Old Bridge, NJ – December 17, 2010 – At a time when online social media is becoming an increasingly popular and effective means of communication, Raritan Bay Medical Center (RBMC) is embracing the technology to deliver meaningful health programs to the community and thereby remain a trusted health information resource for the community.

On December 17, a knee surgery performed by orthopedic surgeon Jonathan Pine, DO, Human Motion Institute at Raritan Bay Medical Center, will be TWEETED live on Twitter and will be observed in RBMC’s Old Bridge surgical suites by St. Joseph High School (Metuchen, NJ) student Chirag Patel. Patel will be ‘tweeting’ the surgical procedure’s clinical activities to his fellow Medical Club students in the high school’s computer lab as well as students from Perth Amboy High School. Any Twitter member will also be able to follow the surgery locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. Several classes at Perth Amboy High School will also be following along.

Patel participated in RBMC’s week-long, annual Healthcare Connection program this past spring, the program allows local high school students interested in pursuing a medical career to shadow clinicians at the medical center, and was interested in the opportunity. RBMC and marketing partner Verasoni (Fairfield, NJ) plans to strategically deliver meaningful programs via social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook in the coming months to provide the community with a go-to resource for general health information and clinical education. Raritan Bay Medical Center will be the first medical center in the NY tri-state area and one of a handful from around the nation to “tweet” a surgery.

Friday, December 17 – procedure starts at 1 p.m. Follow at www.twitter.com/rbmchealth

About the Human Motion Institute at Raritan Bay Medical Center
A unique program offering a comprehensive continuum of musculoskeletal care within a highly integrated orthopedic healthcare delivery network, the Human Motion Institute at Raritan Bay Medical Center provides education, assessment, treatment and therapy services as well as preventative services to help patients achieve maximum function and mobility as quickly and safely as possible, while employing the latest medical techniques available. The institute’s clinical professionals are committed to the consistent pursuit of advancements in care, which are the most efficient and effective.

By combining the extensive clinical expertise of the medical center’s physicians with RBMC’s Magnet nurses and their compassionate Patient Family Centered Care Model treatment philosophy, Raritan Bay has created a program known for its high-quality care. Specialties include: Spine Care, Joint Care (Hip, Knee, Shoulder), Hand and Upper Extremity, Sports Medicine, Foot and Ankle and Physical Therapy.

Your friends tweet, write and update their statuses on various topics. They also read tweets, status updates, blogs and retweets, or share links and other information with their network. And while Google is busy snapping up social search start-ups who include your friends’ content in their search from the broader web, for example if you search for “New York Restaurant” on Google, and your friend has a blog about “New York Restaurants” then your friend’s blog will show up in your search. Not sure the relevancy or value of this type of search, but like a lion waiting in the bush, I have learned to carefully size up new technologies and their uses, so I am taking a wait and see approach before I go after the game.

Here is another way to look at social search. Everyone is already doing it, although businesses may or may not be listening. “What’s a hot spot in Barcelona?” one of my facebook friends asked? Another, “Who know a good Ridgewood area wedding dress tailor?” Yet another, “Can anyone recommend a good pediatric dentist?” And so on…so intra-personal network search is indeed taking something that is alive and well, and with the emergence of sites like FourSquare and facebook Places, social search happens as people eat, shop, and do, yes, as people do. So how do businesses best leverage this fast moving consumer behavior? Here are three sure fire ways to get your enterprise going:

• Understand it’s about integration of your marketing – All of your marketing communications assets must work together, especially the web. Ensure that your web assets speak appropriately to the depth and breadth of your market as well as your products and services. Note that today, you will need more than a website to compete, in fact if you have a website in the traditional sense, then you have a typewriter. Your Mar/Com campaigns must engage the tools of the web, including apps, social networking, and location based web services.
• Your Web Reputation is Your Reputation – So true, so dangerous, so full of opportunity. Understanding what people say about you online, and where they say it is crucial. This is a great opportunity to listen to your market, adjust, and engage.
• Cultivate Web Brand Ambassadors – There are people who love your brand and who will gladly serve as brand evangelists. Engage these folks, on and offline to help you grow your business’ influence.

