Back in October, one of my favourite radio programs, White Coat, Black Art, aired an episode on Social Medicine.  What’s Social Medicine?  Well, on the White Coat, Black art site they say:

That’s when health professionals blog and tweet and text, not only to each other — but to their patients. Some even go as far as making friends on Facebook, though there’s much debate among health pros about where professional should stop at personal when it comes to social networking with patients.

The conversation opens with Dr. Jennifer Dyer discussing some of the opportunities, and results, she’s seen in embracing social media and other communication technologies in working with her patients.  As a pediatric endocrinologist, her patients are no doubt ripe for new doctor-patient relationship models.  In this 2-minute YouTube video, she talks about using texting to help her diabetic patients remember to take their boluses of insulin with some pretty sound success.

While I love the results Dr. Dyer is seeing, I’m fascinated by Dr. Friedman who was definitely less enthusiastic about social media tools being used in medicine.  Concerns about privacy were no doubt his biggest issue and there were thoughts on the appropriateness of relationships between patients and physicians in a well-connected social Internet as well.

With our professional clients at AvidTetra, we preach about using social media on one’s own terms.  When a client want to embrace a tool, we challenge and ask about what gains are expected to be made from using that tool.  When a tool is shunned, we ask about whether they know about what they’re missing.

Using social media on one’s own terms isn’t something that Dr. Friedman got to in the  White Coat, Black Art program – he talked about being “on Facebook” as though that actually means something, but I don’t think it means anything at all.  You can be on Facebook and do nothing.  Ever.  You can be on Facebook and connect with your family to see what they’re up to without contributing any content.  You can also post your entire life in pictures, status updates and Farmville plantations, but Dr. Friedman was representing physicians who put down the idea of social medicine without considering its various implementations.  Social Media is what you make of it – there’s no hard and fast rule for how people should use it.

Despite the unequivocal put-down of social media’s role in patient care, in fairness it’s important to note that Dr. Friedman was very clear that his colleagues are excited to embrace the secure, non-social Internet as a game-changer in how they interact with patients.  To me, I’m not sure that’ll be enough.

The last guest on the program was a fellow by the name of Lee Aase.  I first connected with Lee on Twitter a few weeks before this program while attending a conference at the Mayo Clinic where Lee works at the Center for Social Media.  I love this center – it’s about engaging healthcare professionals in social media to improve the lives and wellbeing of people everywhere and that’s exactly what Lee talked about on the program.

Privacy is a major concern with healthcare, but privacy is not what it used to be.  Take, for example, PatientsLikeMe.  I saw its founder, Jamie Heywood, present at the Mayo Clinic in September and what’d he say about privacy on his site?  ”Here’s the contract: You join our website and you share everything. Everything. You get no privacy on our website. We’re not even going to pretend that you can be anonymous…”.  And people do join.  And they learn.  And medicine improves.

Doctors don’t have the luxury to behave like teenagers in social media.  I don’t think accountants, lawyers, politicians or anyone else who is held to a standard of professionalism, ethics and responsibility can afford to embrace all that is social in social media.  People trust us too much for us to be totally naked and human - fallible - at our own hand.  With that in mind, patient care is not good enough anywhere in the world and the opportunities that we have to connect people with authentic improvements in wellbeing far outweigh the easily-managed perceived risks.

Excited to watch the panel for the next 90 minutes.  Tweet out to #UnPanelYVR so submit your questions!

The UnPanel Rules.  @CKGolfSolutions is laying down the law for us here before we get rolling officially.

First question from Jeff Ciecko:  George Moen, from Blenz, how does Blenz control what people are saying?

George:  We don’t.  But @shanegibson told me that there were conversations about our brand that we wasn’t, at the very least, listening to.  It took us about six months to get our shit together and start engaging people.

Q: Is there a tool that lets your organize your contacts and integrate them to social media?
A: Gillian:  I like Hootsuite for that.
A: George:  I do that at GeorgeMoen.tel.
A: Scott:  You need to pick your platform.  Then you can use that site’s interface to engage your contacts.  You want to use the platform most appropriately.  Don’t sync your tweets and Facebook tweets.  “RT” and “@” DON’T WORK ON FACEBOOK.  Please stop doing that.  Please stop.

