Social networking is a prolific tool.  Ya think? It continues to connect us to friends, products, services and information faster than anyone could have ever imagined. While social networking is now a fact of life, it has been been hailed as the holy grail of marketing, or at least one of them.  An interesting byproduct of social networking is the natural emergence of social search.  Yup, social search is just peeking its head, and the implications for businesses, products, and brands could not be more profound.

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

My next post will be on social commerce…stay tuned.

Copyright 2010

Like it or not, there’s a new economy and a “New Normal” upon us, and will probably be with us for the foreseeable future. “The New Normal” was coined by legendary bond investor Bill Gross, in his June 2009 outlook, when he referred to the new economic order in the aftermath of the most recent global economic collapse.

I would like to add on to Mr. Gross’ thesis in a way that I believe is more meaningful to how dental practices promote themselves and grow.  Certainly the “New Normal” relative to the economy is impacting us all, but there’s something just as significant that impacts your dental practice on a daily basis, it’s what I call our “New Interconnectedness.”  The advent of the rapid adoption of the Internet, and I am not simply talking about websites, has brought meritocracy (real or perceived) to dentistry.  It has, and continues, to radically alter the way dental practices promote themselves, acquire new patients, and keep existing ones happy.  I would like to point out that our “New Interconnectedness“ has less to do with the Internet, although the Internet serves as its backbone, and more to do with the tools of the Internet, which includes: email, blogging, internet video, social media, and perhaps more importantly, the eminent rise of mobile applications.

Double Trouble

At this time dental practices are facing a double-headed snake. Both the recent unfortunate economic realities, and our newly found “interconnectedness” have had a profound impact on the dental patient, and therefore your dental practice.  The Internet has effectively decimated traditional media, and our attention spans. Add to that shrinking paychecks and economic uncertainty and we’ve got double trouble.

Make no mistake about it, from a business point of view; these seismic events cannot be viewed separately, nor seen as or historic anomalies. We must view them in the aggregate, it is the zeitgeist in which we live and work.

Reality Check: Your Internet Reputation is Your Reputation

As a dentist, like it or not, your brand is now in the control of your patients more than ever before. This is not a trend that will reverse itself, you must understand what this means, and more importantly, how to harness it to grow your practice.  Ratings websites can work for and against your practice, and so paying attention to your web reputation is paramount to this discussion.  Your web reputation is your reputation.  So, be sure that you know what people are saying about you on the web, and where they are saying it.

What Dental Practice Marketing Is & What it is Not

Marketing your dental practice ought to be driven by strategy, not tactics.  Marketing represents every touch a potential patient has with your practice. From the front desk experience, your website, your chair-side manner, to the paint on your walls. Everything. Marketing is about behavior – patient behavior – and what it takes to convince them that you are the right dentist for them as opposed to your near by competitor.  Marketing represent any and every activity that allows you to promote and grow your practice from answering the phones to email marketing, every bit if it matters.  Done right, it allows you engage your patients, and in doing so, create a preference for your services / products over your competition.  Think of your practice as the Porsche, and the strategic marketing as the gas.  After all, the Porche would be a pretty expensive paperweight without the gas!

Dental practice marketing is not your logo, your brochures, your website, your magazine and TV commercials. It is not your website, but what you do with it. It is not your logo, but how you use it. It is not your brochure, but what it says, to whom it’s distributed.

Just because you have a website doesn’t mean that you are promoting your practice appropriately, and just because you’re advertising doesn’t mean that you building brand equity in your practice.  In marketing, activity is not synonymous with productivity.  In fact certain activities can be harmful, at least financially, and at worst inflict long-term damage to your brand and reputation.

In addition, we are now in an era of engagement, the old advertising model is just that, old and out dated.  Long gone are the days when a dental practice can rely solely on one mode of advertising.  It’s hyperbole, but it’s true.  Long gone are the days of hiring a graphic designer or web “designer” to “put up a site.”   Long gone are the days of expecting a $50,000 case, when the front desk person is chronically having a “bad day.” But most of all, long gone are the days of “my patient.”  Patients today have real choice, and will seek to exercise it at any given moment, so dental practices must recognize that they must work diligently to keep your existing patients. A new dentist is simply a click away.

