Archive for ‘Uncategorized’

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14 April 2011

Wawa’s the buzz on Facebook?

From my NETT blog:

When discussing social media for small business, people often tell me “a Facebook page is fine for big companies and major brands who have an army of people and something to say, but I’m a small business. What on earth do I have to say that would make my customers want to connect with me while they’re chatting with their friends?”

They’re correct that Facebook is an effective investment for brands like Coke (22 million fans – NB, their page was started by fans, not the company), Starbucks (20 million), Oreo (17 million) or Red Bull (16 million).

But smaller, localised brands can have great success, as well. eMarketer reports that local businesses make up 17.6% of Facebook pages, making it the largest category. Large companies come in 6.3%, behind general interest pages and pages for musicians. Products, meanwhile, lag behind at 3 per cent.

I was at a digital marketing conference in the US recently where they mentioned the Facebook success of Wawa, a chain of service stations based in Pennsylvania with branches across five states on the US eastern seaboard. While they’re not strictly a small business, Wawa is a bricks-and-mortar business (you can’t buy petrol online) with a specific local market, a potential customer base that would number only several million people. Their Facebook page, meanwhile, has 600,000 fans – a staggering percentage of their entire target market. How do they do it?

One thing to consider is that they’ve been doing social media for a long time. They were using social media tools like Livejournal back when Facebook was only a gleam in Mark Zuckerberg’s (or was it the Winklevoss twins’?) eye.

As a result, they have nailed the raison d’etre for Facebook pages, which applies whether you’re a multinational or a hyperlocal. As eMarketer says, “Engagement, interest and constant connection keep fans coming back to a company’s Facebook fan page.”

Read the rest of the article

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17 November 2010

Target those who need you most – NETT blog

Our politicians have shown they could learn a thing or two from small business when it comes to marketing their wares.
You can be the best at something, but if people don’t know about it, that fact won’t get you anywhere.
The federal election brought home for me the importance of positioning and promotion when you’re marketing your business. The shambolic campaign and aftermath showed that you can be running the only western economy to emerge unscathed from the global financial crisis, which should be enough to get you elected a saint, but if you can’t sell your accomplishments – and you let your competitors dictate the agenda – you will be severely spanked.

Policy waffling, backstabbing and leaks didn’t help, but history tells us that Australians give a neophyte government a second chance, even if it’s made mistakes. For the government to have so many runs on the board, the election should have been a walkover. To my mind, Labor’s biggest problems were a lack of firm positioning and an inability to sell itself to its customer base – uh, I mean the electorate.

These principles also apply to running a small business. It’s not enough to be the best-in-class for service, delivery, reliability, range or innovation; if your customers and potential customers don’t know it, you won’t survive.

The first step in this process is positioning. You need to work out what you’re best at; what your salient attribute or point of difference is, and why it’s meaningful to your customers. It’s only worth focusing on a defining attribute if:

Read the rest of Ray’s column here: http://nett.com.au/blogs/target-those-who-need-you-most/162.html

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6 May 2009

Community building: Do customers want another social network?

Reprinted from the Zazoo blog:

With the recent explosion in Facebook and Twitter use (the media hype and recent stats are backed up by anecdotal evidence such as the stream of high school and uni friends that have discovered me on Facebook and a bevy of would-be porn stars following me on Twitter), it’s inevitable that some pundits are starting to ask if we’re reaching social media overload.

Judy Shapiro, writing in Ad Age, writes that, “We use our different social networks to enrich different dimensions of our lives. Therefore, as you would expect, we want different things from our different social networks…. This is the heart of the problem. As marketers, our knee-jerk reaction to every community we create is to motivate members to create rich and robust profiles of themselves so they can connect with each other in new and powerful ways. While this approach may be desirable to us as marketers, it may not be best for consumers. We need to be mindful and respectful of the realities our customers live in and the truth is that managing all these social profiles is none too easy, the technology and tools notwithstanding.”

She suggests marketers take a close look at their community-building strategies, asking “Are we being practical about what we expect users to reveal about themselves in our communities? Is our community a hub where users will congregate regularly, where rich profiles are of value or are we creating a secondary ’spoke’ community meant to address narrow or temporary niche needs? In short, as marketers do we demand that users create too many profiles in all our community-building programs?”

The Harvard Business Review has also discussed this issue recently, recommending that companies treat communities as a high-level business strategy that is integrated across business functions, rather than just being the domain of the marketing department. A Facebook group or a Twitter account is not good enough.

The HBR authors advise that companies shouldn’t try to control communities, and should view online networks as just a tool for community building, not an entire strategy. In other words, get out there and meet people face-to-face rather than just via the Internet.

It concludes: “Although any brand can benefit from a community strategy, not every company can pull it off. Executing community requires an organization-wide commitment and a willingness to work across functional boundaries. It takes the boldness to reexamine everything from company values to organizational
design. And it takes the fortitude to meet people on their own terms, cede control, and accept conflict as part of the package”

Anyone up for the challenge?

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6 January 2009

On the HIT parade

Hurrah for us – the Welling Digital blog has now been certified as a top health technology blog by gaining a listing on HITSphere, “a network of premium weblogs that write content about the healthcare, medical, and clinical informatics and information technology (IT) industry.” Check out HITSphere for a wide listing of blogs in the health tech area.