Q: How do we measure relationship ROI beyond follower growth & report to execs to justify social media?
A: Scott:  Here we are preaching to the choir.  We need real metrics to have conversations outside of our social media space.  Real metrics include things like “conversation share” – percentage of a particular conversation online.  “Your brand is mentioned x% of the time.  How much is it work to you to increase that by 10?  This will lead to sales if the conversation is positive and the product is good.  You need to speak the language of the executives.  You need to speak their language.  You can’t say “Boss, I want 38.5 hours a week to tweet!”  We need to break out of the social media bubble and speak the language outside of that.
A:  Kristi:  I work with small business people, new business people and people with no social media presence.  I ask them why they don’t want to be there and they get started by just giving it a try with a plan behind.
A: Scott:  Use @shanegibson’s line about conversation about your brand happening that you’re not a part of.  That should smack people out of their resistance.

Q: What’s the value of building your own network or channel?
A: Scott:  We are judging social media harder than we judge other media.  We know it’s good to be measured in regular media, but we’re sceptical about being mentioned in social media?  A bit.ly short link has more metrics than most other marketing tools than we’ve seen in 50 years!  I believe companies are afraid of the conversation because marketing has been one-way for so long.  Now it’s a conversation and I believe some companies don’t care.  They just want you to shut-up and buy things without caring.
A: Meena:  It’s always been about repetition and frequency to get people on board.
A: George:  I love that many businesses don’t get it.  It gives me a hell of a competitive advantage.  You know how tempted I am to get the Twitter accounts of my competitors?  They were all available 6 months ago.  I don’t care about the ROI quite yet – I’ve always had to buy paper and radio and it we talked about reach.  About 36 months ago, Facebook explodes and guys like me hijack it.  It’s a business distribution channel for our business.  It’s EARNED media.  It’s word of mouth advertising.  I get to own my own distribution channel.  I get to create my own channel as Blenz and as George Owen and we’ll always own it.  We get to build our own NBCs!
A: Scott: Social media can push stories into big media.  We can create a buzz in social media and than it gets picked up in “big” media.
A: Gillian:  The Victoria police has a blog for stories that they couldn’t get into the local media.  That blog now gets international traffic for certain stories – it’s not their primary business, but they’re getting stories out in a big way.  People lose sight of getting the story out there because they get wrapped up in the tools.

Q: Can you comment on the concept of social equity measurements such as Klout and whether there’s value and accuracy?
A: Scott:  Klout measures reach, followers, etc..  It’s a measure of influence on Twitter.  I’m rated higher than Oprah and I’m 3 below Obama.  Am I more influential than they are?  No, but on Twitter, I am.  Companies run klout scores to decide who gets free products. In Vegas, people get hotel upgrades based on a klout score.  It’s worth what you decide to make it worth?

Q: Why are businesses having trouble understanding social media?
A: Scott: It’s 2-way communication.  Companies are used to pushing and they don’t know how to respond.  In the old days, PR people addressed things.  People look to protect their brands, jobs and overhead.  When you say “social media” is just talking, then people are scared.  You can’t get an MBA in Twitter.  I’m good at Twitter and I’m an idiot.  People who are “experts” fear it for this reason.
A: George: One thing I’ve discovered is that technology moves fast and people don’t.  I look at social media back in 1995 and I remember an exec from Nestle Canada was flying to Switzerland to get an email account and get training.  And there was discussion about whether the Internet might catch on.   The reality is that we suck at building relationships and this new way to do that is a problem for many.

Q:  Hootsuite has gone from free to pay-for-service.  What are your thoughts on the paid model?
A: George:  It’s great, I’d pay for it.  I’m addicted.
A: Scott:  It’s crazy that people get excited about this.  What are they thinking?  “You want me to PAY?  That’s nuts.  I want a refund on my 8 months of using this for free.”  I’d pay for Twitter.  I’d pay for geographic tools to breakout my twitter followers.  Hootsuite is genius.
A: Meena:  People would pay $5 for Angry birds, but not for a tool they use every day?

