facebook Archives | G2 Communications Inc.-Medical Practice Marketing

Jul 29 2013

Building a Converged Media Strategy: Harmonize Your Message Across Multiple Channels

What is Converged Media?

Have you ever watched a news segment on the Internet? Or flipped through a digital magazine on your tablet? You were benefiting from media convergence–the blending of multiple media forms and technologies into one dynamic experience.

Chances are your company has used converged media to connect consumers to your content. Maybe you placed a paid ad on Facebook. Maybe you posted a blog on your website, then saw it tweeted, retweeted, and finally picked up by a journalist or reposted by a news outlet.

Paid, owned and earned media are becoming increasingly integrated, and that’s where converged media impacts you most.

Why You Need a Converged Media Strategy

There is a surplus of content being pumped into every channel, every minute of the day. Consumers are over-saturated, and attention spans are dwindling. It’s only getting harder to cut through the noise with your message.

It’s no longer enough to have a corporate blog, Facebook page, and monthly press releases. Marketing and PR professionals need to share interactive stories across a variety of platforms, using text, graphics, and video. This convergence of paid, owned, and earned media enables you to reach customers they way they want to be reached, so they’re more likely to pay attention.

Sounds great, right? It might also sound like a lot of work. That’s why you need to develop a clear and targeted converged media strategy that can grow with you.

Still need convincing?

According to Michael Briton, author of Your Brand: The Next Media Company, most people need to encounter your message 3-5 times before they begin to trust and take note.
Research published by the Altimeter Group reveals that “the average person sees 3,000 brand impressions everyday.”
Worldwide, people actively use between 2 and 4 social media accounts, and the number only continues to grow.
This non-exhaustive Wikipedia page lists about 200 existing social networks

If you’re not bolstering your PR efforts with multiple media channels, you’re missing out on whole segments of your audience. Even if a consumer sees your message on one platform, they’ll likely forget it until it crops up on another platform (or two, or three…).

Integration: Getting More Out of Individual Marketing Channels

To take advantage of converged media, you need to integrate several channels into a single campaign. You want your message to be consistent and recognizable in each place it appears. The format might change–from a video to a tweet to an infographic–but the story is the same.

Think of your integrated campaign as a finely tuned barbershop quartet. Each member sings their part — tenor, bass or baritone — to create a richly harmonized song. The effect is a big, resonating sound that’s greater than the individual parts.

Blending various forms of media puts you at a distinct advantage into today’s fragmented market. When you start leveraging converged media, you still get to orchestrate the look, feel and tone of your message, and reach consumers where, when and how they want to be reached. And when they bounce from one platform or device to the next, you remain a stand-out on their rapid, over-saturated journey. The perfect confluence of paid, earned and owned media.

Jun 05 2013

How to Write Micro Content for a Macro Audience

“Content is King” has been the credo of digital marketers ever since Bill Gates coined the phrase back in 1996. With the battle for top search engine rankings, and the rise of keyword driven SEO (search engine optimization), content has continued to reign. But the Internet of today is a much different place than the pre-Google, pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter, pre-SEO world of the 90s.

Today, PR and marketing are inseparable from social media, and social media is all about short, shareable bursts of text and eye-catching images. That’s why some have begun using a more web 2.0-friendly credo, proclaiming Micro Content is also King.

Micro-content requires a whole different set of skills than long-form copy. To succeed in the era of micro-content, you must be able to craft punchy headlines, engaging tweets and click-worth summaries. Here are 5 Tips for writing microcopy that will stand out:

1. Get Strategic

Before you set fingers to keys, perform a micro content strategy. Who is your target audience? What action do you want them to take? Which social media sites do they use?

Say your audience is urban, 30 to 50 year-old women, and you want them to subscribe to your lifestyle newsletter. With a little research you discover that Facebook and Twitter are most popular with your demographic. Armed with this information, you can now write micro content that is targeted and actionable from the first draft.

2. Craft Stand-Alone Headlines (i.e., Write for Goldfish)

Did you know that the average attention span has shrunk from 12 seconds to 8 over the last decade? That’s shorter than a goldfish, which can apparently stay focused for a full 9 seconds!

Say it Up Front: Tell readers what they need to know right off the bat with clear and captivating headlines. If a headline is so vague or clever that readers can’t tell what you’re about to give them, they won’t bother finding out.
Don’t Rely on Context: Headlines appear differently online than in print. They frequently show-up in a list of other links, in search engine results, or re-tweeted without supporting text.

3. Be Clear

Internet users don’t read, they glance. Make your item brief, clear, and explanatory. As we just learned, your audience is likely to see bits of content out of context before they click through to the web page (if they actually do). Make sure you state the essential information, and make sense to inundated readers.