The survivors of that era are now the dominant brands that we all recognize, Amazon, Yahoo, Ebay, etc. For every one of these survivors there are untold casualties. At the time, I had a brief stint on Wall Street, and I remember some people trying to present the case for more careful examination of investment in many of the now defunct companies, but with herd mentality rolling like the wilder beast crossing the Mara River, perfectly reasoned arguments went no where, it was like spitting in the wind. And instead of the alligators getting a few wilder beasts, in this scenario the alligators got most of them.

Herd mentality is a powerful thing, in business and elsewhere. Think the Salem Witch Trials, Enron, or sub-prime mortgages. Think of the people who warned us against sub-prime mortgages, but hell, no one wanted to stop the good times! Good times (oh, don’t look now, but was that CNBC with the pom poms on this one too?). The people who spoke out against the Salem Trials were ignored (CNBC wasn’t around for this one, but I am guessing, FOX would have loved it), and as far back as 2006 we had warnings by serious, credible economist and business people about the sub-prime mess, but as you may have guessed by now, these folks too, were spitting in the wind.

So the latest thing that’s kicking up wind, much of it hot air from where I sit, is social networking and the social networking expert. Yes, there are plenty of people who do excellent work in the field, but in my career to date, I’ve never seen so many experts on one subject in the history of history. I wonder if there were “railroad” experts at the infancy of that industry. Yes, this is probably about the only industry that has self-designated experts at its very infancy, which may be appropriate, because the exponential nature of the growth of the net. The medium itself lends itself to this. Can you feel the wind blowing here? Whoooshhhh, whoooshhh.

I’ve read enough articles, attended enough conferences by now, spoken at several, mostly listened to mavens tout the power of social networking. For the most part, what I am seeing is lots of tactics, sans strategy, flailing in the wind. We know that most businesses, from the corporate giants, to middle market and small businesses, to educational institutions and hospitals, need to harness the power of integration of their mar/com strategies in order to deliver the desired results. Integration, done right, is largely driven by strategy.  We also know that silos are useless and that budgets and resources are critical. For those of you who follow this blog, you know our approach is integration – whenever, and where ever we can get it!

What businesses need to grasp is the difference between the social networking folks who talk tactics, and the ones promoting strategy and integration. Listen to the strategists and integrators. The folks on the rise are speaking about integration, the folks falling off their chair – but still speak with the absolute certainty of a recent college grad – are kicking up the wind.

These tactics guys simply riding the wind.

Look, social media is simply a tool, how you use it is critical. I have yet to see a repeatable, credible case where social media, alone, drove a business. Yes, the Haiti example is a wonderful use of mobile technology, a fantastic response to a tragedy. But, when it comes to business complexities, social media alone ought to be a tactic within a global mar/com strategy, and not a singular approach. Take a look at Volkswagon who use their TV commercials to drive customers / viewers directly to their Facebook page, rather than their website. Why? Because VW has a strategy for customer engagement on Facebook, and deliver other engagement programs once customers get to that space. So the television buy, messaging, social media and other elements of that strategy were developed at the same time to drive efficacy.

So here 10 areas of what to look for in rising star on the social media scene:

1. Their ability to integrate social media into your long term business objectives, whatever they may be – the strategy
2. They understand that the medium is in its infancy and that “they” are still learning about it
3. Their abilities to understand your entire business model, all customer touches, and characteristics of your market
4. Their abilities to deliver data based on their proposed program
5. Their understanding of market engagement programs
6. Their understanding of integration strategies, advertising, PR, word of mouth, corporate communications, and so on…
7. Their understanding of budget / resource allocation of your overall campaign as it relates to social media
8. Their understanding of the behavior of your customers online (in the aggregate, which includes email, blogs, CRM, etc)
9. Their knowledge / experience in delivering online programs that engage
10. What are their strategies to get you from “networking” to “commerce?”