Q: What’s your favourite tool?
A: Kristi:  I love hootsuite
A: Scott: I hate Hootsuite.  I’m from Toronto and I’m an ass.  Actually, I would have stopped using Twitter long ago without a good mobile app and I got going with Ubertwitter.
A: George: I love auto-unfollow.
A: Scott:  I don’t follow back everyone.  Just because you follow me, doesn’t mean I’m interested in you.  I don’t want to be a diva, or twiva, that only follows a hundred as an individual.  Now as a brand, if you don’t follow everyone back, you need to.  You need to look good.  As a person, it ruins my feed if I follow everyone.
A: George:  I don’t use the main screen anyway.
A: Scott:  I don’t auto-DM or auto-unfollow.
A: Gillian:  For apps, I use Hootsuite.  It works.  If you’re on hootsuite, you can just schedule tweets ahead of the time.  [Scott hangs his head & holds himself together - barely]
A: Scott:  Will I appear in an article if I get at you?  Automating authenticity?  Twitter is one thing, but automating a newsletter is different.  Depends on your account – if it’s CNN, that’s automated.  If I find out you programmed a tweet and I thought I was following a real person, I’m hurt.  I feel dirty.
A: Kristi:  I work at 1AM and no one would be listening then.  Scheduling helps me with that.
A: Scott: The most reaction to a tweet happens in 5 minutes.  If you’re tweeting and coming back in 6 hours doesn’t work for the conversation.  Automation is a tool for laziness.  if you’re there, be there.
A: Gillian:  I think transparency
A: Scott:  We’re so self-important that we feel we need to schedule tweets when we’re away?  You’re not that important!
A: Audience:  If I RT someone else’s tweet an hour after it comes out, then I think it’s creating a broader impact.  It’s a great use of scheduling tweets.
A: Scott:  Don’t me wrong – with automation, do anything you want with MY tweets.  With my content, please.

Q: You’re saying Twitter is a conversation space, but you don’t follow everyone back?
A: The conversation has nothing to do with following.  I don’t need to follow you to have a conversation.  Following you just opens up the DM’s.  It’s about the conversation.  People test me on whether I will talk back.  I don’t care about the number of followers – I just care about engaging.  That’s all I know.

Q:  How many personalities use ghost writers and tweeters:
A: Scott:  I’ve never tweeted.  It’s all a farce.  Actually, this happens often with celebrity accounts.
A: Kristi:  Lots of businesses have people tweeting for them.

Q: What are your thoughts about politicians using social media with ghost writers?
A: Scott:  There’s too much credit given to social media and not enough to themselves.
A: Gillian:  It’s what they’re saying – it’s not about the tool.
A: George:  It gives them more opportunity to screw up, too.
A: Scott:  Do people change parties based on social media?  Twitter isn’t a game changer here – politics are about values and issues.
A: George: I disagree.  With politicians, it’s just different.  At the end of the day, you can’t protect yourself from real conversations in social media.  If we get unfiltered direct access, then we get a better feel for them.  I think it’ll be a levelling tool.  I think people who *should* be elected, funded campaigns become less relevant.  It’ll democratize elections.
A: Scott:  It does remove the budget aspect.
A: George:  We were the #7 brand during the Olympics because of social media.  We got into play with the big guys like VISA and such.  VANOC and the rest were coming at us hard, but we used the power of social media to outbrand VISA.  We spent less than $50,000 – VISA spent $17 million locally.

Q: How do you get people in an organization to tweet?
A: Scott:  People are the biggest asset for companies so they should be the biggest asset in social media.  It’s the top levels, usually, that are the barriers.  But mandatory engagement isn’t the way to go, but we should embrace those who want to.  I find it ridiculous when employees are help back from engaging.
A: George:  You support your champions wherever they are in the organization.  And we have a policy to go talk.
A: Scott:  Policies are always so negative.  Policies shouldn’t just be handslapping, it should be about embracing people who want to promote the brand.
A: Meena:  Ensure you know your corporate culture.  Does your team and staff embody and live the culture?  If they do, they’ll say what you would like them to say.
A: Scott:  You still have to monitor it.  When you have personal lines crossing over corporate guidelines, it needs to be monitored.

