I recently read an article announcing MyBCTeam, a new social network for women with breast cancer. Initially I thought, “What a wonderful idea.” The social network targets a set demographic audience, women uniquely bonded by their experience with breast cancer. It’s this unique shared bond that draws these women to meet, draw strength from others, and share their own experiences, together. This distinct purpose makes it easier for MyBCTeam to attract their target audience.

On the other hand, hospitals typically focus on a wide demographic audience. Hospitals use social media channels to build brand awareness and loyalty, and to position themselves as experts in their key specialty areas. But are hospitals trying to do too much?

Take Rhode Island Hospital (RI Hospital) for example, (one of the accounts I manage as the Social Media Senior Relations Officer for Lifespan) it’s a large, urban teaching hospital, with many specialty areas as well as a research component. Our goal with social media is to:

• Encourage our local community to make RI Hospital their hospital of choice.
• Position ourselves as leaders in each of our high priority specialties (as defined in the marketing plan).
• Continue building and expanding our national reputation as an academic medical center and a leader in research.

But do we need to rethink the way we approach social media for hospitals? Are we losing certain audiences because we’re trying to be everything to everyone? Unlike hospitals, a business such as a parachute company has a very specific audience and they can talk to them all day long about parachutes and velocity, and landing on your feet when you break all records.

Reaching your audience through social media seems much simpler when it’s focused on one product or one service line. But if we’re dealing with a marketing plan that has 20 areas to promote, are we setting ourselves up for a social media fail?

This is not to say that you shouldn’t promote your brand as a whole, which is very important. I’m not suggesting you create different social media accounts for different specialties either, doing this will only dilute your overall brand image. My point is social media affords us the opportunity to build brand loyalty, develop customer relationships and brand advocates, and to continue increasing awareness of your hospital. If you’re not doing that as an overarching message, you’re wasting time and money.

So how do we work around this and support everyone’s needs? Below are four tips I’ve had success with:

1.      Facebook Groups. One of our nurses (who happened to be active on Facebook) approached me about starting an online community for patients who had bariatric surgery for weight loss. I suggested she start a Facebook Group and it’s proven to be a successful form of engagement among this targeted audience.

According to The Facebook blog, Facebook Groups are the place for small group communication and allow people to come together around a common cause, issue or activity to organize, express objectives, discuss issues, post photos and share related content.

The Group administrator posts updates, information, events, and encourages others to share their own experiences and successes through the group. I’ve witnessed its success firsthand, and since it’s only visible to those accepted into the group, it creates a sense of security for members. 

2.  Twitter chats are a fun way to support specialties that are looking to further their visibility on social media. In order to create a Twitter chat you need to decide on a certain time and day of the week and a specific hashtag for people to use in order to follow and participate in the chat (like recipes for vegans on #MeatlessMonday).

Tip: Develop a content calendar for your chat that supports the specialty you’re trying to promote. Reach out to the folks in that specialty area for ideas about what their patients are looking for to encourage more engagement. When deciding on a hashtag, remember to use a specific and unique hashtag that’s not already being used frequently. For other tips read the Spin Sucks post, Five Tips for Holding a Twitter Chat that Doesn’t Suck.

3.  Google+ Circles makes it easy for users to share certain information with different groups of people. Circles are a natural way to filter information and engage with different communities about their specific interest.

4. Create YouTube Playlists within each of your specialty areas on your channel. By creating specific YouTube Playlists enables users to easily view videos on certain topics. For example, if someone is looking for information on heart health, all they need to do is click on the heart health playlist to find the applicable videos.

What other tips do you have for reaching different audiences with diverse interests through social media? Have you struggled with targeting specific audiences while juggling the overall brand? If so, how did you tackle it?

Nancy Cawley Jean is a senior media relations officer managing social media for the hospitals in the Lifespan health system in Rhode Island and has more than 20 years of health care communications experience. She can be reach at njean@lifespan.org or on Twitter @NancyCawleyJean.

It seems to be a reoccurring trend, at least in the blogosphere, to step back and evaluate the balance that time spent online (largely spent in social networks) affects our lives. This desire for balance is a good move; considering the research showing damaging physiological changes created by increasing use of social networks and the associated decline in face-to-face contact. So it’s time to unplug.

