Social Marketing! Blogs! Facebook! Twitter! Last year, in a sort of symphonic convergence, most of the world’s clients and agencies arrived at the same conclusion, at about the same time, expressing the same question - “How can we make social marketing/media work for us?”
Agencies tried to wrap around specifics of revenues, billing, staffing, and what kinds of projects could provide value.
Clients struggled to see how Social Marketing would serve their brand, their culture, their org chart, and their customers.
As 2010 begins some of the answers, for both, are clear, or at least clearer. Follow me as I detail a favorite project of 2009, social implementation for a regional health care client.
A year ago, the client had a thriving website, a plan for email marketing, and no social presence or plan.
Today, the client has created a social presence that includes:
- a constant stream of new content to their primary web site
- a blog
- a dynamic calendar of events
- Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts
The creation of social marketing began in February 2009.
Launch Interactive was serving the client’s email messages in templated HTML format, and was managing their email contact lists for lower bounce rates and higher click through rates, and had put email collection forms into place on the client website.
At the same time, Launch Interactive was sharing with the client the results of our work using Web 2.0 and social tools. We were talking to our health care client, and listening to them - and to their customers - through lots of discussion, but also, through review of email metrics and website Google analytics data.
By mid-year, the conversation started to take shape as the Health System’s Director of Corporate Communications was assigned ownership of social marketing. Launch’s role and the scope of work were defined, and project specifics were fleshed out. We would be responsible for creating social tools and user interfaces. Our work would be the pieces that connected customers from the client’s web site to Facebook/Twitter and back again.
Our programmer/developers created proprietary tools and adapted other free and share ware apps. These included a blog and interactive calendar. These were important because they put control for on-the-fly content creation in the client’s hands. Our developers mapped out a very sophisticated distribution of blog and calendar content throughout the client’s website, with external feed to Facebook and to Twitter. The client opted for some but not all tools presented to them, but the plan allows for further development down the road without having to do significant re-work.
Here are the pieces that comprise Launch’s social solutions for our client, Bon Secours Virginia health system in Hampton Roads, Virginia:
- the keystone of the social program, the site has encyclopedic information about the health care system’s medical centers, staff and services
- the blog, interactive calendar and newsroom features created by Launch auto-populate site pages
- Save and Share features are found on relevant site pages
- Graphic links to Facebook fan page, Twitter and the bs757 blog on most pages
- The bs757 blog complements official news releases with pieces that are more informal and consumer directed.
- Blog posts automatically distribute to a space on the site home page, where visitors see title and capsule intro and click through o the blog
- Posts are tagged and are searchable
- From within the larger site, links from specific service lines are being set that take visitors interested in that line (ie, cancer, cardiac health, orthopaedics) to a page populated with related blog posts.
- Calendar of events has many contributing editors and a single editor in chief who reviews and publishes event information.
- When an editor completes the event information, it dynamically creates an event page
- Each dynamically created event page pulls in all the event details and google maps info
- Presents save and share options
- An online registration form collects participant info and auto-distributes to a Bon Secours customer service rep and to an email list management application
- Calendar posts are automatically distributed through Twitter to followers of Bon Secours in Hampton Roads
How’s it all working? The results so far are measurable, and the metrics are good.
Since going live, there’ve been more than ninety events posted to the calendar, and an average of seven blog posts each month. Each presents a lot of service and information to healthcare customers, and visits to each are tracked for information about what works and what doesn’t. We’ve even integrated them into our ongoing emails for the client.
Together, we and the client have discovered unanticipated benefits because of these new tools and the new ways they work together.
We’ve watched other clients who have created social programs on their own. The most striking difference between the social marketing we’ve created with and for our client, and theirs, is a lack of connection of their social efforts (Facebook, Twitter, Linked In) to their other interactive assets (web sites, email marketing and blogs). That could mean they’re not getting the full benefit of their investment of time and staff resources.
Will 2011 reveal further advantages for clients who’ve turned to Launch Interactive for support and development of social marketing? We’re working hard to make sure that’s the case.