Q: How do you keep going if you don’t get immediate ROI?
A: George: I basically bought my Twitter audience in Vancouver initially.  I gave out gift certificates to people who mentioned #Blenz on Twitter.  It’s the best $5 I’ll ever spend!  I got that momentum going.
A: Scott:  I tweeted #Blenz today.
A: George: Social media is free, but my time is the most valuable thing I have.  Eventually we all run out.
A: Scott:  Twitter is lonely at first.  I did phases:  Attraction.  Then momentum. There are phases in anything for communication.  It takes time.  The biggest point is that the abandoned Twitter account is huge.  It’s one of the first Google results.  People will talk to old accounts.  If people are speaking at your dormant account, you’re accountable.  [See his story about Fatheadz]

Q: Let’s talk about the different language of the different platforms.
A: Scott:  Tweets die in two minutes – it’s very active.  Facebook is more filtered, it’s a different angle.  It rewards engagement.  Facebook uses “presumed relevancy” so you’ll see the things they deem most relevant from the past 24 hours.  It’s about comments and likes from your circle.  A corporation’s job there is to create engagement in those updates.  Awesome gets rewarded on twitter – engagement gets rewarded on Facebook.

Q: Gillian, there’re lot of reporters on Twitter, but not many on Facebook.  Can you speak to that?
A:  It’s a personal choice.  Facebook is more personal.  I know people who have a totally personal Facebook with different names, then they have their business one.  I make contact with friends on Facebook and chat on the wall – it’s not all about business.  You’ll see things that aren’t totally work on my Facebook.  I do that more on Facebook.  It’s personal.  I can’t speak for my colleagues, but you’ll see *some* of my work stuff on Facebook.
A:  Meena:  I see people using LinkedIn professionally and Facebook personally.
A: Scott:  I can’t get into LinkedIn.  I give each platform 3-6 months.  I just can’t like it.  It was self-serving, one-to-one, good for a sniper approach versus a community approach.  I have an account that I check every few days, but I’m close to pulling the account because I don’t use it.

Q: Is RT’ing talking, really?  On Facebook, I’m sharing.  Is Twitter really talking?
A: Scott: I don’t think Facebook is as much geared to conversations the way Twitter can be.  Facebook is more self-centred – there’s not as much dialogue.  The Facebook is more “look at me”.
A: Scott: I have a different take on LinkedIn.  I do a lot of networking and I’ve found through LinkedIn I can connect with people from previous years.  Every card I now get in business, I don’t have time to input to a database – but I have time to connect on LinkedIn.  That gets people to my database.  That’s the modern day goldmine.  With social media, any platform, anything counts forever.

Q: George, Scott.  Leafs, Canucks, Go.
A: Scott:  I broke up with them 3 years ago because they hurt me.  Go to “Dear Leafs, I’m breaking up with you” on YouTube.

And that’s the end of the day.  Cheers, All.  After party at the Caprice.

Meena Sandhu is the social media driver at ING Direct.  She tweeted Scott Stratten as a test to see how engaged he was and he replied immediately.  They had a conversation and built a relationship right from the start.

What brings ING Direct here?  They wanted to be different.  They want to challenge traditional banking models on all fronts.  They want to be *anything* but a traditional bank.

What you say in the public needs to start internally.  There needs to be congruency throughout internal communications and external.  This enforces transparency and makes companies using social media accessible.  Twitter makes this possible for them as a tool.

Carrying the offline brand isn’t necessarily appropriate for Twitter.  So they had a contest to engage people and talk about how they should present their stuff on Twitter.

They use a number of channels beyond Twitter now.  Facebook, YouTube and a few other Twitter accounts – like @CEO_INGDirect.

For a service-based industry, things are less tangible.  Couple that with an online business, like ING, and it’s elusive.  Social Media has helped them be more tangible as a brand.