Should a social network be obligated to allow a user to vanish? It can be simplified as who owns the content. The article 10 ways social media will change in 2010 expounds on the idea that a battle over content will erupt is a very real concern. And a social network profile is really just content, albeit juicy content for advertising impression research and trends.

In the case of Google, they have explicitly stated that they do not mine the data – with a note that they could and that government institutions can as well:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

*It should also be noted: Google provides many ways for a user to clear cache and attempt to remove themselves or content from its engine’s clutches.

“Nothing’s permanent, not even death.” – from the Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. So what if you want to do more than take a break from social media? Now with morbid flair there is a new tool encouraging users to clean the slate and “meet their real neighbors again.” The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine, apparently seems to be working, Facebook recently blocked the service from their network, citing privacy violation. However given how the service works, by blanking out entries rather than deleting, I think it may help expose the fact that it’s not affecting the privacy of users – rather the information being gathered by advertisers.

How successful is this service? So as a consumer of social media, I take at face value all the “data” about my interaction online as well as the actual content that I “create” is monitored and valued to the larger community. Whether services like Suicide Machine are effective or not do not matter – rather I think they provide a good stimulus to the conversation about finding the balance between the real life and the social network persona. What are your thoughts about vanishing your online presence?

We’ve heard that the Internet is supposed to be the great equalizer. In a recent article about how hospitals are competing with smaller ad budgets, several steps were defined to almost guarantee a successful digital campaign:

• Having a (content) rich, useful and consumer-friendly website
• Advertising on popular local websites
• Concentrating on paid and organic search optimization
• Establishing appropriate niche group pages and advertising to highly targeted audiences with matched services
• Using communication based networks (aka Twitter) with healthcare special interest audiences

It is excepted that these strategies all take time and are worth the investment, it can even be considered part of the process to attract brand loyal customers. So why does this not always work?

I suggest the landscape is moving and that most marketers are not willing to change. Bill Hunt asked if big brands will be the death of social media? While it is a catchy question I think he hits on the underlying concern about using social media: YOU have to make it unique everytime!

I know this concept isn’t revolutionary. To me it seems that the lesson isn’t being learned about trying to put lightening in the bottle. The best quote from Bill’s post is “Social Media users are people who are connecting with people who have shared interests – “SHARED INTERESTS” – which makes it niche marketing at best.”

This is a no-brainer… So when a social network changes why do we care? Because we are lazy (in the bad way) and want to just connect to people the same way every time. So when another social network crops up or Facebook changes it’s layout again, when Google tweaks its algorithms or *gasp* Twitter tweaks its service – there is concern over how to “game the system” again. It’s not about the technology or overcoming the “roadblocks” but connecting with the audience.

This year I was privileged to be involved with Tweetsgiving, a social media project with a goal to raise $100k in donations for an orphanage in Tanzania. While the total donation amount hasn’t been reached (yet), the campaign was successful because of the impact to the targeted audience. It wasn’t about making fans or followers but to encourage individuals to change the world through the power of gratitude. I think the following stats are evident of this happening.

• 21,226 tweets
• 336 photos tagged
• 79 videos tagged
• 68 songs tagged
• 896 blog posts

So where does this leave an online marketer? Nigel summed it up with simplifying the solution: Great strategy and creativity are critical whether your brand is big or small. It’s not about making a repeatable success rather focusing on your unique and targeted audience and engaging each time with personal interest. The rest will follow in time.

Real life relationships are complex enough, add the digital medium with a sprinkle of ego and the relationship points become more complicated. In a social network defining relationships beyond friendship is a tough problem to solve.

In the story “Are You My Mother?” by P. D. Eastman, the baby bird explores the world looking to find his mother, confused he asks if each character in the story is his mother. In the end a digger ends up dropping him back home to his real mother. Just like this, it seems every social network touts the idea of being a friend, but none offer ways to satisfactorily address the complexity of the relationship.

The issue of the complexity of digital relationships started with linking to other websites. Defining the link relationship has been an issue since the early days of the Internet, thus the creation of NoFollow and the XHTML Friends Network (XFN). These tools were developed to define in the code what human relationships exist between the two websites. According to Wikipedia, the “nofollow” HTML attribute was originally designed to stop comment spam on blogs. Stemming from this concept the XFN specification outlines the relationships between individuals by defining a small set of values that describe personal relationships. Thus, using XFN, machines that parse your web pages, as well as other humans, can see how you are related to the pages you link to.