What I am talking about is strategy. What is your strategy to market your practice?  Once your strategy is in place, what tactics will you be using?  Remember the strategy is what, when, and how you will market your practice. The tactics are the specifics steps you will take to do so.

Here’s an example:

Strategy:

“Utilize our practice’s laser dentistry to differentiate our selves in the market place by promoting laser dentistry.”

Tactics:

1. Build the key marketing messages that the market needs to hear about your laser
   1. What is it?
   2. Why should they use it?
   3. Why here?

[Remember in messaging it’s not about you or your credentials, those are features, and we need to sell benefits to the patient. So think from the patient back]

1. Message Distribution
   1. Where do you distribute this message effectively? What media do you use?
   2. How frequent?
   3. Budget?

[Imagine if Apple has developed the iPhone or the iPad and told no one about it?]

1. Evaluation
   1. What are your metrics to evaluate this strategy?

The Internet Deconstructed

Websites

The chief customer for your website is Google, and no one else – at least for the foreseeable future.  Google represents 85% of search, if not more, so if Google can’t find you, then potential patients can’t find you.  The main strategy and goal of your website ought to be is relevancy to Google.

Not all websites are made equal.  Your website must be developed by those who understand two vital elements: Patient behavior and the medium.  Hiring a “programmer” or “designer” will rarely achieve your goals. They will give you what “you” want, because they are probably good at what they do: design / programming, but chances are they have no clue about positioning your website to compete on the web. After all, if your website is not competitive, then you might as well print a brochure and call it a day.

Understanding patient behavior on the web is critical. Your website has to be written from their perspective and must support your business goals.  Understanding where patients aggregate, and how market to them using various modalities on the web is crucial.

The actual writing and programming along with design have a profound impact on how you promote your site, and the costs going forward to promoting your site.  Remember, like the lifetime cost of a car, you need to know what the on-going costs of promotions are going to be, and those costs are necessarily impacted by the design, writing, and programming.

Key to a Kick-butt Website

For all purposes, a website is useless unless it is doing all of the points below on some level:

• Controls your web reputation
• Is relevant to search engines
• Either supporting or enhancing your offline brand
• Is a source for patient leads
• Deliver key marketing messages on home page within 4 seconds (research tells us that patients will spend 4.5 on the home page before they decide to either leave or go the next page on your site)
• Provides the visitor the opportunity to take action

That’s your website.  Now what about the opportunity to distribute your brand across the web in order to drive your practice?

Social Networking

Ah, the fools gold of dental practice marketing.  I’ve seen “intensive course” being sold by self proclaimed social media experts, I’ve seen articles hyping social networking in dentistry, but what I haven’t seen are tangential results. And while the idea of social networking is appealing on so many levels, it makes little practical sense for the individual dental practice.

Multinational, billion dollar corporations with substantial resources still haven’t figured out how to monetize social networking. They have learned to distribute their brands to achieve more effective impressions, reach more people, but when you examine the research, the evidence is compelling.  Most corporations recognize that they are still learning how to better convert impressions into dollars.

To start let me debunk two ideas running wild in the marketplace: First, that social networking is free; second, anyone can do it. Social networking sites are free to join, but the time it takes to “do it right” is not free, it has a real cost.  Social media is time intensive, because it is a medium of engagement, so if you are not constantly engaging your network with relevant programs, then you’ve got people sitting there in a group or a fan page doing what?  Second: The idea that a high school kid or college kid can do this for a dental practice borders on the sublime. While these kids can socialize online, there’s a real difference between socializing and delivering integrated, business driven social media strategy for your practice. It’s akin to me reading an article on root canals and then attempting one!  Besides who cares about social networking, isn’t the real business goal social commerce?

Your social media network is only relevant if your network keeps growing, and if you have engagement tools for those who choose to follow you on line. Moreover, recent data speaks of “social networking fatigue,” especially with respect to facebook.  And while facebook’s aggregate user numbers are overwhelmingly compelling (500 million users or so), your practice’s network will be as large, and more importantly, as relevant as you make it. Aggregate numbers mean nothing without relevancy.  Relevancy means nothing without engagement.

The Internet: Where the real gold can be found:

I compare the rush to social media in dentistry as well as other industries to the Internet rush in the mid-90s, which directly led us to the crash of 2000-2001.  Social networking, like the Internet is being sold as an overnight road to riches.  Take a step back for a moment and consider this, if it took Coca Cola 85 years to become the brand it is, what makes us think that any medium will meaningfully propel our dental practices into prosperity overnight?  That makes no business sense, and there is no evidence of the same to boot.