Twitter and Facebook are an extension of the cafés and other presences of ING so it fit in well.  Meena then began to take the Twitter presence offline by attending Twitter meetups: Tweetups.  Twitter was the starting point of a conversation for her, but the relationship really grew by taking that offline.

The first ING Tweetup had 70 people.  She realized that RSVPs don’t mean anything in Vancouver.   (everyone who has hosted an event knows this! – Dave)

If we were solely online, we would not be here today.  We’re here, in-person, talking about social media.

ING created a Vancouver-based presence to be more local.  They started tweeting about savings of all kinds that are relevant to Vancouverites.  Events, sustainability products and other things that aren’t just ING-specific.  Most aren’t ING-specific.

Meena was able to create a network with one tweet.  When thinking about ING’s ROI for social media, ING measures conversations.  (This is in line with Scott Stratten’s strategy – get relevant metrics! -DM)

@MeenaSandhu is a name on Twitter that’s associated with ING.  It’s her personal account, but it’s a brand.  Her tweets will be associated with ING and their brand rather she wants that or not.

ING is driving Twitter from the inside.  They have an internal sharing tool like Twitter called “Orange Spark” to give every employee a voice in their own networks.  They also encourage people to join Twitter and be part of the conversations going on.

ING’s social media strategy is about:

1. Listening.  Keeping track of what people are saying and paying attention.
2. Talking.  Contribute valuable conversation so other people listen.
3. Energize.  They want people to be excited about savings and banking.  This is also about lifestyle.
4. Evangelize.  They want people to change the way they think about money and gain control.
5. Embrace.  Embracing people’s ideas and contributions to the future of ING by getting feedback that is meaningful through social media.
6. Support.  Need to be there for their clients.  People will ask more questions online than anywhere else.

Chance left the @OrangeYVR account quiet for two weeks and people wondered what happened.  The silence was noticed – consistency is key for a brand.

The last thing you want to do in social media is have a gatekeeper handle your content.  There needs to be genuine authenticity – you are accountable for your own credibility because your name is attached.

Whenever ING tweets about something green, it propagates and creates responses.  Vancouver’s local market embraces this type of content.  It’s important to know the content people will embrace and also when to engage them.  In Vancouver, ~9.30AM is active.  In Toronto it’s between 7 and 8AM.

Question: How does the company do succession planning when individuals build their own brands and protect against it vanishing when a high-profile person has?

Answer:  Meena didn’t use Twitter solely as a business tool.  The local Twitter handle allowed more flexibility and engagement inside the organization.  It distributes the risk of key departures.

Scott Stratten has come out on stage, talked about this being his first dance stage out of 30 book tours.  This is his last stop – a great venue for it.

His cover was the first draft of covers for his book.  It was the first one of 5 concepts.

The testimonials on the back of his book are all fake.  His footnotes are funny.  He actually outted authors who write their own testimonials or get unauthentic ones.

Scott encourages people to keep their phones on.

The only thing you have to take away today is that “Marketing Is Not A Task” – everything is marketing.  Every time you tweet, every time you go to a conference, it’s branding.  If you’re puking outside on the street because you got sick at an event, that’s your brand.

Your front line is your biggest brand.  It’s the most engaging tool you have.

“Old and Cold” is a bad combination for anything.  He had a cold, old breakfast at a buffet and when he told the waitress, she just stared.  Then she stared before getting a manager who created a remedy.  He didn’t tweet or blast the restaurant publicly – the manager offered additional food, but then took care of the bill.  What happened next was key – the chef flagged him down and explained why the food was bad.  He said there was no excuse, but explained the situation.  Then he asked what he could do – Scott told him he already solved the issue by just giving a damn.

One chef, not the CEO or the manager, was the brand of that restaurant.  He fixed the issue, gave a damn and defined the brand for Scott.  He wasn’t trying to push the brand, he was just trying to make things right.

“People Spread Awesome” – No one says “You need to go read Scott’s new blog!  It’s pretty okay!”  People only spread awesome.  Bloggers write for frequency rather than “awesome” – the frequency is “whenever you have something to say.”  Be frequent with “Awesome.”

