Monthly Archives: November 2010
How ‘Open Community’ Applies to Senior Living, LTC, and Home Care
Here at CareNetworks, we’re taking part in the virtual book tour that our good friends Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer of SocialFish have launched to explore the concepts in their new book, Open Community: a little book of big ideas for associations navigating the social web. This post is Lindy’s take on the Open Community concept and why it’s important to you.
Building Community on the Web
We come from the association industry and for many of us “membership” people, community is old hat. It’s what we do. It’s central to our work. And yet, for some reason (actually a lot of reasons) what we know about community isn’t always translating well to building community online. Maddie and I have talked to thousands of association executives who have voiced their frustrations about the social web – from the overabundance of tools and the disorderly experimentation of staff and members, to the lack of organizational support and the unwieldy processes for monitoring and managing social media, and that’s just the beginning. It’s easy to get bogged down in the newness and the detail, and miss the bigger picture – not the 10,000-foot bigger picture, but the “just high enough to make practical sense” bigger picture.
What is “Open Community?”
So we started writing the book, and the idea that kept popping up is the concept of “Open Community.” Here’s the gist. Your Open Community is your people who are bonded by what your organization or company represents and care enough to talk to each other (hopefully about you!) online. To be clear, the Open Community concept is not about building an online community platform or internal, private social network. That could be one tactic in your arsenal, but one of the most important first steps toward building community online is accepting that your Open Community is out there, not just on your web site. Your stakeholders are connecting on their own terms in the social spaces where they spend the most time, and you need to be where they are. Sometimes, rather than hosting every conversation and leading every initiative, your company can (and should) simply be present and act as a supportive participant.
Open Community and You
The concepts we present in Open Community are important for the Senior Living, Long-Term Care and Home Care industries, too, because they get to the heart of why building community on the web can help companies like yours achieve business objectives. If you follow this blog, you already know why relationship building online is so valuable to companies and you already know that connecting with customers and prospects on the web is a smart business idea. Social sites like Facebook and Twitter are showing rocketing growth in usage among people age 50 and older (your audience) and therefore that social media sites can be a good way to interact with people in the places they are choosing to spend their time.
Engaging Your Open Community
But being able to harness what we call the “messy ecosystem” around your brand or your industry, being able to nurture and care for and engage the open community in which your staff, customers and prospects operate, those are the things that will lead to return on investment. How do you get your Open Community to rally for you – to share your ideas and content, to participate in your events or simply to spread good word-of-mouth about you. Unless you are able to build real relationships between real people, it cannot be done.
We hope our book will help you develop a good understanding of how to embrace the Open Communities around your companies – to engage them in the right way so that the full power of social media can be unleashed when you need it most.
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To purchase Open Community, click one of the following links:
- Open Community on Amazon
- Open Community on Kindle
- Open Community on SocialFish
- Open Community on Engage365
To learn more about how to put Open Community to work for your company, contact us.
CareNetworks Nominated for Best Senior Living Industry Blog and Website!
Don’t you just love it when somebody you don’t even know recognizes how awesome you are? That’s assuming, of course, that you are in fact awesome. Well the good folks at SeniorHomes.com set up a little contest to give people the opportunity to recognize awesomeness on the web and some lovely person out there nominated us for Best Senior Living Industry Blog and Website for 2011(and no, it wasn’t my mom). As Willie Wonka once said as he helped his guests off the chocolate river boat, “A small step for mankind, but a giant leap for us.” So, if you’re one of our socially savvy clients, a regular reader of this blog, or a member of one of our ultra hip online communities, help us get out the vote. Click here to cast your vote for us. If we win, we’ll hook you up with an all expenses paid trip to our chocolate factory, where all of the social media candy is made. Ah… that last line was a bit of a joke. Again, to quote Wonka, “A little nonsense now and then is cherished by the wisest men.” Thanks for your support!
Brian Geyser and the CareNetworks Crew
How Emeritus Senior Living Tames the Social Media Beast: Part 2 [INTERVIEW]
This post is part of our Social Media Success Series, which features interviews with innovative and fearless socially networked senior living, home care, and LTC companies that are achieving positive business results using media and other social technologies. To have your organization included in this series, contact us.
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Emeritus Senior Living (ESL) is currently the nation’s largest assisted living (AL) provider with over 460 AL communities in 43 states. Their services range from Alzheimer’s and memory care, to skilled nursing, retirement living, independent living, and rehabilitation services. I recently caught up with Chris Kim, ESL’s eMarketing Specialist, and asked him how Emeritus leverages social media. Due to the length of the interview, I broke it up into two parts. To view part one, click here.
Q: What is your total “reach” on all your social sites (i.e. how many individuals do you have direct conctact with via FB, Twitter, Blog, RSS, email, etc.)?
