• Assume Everything Will Eventually Make its Way to the Web
• Find a Style that Matches You and Stick With It
• Put Your Best Foot Forward
• Join the Community and Above All Don’t Be Seen as a Pitch Man
• Check Your Online Reputation as Often as Your Stocks

Online Reputation and SEO

With more people getting socially active online and given the ability to discuss anything with their network, it has become an absolute necessity for businesses to gain control of their brand’s online reputation. Though often overlooked as a factor in managing your online reputation, you cannot afford to overlook SEO. Search engine optimization, if used and implemented properly, can be an effective tool in determining and controlling the success of your online business reputation.

Here are a few tips on how you can use SEO in your online reputation management campaign.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is an excellent way to instantly help you populate your brand’s name on the search engines with content that is completely controlled by your practice. Creating profiles on various top social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+ can help you gather good and positive recommendations for your brand from followers and fans.

Brand Keywords

Brand searches can account for more than 40% of all organic traffic, especially for consumers who are late in the buying funnel. Be sure to use your brand and company name as the keywords you target on various content sources such as your blog, social media profiles, and in the content of your website.

Positive Reviews

If you find an interesting review of your brand or a blog post that advocates your services, ensure that you link to it from your website or your blog. Search for all the positive recommendations and reviews about your brand and give it the desired promotion that it needs.

Frequently Optimize

Frequently optimize your website and blog with keyword rich content. Also include a basic optimization strategy to your marketing campaign to optimize the content for your brand name. Creating industry related quality content will not only prove that your brand is capable of all of your offerings, but it will also enhance your brand reputation online.

User Reviews

Offsite user reviews on popular social media channels are extremely helpful in earning consumer trust and improving brand reliability. There are many free tools and more sophisticated brand monitoring tools that you can use to locate and link positive conversations that are happening about your brand.

Check your Online Reputation Often

There are now hundreds if not thousands of web sites devoted solely to consumers registering their experiences with everything from the local McDonald’s to a Plastic Surgeon’s practice. These sites not only welcome complaints but encourage them. It is essential you have a plan in place to monitor what is being said about you and your practice and there is no better place to start than with our own free review tool.

Pop-Up Ads:

Automatically Playing Multimedia Content: If someone’s enjoying what they thought was a silent browsing session and they’re bombarded with your theme song or a talking head on a video for which they didn’t press “play” and can’t find the button for “stop,” what do you think they’re going to do? Some might fumble for their mute button, but I can more easily locate the back button in my browser than my computer’s volume controls. Let visitors choose to play your multimedia content; don’t force it on them.

Confusing Animations: There is a three second window which users take to orient themselves on any given web page before they click ‘back’ in their browser. Animations, auto-play videos, blinking and flashing paid advertisements detract from a visitor’s focus during those critical three seconds. Drop the animations, and allow visitors to focus on what they can do on that page with clearly written headlines and explanatory copy.

Generic Stock Photography: Using images is great for your inbound marketing but only if those image show real people who work in your practice, real products, and your real location. Images are helpful if they clarify something for a visitor. Generic stock photography doesn’t help visitors, so by extension, it doesn’t help you.

SEO-Driven Content: Unfortunately, some websites are still writing for bots, even though Google’s algorithm is far more sophisticated at determining a page’s relevancy than it was ten years ago. In fact, Google will now penalize you for these types of activities! There’s a difference between search engine optimized content and over-optimized content. Don’t write for crawlers; write for humans.

No Social Sharing Buttons: These buttons make social sharing easy for your readers — they don’t have to copy and paste your URL, shorten it, and compose a tweet. And easy social sharing options means your content gets more visibility, which means more site traffic, better search engine rankings, and more lead generation opportunities.

Titles and Content that Don’t Match: Content creators know how important a well-crafted title is. Great titles are what cause people to click through in their RSS, emails, and search engines to read what you have written. But if they’re met with content that’s unrelated to the title you provided they will abandon your site. While it’s important to capture peoples’ attention in titles, make sure it isn’t misleading.

Internal Linking that Isn’t User-Friendly: When done well, internal links are helpful for readers and the website alike. They point readers to other relevant information, and help you improve the organic ranking for important pages on your own website. But some websites don’t execute internal linking correctly, pointing users to irrelevant pages, linking strange phrases within the copy, and overdoing it to the point of making content unreadable.

Sliders That Take too Long to Load: Sliders are an excellent way to showcase multiple images in a space-efficient manner. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to use them. If your slider loads images quickly and doesn’t require a new page to load every time a user clicks, congratulations! But the web is filled with sliders that, every time you click the arrow for the next image, load an entirely new web page.