But it doesn’t stop with links, relationships involve the action (or lack of action) taken between users on a given social network. It can be like high school all over again.

Of all the large digital networks, Facebook has the greatest to gain by improving relationship classifications and tools to manage the dynamics of human relationships. For example in the event of a relationship fallout – the possibility to loose digital property such as tagged images when the relationship status changes is a real problem. But taking an aggressive approach to the relationship such as disliking a friend or their action could add balance to the existing reconnect strategy.

The advent of life streaming added more dynamics to relationship algorithm with more immediate conversation tools and ways to define and track a relationship by time. Sites like LinkedIn have an advantage of defining the relationship based on a time and professional association. Yet, still fall short when truly giving information into how connected you really are with someone because you’re afraid of fallout from six degrees of separation. Below is an example of my Facebook network and how interconnected the relationships are with each other.

In the early days of Twitter it was etiquette to just friend back anyone who followed you. Now, unless the user is of interest it is fine to not reciprocate the follow; however, with the addition of the list feature being exclusionary in nature misunderstandings in the network relationships have begun.

Now with geo-location tools like FourSquare – I believe some connections shouldn’t know every move you make. I understand the benefits of advertising your location – such as getting friends together for karaoke; however, I really don’t care if you’ve been to Starbucks 15 times this week. Or more dramatic, announcing your attendance to a Democratic convention with Republican parents who follow your stream can lead to icy conversations around the dinner table. Having location data is great for location aware networks and the ability to offer additional features, yet the ability to merge privacy with relationship classification will be a big advance in social networks.

When it comes down to it, being a big deal is not as big as you think, but I think there needs to be continued thought given to online relationship classifications. The next big thing in relationship dynamics online will be the ability to go beyond just measuring compatibility between individuals to being able to craft (control) your life message based on the individual audience. The concept of a digital “friend” will morph into the classification structures like we have in real life. Be honest, do you really want to be “friends” with a brand? What ways do you think relationship dynamics will change on the Internet in the next 3 months to 5 years?

The best measure of success for any communication effort on or offline must be the successful development of a movement. Movements encompass true word of mouth where the community embraces the call-to-action or brand and makes it their own.

Yesterday, we discussed how the LIVESTRONG effort has achieved this noteworthy status. And of course, there’s the case study of the year: The 2008 Obama Campaign (so tired of this one). Yes, causes have an unfair advantage when it comes to movements because by their very nature they deal with subjects that touch people’s lives. Yet companies have been successful with this, too. Apple, Harley Davidson, Starbucks, etc.

Movements do more than just publish content on social tools or engage people in conversations. They touch people’s hearts. An emotional connection exists, and people make the cause or product a part of their brick and mortar lives.

To be successful means that as a CMO, a strategist or simply an online community advocate, our job must surpass the deployment of a social media effort that simply uses tools (for example, the DoD’s new site). Orchestration of a true communications strategy must occur for a movement to succeed!

We must have the discipline to step back and create a true value proposition (or strategic offering, for people freaking out on semantics) that touches the hearts of our stakeholders. To do that we must find, listen and understand the people we want to communicate with. Then we have to inspire and compel them to act. And we have to vet our own cultural barriers preventing us from openly enabling our stakeholders to take these movements into their own hands. When we deploy, we must integrate cross-channel activity within social and beyond into traditional communications vehicles.

Yes, sometimes it’s much easier to simply deploy a tactic (like FB, Twitter, Ning, iPhone app, etc., etc.). Movement building takes time, intentional effort, commitment and discipline. But that’s the difference between true excellence and just may be good enough.

Use a Framework

When Now Is Gone was in the active marketing phase, I blogged here and on the Now site. I created a social media strategy process that I open sourced for all to use. Below find an updated version of that process. Whether you use this or your own, a process gives you the framework to act in an intentional, disciplined way.

This process is general enough to guide development of specific social media initiatives. It really incorporates many of the steps in a traditional communications strategic process. It does not recommend blogging or video, per say. Rather the process encourages social media to move towards the market’s needs, and within the company’s resources.

There are 15 steps in all (image: triumph arch stairs by maria flying):

1) Clearly articulate who your stakeholders are before you begin.

2) Clearly articulate the key issues these stakeholders care about as it relates to your offering. Use a bulleted list with no more than three or four words per item.