4. Write Visually: Visual language is engaging and memorable—two objectives all marketers strive for. Don’t mistake visual writing for flowery writing. Too many adjectives make for a slow and clunky read. Instead, use descriptive nouns and verbs to paint a vivid image with as few keystrokes as possible. For example, “Zoo Acquires New Animal” becomes much more click-worthy as, “Baby Elephant Reunited with Worried Mom.” And including actual visuals never hurts. Tack on a twitpic of the elephant’s reunion, or a link to the zoo’s photo gallery.

5. Make it Personal: To get personal, you have to be personal. Whenever possible, give your social accounts a face. Readers trust micro content that is shared by a human with a name, profile picture, title and background story. They are also more comfortable sharing content, commenting and generally interacting with human accounts. Personalize your content and steer clear of empty, mass marketing lingo. You’ll be rewarded with loyal followers.

Bottom line: the micro-content revolution has already occurred. The best way to join in is to spend time in the social media world and see what has traction. Learn the language and identify the key players of each platform, then get in there and claim your niche.

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Apr 05 2013

Storify Your PR: A One-Stop Social Media Solution

Most of what’s said about using social media to promote your brand boils down to this bit of unhelpful advice: You have to use it. That may be true, but it leaves you with little more than trial and error to guide your social media marketing efforts.

While there will always yet another platform everyone says you must use, one shows promise in actually simplifying and enhancing your social media outreach. It’s called Storify and companies big and small are already using it to skip the pitch and publish their own stories using their best curated content.

What is Storify?

Social media is supposed to boost your brand building and customer engagement efforts, but the actual results are diffuse and still difficult to measure. It’s one thing to sign up for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, Tumblr, FourSquare and Pinterest, and quite another to create an integrated campaign that is effective across each unique platform. Storify helps you do just that.

From the user dashboard within Storify you can gather all the content that you have already generated in the press and on other social media sites into one window. From there you can select the best tweets, comments, photos and videos, plus links to PR news stories you’ve generated in traditional media, and package them into a single post. Think of it as designing the front-page layout of a newspaper: you put the best stuff front and center, highlight noteworthy pieces and entice readers to dig deeper.

Become Your Own Publisher

Storify’s own slogan is “Don’t get lost in the noise.” Rather than spewing a fire hose flood onto the Web and seeing what sticks, Storify lets you bring together a multitude of voices into one targeted story. And you can publish as many stories as you like. Use it to support your current marketing strategy, respond to up-to-the-minute trends, or bundle the most useful information on a newly released product.

The best part of publishing with Storify? Your audience becomes your distributor. Storify was built for the lay person, so it’s accessible to everyone and it’s optimized for sharing across the Web. That means when you create a story it doesn’t only exist on the Storify site; it can be posted to Facebook, tweeted, emailed, and blogged about all with a single link.

Is Storify Right for Healthcare Providers?

Storify is an excellent way to promote medical services and devices. You may have heard the expression, “If you don’t control your image, someone else will.” This is particularly true for the healthcare industry, which frequently has to combat misinformation and bring patients up to speed on medical and technological advancements. Storify lets you decide what information is important and deliver it to patients in a clear and engaging format. Your message is less likely to get muddled by unrelated hashtags and pictures of cats

In a recent twitter discussion hosted by Healthcare Communications & Social Media (#hcsm), they invited doctors, patients, hospitals, and communications professionals to answer the question: “What motivates healthcare providers to use social media?” Once the discussion was over, one participant used Storify to publish the results. The participant archived the most relevant tweets in one easy-to-browse place so others could read it without having to comb the twitterverse.

The archived conversation is one of the most basic examples of what Storify can do. Hospitals and healthcare companies can get much more creative and produce a range of multi-media “stories” like:

Case Studies: Pull in all the tweets, comments, blog posts, and photos you can find on a particular healthcare issue. Discover and highlight patients’ thoughts, questions, and needs to improve product marketing.
Executive Profiles: Collect video interviews, Slideshare presentations, press releases, and tweets on company leaders.
Product Launches: After the release of a new product, gather reviews, briefs, social media comments, press releases, and marketing content into one package. It can become a one-click patient, employee, and sales resource.

Storify returns some of the command social media has taken away by letting you curate the content to create the kind of story that gets shared.

Oct 17 2012

The PR Honeymoon is Over… Now What?

You’ve just completed a successful PR launch for a new medical device that yields faster post-operative recovery for cardiac surgery patients, the clinical trial results have been published in a medical journal and the FDA has approved it for safety and efficacy. Health and science journalists from top media outlets thought it was unique enough to cover. The articles have been very respectable by startup standards.