Flash: Designers love using Flash on clients’ websites but search marketers hate it. Search engines can’t read it, so your site won’t get indexed. Plus, visitors are often looking for a very specific piece of information when visiting your site. If they have to wait for a 10-second visual introduction before they can find your hours of operation, they are likely to leave before getting what they wanted.

Steve Allard of Wise Metrics, says most of the metrics are not actually real-time, but updated every 15 minutes, and most are related to posts on pages, and not the pages themselves. Even so, this is a vast improvement for the metrics available through Insights on your Facebook Page.

Here is a full list of the type of metrics now available for your Facebook Page in real time:

• Page storytellers: The number of people sharing stories about your page
• Post stories: The number of stories generated about your page post
• Post stories by action type: The number of stories created about your page post, by action type (like/share/comment)
• Post storytellers: The number of unique people who created a story about your page post
• Post storytellers by action type: The number of unique people who created a story about your page post, by action type (like/share/comment)
• Post impressions: The number of times your page post was seen
• Post impressions unique: The number of people who saw your page post
• Post impressions paid: The number of impressions of your page post in an ad or sponsored story
• Post impressions paid unique: The number of people who saw your page post in an ad or sponsored story
• Post impressions organic: The number of impressions of your post in news feed, ticker, or on your page’s wall
• Post impressions organic unique: The number of people who saw your post in their news feed or ticker or on your page’s wall
• Post impressions viral: The number of impressions of your page post in a story generated by a friend
• Post impressions viral unique: The number of people who saw your page post in a story from a friend
• Post impressions by story type: The number of times this post was seen via a story published by a friend of the person viewing the post (comment, etc.)
• Post impressions by story type unique: The number of people who saw your page post in a story from a friend, by story type
• Post consumptions: The number of times people clicked on anywhere in your posts without generating a story
• Post consumptions unique: The number of people who clicked anywhere in your post without generating a story
• Post consumptions by type: The number of times people clicked on anywhere in your posts without generating a story, by consumption type (photo views, video plays, link clicks, other clicks)
• Post consumptions by type unique: The number of people who clicked anywhere in your post without generating a story, by consumption type (photo views, video plays, link clicks, other clicks)
• Post engaged users: The number of people who clicked anywhere in your posts
• Post negative feedback: The number of times people took a negative action in your post (e.g., hid it)
• Post negative feedback unique: The number of people who took a negative action in your post (e.g., hid it)
• Post negative feedback by type: The number of times people took a negative action in your post broken down by type (hide, hide all, unlike page, report spam)
• Post negative feedback by type unique: The number of people who took a negative action in your post broken down by type (hide, hide all, unlike page, report spam)
• Readers who manage Facebook pages: Which of these do you believe will be the most helpful, and what would you like to see Facebook add?

More Help for Facebook:

Healthcare Marketing and the New Facebook Timeline
MD Social Media: Facebook Timeline Comes to Fan Pages

Brain Solis

Solis cautions businesses to embrace and adapt to the digital revolution and prosper or ignore it and die. When it comes to marketing via the Internet, part of your task is to determine what causes prospects to connect and how their social conversations influence your brand. Here are some thoughts from chapters in his book that directly affect your Inbound Internet Marketing Efforts.

The Co-creation of Brands

In this new social media landscape we live in, the consumer plays a critical role in the reinforcement of a brand’s identity. Each brand experience triggers an encounter that is rich with emotion. Posts, updates, tweets and other forms of self-expression become platforms for these experiences.

These shared social media experiences are exceptionally powerful.

One example given is what an airline executive discovered in an online conversation where customers were talking about his brand: “This airline sucks. When I checked in, I was told, ‘I’m sorry, there’s nothing we can do about bumping you off this flight or losing your luggage.’ Really? Well not only did you just lose a customer, I’m going to go out of my way to ensure that no one I know flies with you again.”

When these kinds of experiences are shared on social networks and elsewhere they serve as guides for other consumers seeking input and direction from peers and experts.
So the relevant question is not “Who owns the brand?” but rather “Who owns the customer relationship, or who owns the customer experience?”

Now apply this to your practice. As you engage both patients and prospect, you should design experiences based on what you learn through sharing and reviews. In other words, your prospect and patients should play a part in molding your brand.

Youth Quake

This chapter focuses on the Millennial generation (those born between mid-1970s and the late 1990s) and why they matter to every brand.
According to a study done by Edelman Digital in February 2011, this generation has an incredibly high level of brand loyalty. Specifically:

• 70% of Millennials feel that once they find a company or product they like, they will keep coming back
• 58% are willing to share more personal information with trusted brands
• 86% will share their brand preference online
• Nearly 20% of Millennials attended a brand-sponsored event in the last 30 days
• Of those who attended, 65% purchased the featured product

This generation is also assuming the role of self-ordained experts. 47% of Millennials write about their positive experiences with companies and products online (blogs and social media sites). Conversely, 39% share negative experiences with their social networks as well.