3) Begin by researching which, if any, top bloggers are discussing these issues. Use your bulleted list to search. The following are good places to start…

* Twitter Search
* Del.icio.us
* Google Blogsearch
* Ask.com Blogsearch

4) Inevitably, any substantial subject matter area has a back channel where top bloggers and influencers chat. For example, PR and marketing bloggers tend to connect on Facebook, Twitter, and to some extent, private communities on Ning and FriendFeed. This back channel can yield powerful connections to highly influential minds.

Marketers looking to find their subject area’s back channel should start with a basic search. Once your initial search yields important blogs, events, shows, etc., please visit their web sites and note which social networks the influencers use to connect. Join their communities. And learn what your stakeholders really care about.

5) Don’t just observe, participate. Comment on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, blogs and other social networks in a non-promotional way. Become part of the community.

6) Note several things in your research:

1. Top industry issues
2. Top bloggers/thought leaders that write about your issues (you will need these for marketing purposes after your content creation process is done)
3. Preferred content forms (video, white papers, blogs, podcasts)
4. Ideal places to connect with the larger industry (social networks, etc.)
5. Other companies playing in the space: Who’s successful, who isn’t? Why?
6. Behavioral norms.

Write this information down in a formal analysis.

7) Using the analysis of your social media marketplace, identify the outcomes the organization would like to achieve. These outcomes will determine the measurement benchmarks once the company decides on its preferred communication tools. Possibilities include:

* Influence
* Awareness/changed perception on a particular issue
* Third party credibility through Word of mouth
* Brand awareness
* Return on investment (sales)

8) Identify the company’s value for the marketplace. Specifically, the organization’s subject matter expertise as it relates to the top industry issues currently being discussed amongst bloggers and thought leaders.

* Will internal cultural barriers prevent the company from participating in the conversation (control, IT, legal, etc.)?
* Can the company provide enough information to add to the conversation?
* If so, is it enough to consistently be a part of the conversation, or is it limited in nature? Will it only be valuable for a short time?
* If so, is it enough to consistently be a part of the conversation, or is it limited in nature? Will it only be valuable for a short time?
* Can the organization afford to give away this information or does the information comprise trade secrets?
* Would it be easier for the company to host or help host a conversation rather than publish content or participate in conversations with influencers?

9) Based on the company/organization’s value offering and the marketplace’s issues and needs, draft an editorial mission or value proposition statement to serve the community/stakeholders. For example, here was the Now Is Gone blog editorial mission:

Continue serving as a primer for those business executives new to social media or considering engaging with these new communications tools. The conversation should be educational, pragmatic and weigh the pros and cons of social media to provide an authentic, genuine viewpoint of social media marketing. We believe in social media’s potential to better communications, but do not think it will replace traditional tactics. Instead we believe social media will be integrated into the larger marketing mix and may influence change in other disciplines.

10) Now examine the company’s resources:

* Time
* Thought leaders
* Technical capability and savoir faire: Blog, audio, video, social networking
* Financial resources for some of the above, plus graphic design, SEO, web hosting, application development

11) Select the outreach mechanism(s) that best fits the industry’s preferred content needs (#6), can achieve outcomes (#7) the ability to convey the company’s ability to deliver value through it’s editorial mission (#8 and 9), and that the company can afford to invest in (#10).

There are Many, Many mechanisms. Each has its assets and detriments. And blogging is not a cure all silver bullet solution. Consider these more popular initiatives:

* Execute an influencer relations program
* Blog or Facebook page
* Tweet
* Podcast
* Create video(s)
* Develop social network community
* Create social network application
* Go mobile
* Build your own social network
* Build a widget

12) How does the effort work with traditional communications tactic? Is the effort integrated intelligently? Will cross channel marketing and calls to action seem natural to stakeholders or contrived, or even worse, are they nonexistent?

13) Determine who will be the voices, or the community manager(s). Group efforts can help distribute load as well as protect the company from an individual personal brand departure. Assign a schedule and make the person responsible. Participation in larger networks should be part of your community development plan and resource allocations.

14) Map back to your larger strategy, and select general discussion/content categories to provide guidance on a weekly basis (if the effort is ongoing). Remain flexible to allow for larger industry and community events.

15) Determine measurement based on outcomes, social media communication vehicle(s), and dedicated effort the company intends to commit to the effort. Select tools to attain measurement. Tools and measurement can vary greatly. Research what is right for you and your effort. Some are free, some are not.