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April 20, 2011

Respecting privacy with social media

Online privacy Facebook and social media are great outlets for people to vent with friends. People go online to complain about the weather (especially here in Western New York), sports teams, a bad day, boredom, etc… but what are the rules of the discussion? Are there any topics that are off limits – politics, religion, or personal matters?

A doctor from Rhode Island just found out the hard way that patient privacy is definitely not a topic that should be shared publicly through social media. “Dr. Alexandra Thran, 48, was fired from the hospital last year and reprimanded by the state medical board last week. The hospital took away her privileges to work in the emergency room for posting information online about a trauma patient.” While Dr Thran’s post did not actually include the patient’s name, apparently enough facts were included for others in the community to properly identify the individual.

While this may seem obvious to some, to others discussing their daily grind is a normal routine. There can be a lot of gray area for appropriate content. There comes a time when common sense should prevail. If you are not sure about something you are about to post, you probably shouldn’t be clicking submit. I’ve often thought about launching the social media hall of shame – to showcase social media bloopers and blunders. They are everyday occurrences. Just a few years ago the biggest concern was clicking “reply all” to an email. Now a simple post or tweet has trumped the old school email.

There is a lot to be learned from this Rhode Island case. I’m sure much of the healthcare industry is taking note and working to implement training programs and education for appropriate use of social media. With liability concerns, health privacy issues (HIPAA), and reputation there is a lot at stake for health facilities. It’ll be interesting to see how other healthcare institutions react to this occurrence.

March 24, 2011

Creating customer loyalty and retention with mobile applications

Mobile application development Customer satisfaction and retention is the underlying goal of most businesses. A happy customer that buys repeatedly from you and perhaps even acts as a reference or ambassador on your behalf is invaluable. How do you effectively monitor or stimulate this behavior?

While there are a number of traditional methods to reward and retain customers, new technology is providing a number of innovative formats. Mobile applications and even web compliant websites can be a powerful way of monitoring and rewarding loyal customers. Imagine pushing highly targeted specials or promotions to regional customers based on their location or buying patterns? Companies right here in Buffalo are embracing new technology as effective branding and marketing tools.

This trend is influenced by the escalating statistics of smartphone users who are the target of mobile marketing. Digital advertising is projected to reach the $1.1 billion mark by the end of the year and over $2.5 billion by 2014. This is an opportunity for businesses to reach a much more diverse demographic audience and influence their purchasing decisions, all happening in real time.

According to Gartner, by the end of 2013, 12.5% of all ecommerce transactions will be undertaken from mobile devices and context-aware data based on location or personal user profiles will be used to validate 90% of them.

William Clark, a research vice president at the firm, said: “Enterprises that want to remain competitive in electronic commerce over the next five years should begin exploring context-aware applications by year-end 2011 for both fraud detection and later on for customer acquisition and retention activities afforded by personalized and customized marketing and advertising information.”

For both small and large businesses the challenge is implementing an effective strategy to compete in this mobile space. Since many small businesses rely on regional customers, GPS and other social networking tools are available to help identify and reach prospects. Voice of the customer (VOC) is a powerful vehicle to gain valuable feedback on your products and services which can directly lead to quality improvements and enhanced features. These types of customer satisfaction surveys and suggestion features can all be deployed through a custom mobile application. These are immediate ways to capture and analyze essential information. More importantly this data can be harnessed to better serve and reward customers.

According to the JiWire Mobile Audience Insight Report, location-based ads and marketing are soaring, and it’s also the key factor that’s compelling people to shop online with their mobile phones. This is why many large companies are jumping onboard to take advantage of the trend. Facebook, for example is a recent supporter of location-based mobile marketing. However, a recent Microsoft survey sees that a part of the location-based trend is an opening to several forms of private data exploitation such as identity theft.

Early adopters of mobile technology are seeing immediate results. Furthermore, they are providing convenient methods for customers and prospects to express themselves and stay connected. As companies discover innovative uses of mobile technology, they can help differentiate their services, reinforce corporate culture, and build long-term customer loyalty.

March 15, 2011

Creating your social media strategy

Create your roadmap Is it wise to start a business endeavor without a plan? Most people wouldn’t build an office before they determined what their business would actually do. Without a strategy there is simply no structure, no clear objectives and no real way of determining its success.

The same principles apply to social media. Establishing a roadmap with clear objectives can help you determine the success or failure of your program. For example, what is your business trying to achieve through social media? Is it to:

Interact with customers and prospects
Increase visibility and strengthen your brand
Reach new audiences
Create loyalty
Deal with customer service and support issues
Boost revenue

Regardless of what you decide, you should plan to create measurable metrics for your social media program. These types of statistics, if tracked properly, can help to measure and monetize the results of your social media campaigns. Let’s say, for example, you have a small business and your goal is to interact with customers and prospects. In this case, you’ll want to define what would constitute success. For instance, the number of:

Completed customer satisfaction surveys per month
New features suggested by users (that are implemented)
People who post something about us
Blogs that link to us

There are a variety of criteria which you can use to measure progress. The idea is to define relevant success metrics that translate into meaningful business context for you. For example quantitative metrics may include number of sales, new leads, new qualified subscribers, while qualitative could track satisfaction levels, loyalty, visibility, amount of interaction, feedback. For qualitative goals, don’t get too complex, use simple rules as metrics.