Posted in Australia, e-health, Healthcare, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

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17 November 2008

That’d be right – blame the parents

I remember my mother bemoaning the fact that my sister took a psychology course at college and announced that all her problems were due to the dysfunctional way she was brought up. “Sure, blame everything on me, don’t take any responsiblity for your own actions,” she grizzled. I thought to myself, “Hmmm, it’s all someone else’s fault – I’ve got to check out this caper!” When I went to university I minored in psychology so I could examine this theory in more detail. Sure enough, everyone from Freud on down had been blaming adult issues on mothers. It was a great way of excusing everything from relationship breakdowns to career frustrations over the next several years. Finally, while co-writing a book with a psychologist about men’s issues, we were talking about mothers and childhood and I had this great epiphany as the psychologist turned to me and said, “Ray, your mother is who she is, and she did the best she knew how to do. At your age, you need to start taking responsbility for your own actions!”

I’d like to say I completely changed my life that day, became a perfect husband, father and son and my career blossomed as I released my mother from her role as child-thwarter. Yeah, pull the other one… let’s just say I became more self-aware and have led a life with a bit more balance since then.

Anyway, to pull this huge digression from the topic of this blog back to the business at hand, I was reminded of my early studies in psychology by a new book about the Net Generation by futurist Don Tapscott, Grown Up Digital. A sequel to Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation, Tapscott studies the generation of children who have grown up not knowing anything other than the Internet. While media reports decry the kids of today, accusing them of being unfit (well, that one is probably true) and brain dead through playing video games and Facebooking instead of dealing face to face with real people, Tapscott says that, in fact, “Net Geners” are, as he told a reporter for The Economist, the “smartest generation ever”. He says the experience of parents who grew up watching television is misleading when it comes to judging the 20,000 hours on the internet and 10,000 hours playing video games already spent by a typical 20-year-old today. “The Net Generation is in many ways the antithesis of the TV generation,” he argues. One-way broadcasting via television created passive couch potatoes, whereas the net is interactive, and, he says, stimulates and improves the brain.

The book sounds fascinating and I think I’ll buy a copy, if for no other reason than to get some insight into how my kids’ brains work. But I can’t believe how things have come around; now, any misunderstanding of my children and their contemporaries is being blamed on that generation of people who grew up frying their brains through too much television. So again, it is the parents’ fault. Wait a minute, who was it that let me watch too much “Gilligan’s Island”, “Get Smart” and “Lost in Space” when I was a lad?…

Posted in e-marketing, Education, Media/journalism, Social media, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

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17 September 2008

Thumbs up for online medical education

From today’s Australian Doctor:
“Online medical education is as effective as traditional methods, a meta-analysis suggests.

“Internet-based education had become an increasingly popular approach to medical education, the authors said, but concerns about the effectiveness of online learning had stimulated a growing body of research.

“The meta-analysis published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (10 September) found internet-based learning was associated with large positive effects compared with no intervention and had a similar effectiveness to traditional methods.

“’Internet-based education permits learners to participate at a time and place convenient to them, facilitates instructional methods that might be difficult in other formats, and has the potential to tailor instruction to individual learners’ needs,’ the authors said.

“Professor Ian Wilson, professor of medical education, University of Western Sydney, said the internet was an effective teaching tool, but the medium worked best when used in conjunction with face-to-face teaching.

“Although the online environment had improved markedly over the past five years to play an increasingly important training role, he said the quality of the education provided on the internet was sometimes inadequate.

“’Sometimes people get so enamoured with the technology that they forget about the underlying education principles,’ he said.

“Internet learning was more suited to some areas than others, Professor Wilson said.

“’Certainly online learning packages that work in isolation work much better for knowledge-based material,’ he said.”

Posted in Australia, e-health, Education, Healthcare, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

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2 July 2008

All ages and professions need to get with Web 2.0

This one is a couple of weeks old, but recently came to my attention. Richard Smith, ex-editor of the British Medical Journal, CEO of BMJ Publishing and now involved with open access journals, wrote a terrific blog on the BMJ about how doctors need to expose themselves to the world of Web 2.0/Health 2.0 and the possibilities it presents.

He writes, “Web 2.0 has the potential to improve global health greatly and to solve complex problems in health science. (However,) the barriers to these potential achievements are social and cultural, not technological.

“The machines we can fix. It’s the people – particularly old timers (that’s anybody over 40) – that are the problem.” Smith, who is 56, has some simple advice for his fellow old-timers. “The only way to really understand Web 2.0,” he says, “is to jump in and start using it.”

He recommends everyone sign up for Facebook and concludes, “The essence of Web 2.0 is that it’s bottom up and participative: it’s created by the many, not the few…. Doctors, I fear, are too fond of a top down world – because they are usually at the top. But that top down world is crumbling. Think of Nicolae Ceausescu’s statue being hauled down and smashed. That’s the old world of Web 1.0. Get with Web 2.0 in a serious way or become a yesterday’s person.”

Posted in Business/corporate, e-health, Education, Healthcare, Media/journalism, Social media, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

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