Earlier this summer, we took a look at a few different ways that hospitals have been using social media – or even what new networks could mean for future patient outreach. There are some hospitals and health centers that are ahead the pack, and the best example may be the Mayo Clinic.

The Mayo Clinic raised the bar in the past month, not only further committing resources to digital and social media efforts, but also by creating a first-of-the-field Center for Social Media. As Valeria Maltoni reported at Conversation Agent, the effort is designed to “accelerate effective application of social media tools throughout Mayo Clinic and to spur broader and deeper engagement in social media by hospitals, medical professionals and patients to improve health globally.”

As a case study on textbook engagement in the healthcare space, here are a few different ways the Mayo is using online channels – and what it could mean for the future of patient communication.

The Mayo Blog Network

At the tip of the iceberg is solid, original content, and Mayo lays its social media center on that foundation. There are few places that are as well respected when it comes to healthcare leadership as the Mayo Clinic, and by creating a blog network with these experts on topics like nutrition, pregnancy and dealing with depression, Mayo can ensure it always has quality information to share.

Cases in Social

As we have learned, the lessons from general consumer PR do not always apply to health communication, especially online. For a healthcare facility like the Mayo Clinic, there aren’t many examples to look toward while determining a new program. To help fill that gap, one section of the Center focuses on case studies of what organizations have successfully done in the space.

Centralizing Existing Networks

Across the big three social networks, few healthcare facilities are even in the neighborhood of the Mayo Clinic’s audience: 67,000 strong on Twitter, another 23,000 Facebook fans and more than 2.4 million total views of 800-plus YouTube videos uploaded. Not too shabby. But by building a central home, it brings all of these networks and conversations into one – making both monitoring and engagement less of a challenge.

Sharing Mayo Clinic

Up to this point, everything discussed has generally been content created by the organization (or at least conversations moderated by it). One additional component of the center, though, is Sharing Mayo Clinic, a blog dedicated to the stories of patients and families, as well as Mayo Clinic staff. With the number of people who touch Mayo, it’s easy to gather these stories, and promoting them online helps to get those interactions out to people looking for someone going through what they are. It’s further worth noting how simple this was to create: a free Wordpress blog, a small annual fee to move it to the mayoclinic.org domain and minimal design. Complexity doesn’t make things interesting; this is excellent proof that compelling content matters much more.

But Why?

Katherine Hobson of WSJ Health Blog got a chance to interview Lee Aase, one of the managers of Mayo’s center. Hobson asked Aase what the goals of the new effort were, and Aase’s straight forward response is worth ending on, “[What’s the goal?] To help patients. Sometimes that means providing information directly to them, and sometimes it means disseminating information more rapidly to the medical community.”

I think we can all agree that Facebook has grown to be a medium that we should all be paying attention to. Whether or not having a branded Facebook page is part of your online strategy, monitoring Facebook for general brand awareness is still exceedingly important. We should know by now that even if you’re not starting the conversation, consumers are still out there talking about you.

Below are several Facebook search tools for making yourself aware of the online conversation.

48ers

Recently launched in beta, 48ers.com allows users to check in on conversations happening across some big social networks including Facebook, Twitter and GoogleBuzz. As co-founder Mike Whyley explained via e-mail, “we felt that the other realtime search engines did not provide a real-time enough interface as to what everyone was saying – as such 48ers was born…we imagine it could be used by bloggers, music bands or individuals who want to track what is being said about them online in realtime.” Currently 48ers makes it easy to follow conversations across the Web from one easy location, and sentiment analysis may soon be added to the mix.

Facepinch

Facepinch offers a simple and easy-to-use search for Facebook. Simply enter a keyword or name and you instantly have real-time updates, or you can watch the homepage as it is updated in real-time as well. This tool also offers a list of recent searches, the most popular searches and hot trending topics, similar to those found on Twitter. While this tool isn’t terribly fancy, it offers a quick way to get a sense of awareness about conversations on Facebook.

Kurrently

Similar to Facepinch, Kurrently offers a quick and easy interface through which you can monitor conversations on Facebook and Twitter. One of the best features of Kurrently is the automatic refresh which shows new updates in real-time so you can engage and react as the conversation happens. There is also an option to search using numerous search engines, like Google and Baidu.