No one’s said “This blog is okay, but it’s published weekly so that’s not bad.”  The reaction should be “It’s got to be good, it was blogged!”

Creating Awesome isn’t creating Content.

“When you shift a communication method, you shift a population.”  Social media is shifting a population.

But what we need to do is fix the bright, shiny product syndrome.  You need to fix your company, fix your products.  Social media isn’t for everybody.   If you suck, you just suck harder in social media.  If social media isn’t for you, don’t use it.

If you want to use Reddit or Digg, you need to cater to the geek crowd.  What’s interesting is that his site started getting traction on Reddit and Digg – but Facebook and Twitter carried it.

Stopping the Spread:  When we create content, we do things to stop the spread.  Look at the RSS feed.  In the prime space on the blog, you have the RSS logo.  This only appeals to geeks.

“I am a geek and I don’t subscribe this way.  You should have a system that people actually use.  Make the email signup as prominent, if not MORE prominent than the RSS.  It’s not your job to tell your audience how to consume your content – you just want them to consume it.”

What are people doing to enable mobile?  If people are roaming, will they want to visit your site?  People are shifting to mobile – it doesn’t matter if YOU don’t like viewing sites on your mobile device, other people do.

Zynga, the company behind farmville, is worth ~$5billion.  You can pay them any which way – they will take your money however you want to give it.  The harder you make it for people to connect, the higher your drop rate goes.  Think about what you need – you don’t need a phone number for a mailing list!  You need a first name and email address!

SEO – it gets you an initial hit, but no one tells their friends about something that’s keyword rich.

AdSense – if you have AdSense, people end up leaving your site to go to someone else.

Popups – it’s like throwing a shoe at a customer on the way out of your store to stop them and then asking them to buy something that you’re desperate to sell at a discount.  “Assault may work from time to time because people will pay you to stop abusing them, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good sales tactic.”

Captcha – What is that?!?  It can look like a drunk bat that’s been hit by a car.  You don’t need to put a Captcha when people are trying to buy something.  Using Askimet and Disqus, Scott’s gotten less than .2% spam actually posted to his blog.

Moderation – stops people from engaging in real-time and being inclined to share.

Social media success doesn’t exist.  It’s a tool.  You need to pick your tools and use them to build the relationships you want to have in social media.  Relationships take time, they take investment.  You can’t get 10,000 followers without tweeting.  The reason for his success is that 75% of Scott’s tweets are replies.  Building relationships this way gets you more re-tweets.

This book tour was based on relationships from Twitter.  Relationships are the business of Twitter.  “No entrepreneurs say it’s easy – they work their asses off.  It’s the implementation of ideas.”

“Technology should not change your etiquette and common courtesy.”

The problem with ROI is that people don’t understand the R or the I every time.  Sometimes this just isn’t monetary.  There are other metrics.

We need to remember that social media is public.  Your mom can see it, but customer service is public, too.  People can see what you’re telling your customers.

Trolls.  Trolls are people who attack others online.  You need to know when you engage in this area.  If you engage jackasses online, the end result needs to be worth it.  If non-influential people aren’t offering you something constructive online, they don’t deserve your time.  You can post responses, but why?

You can ignore those people and just be yourself online.

Just sitting down for the UnMarketing Vancouver Event.  It’s great to see Jeff and Tara Ciecko from CK Golf Solutions, Marc Smith from Amuse Events and still looking for Cadi Jordan from Jordan Consulting.  Follow on Twitter at #UnBookYVR

Today UnMarketing author Scott Stratten will be speaking and we’re also expecting to see Meena Sandhu from ING Direct, George Moen President of Blenz Coffee, Gillian Shaw Tech Writer for the Vancouver Sun and Kristi Ferguson from the Fraser Valley Pulse will be talking about their experiences with social media, taking questions from the audience and sharing stories.