Research from the Pew Research Center tells us that email is still the number one way to reach patients, and that healthcare, excluding pornography, is the number one searched category in the United States. So what are your search and email strategies? What is your Internet reputation as measured by the number of blogs that you have contributed?  Remember blogging will enhance your Google reputation because Google loves fresh content. So the more fresh content you have on your site, the more relevant your site.  By the way, if your site is less than the market expects, do not expect it to perform.  If you want the large cases, and your nephew did the site, chances are your site is not speaking to the market you desire – both in design and copy.  So if you’re going to venture into social networking and blogging ensure that your site is done right or else risk alienating new visits to your site.

The Internet: What’s next?

What’s next is already here. It’s mobile. Forget social networking and focus on mobile. It’s where everything will be for our lifetime.  If you website is flash based, then the iPhone can’t read it. If someone sees your ad, card or brochure somewhere and gets on their mobile to find you and your site looks less than, they will leave.  So being prepared for mobile strategies in my estimation is far more important and productive than involving your practice in social media.

Frequency & Reach: The Ultimate Reality

Regardless of what you do the name of the game in marketing is frequency and reach. Meaning how frequent do your messages penetrate the market place and whom do they reach.  You can calculate the cost per impression by dividing the impression by the Frequency and reach take strategy and budget, otherwise, you are simply buying media.  Frequency and reach without proper messaging techniques is also frequently used.

The integration of your messaging, frequency and reach are the foundation blocks on which to build a successful marketing strategy for your practice.

What Your Dental Practice Really Needs

What your practice really needs is someone focused on marketing it.  Not a graphic artist, not your receptionist, but someone who understands the nuances of marketing.  By the way, while it would be nice for them to know about dentistry, it’s not necessary.  When American Express interviews marketing consultants and agencies, they are looking for good ideas, and rarely ask the question “what do you know about financial services?”  As Albert Einstein famously said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”  So look for a firm who be your advocate and fight on your behalf in the marketplace.

Also, Not Everything You Do Will Work

The old Madison Avenue adage is still in play, “I know that 50% of my advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which 50%.”  Yes, marketing your practice is experiential. It is unique to your situation and despite the claims of many out there, there is no cookie cutter solution to promote your practice.

If you are in business, then you recognize that you need to continuously market your business.  You also recognize that not all marketing strategies will work, but that doesn’t mean that you ought to stop marketing. Marketing is a business discipline and you will need to continuously develop new strategies and tactics and hone what works and what does not.

Finally…
Growing your dental practice requires one basic understanding. Your dental practice is a business and must be treated like one. Patient volume growth doesn’t simply happen, it is driven by two interconnected business realities: strategy and execution.

Think of your dental practice itself as one of the great Duke University Basketball Teams, and you, doctor, are Coach K.  No matter how talented your players are, no matter how good you are as a dentist, you have to execute the game strategy each and every time.  If you don’t execute, you don’t give your team, in this case, your practice a chance to succeed.  Think of it this way, what if Apple developed the iPhone and did not tell anyone about it? How likely would it be that the iPhone would be the juggernaut it is today?  Not likely.

Marketing matters because your business cannot thrive without it, because the status quo simply isn’t good enough anymore.

Check out this article from Forbes about “The New Rich.”  Can’t say it’s earth shattering, but important insights nonetheless.

Click here to see the article.

The question isn’t whether you should be using social media. Of course you should. The question is: do you have an engagement strategy and the resources to implement it. If you don’t have either of the latter then, congratulations on setting up your social media account

Verasoni’s CEO, Abe Kasbo was recently featured on the popular podcast, Ear on Careers. Take a listen by clicking here.

Brands are on the decline in this economy. Even with the recent bounce in stock market, People are choosing value over brand loyalty and where they can get both, they will buy it.  According to the recent results of a comScore study on brand loyalty among consumer goods products, showing a significant decline in consumers’ allegiance to their favorite brands during the past two years, the percentage of shoppers who typically buy the brands they want most has steadily declined across the categories examined. In March 2010, less than 50% of shoppers reported purchasing the brand they want most.