Social media is real, it does have business implications that can work for or against you. So it’s important to get it right, and it’s important to integrate. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of people doing excellent work in this area. But I would just hate to see your business spitting in the social networking winds, because it will come right back at you.

Bank of America wants you to know that every time you use your Bank of America credit card, it will move the remaining balance of that to the nearest dollar to your savings account.  Essentially moving your own money from your checking to your savings.  So let me get this straight, it’s my money, and whether its sitting in a savings account or checking account, the money is technically still there, it’s still mine, and Bank of America is moving it from one account to another and giving it a name. You could argue that savings accounts may be earning more interest, but hardly, just check out what banks are paying.

The point is, this is marketing at it’s worst.  Bank of America isn’t rounding up to the next dollar and adding to your savings

In the brave new world of retailing, stores are going to be less concerned about what’s in shoppers’ wallets and more interested in what’s on their mobile phones.

Retailers and a wave of start-up companies are rushing to create smart-phone and iPhone applications that let shoppers compare prices, redeem coupons, lend a friend $25, buy movie tickets and make dinner reservations, and even find the nearest bathroom in the mall. Right now, most of what’s happening in mobile retail is marketing and promotion, rather than sales and revenue-producing activities. But Web developers and retailers say the day is coming when consumers will be able to wave their cellphones to pay at the grocery checkout line, department stores, and restaurants and movie theaters.

“Consumers love their cellphone,” said Conrad Sheehan, founder and chief executive officer of Chicago-based mPayy, which is developing a mobile payment system that shoppers can use instead of credit and debit cards. “They’ll walk out naked, but they’ll have their cellphones.”  This past Christmas, Wayne-based Toys “R” Us Inc. let shoppers shrink the company’s 80-page holiday toy “wish book” down to cellphone size, through an iPhone app. Toys “R” Us also introduced mobile shopping in November, allowing customers to make purchases from their phones, as well as read customer product ratings and check if items sold out at one store were available elsewhere.

Pizza Hut Inc. and Chipotle Mexican Grill are selling thousands of takeout orders that were placed via mobile phone. Verasoni Marketing in Little Falls is helping Rod’s Steak and Seafood Grille in Morris Township create a phone app that will allow diners to access the restaurant’s reservation system, check if a table is available and make a reservation. Aetrex Worldwide, a footwear company based in Teaneck, has developed software that lets stores scan impressions of a customer’s feet and send the images to a cellphone, along with the store name, address, phone number and information about the customer’s shoe size.

“The app world right now is where the Internet was 15 years ago,” said Abe Kasbo, CEO of Verasoni. “It’s still young.” He has no doubt that apps are the future. Having a Web site now without apps, Kasbo said, is like having a typewriter instead of a computer.  The National Retail Federation, at the beginning of this month, held a daylong “mobile boot camp” conference in San Francisco attended by 160 retail executives from around the country. “Retailers are at various stages with mobile,” said NRF Vice President Ellen Davis, whose organization represents 1.6 million U.S. retail establishments. “Most of them can understand and see the power of cellphones and smartphones with today’s shoppers, but they are trying to figure out how to leverage it,” she said. “Where to start seems to be the biggest hurdle.”

The NRF is preparing to introduce a mobile-retail initiative within the next month that would combine representatives from the federation’s various divisions to study issues related to mobile shopping and applications.

The NRF doesn’t have statistics on how many retailers have launched mobile applications, and speakers at the mobile boot camp conference cautioned against the rush to mobile retail.  Research firm Parks Associates estimated recently that the number of smartphone users is expected to reach more than 1 billion by 2014, four times as many as in 2009. And those users love their apps. The iPhone App Store has more than 25,000 apps, most of them free downloads, and users performed more than 2 billion app downloads in the first year that online store was open.