Tweetaboogle

With even more handy features, Tweetaboogle offers a unique search option. The interface looks much like Facebook itself, and search results are similar to those pulled from a regular Web search but with social integration. For example, if the first Web result is a blog post, below it will be tweets which include the blog post’s URL or Facebook posts which have shared or liked the post. Play around with this one for a while, it’s pretty nifty!

Bing Social

Bing Social features public updates (from Twitter and Facebook) at the top of its search results, and other social results like blog posts. Public updates are updated in real-time and results can be filtered by Twitter or Facebook, trending topics and shared links. (Microsoft is an Edelman client)

Google Social

As one of many search options, Google Social allows you to not only see top social results but also allows you to filter by only those folks within your own social circle. You can also filter these results by just those who are near your location or see all social results. This can be an easy way to learn more about brand awareness of those in your own circle or in your city.

Shoppers of the world unite. For many people, shopping is a solitary activity; one where the individual hunter-gatherer sets off on a mission to find that perfect something…and then brings home that perfect something (plus a few other things that caught his/her eye).

But now there’s less reason to be a lonely shopper. You can make shopping a group effort, complete with communal decision making but without the need for an actual parade of people moving store to store behind you. Social shopping allows consumers to harness the wisdom of the crowds (or at least their friends) and gives retailers a new tool to foster loyalty, acquire new customers, and enhance the shopping experience.

Amazon

When you sign up for Amazon’s Facebook Connect you get a very deep connection. Based on the published likes and dislikes of your Facebook friends, their collective favourite books, movies and music are revealed. You also get access to their wish lists in case you need to buy a personal birthday gift, a great way to get that “How did you know!!” reaction. At first this almost sounds overly intrusive, however, Amazon only shares what people have agreed to post on their public profiles.

Sephora

Sephora gets a nod for incorporating social and mobile attributes within the in-store experience. Type in a SKU, product name, or brand name into their mobile app and see reviews from others. You can also Facebook Like a product from within the mobile app so you can get feedback from your friends.

JustBought.it

Part Twitter, part TwitPic, and part Google Maps, JustBought.it encourages users to tweet whenever they’ve “just bought something” with a picture of the product and the location where they purchased it. What emerges is a local shopping community. An iPhone app is available with BlackBerry (client) and Android versions to come. The Android version will come with an augmented reality function that lets users walk into a store and see what others on the site have already purchased.

Threadless

Have a T-shirt design idea? Post it to Threadless.com. In seven days the community scores your design. If it scores high enough, Threadless will feature it and sell your T-shirt and the designer gets paid.

Tobi.com Fashionista

Augmented reality comes to online shopping with Zugara’s Fashionista app (now in alpha mode) that lets you try on virtual clothes from the comfort of your home. This takes the convenience of online shopping to a whole new level.

Image credit: Mashable

Originally posted on Harvard Business Review.

Okay, maybe that’s going too far. I don’t really recommend firing your marketing manager. I do however believe that most companies will eventually need to hire or contract with a community manager, if they haven’t already. A recent BusinessWeek article called “Twitter Twitter Little Star,” describes social media as a booming industry which has caught the attention of corporations everywhere, and suggests the role of a “social media director” and what that person should do. I’d like to dig a bit deeper into why this core function is necessary to create what’s becoming known as social engagement. I’ll call the role the community manager.

A community manager actively monitors, participates in and engages others within online communities. These communities can be on Twitter, Facebook, message boards, intranets, wherever groups of people come together to converse and interact with each other. A traditional marketing manager is likely to have little experience with this function. Historically, community management developed outside marketing, in areas such as community organizing (politics) or in niche verticals such as the video game or software industry, which are no strangers to digital outposts such as message boards.

A community manager acts as an ambassador for your organization, whether that person is an employee or contracted to manage your social web presence. A good community manager gives a human form to the faceless corporation. On Facebook Whole Foods, for example, community managers have created a forum that impels customers to respond to its posts. They also often informally engage their customers in the process.