Value is the name of the game in this “New Normal.” “The New Normal” was coined by legendary bond investor Bill Gross, in his June, 2009 outlook, referring to the new economic order in the aftermath of the most recent global economic collapse.

According to McKinsey Quarterly, “We are experiencing not merely another turn of the business cycle, but a restructuring of the economic order.” If you believe that, if indeed there’s a fundamental change in the people shop, then it would prudent for business to at least reflect on the new realities and at best, adjust their marketing plans accordingly.  For the record, I’m in the New Normal camp.

From web 2.0 and Social media, to advertising, public relations…but, let’s snap on the breaks here because I don’t want to drag myself on this post into promotional tools, but stay focused on on the what businesses are facing…

Everyone is doing it…

From Wallmart to Home Depot, retailers are slashing prices. They are doing it and saying in their marcom campaigns. Wachovia, Bank of America have changed their fee structures. Applebees, Red Lobster are pushing value dining options. Wall Street money managers like Edward Jones are working against the grain as well by touting long term approach to the market. So business is getting it right? Right?

Not sure about that, but based on my observations larger enterprises seem to understand the market, and more importantly the culture and psychology of the post crash market.  Yes, there is a post market consumer psychology, and it’s manifested by how they behave.  I am not sure that middle market business got the memo. Far too many businesses are still operating as if it was 2007.  Their prices and service have remained at 2007, but more importantly their expectations are unreasonably set for pre-crash markets. At the same time, their marketing strategies have somehow adjusted themselves to post market crash expectations. The scenario is we’re not going to adjust to market expectations, at the same time we expect spend less to grow our business…catch 22, ain’t it?

In the mid-90s the internet heated up. Every Wall Street Analyst became an instant expert on e-commerce, touting stocks that were trading at multiples of 50 and over. CNBC, acting mostly as a cheerleader, celebrated the American entrepreneurial spirit on an almost minute by minute basis, the rest of the media did the same. When the late 90s came around, web business fundamentals became exposed. We now know that these Wall Street experts, while perhaps foreseeing the potential of the net, did not really understand the business fundamentals of the effects of the web on business. An untold amount of web businesses went bust, people lost lots of money.

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.

Once again, Bank of America is reaching our to “helping us save money” through their keep the change campaign.  They want to move your money from your checking account to your savings account each time your use your debit card. Whether this marketing ploy is successful in getting more customers remains to be seen, but what is clear is that Bank of America clearly has not learned the lessons of our historic economic collapse.  You know, the one that nearly wiped out most of our savings last year, and cost some people their.  But let’s not dwell on that.

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

Sharing an interesting note from this morning’s MediaPost…As we have always done and we will continue to do, we advise the proper integration of on and offline strategies…Tracking is critical, and digital provides the tools, what I am not convinced about is the use of digital for various strategies for growing brands and businesses…take a look.

by Julia Dudnik Stern, Friday, April 2, 2010

Every month brings new evidence of advertising, marketing and communications budgets steadily moving in the direction of the Internet, with predictions that 2010 will see digital spending surpass print.

Consulting and research group Outsell surveyed over 1,000 advertisers and marketers in December. The company found that $119.6 billion, or 32.5% of the planned 2010 U.S. ad spending of $368 billion, is destined for digital media. The 30.3% going to print advertising is lower by more than $8 billion.

Granted, these are only predictions — but this tipping point has been predicted for some time. It is now a matter of when, not if. Even in the tough economic climate, digital remains the one area of aggressive budgetary increases.

Econsultancy and ExactTarget recently released Marketing Budgets 2010: Effectiveness, Measurements and Allocation Report. While only 46% of the surveyed 1,000 marketers planned to increase their overall budgets, 66% were upping digital spending. This relationship held on the decreasing end, too: 13% were cutting overall budgets, but only 4% said they planned to curtail digital spending.

The money is apparently not just going online, it is staying there. Outsell predicts that U.S. businesses will invest $63 billion in company Web sites this year. The remaining half of U.S. digital dollars is destined for display and search advertising, as well as direct email marketing.

Most analysts agree that the primary reason for the digital shift is the ability to track marketing efforts more precisely. While online advertisers have been able to tie pay to performance, the same cost-tied-to-value paradigm is a long way from trickling down to online image uses.