail and Hotmail who manage the flood of incoming email each day. According to the Harte-Hanks Postfuture Index 2009 -2010, “Engagement levels (usually thought of as a combination of open and click rates) have always been indicative of the success or failure of a program. Now engagement levels are becoming an important component in the delivery rate. ISPs are beginning to watch what their customers are doing, or not doing, with their email.”

Hotmail and Gmail are both using engagement metrics today to determine where to ultimately place the message your marketing messages – at the top of the inbox, bottom or even worse in the Junk Mail folder.

So every piece of content you produce is being measured and monitored. And today every piece of content counts and has a ripple effect toward the success of future marketing campaigns.

Tips to Improve Your Content (for customers and ISPs):

1. Create a Content Strategy: Create content that teaches or brings value to your audience every time.
2. Study Your Analytics: Do you know what types of content are of most or least interest to your audience? Knowing this could improve your engagement and future success.
3. Know Your Audience: Whether you create your own content or choose a partner like Priority, ensure that your content creation team knows the audience and can speak to them in the right “voice.”  One size does not fit all and the more niches you create, the better.

What Google learned:

1. Consumers don’t want to enter health information online, unless it provides value to them personally. Gathering information from multiple doctors, clinics, family members etc. isn’t easy and updating is still a manual process.
2. What will consumers do with the information once it’s online? If there aren’t calculators and learning modules that show you how your health is improving, then information is meaningless.
3. Online consumers need more engagement with other consumers. How your healthcare costs compare to other consumers or how your fitness levels ranks compared to others your age, is more helpful than simply an online record storage.

Financial Industry: A Model to Follow for Healthcare

Today almost every financial institution offers online and mobile banking to provide instant access to your finances. And that employer-sponsored 401(k) is easily portable to the next online portal if you switch jobs. Plus with “screen scraping” you can see all your banking accounts for a single financial institution. That’s the model to follow for the healthcare industry.

If Google couldn’t figure out the personal healthcare record, who will? My guess is it will eventually be the financial services industry. A big player like Wells Fargo or Bank of America will step up because they already have the digital platforms, security and educational tools to help consumers manage their health and wealth. And employers who are the biggest purchasers of health care insurance could partner with financial institutions to ensure their employees are making wise money and health decisions.

We see this as an exciting time and opportunity for our company because we serve the marketing and education needs of the financial and healthcare industries. We’ve always been creating content around “health and wealth” because the two themes are so important to everyone’s well-being.

And recently Dowden Health Media purchased our company because of the synergies between these two industries. Together we’re already working on tools to help consumers gain instant feedback on the personal information that helps them manage their lives.

Marketers like Groupon are well aware that mobile readers are willing to act on offers and drive foot traffic to retail locations.

Now that you know how mobile your email campaigns are, why not leverage this knowledge? Here are a few tips:

1. Create a mobile-optimized version of your emails. Make it easy to read in the phone’s smaller screen.
2. Email offers that relate to mobile readers. Act as if you are Groupon to drive foot traffic to locations.
3. Encourage mobile readers to opt-in to text messaging for hot offers. Texting is growing too!

Our email marketing manager, Grant Evans has even more tips for incorporating mobile into your email strategy.

Timing is everything. Email usage peaks in the middle of the day across all time zones. That means the majority of people are sending and receiving messages from 11 AM to 2 PM. If you are trying to reach the mobile consumer, middle of the day is probably better than morning and afternoon drive-time. Consumers shouldn’t be checking their email while driving, right?

According to Diane Merrifield of MindBridge Marketing, free checking isn’t going away, but many financial institutions are now creating new relationship-building products that could be good for the industry and consumers too.

To hear what Diane has to say about the evolution of banking products, listen to the interview.

Download audio file (DianeMindBridge.mp3)

One important lesson from banking reform is that educating consumers works. While a high percentage of consumers did opt-in for the convenience overdraft protection by last summer’s deadline, many are now managing their money better and avoiding overdraft fees altogether.

And financial institutions are looking at their customers differently, too. Why focus only on one acquisition product when the goal for most financial institutions is to onboard these customers to other life enhancing products such as mortgages, small business loans and wealth management services?

So which is the bigger challenge, content creation or list building? I posed this question recently on LinkedIn and I’ve paraphrased some of the best answers.

Flyn Penoyer wrote: For most people content creation would be the far bigger challenge — most people can’t write copy.

List building is challenging but if you have some valuable offers and do article marketing and webinars you can pretty easily build a list.

For “marketing directors” I think the bigger problem is there attachment to “brand marketing” which is useless if you don’t have a gazillion dollars to spend pounding the market with your message.

Sabrina Gage wrote: I think list building is the bigger challenge. No matter how interesting you have made your emails, they would be of little help if most of them go directly to the junk folder. A good list is the foundation of a successful email campaign. So if you want to take your email marketing to the next level. Try focusing on building a good list. Of course, do not be loose in content creation. It’s important too.

Tim Roman wrote: List building (specifically opt-in) is much more difficult than producing content. One way I can prove this is by comparing the cost it takes to grow a list versus creating content.

Have you seen what Groupon is paying to generate new new email subscribers? Based on an Amazon gift card (about as ubiquitous as you can get) deal run a few months ago, their goal is about $10 per opt-in subscriber. Now you know where their crazy valuation comes from. Their huge email list!

William Johnson wrote: Focus on building high quality relationships and strong trust. You can always recycle content from the past and add to it. I would make sure all of your list members have opted-in and send an email asking if they are still interested in receiving promotion – let them opt-out.

You may end up with a smaller list, but it’s a list of the most devoted fans you have.

Sharon Bailly wrote: Content–I agree wholeheartedly with Flyn. It’s true that you can’t start without a list; but you can’t continue without content. Failure comes from the inability to generate quality content, not for lack of people to send it to. Some of this may depend on the size of the company but most businesses know exactly who their customers are (or how to find them); they need help in generating copy.

Mike Corso wrote: With content comes the LIST!

My question on LinkedIn Answers can still be responded to for a few more days. Thanks to everyone who contributed. Feel free to comment below with your opinion. I’d love to hear from you here as well.