Set your social media campaign goals based on these metrics. Monitor often and course correct as necessary. Don’t expect to get it right the first time, but by establishing benchmarks you can filter out channels and strategies that don’t return good results. Trial and error can be your best ally in discovering where to focus the most energy.

February 16, 2011

waveSpawn selected as a Finalist for the Rookie of the Year BETA Award

waveSpawn was recently announced as a Finalist for the Rookie of the Year Award for the 2011 BETA Awards! BETA is an acronym for Buffalo/Niagara Emerging Technology Awards. The annual awards are hosted by infoTech Niagara – who recognize the “best and brightest in Western New York’s technology sector”. Since 1998 infoTech Niagara has worked hard in supporting the WNY IT Community through networking, professional development, training and more.

The 2011 BETA awards will be held on March 23rd at the Buffalo Convention Center. waveSpawn is honored to be among the selected finalists. We are looking forward to a fun-filled evening. Many thanks to our customers and the infoTech Niagara association. term paper buy online

November 15, 2010

Facebook announces email and social inbox

Facebook announces email There’s been a lot of speculation regarding Facebook’s “secretive email” platform. Internally this has been dubbed the “Gmail killer”. At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco today, Facebook held a press conference to clarifiy this rumor.

“It’s true people are able to have an @facebook.com email addresses” announced Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. However, he later added “This is not an email killer.” The new developments at Facebook included three items:

Social inbox – filtering techniques to show the messages that you want to see
Single conversation history – which includes a complete historical thread of user conversations
Seamless integration – a means of aggregating a variety of communication including email, text, IM, etc.

According to Facebook engineer, Andrew Bosworth (or Boz) “The system is definitely not email.” It is not intended to act like email or replace your email accounts. He summarized that this is Facebook’s way of using individual social graphs to filter and improve communication. By having categories of friends, it’s possible to be notified by those people that are closest or most important.

This announcement seemed to be met with confusion and doubt. Do we really need to keep a complete communication log with friends? Don’t we have enough data coming at us each day as it is? Most emails are deleted for a reason – they’ve already been read or answered. If it needs to be stored, it’s got a specific title and date to reference. I’m not sure people want to comb through a thread to find the snippet of useful data. It’ll be interesting to test these features out to see how effective they are.

November 2, 2010

Ok, you’ve signed up for social media now what?

A little while ago, we discussed the implications of signing up for social media platforms only to neglect them. Is this due to the fact that most people simply don’t know what to say or how to say it? With the array of options available today – particularly for small businesses, it’s more important than ever that they understand and leverage these tools. I thought this article by Jeffrey Gitomer was very timely and relevant: What should I tweet, what should I post, how should I link?

In the article, Gitomer points out that “Most people don’t know what to say on, what to do on, or what to do with social media. And it’s a club with more than 700 million members.” He goes on to outline some helpful suggestions including:

Stop thinking of it as social media, and begin thinking of it as BUSINESS social media.
What will help your customers produce more, profit more, understand what’s brand new in the market, improve morale, improve attitude, and/or improve their life. Then write about it, tweet about it, and post on Facebook about it.
Why not create daily/weekly/monthly value messages that your customers would find so interesting and informative that they would save them, print them, put them into action, and forward them to others?
All business social media is interconnected. You have to do ALL of them consistently to gain effective results. And you have to do all of them well if you expect to monetize your efforts.

I think Gitomer provides a very rational approach to utilizing social media. While consistency, messaging, and value proposition are all important, there is also a strategy in connecting with the appropriate audience. You could have the best tweets, comments, and suggestions to offer, but if nobody is listening, how effective are they?

As a precursor to this article is the topic how to network with the appropriate business audience using social media. For many people this is fundamentally more critical than the messages being sent. The first step is determining which social media platforms are right for your business or personal use. Select the combination of outlets which you can maintain. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. While some of these tools are easy to integrate with services such as Twitterfeed, the proper time should be taken to set these communication channels up properly.

Next is identifying and connecting with your unique business audience. Don’t just stalk and link to prospects with whom you are trying to close business opportunities. Connect with people who share similar interests or view points. Connect with partners and customers who can also share experiences. Connect with and/or follow competitors. What better way to monitor intelligence and stay competitive.

In closing, don’t use social media as simply a vehicle to announce your specials or flavor of the day. People see right through that and will lose interest quickly. Be genuine, and as Gitomer stated in his article, add value and be consistent.