“We’ve seen the major retailers – Target, Macy’s, Walmart, Best Buy, Amazon – launch great iPhone apps, but the theme of the boot camp seemed to be ‘start slow,’ ” Davis said. Retailers need to examine if their proposed app “makes the shopping experience easier, or are you doing an app for the sake of having an app?” she said.

Right now, Davis said, consumers seem to be wary of making purchases via cellphone, or transmitting their credit card information over a phone, the same way many initially were wary of using their computers for online purchases. “People use their phones to find the nearest Banana Republic or to figure out what’s on sale at the grocery store before they go,” she said. But many consumers are reluctant to use their phones to make a purchase, she said.

The most successful mobile apps, experts say, link to the retailer or restaurant’s Web site, where the credit card and other personal information is stored. The mobile app recognizes the shopper’s log-in, and the shopper doesn’t have to transmit any information over the phone.  Sheehan, founder of mPayy, was a senior vice president at JPMorgan Chase & Co. and head of its consumer-payments business before he founded the mobile payment service. The mPayy app uses a person’s mobile phone number as an identifier, because mobile phone numbers are “globally unique – there’s no two the same,” Sheehan said. “If I want to make a payment online, I simply enter my mobile number and password. If I want to send a friend some money from my cellphone, I type in their cellphone number as the address.”  Users of mPayy can link the service to their bank accounts, or set up a stored value account with mPayy, by sending money to mPayy. The advantage for retailers, Sheehan said, is mPayy fees are about half the price of a debit-card transaction. Companies that have lots of “micro payments” – for example publishers that charge 50 cents for online newspapers – find mPayy’s model attractive, he said. “We can move 50 cents profitably for you,” Sheehan said. “The key is not using the legacy credit-card networks, because those are very expensive.”

The day when shoppers can wave their cellphones at cash registers and walk out with their groceries won’t arrive, Sheehan believes, until the cellphone wireless carriers form partnerships with retailers to create payment devices that work with the phones. “The wireless carrier plays a big role because the device would need to have a chip inside of it for it to work really well,” he said. “And that’s what people expect. You have to give them a reason to do that versus pulling out their credit card.”

Another application that retailers are eager to add to their mobile marketing arsenal is the ability to send targeted coupons or discount offers to shoppers when they are in the retailer’s stores. Most mobile coupons are delivered through coupon collection sites, such as Coupon Sherpa or Cellfire, that let mobile users search among hundreds of online coupons for ones they can use.

Mindsmack, a Web-development company with offices in North Brunswick and New York, has created an app, FastMall, that hopes to eventually be able to deliver targeted coupons to shoppers who use their phones to let retailers know when they have arrived at particular malls or stores.

Fast Mall currently is an application that provides detailed maps and store-locating directions for malls around the country. A popular feature of FastMall is the bathroom finder – users can shake their phone to see all of the nearest mall bathrooms pop up on the map.  Eventually, Mindsmack Chief Executive Officer Sam Feuer would like to line up deals for advertising, sponsorship, and revenue sharing tie-ins. “We can work with Fandango [an online movie-ticket sales Web site] and sell movie tickets in the app, and every movie ticket that’s sold we make a percentage off it, the mall owner makes a percentage, Fandango makes a percentage,” he said. “That could be the same for anything that’s sold at the mall.”

E-mail: verdon@northjersey.com

“The current struggle businesses seem to be having is recognizing the ‘new normal’ of the business environment, as coined by legendary bond investor Bill Gross. The economy, social interaction, and media have all changed drastically – seemingly overnight,” said Kasbo. “So businesses have to respond appropriately to this “New Normal,” strategically, and yet without hesitation. The challenge is for businesses is to redefine their value to the marketplace in order to grow and maintain both “business to business” and “business to consumer” relationships,” continued Kasbo.

Abe Kasbo is the CEO and founder of Verasoni Worldwide. Kasbo has over 15 years of experience in both buying and selling marketing and public relations services. Kasbo is a thought leader on integrated marketing communications strategies, speaking at numerous events throughout the nation. He blogs at http://www.verasoni.com/vblog.

