In a world where dancing college kids and a Korean pop star can go viral seemingly overnight, it can be tempting to think your latest video, tweet or blog post can have the same kind of viral impact. Alas, it doesn’t work that way for the rest of us, especially when you’re trying to market [...]
Tag Archives | social
Live from the OR: Want to Demystify Cosmetic Surgery? Social Media Can Help
As RealSelf CEO Tom Seery likes to say, most doctors are at one of three stages in their approach to social media. There’s the Crawl stage, which entails basic reputation management, the Walk stage, where doctors freely share their expertise, and the Run stage, in which they embrace the kind of two-way conversation that leads [...]
Infographic Friday: Is Your Online Reputation at Risk?
Every minute of every day, people are online talking about the brands and companies they’ve done business with or are considering doing business with. They’re asking questions, posting compliments and complaints and reading and writing reviews about everything from baby clothes to mommy makeovers. Given the above, the answer to the question “Is your online [...]
Women Are from Pinterest, Men Are from Google+ — NOT
This time last year, media outlets from TIME Magazine to TechCrunch reported an interesting phenomenon: While women dominated the pages of Pinterest, men represented the majority of users of Google+. That was then and this is now and, going forward, it’s safe to say that women are thinking beyond pretty pictures of food and fashion. [...]
Infographic Friday: Kickstart Your Marketing with Collaborative Input
As a Web-savvy doctor, you no doubt recognize how important it is to monitor your professional reputation by listening to what’s being said about you online. Perhaps you’ve even taken the next step, creating quality content, sharing it via social media and building the sort of following that leads to brand advocacy and great word-of-mouth [...]
Desperately Seeking Consumers? The Internet is the New TV
You don’t need a Ph.D. in communications to know that the media landscape is undergoing rapid and far-reaching change. Newspapers are folding, books and magazines are going digital and now, it seems, even that mainstay of the living room is losing its lock on viewers. Truth is, more people are spending more time online than [...]
Resistance is Futile (and Self-defeating): If You Want to Survive, Get Social
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you already know many of the reasons we believe aesthetic professionals need to embrace social media: Patient education. Reputation management. More effective marketing to today’s consumer. But, in light of a recent study by researchers at UCLA, there’s one that may trump all of the above: [...]
Best Practices: 7 Tips to Creating Your own Code of Conduct
At last month’s ASAPS conference in New York, I was encouraged to see the number of doctors who are coming to understand how valuable social media can be in promoting their practice. Slowly but surely, more and more aesthetic professionals are realizing that engaging with consumers online is the future and that they can do [...]
Infographic Friday: Listen Up, Doc, but Don’t Be Intrusive
There’s a reason they call it the “art” of listening. Trying to ascertain what consumers want is definitely more of an art than a science and nowhere is that more true than in social media. As this infographic from NetBase.com suggests, such “social listening” is especially tricky, in large part, because consumers aren’t sure how [...]
Go with the Flow: 3 Channels to Connect with Aesthetic Consumers
We spend a lot of time at RealSelf talking about the “consumer decision journey” for a very simple reason: When people begin considering cosmetic surgery, they really are embarking on a journey. It can take weeks, months or years as they consider and evaluate their options and it can extend long after the fact as [...]
Openness, Engagement and Trust: The 3 Essentials of an Effective Code of Conduct
After our presentation at the 2013 ASAPS Conference in New York, a doctor came up to me with concern about establishing a Code of Conduct (CoC) for her team. “My world is already surrounded by rules, policies and regulation. Doesn’t a Code of Conduct just create more rules for my team? Isn’t social media supposed [...]
Infographic Friday: Generate Buzz with Brand Advocates (not Online “Celebrities”)
Imagine Jennifer Aniston standing on the red carpet thanking you for her new nose or Victoria Beckham telling Oprah about how delighted she is with her new breasts. Well, “imagining” pretty much sums it up. Even if you were the doctor who performed those procedures, the reality is that celebrity endorsements are not all they’re [...]
Infographic Friday: The Search for Health Info Goes SoLoMo
Not familiar with the term SoLoMo? You should be because it’s rapidly redefining how consumers get their healthcare information. Increasingly, people are turning to Social media for insights, searching for Local providers who can fill their needs and doing it all on their Mobile devices. SoLoMo. It’s the connective tissue that’s helping aesthetic consumers navigate [...]
For Doctors, the Future of Marketing Is on Demand
If you’ve ever found yourself thinking that consumers are just too demanding, brace yourself. According to the folks at McKinsey, you ain’t seen nothing yet as evolving technology and rising consumer expectations are setting the stage for the next great stage in marketing. It’s called on-demand marketing and doctors who ignore it run the risk [...]
Infographic Friday: Get Social to Counter Patient Complaints
Are you giving lip service to customer service? These days, if you’re ignoring social media as a channel to respond to customer complaints, you probably are. Worse yet, you’re also ignoring an excellent opportunity to turn those complaints into accolades that will net you new business. The fact is that customer service should be a [...]
For Doctors, Providing Relevant Content is the Key to Social Success
If you’ve ever found yourself frustrated by Facebook, you’re not alone. Between disappearing posts, questionable conversion rates and a steady stream of platform changes, it’s not surprising that many doctors find the site a mixed blessing at best. Case in point: The site’s latest update which entails giving users far more flexibility in determining what [...]
RealSelf 100: Socially Savvy Doctors Earn Honors for Helping Aesthetic Consumers
There’s no escaping the fact that social media has given aesthetic consumers greater control over their medibeauty decisions but that doesn’t mean doctors can’t play a major role in the process. In fact, smart doctors recognize that social media enables them to play a larger role than ever by facilitating engagement with consumers in the [...]
Infographic Friday: Successful Social Media Starts with Strategy
“If everybody jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you jump off it too?” If you’re like us, you probably heard that line a lot when you were young and about to do something that was destined to have an unpleasant outcome. These days, it’s just as relevant for doctors who see their peers engaging with [...]
Recent HIPAA Update Adds Requirements for Marketing Your Practice
As a board-certified aesthetic professional, it goes without saying that you go to great lengths to protect patient privacy. However, it now appears that you may need to go even further. Earlier this year, the Dept. of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced new HIPAA rules than not only update the Act’s privacy and security [...]
The 5Cs of Social Healthcare: Keep the Commitment to Stay Top of Mind (Part V in a series)
Content, conversations, channels and code of conduct. As noted in previous posts, these four concepts form the pillars of successful social media marketing. Yet in and of themselves they won’t help you grow your practice without the fifth C of social healthcare: Commitment. Unlike buying an ad or mailing out brochures, social media is not [...]