No brand can afford to disregard the Millennial generation. They have money, they’re influential and they’re making decisions. The technology that is part of their DNA and their social network is always within arm’s reach. Even if this is not the main demographic for your practice they still greatly influence every social media conversation.

An Audience with an Audience of Audiences

Attend any large seminar and you see this all around you. As the speaker presents, you notice that their laptops, tablets and smartphones are being used for something more than note taking. Those devices are also being used as a portal to share experiences with their fans or followers. The speaker looks up hoping to catch their attention, only to see eyes dipped into their devices and the battle for eye contact is lost.

Today’s audience can capture every moment through text, video, audio and still images and then share them in real time with the hundreds or thousands of individuals in their social graphs. They are connected consumers. They are connected with other people in vast networks that are rich with interaction. Indeed, the social graphs that connected consumers are increasingly interconnected, resulting in audiences that also have audiences of their own.

Digital Influence and Social Capital

Talk about “influence” is the rage these days. Services such as Klout and Tweetlevel are busy measuring your level of digital influence based on your activity on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. By scoring influence, these services create a social hierarchy where you are ranked against other individuals based on your capacity to influence those who follow you. Social consumers receive a score based on what they do within social networks, who they know, and the activity that follows their interaction.

Brands have taken an interest in this concept because it represents an opportunity to engage connected consumers who are beyond the reach of traditional media. They can use this information to influence the behavior of “desirable consumers.” Consumers on the other hand see this as an opportunity to earn higher scores, gain status, power and recognition and also earn free products, promotions or deals.

If you can find the time, you would do yourself well by reading The End of Business as Usual. But even if you don’t read the book, you can’t afford to ignore the principles it lays out. As the author says, “Businesses that embrace and adapt to the revolution will survive the perpetual threat of digital Darwinism—and those that do not will die!

A term that is making its way around these days is Digital Darwinism. This speaks to the fact that society and technology are evolving faster than many companies and medical professionals can adapt. When it comes to marketing via the Internet, part of your task is to determine what causes prospects to connect and how their social conversations influence your brand.

Brian Solis, tackles the reality of Digital Darwinism in his new book, The End of Business as Usual.  In this ground breaking work, he cautions that businesses that embrace and adapt to digital revolution will survive the perpetual threat of digital Darwinism, and those that do not will die!

Digital Darwinism and Failure to Adapt

A prime example of a business that failed to adapt is Blockbuster. When it filed for bankruptcy in 2010, analysts recognized that its predicament had more to do with the radical shift in “how people watch video” than with their fiscal issues.

Blockbuster made the crucial mistake of exhibiting indifference to their customers’ collective experiences and thus refusing to adapt to their needs. During that same time period, Netflix embraced the culture of innovation and turned home video into the kind of experience customers wanted.

The moral of the Blockbuster’s failure is that when businesses underestimate the power of the connected consumer or mistakenly presume to have control of the brand, it’s only a matter of time before “the end of business as usual.”

Why You Need This Information

Brian Solis says he wrote The End of Business as Usual to demonstrate how our digital culture is radically changing the landscape of business, consumerism, and what you should do about it. We seldom recommend a book but the insights found here are invaluable in teaching you how to embrace new media in order to become a more competitive, more successful practice.

The End of Business as Usual is about a new era of business. An era in which information (social media) has drastically changed the landscape, disrupted markets and put the connected consumer in charge. It is an era in which all businesses, retail or medical, must either “adapt or die!”

In Brief

With 283 pages of weighty concepts and projections (all supported by research, quotes, statistics, graphs and passionate arguments), this book gets a little intense at times. And because you are so busy, we decided to read it first and provide you with the basics. In a later article we will offer five takeaways you can’t do without but for now, some of the concepts the book covers include:

• Social consumerism
• The connected consumer
• “Youthquake”—how the Millennial generation has become a powerful force of influence and consumerism
• Your audience as an audience with audiences
• The co-creation of brands
• How digital influence creates a new “world order”

This is the connected consumer. He or she is connected with other people in vast networks that are rich with interaction. Indeed, the social graphs that connected consumers are increasingly interconnected, resulting in audiences that also have audiences of their own.    - Brian Solis

Dan Bowman

Why social media, healthcare don’t mix: One doc’s take

To be fair and open-minded we’re including this post of one doctor’s voice in the debate over the role of Social Media in Healthcare. Read More.