Later this spring Kasbo will embark on a limited engagement speaking tour throughout the Northeast.  To book Kasbo for your speaking engagement please call 800-975-6131.

Verasoni Worldwide is a fiercely independent marketing and public relations firm serving clients across various sectors such as healthcare, financial services, government, and hospitality, throughout the United States. For more information please visit: http://www.verasoni.com <http://www.verasoni.com/> .

The website allows patients to learn more about the services Dr. Klele offers, find answers to commonly asked questions regarding dental health, and meet the staff, and get special offers and discounts.

“We wanted a simple site, and one that reflects our brand of dentistry,” said Dr. Klele. “We selected Verasoni for web strategies and they really made the process simple and delivered a first class site for our practice,” continued Dr. Klele. “Our goal was to ensure that we built a world-class site that speaks to search engines on a platform designed to keep Dr. Klele’s cost of maintenance down,” said Verasoni CEO, Abe Kasbo.

Dr. Klele is recognized by his peers and patients as a dedicated dentist who delivers high quality dental care to everyone he treats. His dedicated staff in his Wayne, NJ office will ensure that your experience is exceptional while in the office and beyond.  Dr. Klele’s commitment to continuing education means that his patients always receive state of the art care.

Dr. Klele’s Wayne, NJ Dentist office provides exceptional dental care including: Family Dentistry, Porcelain Veneers, Porcelain Inlays and Onlays, 1 Visit Root Canals, Implant Supported Dentures, All Porcelain Crowns, Metal Free Fillings, Juvéderm™, Botox® ,1 Hour Whitening, Invisalign, Dental Implants and 24 Hour Emergency Dentistry.

Visit Dr. Klele in his Wayne, NJ office at 931 Hamburg Turnpike, Wayne, NJ. Or call 973•553•2512 or visit the new website at http://www.waynenjdentist.com.

New York, New York – Cambridge MedCom, the nation’s leading boutique internet, marketing, and public relations firm serving dentists, and the larger healthcare community, will be shooting free videos for dentists at the Greater NY Dental Meeting at Jacob Javitz from November 29, 2009 to December 2, 2009. “The internet represents a tremendous opportunity for dentists to expand their business and acquire new patients, but only if it’s done right,” said Abe Kasbo Chairman of Verasoni Worldwide, the parent company of Cambridge MedCom.

Cambridge MedCom will provide participating dentists with a complimentary 30-second “webisode” to use on their website, Youtube channel, facebook, Linkedin, twitter and blogs. The videos will be professionally taped, edited on the spot, uploaded to the dentist’s email account, and placed on Cambridge’s Branded Youtube Channel for additional exposure. “Having a website without an integrated marketing plan is akin to flying a plane without a pilot, so it’s critical that dentists implement a content distribution strategy to ensure their site stays ahead of the competition,” continued Mr. Kasbo. “Additionally, various active organic and non-organic strategies must be incorporated in order to effectively optimize a websites’ position, and that takes fresh thinking along with work.”

Dentists will be asked to dress for the on-camera interview. The interview will be brief, focused on one area of interest to each dentist, and specifically designed for online viewing. The video’s positioning on Youtube, which happens to be the second largest search engine in the world, ought to contribute positively to the participating dentist’s website search engine relevance.

How To Get Your Free Interview:

Interview spots are limited to 32 per day and, dentists must reserve their spot. This offer is on first-come, first-serve basis. Dentists will be able to reserve an interview spots by sending an email to nydentalmeeting@verasoni.com and MUST include the following:

Dentists must choose from the following time categories:

• Early
• Mid-morning
• Noon – early afternoon
• Late afternoon

Once the time category is chosen, Cambridge MedCom will provide an exact time based on the category chosen by the dentist. Dentists will forfeit their interview spot if unable to make the time reserved.

To learn more about Verasoni Worldwide and Cambridge MedCom, visit www.verasoni.com.