We are excited to be part of today’s event as the “Live Blog” coverage.  While marketing isn’t what we do, it’s an essential component of social media – whatever you do with social media is some kind of marketing.  We’re also looking forward to the stories from today’s panel.  Stay tuned.  T-minus 15 minutes.

Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega

For many readers of our blog, particularly those outside of Vancouver, Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega may not be someone you know.  Raul is a professional researcher, accomplished academic and an educator at the University of British Columbia.  He holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering, an MBA/MEng in Advanced Technology Management, a PhD in Resource Management and Environmental Studies and his students rave about the classes he teaches.  We are profiling Raul in order to demonstrate the effective execution of a very unique social media strategy.

On Raul’s professional site, he offers a dynamic curriculum vitae that demonstrates his expertise and passions across all his professional areas of interest.  He highlights his media coverage, presentations and publications.  In addition, he updates his content through his professional blog.  As an independent professional, Raul has done a great job of presenting his profile to the world through this site.  Readers of our blog that belong to a firm probably have a site that’s quite similar to this one.  Many of our freelance readers have sites such as this or have decided it’s not for them.

Raul has done something unique with his online presence and that is to complement his professional presence with a fully-immersed personal presence in social media.  His alter-ego, hummingbird604, has achieved a popular status that supersedes his professional profile in a number of circles.  Raul’s media of choice for hummingbird604 are his blog at hummingbird604.com and twitter as @hummingbird604.  His recent content ranges from online contests for his readers to win tickets to local events, restaurant reviews, well-wishes on Canadian holidays, and social media.  It’s not all fun and games- it’s a site that shows he is well-rounded.  In addition to these other posts, he also features causes such as Mental Health Camp & water sustainability and general thoughts on where life is at.

Raul is incredibly prolific online and we have been hesitant to compare what you can reasonably do as a professional starting out in social media to someone as prolific and involved in social media as he is.  For almost every one of you, it’s just not realistic to emulate this model and that’s not lost on us.  That said, as a professional who is exploring social media, perhaps for the first time with this very post, what you should be paying attention to is the deliberate balance Raul has demonstrated in separating his personal self from his professional self.  This is a question that runs through every professional’s mind and for people who are simply not used to engaging with the general public as directly as social media allows, it can be quite daunting.

What Raul has done is something we encourage professionals to all do:  Make some consideration of what you’d like to do in social media, have fun with it and engage on your own terms.  When you have a strategy and an understanding of what you want to achieve with social media tools, then you have a lot of freedom.  Something else that’s notable about Raul’s strategy is that he’s identified the tools that work for him and sought to really own how he uses them.  Though he’s present on Facebook and LinkedIn, they aren’t his primary vehicles, and that’s his plan.  Again, he’s engaged on his own terms.  What terms would you consider as a professional using social media?

Through most of our posts and workshops to date, AvidTetra has been very focused on demonstrating how individual professionals can use social media tools to tell their stories and effectively maintain a consistent, dynamic online presence.

This post takes a step back from that and looks at corporate social media strategies that were studied in the early part of this year by the Brand Science Institute based out of Hamburg, Germany. They studied mostly European countries, but their findings are clear and we believe they can be extrapolated to any organization that has rolled out a social media initiative. Their full presentation is at the end of this post and directly here. These findings are great starting points for developing your own social media strategy, both corporate and personal.

Their key findings are that:

• 81% of companies don’t have a clear social media strategy
• Corporations don’t have the agility that start-ups have in delivering media or marketing
• Social media is a raw, direct line to customers and many companies aren’t ready for that type of interaction
• The demands of a Return On Investment within a year are too strict (moreso than most other marketing initiatives)
• Two words: Legal Departments
• Too much weight put on being viral versus present with customers
• Expensive up-front investments in technical architecture versus seeking to just use tools most effectively
• Lack of social media guidelines at companies
• Weak internal communications about social media interactions
• 90-9-1 Rule: Companies fail to understand that content creators represent just 1% of social media users. For every 1 content creator, you will find about 9 ‘editors’ (semi-active contributors to existing content through comments or feedback) and 90 people in the audience

The bottom line is that based on this study, companies are quick to amalgamate social media into existing schema and it’s just not working.

