Heidi Allen Digital Strategy

Every company has critics, however these critics are now able organize a coordinated global attack using social media tools.

‘Facebook fan page brand-jacking is the new form of tree hugging. As movements form, the organized groups can stage mass attacks on brand Facebook fan pages, overrunning it with negative messages.  Like sitting in trees with banners to slow down clear cutting and spray painting messages on buildings, this is simply the digital form of real-world protest’[1]

This is one of the reasons many are hesitant to jump in and start a blog or facebook page. Anyone embarking on social media, especially companies in health, should have guidelines or an escalation plan about what to do when things go wrong, protecting themselves (and their employees). Guidelines should describe those comments which require an immediate response, what the response will be, from whom, and indicate what to do if negative comments escalate.

Without such a plan you run the risk of being forced to shut your site down or take extreme remedial action (higher profile cases of organisations who got caught out include Nestlé, Sanofi Aventis, Elsevier). Whatever the case, it may not be possible to talk about specific adverse events but let readers know that they have been heard, that communication is open and that their comments have been taken seriously. Sometimes there may be instances where ‘top management’ are visible and active.

Processes Brand Triage

Although these guidelines were made for the ‘corporate’ world, they also apply to individuals, especially within the area of health and research where a comment taken out of context can harm not just reputations but also have clinical implications. The thing not to do is to ignore or block someone out of hand (unless they are a troll), this can lead to an escalation of the problem – a very public example of this was a mistake made by Nestlé in trying to ban a Greenpeace video on YouTube – it simply added fuel to the fire (see ‘Censored Greenpeace video gets helping hand from Nestlé).

Crisis communications is not necessarily about fixing the problem but putting forward the human face of a company and letting people know they have been heard. Addressing an issue will go a long way to building trust (whether that trust is warranted of course is another matter entirely).

References

[1] Jeremiah Owyang: Crisis Planning: Prepare Your Company For Social Media Attacks

How do you get your picture or avatar to come up automatically when you comment on a blog or another social media site?

Getting an Avatar

This is how you do it. Go to http://en.gravatar.com. Fill in your profile, add your picture and the email address you’d like your picture to appear with and you’re done.

then, every time you comment on a blog and leave your email address (the address won’t appear in public), your picture will appear.

Try it!

You may have different personal and professional social media accounts within one application (like a private facebook page and a professional one, or two YouTube accounts) – as someone emailed me recently,

…there are many interfaces and how to manage them all? This can be a very resource hungry experience without a good process

It get’s difficult if you have to keep logging out of one account and going into into another. Here is a time saver that I am using based on Bookmark folders and Browsers.

Managing personal and professional accounts

1. List all of the sites you have and divide them into personal or professional
2. Open your browser (a browser is what you use to browse the web with, for example: internet explorer, or firefox, safari, chrome)
3. Open all your personal  accounts and bookmark them.  Save them onto your bookmarks toolbar.
   (Note, if your toolbar is already  full put the bookmarks into folders – I’ve done a screen shot below)
4. Open a different browser and go through the same exercise with your professional accounts

You now have your accounts separated, and can switch easily between the two without having to log out of accounts. If there are some accounts that you use regularly you can set them to open automatically.

How does this work in practice?

I have two identities – Heidi Allen and associated social media accounts, and Body In Mind (health and research) and associated social media accounts.  How to manage them day to day at the same time?

Heidi Allen

All accounts here are in my firefox browser. Here are the tabs that open automatically and the folders

And here is what is in one of my folders (Heidi Allen Profile) if I need it

Body In Mind

All accounts here are in my Google Chrome browser – again, here are the tabs that open automatically and the folders (this time Body in Mind Profile folder)

I have the same bookmark folders in both browsers but you could have one set on each browser – and if your life is blissully simple and you only have a few accounts – stick to one browser!

Vegard – I hope this develops our discussion further from the previous Digital Strat post.

Do you go online for your company or for yourself?  Do you keep them separate or are they the same thing? Your personal identity and your professional identity are different things although they may appear to be the same.

For example: you may be a manual therapist with your own practice and also interested in health related social media sites, or you may be an employee of a larger organisation such as publishing but also interested in developments of new technologies for publishing (or something completely unrelated).

Your work profile is one thing, your personal profile is another and keeping your personal identity is important online – what happens when you leave the company, sell the practice, change careers and retrain, if you only have one profile you will have to build up who you are online from scratch.

How does this work in practice? Some sites you join will be for your personal profile (for example my dreamingspires identity on twitter, or my blog here) is essentially for me and what I record here is a repository of information for me to go back to and refer to while I’m working, it also identifies who I am and what my interests are.

Work identities, on the other hand may change.  So if you are managing social media accounts for your ‘professional self’ or for a company keep in the back of your mind that you may leave, sell the business but still want to keep your individual identity when that happens.

To be found online, search engines like Google need to be able to find you, look at your content and make you visible.  The more visible your content to search engines, the easier you will be found – this is called search engine optimisation, or SEO.  To be most efficient in the social marketing frame there are some basic things to do when you are starting out.

• Standard naming convention (for sites, products, location etc)
• Standardardised names for all social media accounts (try to avoid spaces in names and terms and phrases)
• Define your keywords – these are your meta tags
• Have a tag line
• Be able to describe your service or business in a single line, single paragraph and in 400 words
• Set up relevant social media accounts such as facebook and twitter to get your message out quickly
• Use different media such as videos, slideshare as well as blogging
• Have a blog for rapid news dissemination
• Connect into a blogging network (such as a medical network) who will be ready to take up your links and disseminate your work

A word about Link popularity

Link popularity is essential for your site to increase your online presence and establish your lead in whatever topic your site addresses. It is determined by both the quality of links (links from high ranking trustworthy sites in your subject area) and quantity of sites that link to you to increase your exposure to search engines.
If your information is behind a login wall (eg a subscription site) this can make it more difficult for search engines to assess the value of the site linking to you and this is something that needs to be thought about when considering your online strategy.

Keywords

Paying attention to adding relevant keywords to your description could ultimately lead to more traffic being generated to your site.

Google Webmaster Central

And while you are getting to grips with being found online don’t forget Google’s tools – webmaster central is for ‘webmasters’ which is anyone with a website/blog. You log into it with your Gmail account and start learning.  There are a lot of tools there including diagnostics for your site.

A word of encouragement

SEO, rankings, digital strategy goes up and down.  There is always something to learn and it can feel like a mountain to climb. Start slow and go step by step.  And ask questions.

If you are feeling very keen here is a wealth of information in this video. It’s focused on domain names, but good for how to check out a site with some useful tools

• keywords
• google page rank and how to check for fakes
• backlinks and link juice in google and yahoo for a site
• indexed pages
• DMOZ/Yahoo listings

For more info like this check out Noble Samurai.

Thanks also to Mike Cadogan, Lifeinthefastlane.com of whom I have asked a lot of questions in this area.

A first – the conference recently attended (Noi2010) is the first I have been to that had a social media in health workshop.  The audience was in the main experienced clinicians who were trying to make sense of what was happening online irrespective of whether they had a website and were also curious to see how the conference organisers Noigroup and some Presenters were using social media.

I learned from the questions that were asked:

• What is the difference between a blog and a website
• Why is social media so important
• How much time will it take
• Is it free?
• How do I make money from using this
• How do I manage my personal identity on line vs my company -are they the same
• How often should I blog
• Where do I start

Here’s the presentation or you can download a pdf version of the presentation from here

Here’s a powerpoint version if you want to skip through to a particular slide