A community manager must be a good or great communicator. He or she of course needs to be social, and understand the social mores of the communities served, and have a strongly developed sense of ethics. He or she should know, for example, when deleting a member’s comment is wrong or justified and be prepared to explain why. Enthusiasm is also required. Finally, a good community manager will be well connected, forming relationships with the right people in your communities, the individuals and groups you want on your side.

No doubt companies are flocking toward non traditional job descriptions like community manager. If I were building my my all-star business team, I’d think about how community management works and why I might need a few good ones on my roster.

Originally posted on The Naked Pheasant.

Zynga, the fast-growing maker of Facebook games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, has been called by the New York Times “the hottest start-up to emerge from Silicon Valley since Twitter and, before that, Facebook.” This week, its CEO, Mark Pincus, is profiled in the story, the second in two weeks, highlighting the company’s recent success (though not without its fair share of controversy). Among other things, the article profiles Pincus as a fearless entrepreneur and visionary aiming to build an online entertainment empire as important to the internet “as Google is to search.”

While Zynga will cite profits and player numbers as success criteria, it is another recent trend Zynga is pioneering that has caught my attention; advertising through social gaming. Zynga came under fire recently for allowing advertisements into its games. Some ads, for example, signed up players for subscriptions to costly text-messaging services. This caused a PR headache for the company with TechCrunch, the technology blog, calling the practice “ScamVille,” after some users filed a class-action lawsuit.

But with 211 million players every month, according to AppData.com, Zynga is perhaps well on its way to making social gaming as important to the internet as anything else thanks to a new partnership with an American food manufacturer, (also covered in the New York Times recently). Cascadian Farm, an organic farm in the U.S. and subsidiary of General Mills, is using one of Zynga’s more popular games, FarmVille, to reach a growing customer segment through advertising. Instead of your standard click-through ads a la GoogleAd Words however, the Cascadian Farms content will be integrated into the gaming experience.

In FarmVille, you participate, create, build and manage your own farm. You gain experience points by visiting your friends’ farms and lending a virtual hand. From next week, players in the U.S. will be able to purchase (using farm bucks) and plant, an organic blueberry crop from Cascadian Farm. In doing so, FarmVille users will learn about organic farming and green living through standard game play, and at the same time, earn additional points to grow fruits and vegetables or raise animals on their virtual farms. Cascadian Farm executives said in a New York Times article that they hope that the company can expand its food niche and make itself better known by increasing awareness among FarmVille’s audience – that’s 221 million players a month. Users will also be able to access a $1 off coupon.

It will be curious to see just how successful Cascadian Farm is on FarmVille. Will the strategy work to attract and educate potential customers through participation and content or will it backfire? While integration in game play gives the user unique exposure to content in an experiential manner, will users see through the stunt and reject it as advertising or is this campaign just clever enough to work?

Originally posted on Logic + Emotion.

While the current trend in all things social is demonstrating ROI (did Old Spice Increase sales etc?) There remains a lack of emphasis on actually executing well in social spaces with the assumption that this is simply where customers, consumers, employees etc. will go to seek information and interact. That’s why I think Altimeter’s recent report listing out 8 success criteria specific to marketing initiatives on Facebook is a breath of fresh air. I was fortunate to help inform the report as an ambassador for Edelman Digital, and was happy to see best practices featured from brands we work with such as AXE (client). That aside, the report is worth reviewing and digesting as it goes through the 8 criteria in depth backing it up with examples:

With the above criteria in place, Altimeter has drafted a simple framework for brands and organizations to keep in mind as they build out their digital embassies in the Facebook ecosystem. Using this criteria, Altimeter then selected a few brands to evaluate calling out specific best practices and areas for opportunity. Here’s how the brands fared when compared with each other:

At minimum the report offers a few choice insights and examples of brands to look at and learn from while you are developing your strategies and tactics for this space. Specifics such as being inconsistent or not addressing angry comments serve as early indicators to learn from as companies develop their rules of engagement for Facebook and other digital embassies. While other studies focus on devising formulas that assign dollar values to Facebook connections, reports such as this offer a few high level guidelines for how to best navigate through social systems such as Facebook. Have a read and chime in. What are your best practices?

Local social networks across the world are under pressure by the spread of Facebook. Smaller, local players seem to be no match for the worldwide network. The question arises: Will they survive? A European case shows they can.