That is true for companies, but it’s also true for individuals as well. Social media is raw, often un-moderated, incredibly diverse and very public. It’s important to recognize where you are in social media: Are you part of the 1% generating new content or are you part of the audience? There’s certainly nothing wrong with either, but knowing where you’re at will certainly affect your strategy.

There’s a lot of focus on teaching people to create content in social media. The bottom line is that there’s significant value in doing so, but it’s not for everyone. Our post on the 90-9-1 rule demonstrates why maximizing your ability to be part of the audience is key if creating content isn’t for you.

If you’ve spent some time on our site, attended any of our social media workshops or spoken with us one-on-one, you will know that we are advocates of professionals using social media effectively. To that end, we often discuss how to participate in social media as either a content creator or as a member of the audience.

Unlike many social media people, we actually spend a fair bit of time on the latter.  The professionals we work with are often too busy to be generating content at prescribed intervals, don’t know what to say or just aren’t interested in putting themselves out there and nothing anyone says will change that enough to have an effective strategy based upon content creation.  According to research by Jakob Nielsen, it turns out that most members of massive communities, on the order of 90%, are in the audience and not creating new content.

by Jakob Nielsen

The actual breakdown, according to Nielsen, is:

• 90% – Audience (or “Lurkers”)
• 9% – Intermittent Contributors
• 1% – Heavy Contributors

Because there are so few contributors and creators of content, this theoretically makes it somewhat easier to be part of the audience.  Conversely, the amount of content being created is astounding and the audience is predisposed to information overload.

So, if you’re interested in social media and don’t know what to put out there, you are clearly not alone.  Your only challenge is in parsing the information.  It’s also worth noting that a non-participatory audience in the social media world is a collection of individuals in their homes, offices or on their mobile devices.  This type of audience is literally a crowd of individuals.

A challenge for the audience that’s created by this “participation inequality” is that 90% of original content is originating from 1% of users.  The counter to this is that 1% of total users is still an awful lot of people that are creating some incredibly diverse content.  Managing individual intake of this information is initially a challenge, but offers a fantastic opportunity to gain insights that are raw, outside the mainstream perspective and often incredibly novel.

On the flip side, since most of the content is coming from a very small subset of users, it’s also worth considering that social media maybe should only be a complement or a nice addition to other forms of information you’re already receiving.

Tom Hood, CPA

One of my introductions to professionals using Social Media came from the Maryland Association of Certified Public Accountants (“MACPA”).  I met Tom Hood, CPA.CITP and Bill Sheridan, CAE in 2008 and was immediately impressed by their integration of social media tools such as blogging, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube to engage CPAs in Maryland.  While their use of social media is complex, it is easily accessible by their audience and that’s a key they’ve really nailed down.

Bill Sheridan, CAE

Take, for example, one of their blogs, http://www.cpasuccess.com.  While it’s “just a blog” or traditional social media, it really captures its intended audience and loyal readers can easily be updated when new content is created.

On the other hand, if you check out the Maryland Association of CPA’s site, http://www.macpa.org, there is a full assortment of static information like you’d see in a standard website, news updates and CPE that are updated periodically, a blog-style for rapid updates and then semi-permanent links to a YouTube channel featuring recaps of the 2010 Maryland CPA Summit.  The site provides access to all of the information that I, if I were a practicing CPA in Maryland, would need access to in addition to other interesting pieces worth picking up along the way.  As the CEO of the MACPA, Tom has really driven home the idea of engaging members above “doing something cool” with social media.

Tom and Bill have figured out how to take a wealth of content and make it accessible to CPAs.  One of the biggest issues faced on the web today is information overload and they’ve done a great job of filtering through and giving members of the MACPA some excellent resources in bite-sized fashion.  In addition to its value for CPAs in Maryland, much of their content is of significant value for finance professionals across North America and that really demonstrates the power of social media.

Tom Hood discusses that value of professional organizations leveraging the internet to connect with members and highlights how an annual conference called “DigitalNow” gave him the tools to do that in Maryland.