New Healthcare Study Shows Huge Opportunity in Social Media

And now some facts about Health Care Social Media we can get behind. “According to a 2011 study by the nonprofit research firm Pew Internet & American Life Project, the third biggest use for the Internet — just behind a general search and checking your email — is searching for online health information.” Read more.

Harnessing Social Media for Health Promotion and Behavior Change

“This article summarizes current evidence and understanding of using social media for health promotion. More important, it discusses the need for evaluating the effectiveness of various forms of social media and incorporating outcomes research and theory in the design of health promotion programs for social media.” Read More.

Seattle Mama Doc

Imperfect Pediatrics

This article casts a realistic, concert vision for what social media, used well, can do to improve patient care. The example is for a pediatric setting, but the principals apply to any doctor who’s schedule is stretched thin and us open to using Social Media tools in new ways. Read More.

We have looked at the following areas where good metrics are needed in previous articles:

• Content and Blog Post Comments: Measuring Progress in Cosmetic Surgery Inbound Internet Marketing: Part 1
• SEO, Landing Pages and Lead Conversions: Measuring Progress in Cosmetic Surgery Inbound Internet Marketing: Part 2

Here are a few more areas where good metrics are invaluable:

Email & Lead Nurturing

Database Size – This is the number of email addresses in your database that you can email. It is exceedingly important that you work at increasing this number over time, as your email database expires at a rate of about 25% per year. So if your database size is staying flat, it’s actually shrinking.

Email Opt-Out Rate – Your email opt-out rate, also known as your email unsubscribe rate, is the rate at which people select to not receive your emails by clicking the “Unsubscribe” link in your emails. If this number is relatively high, meaning over +5%, take steps to better segment your email list by things like demographic information, company size, pain points — whatever is appropriate for your business. This allows you to execute smaller, more targeted email sends that offer more value to subscribers.

Delivery Rate – This tells you the percentage of your database that actually received your email in their inbox. A low delivery rate could be a sign that you have a low Sender Score.
Email Open Rate – This metric tells you what percentage of the people who received your email opened it. If you had a strong subject line and the receiver recognizes your company (or the person who sent the email), you should see a higher open rate.

Click-Through Rate – Your email Click-Through Rate tracks the percentage of people who received your email, and clicked a link within that email. Use this metric to understand how valuable the offer you sent was, or how well your link was positioned.

Campaign Conversion Rate – This metric indicates the rate at which people who received your email converted into a lead. You can use it to gauge the success of your email campaign compared to past sends. A high campaign conversion rate is the result of a targeted send with a great offer.

Public Relations & Branding

Direct Traffic – Direct traffic is the amount of traffic coming to your site as a result of people typing in www.yourcompany.com into their browser. Measuring how much traffic comes to your site in this manner helps you gauge the effectiveness of your PR efforts.
Branded Search Traffic – Very similar to direct traffic, branded search traffic is the amount of traffic that came to your site as a result of a visitor Googling your company’s name, most likely because they recently “heard” of you and wanted to learn more.

Visits From Guest Blog Posts and Media Placements – How many visitors did it send to your website? Use that as your metric for success!

Overall Funnel Metrics

Site Visits – Measure overall visitors to your website from all channels — email marketing, social media, organic search, the works. This metric tells you how good your marketing team is at driving traffic to your website.

Leads Generated – Are you meeting your leads goal? Track leads generated month-to-month, as well as number of leads generated per channel, like you see below.
Patients Generated – If you aren’t tracking patients earned, how do you know how valuable your leads are? Use closed-loop analytics to determine which channels generate leads that turn into patients.

Lead Cycle Length – Do you know how long it takes for a new lead to turn into a patient? Track this and monitor how it changes over time so your sales team can prioritize their funnel, and marketing can generate more leads that convert in a shorter time span.

In Measuring Progress in Cosmetic Surgery Inbound Internet Marketing: Part 1 we looked at the areas of Content and Blog Post Comments and what to look for there in terms of metrics.  Here are more areas where you need to be measuring results on a regular basis.

SEO

Keyword Rankings – These rankings tell you for which keywords you rank very well, poorly, or somewhere in between. You can also watch how your rankings change for these keywords over time to ensure you don’t slip on important keywords.

Visits per Keyword – This metrics tells you how much traffic a keyword drives to your website from organic searches. This will be a symptom of how often people search for that keyword and how well you rank for the keyword.

Leads per Keyword – This number tells you how well the traffic you generate from a given keyword converts into leads for your practice. If a specific keyword and page is driving a lot of visits but not leads, perhaps you need to optimize the CTAs on that page to increase lead conversions.