Investors are delighted and all 20 employees are singing your praises. You’ve had lots to tweet about and post on the company Facebook page and the retweets and comments are rolling in.

But eventually the PR bloom will fall off the rose and the board will be expecting the next wave of coverage. Customers are not quite ready to go on record, nor are surgeons who are trying out the product. What do you do?

While you have focused on generating broad coverage with great success the second wave of brand building requires a new PR strategy to sustain momentum. It’s the right time to narrow your PR focus to reach your target customers – the surgeons who will push their hospitals for acquire your device; the patients who will benefit; the investors who see a healthy ROI. Identify the publications, blogs and other digital destinations where surgeons and post op nursing staff get their medical news and information. Set up specific PR programs to penetrate this second tier media: trade publications, medical journals, blogs, etc.

First, research healthcare and medical publications read by your customers. Check out the magazine editorial calendars which schedule feature stories throughout the year to drive advertising spending. Identify the topics related to your device. Set up a spreadsheet and populate with those publications and topics. Pitch your new device and how it shortens patient recovery times in unique ways. Invite the editor – or assigned writer to interview your company founder.

Develop a thought leadership program for company clinical executives by proposing and ghostwriting articles for those same publications, which are often looking for content, especially for their websites. These articles help position executives as experts who articulate the problem your device solves — but doesn’t shamelessly promote it.

Don’t forget to post and Tweet all PR driven content on Facebook and Twitter. Reshape these articles into blog posts, or add an introductory paragraph with a link to your published article.

Start a speakers’ bureau and arrange for speaking engagements at medical conferences and tradeshows where you’ll be exhibiting your product.

Find opportunities to announce the latest company news [following the initial product introduction]: a new round of funding; new customer; new executive hire; results of a clinical trial; etc.

Set up a mini PR program for new customers with a news release template that lets them announce the benefits of your product to the communities they serve and how they’re securing post-op safety for their cardiac patients.

Develop a story around the company founder for the business media; who she is; what inspired her to create a solution; her unique journey that led to the invention of the device.

Set up Google alerts on cardiology or cardiac surgery. Use headline news stories as angles to introduce your company to the media; pitch the founder as a guest for a radio talk show.

The honeymoon will end at some point so don’t ignore the myriad ways you can use PR to promote your company’s accomplishments.

Oct 01 2012

What the Heck Should I Do with Pinterest?

I listened to Pinterest pro Andreea Ayerslast who runs Pinterest Advantage. She gave us some of her choice ones…

Pinterest is a new way to discover new audiences. It’s visually based and image driven. You can organize and share (pin) visual content – images and video — around specific topics.

Unlike Facebook, Pinterest is not chronologically based…and images live a lot longer!

You create boards which are viewed as catalogs. Use Pinterest to plan a wedding. Start by searching on wedding locations; find wedding gowns, caterers, cake vendors, photographers, etc.

Pinterest is good for authors. It can help you connect with current readers and find new ones; drive more traffic to your website. Book genres that have the most success? Cookbooks, children’s books, home decor, self-help, health and lifestyle, marketing books.

How to use Pinterest effectively and efficiently:

– Create an account – very easy to do

– Think about what you want out of Pinterest – promote you as an expert; promote a book tour, promote your photography

– Figure out who you’re trying to reach

– Build your following; add a Pinterest button to your website

– Direct Facebook and Twitter followers to your Pinterest boards

– Repin other people’s pins, especially the people you follow on Pinterest and those who follow you

Let’s say you’re an interior designer. What about creating a board and pinning the latest colors or one with images of creative small spaces. Or perhaps a board with living room themes. How about a board with some nice quotes on the aesthetics of your home? Or create a board and pin the interiors of others’ designs you admire. Show us your own work environment – the space that gives rise to you creative ideas.

What are the lifestyles of your clients? Start a board on those visuals.

Here’s a good one: create a board with quotes and turn them into a graphics using Pinstamatic. Drop in a testimonial from a client, click some buttons to add the flourishes, then click on Pinterest to upload.

Make sure you support other pinners. Promote other pins and boards you like. Leave comments too. Show us your design team: the upholsterer, the furniture showroom, the cabinet craftsman, the painter, artist rep. Show viewers your next project.

For authors pin your favorite book covers – yours and others. Comment and tell us why. If your book is in 20 stores create a board to tell viewers where they can find your book with images of those bookstores.

Pin inspirational quotes for your target reader. Quotes get widely repinned.

Don’t forget boards related to our own personal interests. People might want to learn about us — not just what we do for a living.

PicMonkey – you can upload your image and add all kinds of textures, backgrounds, facial designs, and add text on top of that.

Try it out… have some fun. Don’t worry about monetizing for now!