The big turnaround kicked off when Facebook started publishing in multiple languages in 2007. Two years ago Skyrock still was the undisputed champion of social networking in France, with Tuenti holding the title in Spain. By now, the American network can pride itself in having twice the number of users in France as Skyrock and about 1.5 times as many as Tuenti in Spain.

‘Two years, no longer’

In Germany, the popular StudiVZ Group remains top of the chart for now but Facebook is closing in fast showing impressive growth numbers. It’s a matter of time before it will top StudiVZ as well. Björn Hasse (Director at Edelman Frankfurt, Germany) said it best when he stated: “Let’s give it two years, no longer. The globals will win.”

There is hope however for brave little local networking sites. Take a look at Hyves in the Netherlands. The Amsterdam-based organization is showing encouraging endurance. Its market share continues to grow and one in every five pages visited in the Netherlands is a Hyves page. In a country inhabited by sixteen million people, Hyves claims an impressive eight million unique visitors a month with Facebook lagging at a mere 2.5 million (source: ComScore).

Business case

Despite being founded in the internationally oriented Dutch market, Hyves retains its dominance against global player Facebook and provides other local networks with an interesting business case.

What sets Hyves apart is its talent for making the most out of local trends and current events such as elections, national holidays and sports highlights. It successfully engages users in discussions and co-creation initiatives on the platform. Offline, smart partnerships with key Dutch brands and organizations like national TV stations and the Dutch national football team ensure visibility and emphasize the local relevance of the network.

Worth coming back

According to the statistics, Hyves offers more than half the country a user experience worth coming back for – and with that, a wealth of segmented target audiences for advertisers and social media strategists. It’s therefore not surprising that the company has been profitable since 2006.

In short: local networks can co-exist with Facebook and will continue to do so. Skyrock, Tuenti and StudiVZ are all cooking up ways to differentiate themselves from Facebook – as Hyves has. Local online networks will remain a force to be reckoned with when developing social media strategies.

Image credit: Vincos

We have a late-breaking Friday Five today that functions as the best kind of Ask the Experts column. When you need to know the latest and greatest on some of the most prominent social tools in the digerati arsenal, these five sources are the folks to read.

Foursquare

Foursquare’s company blog is updated only a few times a month with information about system upgrades and random musings from founder @dens, to get a more in depth look at the happenings at Foursquare I check out About Foursquare.

Chris Thompson founded About Foursquare in April 2010 and since then he has been updating the site daily with announcements of new Foursquare partners, upcoming geolocation features and interesting apps based on the Foursquare API. The site also offers resources like Foursquare 101, a list of apps for all mobile devices and a Foursquare style guide.

Facebook

Inside Facebook focuses on tracking Facebook news for developers and marketers. The site has great stats about the top Facebook apps of the week, interviews with top industry leaders, up to the minute news and research about the growth of Facebook globally.

I also make sure to read AllFacebook which is associated with the popular social media website SocialTimes. While AllFacebook is very similar to Inside Facebook its strength lies in its in depth stats on the most popular Facebook developers, fastest growing applications and usage of applications site wide.

Twitter

Twitter recently created a group of blogs to educate marketers and media folk about the best uses of Twitter. @CleverAccounts is a Twitter blog (and of course Twitter account) that shares the most creative uses of Twitter from businesses and organizations. @TwitterMedia is another Twitter blog that features tools and knowledge from the media and journalists.

Augmented Reality

Augmented Planet and Augmented Times are my go to sources for all things augmented reality. Both sites provide great insight into developing trends, inspiration for future applications and examples of current applications being developed and used.

Innovation

KillerStartups is a website that reviews between 15-20 startups everyday. The startups range in genre from social media to music to lifestyle. This site has become a necessary resource for finding new social media tools.

If 20 innovative ideas isn’t enough for you, be sure to check out Springwise. Springwise is a network of 8,000 spotters dedicated to finding the next big thing. Like KillerStartups the topics spread across several areas but you’ll be sure to find something on the site everyday to get your creative juices flowing.