Links per Page – A specific web page that has a high quantity of inbound links has a better likelihood of ranking in search. Is there a specific page or blog post that’s generated a lot of links? Perhaps you should make more content of that type!

Landing Pages and Lead Conversion

Call to Action Conversion Rate – Track the percentage of people who visited a particular page who also clicked a Call to Action that page. It indicates the appeal of the offer, whether the Call to Action is well-crafted, and if it has good placement on the page.

Offer Redemption – Offers come in the form of webinars, eBooks, patient guides, and the like. When you launch a new offer, how many people download it? Or if it’s a webinar, how many people register?

Landing Page Conversion Rate – This metric is exceptionally important and determines your effectiveness at converting visitors into leads. Track the percentage of people who land on your page and then fill out the form. If it’s low, you have an opportunity to do some A/B testing to increase conversions.

Landing Page Bounce Rate – Think of this number as the flip side to your landing page conversion rate — it describes the percentage of people that visit your landing page and then immediately leave. If your bounce rate is high, you might need to better align the offer on the page with the language on the landing page, or come up with a more enticing offer.

In a future article we will cover the last three areas where you need to be getting good metrics:

• Email and Lead Nurturing
• Public Relations and Branding
• Overall Funnel Metrics

Each phase of your inbound marketing needs to be monitored. Good metrics in each of these phases will help you know what is working and what isn’t and enable to make the necessary adjustments.

Content

Blog Traffic – Everyone wants to know how many people are visiting their blog day-to-day or month-to-month. This metric is the total number of people who are viewing your blog content. Is that number changing over time? What is the month-to-month growth rate? Are there patterns of high and low traffic?

Blog Subscribers – The number of people who are subscribing to your blog (via RSS or email) is an indicator of the value of your content. If they appreciate what you’re writing, they will subscribe to get more. Watch how this number grows over time. Are you losing subscribers? If so, what steps have you taken to regain them?

Views per Post – How many views does a particular blog post earn? Use this metric to compare posts. Does one type or post get more views than others (question posts, for example)? Learn from your successes, and use this metric to create more content that your readers enjoy.

Post Views per Contributor – If there is a certain contributor who receives more views on average than others, find out why. Is it because he has a larger social media following to promote his blog post? Is it because she wrote about a topic that garners more attention? Use this metric to generate some friendly rivalry that helps increase content quality.

Blog Post Comments – Comments are a good sign of how engaging your blog post is. You can also encourage conversation by asking an intriguing question at the end of your posts to help stir up debate.

Links per Post – Blogging is a critical component of any SEO strategy. Practices that blog get substantially more inbound links than those that do not. Look at which posts generate more inbound links, learn, and repeat.

Social Media

Social Clicks – Measure the number of clicks you receive for the links you’re posting in your social media updates. This is a good way to gauge how interesting your network finds your content, how well it’s positioned and how engaged your audience is.

Followers and Reach – Some marketers think of their social database like their email database. What is the total count of individuals that your business can reach through social channels? How does that reach change over time?

Retweets & Shares – When people really love your content, they share it with their own networks. Is your content being shared socially throughout the web? Track it through retweets and shares.

Facebook Like and Google +1 Count – Everyone likes to be liked! This metric tells you how many people like your content by clicking a “Like” button on Facebook, or “+1″ button on Google+.

Percent Engaged – Of your entire possible network (your friends, and your friends’ friends), what percent is engaging with (meaning clicking, commenting on, or liking) your content? This is a good metric to understand whether people are paying attention to your content.

Check back in the days to come for more areas where good metrics are needed. These include:

• SEO
• Landing Pages and Lead Conversions
• Email and Lead Nurturing
• Public Relations and Branding
• Overall Funnel Metrics

More help:

Make your Social Media Funnel Produce More Results

You may have heard of TEDMED’s Great Challenges Program. Twenty of the biggest health issues facing the world are chosen each year at the annual TEDMED gathering. Those twenty topics then become the focus of TEDMED discussions throughout the year. Here is a taste of some of the most exciting things from the Great Challenges advocates at this year’s conference. Read More.

John Luginbill

3 reasons why a physician’s online reputation is essential

Online reputation isn’t just about looking for angry patients who slam you on a review site. It’s about between visit patient care and focusing your practice. Read More.

Julie James

Aza Raskin’s health revolution handbook

In 2010 Aza Raskin co-founded Massive Health and promised “beautiful products” that would sit in users’ pockets and give them “deep insight” into their own health-determining behaviors. Raskin will be speaking about his current pursuits in September at Medicine X 2012. Here is a taste of some of the big ideas this Silicone Valley talent has in store. Read More.