We currently have a total of 2220 fans on Facebook that we interact with pretty regularly. We actually found that our number of fans go up regularly by about 5-10 fans per day. During contests and various other promotional seasons, this doubles or even triples each day. Likewise, our Twitter account consists of roughly 470 followers who many times reposts and shares our posts. I don’t have the exact numbers for Blog RSS and Email subscription but it’s a large number!
Q: Have you been able to capture leads using social media?
Capturing leads through Social Media was never really our goal so unfortunately, I do not have any data on this. Some of the metrics we look for however are how many visitors are coming from Twitter and Facebook to our website? How many visitors are going from Emeritus.com to our social media outlets? The numbers vary quite a bit but our social media do drive quite a traffic. This is because almost everything we post on our social media are directly from our corporate blog and resource center. Since one of our goals is brand reputation management, we’ve had potential customers inquiring about our services on Facebook. This is usually followed by many employees in the field, other residents, as well as our marketing team to direct them to the right page on Emeritus.com to get them the best information they seek. In cases like these, I think they certainly have aided in converting the lead into a move-in.
Q: Have you been able to attribute any move-ins directly to social media? Do you have any data or comments on ROI?
We unfortunately do not have any solid data on ROI. However, as stated in the question above, we work to direct our fans and viewers on our SM to the right places for whatever information they may be seeking. Once in awhile, we’ll get potential customers asking for information from a specific community. We make sure to message them and direct them to the right contacts to find the information. Likewise, we work closely with each community to make sure they reach out to these customers as soon as possible.
It is also truly great to see that when a resident moves in to a community, we’ve had many family members as well as residents themselves who post up a quick testimonial and great feedback on the experience they’ve had so far. It has been a blessing through social media to see that!
Q: Can you share some data on how social media has impacted your overall web presence?
Each month, I check our analytics tool to see what kind of traffic our Social Media outlets are driving to our website. We found that our Facebook page drives anywhere between 500 to 1,500 visits to our website each month. During seasonal promotion and contest months, the number of visits can spike up quite a bit.
It’s great that you mentioned SEO enhancements. As an online marketing specialist at Emeritus, SEO is definitely one of the biggest initiatives we have at Emeritus. One thing many social media marketers tend to forget is how great of a link building opportunity Facebook and Twitter is. It’s a great opportunity to directly show a fan base exactly what they are looking for. We’ve found that by sharing our resources, there are a lot of third party vendors as well as customers who are more than willing to share the resources on their blogs and websites. It seems to work great because we regularly see industry blogs linking to our website for our contests as well as resources and guides we provide!
Q: Do you think social media enhances your other marketing/PR initiatives/campaigns?
Our social media definitely does enhance other marketing campaigns. I won’t say it dictates our initiatives but its just one more outlet we can utilize to promote our marketing campaigns. If we are sending out a press release on various events or newsworthy updates, we post them directly onto our social media. What better ways to keep our customers directly updated with our happenings than through social media? This way, they’re able to give us direct feedback on what their thoughts are. We get quite an excited response when we post news articles!
We also work very closely with our marketing team and PR team. A lot of times, we post news articles that are picked up from our press releases so what better way to enhance our presence than to use social media!
Q: What are the downsides to using social media? Do you have any horror stories or crisis incidents to share?
One of the downsides, which also happens to be a great upside, is that it is completely open to the public. Our Facebook profile is 100% open to the public. Fans can post whatever they’d like and we try our best not to delete them, but to address them appropriately. We’ve seen viewers post negative comments that are borderline slandering, but unless they are completely out of line, we still address them accordingly.
One incident we had awhile ago was that a former employee, who was a bit disgruntled by their experience with Emeritus, created a fake account to post many negative comments. We unfortunately were not able to find out who the specific employee was, but again, by addressing each negative comment accordingly, they stopped posting fairly quickly.
It helps a lot when our customers and family members also help in addressing the issue. A negative comment is usually followed by a reply from a customer or family members with great positive testimonials.
Q: Do you have social media policies in place?
We currently do not have a formal SM policy in place but we are actually working in collaboration with our Human Resource Department to get this in place. Originally, we left it somewhat open with the idea that our main policy is to manage and address everything that happens on our social media venues. When we first opened up our Facebook profile, it was actually not open to the public. We simply posted resources and news articles which didn’t help others interact with us. So we finally opened our page to the public and the only thing we really wanted to maintain was a positive atmosphere and community where we address things in a positive manner, address any issues that come about, and most importantly, provide our fans with fresh, new posts on a daily basis.
Now that our Facebook and Twitter profiles have grown to a much bigger scale than what we had originally started with, we feel that having a solid structure and guideline will help manage our profiles a bit better.
Comment:
Emeritus’ Facebook Page alone is an amazing example of how LTC companies can use free social media tools to expand their reach, engage customers and prospects, and build community around their brand. Emeritus may just have the best Facebook community in the industry right now. Kudos to the Emeritus team, and thanks for the interview!
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To learn more about how to leverage social media for your senior living company, retirement community, skilled nursing facility, home care agency or hospice organization, contact us.