September 27, 2010

Reinforcing your value proposition with social media marketing

Well thought out sales and marketing plans are critical for most small businesses. There are many strategies to leverage in order to meet specific revenue goals. However, decision-makers should not lose sight of establishing a unique value proposition which clearly differentiates the product or service from competitors.

What differentiates you from your competitors? Why should prospects buy from you or utilize your services? These are the types of questions that you need to answer before generating your sales and marketing plan. Your value proposition should support your brand. As discussed in an earlier topic, your brand is the personality that identifies your product, service or company. Specifically, this image should represent the heart and soul of your organization as it relates to your customers, employees, partners, and investors.

If you don’t focus on your unique value proposition, you’re likely to get lost in the shuffle with your competitors. Understand what makes you better and use it to your advantage. This could be customer service, quality, cost, innovation, a niche market, core competency, or something else. Incorporate that same strategy into everything you do – including both internal and external communication. Consistency in your message will help establish a clear vision. More importantly it’ll define who you are.

Ultimately, you want customers and prospects to recognize you for something – best quality, lowest price, fastest delivery, most helpful, dependable, etc. That same competitive advantage should be leveraged in your marketing and communications strategy – including social media. Social media offers endless innovative and creative possibilities for businesses to exploit. Learn how to leverage these tools to your advantage. Know your target audience, share your value proposition, and consistent follow-through are all keys to your success.

September 18, 2010

Succeeding in Buffalo with social media marketing

Small business owners in the greater Buffalo area have a lot of marketing options to leverage. Many of these are changing by the minute. Services such as Groupon, foursquare, Yelp, Facebook Marketplace, Yahoo Places, Twitter, and too many others to mention are waiting for local retailers to exploit. With GPS technology and mobile apps at consumers’ fingertips, local businesses can create more visibility than ever before. By harnessing the power (of a combination) of these social media platforms, Buffalo businesses can successfully generate brand awareness, in-store traffic, product buzz, and ultimately revenue.

Many of the strategies and underlying concepts of social media marketing are derived from traditional marketing; however, there are many new tactics and technologies to incorporate. Businesses need to open their minds and be creative. Innovation is paving new opportunities for businesses to market themselves and secure customers. Integrated marketing campaigns with direct mail and PPC advertising can yield even more significant results. Whatever your objectives are, social media can be a powerful communication tool to help spread your message.

waveSpawn is a pioneer in social media and located right here in beautiful Buffalo, NY. We are proud to work with a number of local businesses and assist with their marketing efforts. Please feel free to download our white paper on Understanding Social Media ROI. For specific questions or information, please feel free to contact us.

September 10, 2010

Flash coming soon to iPhones and iPads

Flash coming soon to iPhone After an antitrust investigation by the FTC and increasing competition from other mobile devices (such as Google’s Android), Apple has “decided” to relax their programming restrictions for third parties. Even though this sounds voluntary, Apple was certainly under pressure to comply.

So what does this mean? Essentially Adobe is now resuming its work on developing a version of Flash technology suitable for the iPhone and iPad devices. It had put those efforts on hold back in April when Apple placed severe restrictions on third party applications. This should come as good news for Apple users. Having additional functionality, such as Flash, will help to stay competitive in the rapidly changing space. As an iPhone user, why should I be limited because of a personal grudge between two CEOs? Get over it Jobs… let’s move on!

Downstream, this decision will also create new marketing opportunities. Since Flash applications are currently being utilized by ad agencies and media sites, they’ll eventually have the infrastructure to expand these campaigns to mobile devices. While some devices already support this technology, advertisers generally want to expand their reach without limitations. While it’s difficult to predict where this will lead, with Apple and Jobs in the mix, it should be an entertaining journey.

August 19, 2010

Facebook Places positioned to replace foursquare and Yelp

Facebook has officially joined the GPS, location-based, “check-in” game. With the announcement of Facebook Places yesterday, users can now share information of their whereabouts as well as connect with nearby friends. It’ll be interesting to see how this impacts both foursquare and Yelp who are also competing for customers in this location game.

Since Facebook recently surpassed 500,000 users, they clearly have the advantage over competing services. It would seem natural that social media enthusiasts are looking for a convergence of all these features – and not have to jump from one platform to another. Perhaps Facebook should look to acquire foursquare and simply aggregate the existing data and comments into their system?

Location features can create tremendous value for small businesses. With just a few favorable reviews and recommendations, viral marketing can generate a wave of new customers. It helps new prospects discover places that they would otherwise never know.

On the other hand, are GPS signals revealing too much information about people? Is this big brother zooming in on us? Are we compromising our privacy?

I’ve downloaded the latest Facebook app for the iPhone. While the Places icon is visible, it doesn’t appear the service is available yet in Buffalo, NY. We’ll be watching closely!

What are your thoughts? Will these location features help advance Facebook and small businesses or will this create new privacy and security concerns? Is Facebook Places sensible?

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