My colleague Steve Rubel and I wear many hats at Edelman. One of those hats is keeping an eye on the trends unfolding in real time and deriving meaning from them as they pertain to organizations and brands. Attached to this post is a slideshow where we identify what these trends are and at a high level how your organization needs to plan accordingly for them. They are:

1. Marketing in the age of streams

Your customers, consumers and employees are no longer only visiting static Web pages but participating in conversations which increasingly occur off domain in “streams” flowing from Facebook, Twitter and even apps. In order to catch them, you must be highly relevant in their streams.

2. The Googleization of media

Quality Content and potent social connections in addition to traditional keywords are influencing how visible you are to the search engines. Everyone is media.

3. The data decade

Data is increasingly becoming available to anyone and everyone. From it we can derive insights into behaviors. We must become “data junkies” to fully harness this trend.

4. Business becomes social

Moving from designated spokesperson to employee engagement at scale—business itself is beginning to look more social as organizations start to engage all stakeholders in open and mutually beneficial ways.

5. Location, location, location

Where you are is becoming the new what are you doing as multiple platforms begin to adopt the new geolocation status update generating new kinds of data.

6. Private becomes public

Despite privacy concerns, applications and behaviors which support social sharing are still going strong as what is considered private becomes re-defined as we continue engaging in networks.

We believe these trends are not future gazing but what’s happening at this very moment and that they will cause organizations to adapt to change, adopt new practices and innovate accordingly. For more industry insights, ideas and perspectives you can visit our newly created “branded channel” on Slideshare.

@EarlyBird to offer Twitter users “promoted deals”

Bargain hounds on Twitter are now able to follow the official @EarlyBird handle for relevant, timely offers and deals from Twitter’s advertisers. Twitter will partner with select advertisers to give followers of the account the inside scoop on limited-time or –quantity offers. It remains to be seen whether branded accounts that rely on offering last-minute deals (like JetBlue’s Cheeps, for instance) will be affected, since offering deals not available elsewhere is a key component of many branded Twitter strategies.

Facebook and Twitter battle for control of connected TV

As Google and Yahoo launch their social television platforms (Google TV and Yahoo Connected TV, respectively) designed to connect your TV to your friends’ Facebook and Twitter are shoring up resources to tap into the social TV ad market. The two social media giants are vying to be the leader in key areas of the new technology, including “socially-targeted TV advertising, pay-TV content recommendation, TV show marketing, next-generation EPGs and interactive viewing.” Perhaps the most interesting point to ponder is the assertion that the dominant position will go to the platform that “is able to establish themselves as the primary way to connect with friends and exchange information” because those are two very distinct strengths, and one could argue that Facebook excels at the former while Twitter dominates the latter.

The NBA takes the plunge with Twitter’s new ‘promoted trends’ by sponsoring “LeBron James”

In an effort to harness some of the tremendous buzz around the free agency of hoops superstar LeBron James, the National Basketball Association took advantage of Twitter’s new promoted trends to bump the topic “LeBron James” to onto the list of trending topics. While it may seem like James’ name might already be a trending topic, the NBA hopes that sponsoring the term will drive users the league’s website instead of outside news sites. James also joined Twitter this week (@kingjames), gaining more than 150,000 followers in his first seven hours as a member.

Twitter Search volume up 33% since April

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone announced at the Aspen Ideas Festival this week that Twitter Search is handling 800 million queries per day, up from the 600 million per day he reported at the Chirp developers’ conference in April. While Twitter’s growth in user base is a major contributing factor, the value of the Search function’s ability to give insight into conversation trends and real-time information is driving major traffic for Twitter. This will likely have a huge impact on the site’s ability to generate revenue through its new ad platform.

YouTube, major film directors want to know what your day looks like

Renowned film directors Ridley Scott and Kevin Macdonald are partnering with YouTube to create a wholly user-generated documentary film about life on all over the world over the course of one day. Participants are being asked to film part of their day on July 24, 2010 for possible inclusion in the doc, which will debut at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. The project is interesting because it’s an extremely high-profile example of crowd sourcing content for repurposing as mainstream entertainment. Though this has been done numerous times (and with varying degrees of success) by brands in the past, YouTube’s project relies not on a prize or reward but on the public’s desire to share the intimate, mundane details of their personal lives. Sounds a bit like social media in general, doesn’t it?