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Senior Living Websites and Social Integration

Posted on Saturday, March 3rd, 2012 by Brian Geyser

When Will Senior Living Websites Evolve?

Senior living communities are very social places, so it would stand to reason that senior living companies would want to showcase some of the social aspects of their communities on their website.

Many senior living companies use a Facebook Page as an online community for residents, staff, and family members, but most don’t integrate that Facebook Page into their websites. Why not? The standard way senior living companies demonstrate their presence on Facebook is by placing a small Facebook icon on their homepage, but who really ever clicks on those?

Why not entice people to visit your Facebook Page by embedding a small section of the actual page right into your website’s homepage using Facebook Social Plugins instead?

When we sat down recently with the folks at Meadow Ridge, a premier Continuing Care Retirement Community in Connecticut, to develop a strategy for their new website, we made the case for building social integration right into the design.

Meadow Ridge is an amazingly vibrant place with a beautiful campus, state-of-the-art facilities, a talented leadership team, and, most importantly, a lively community of residents, staff, and family members. But their website was an outdated and static digital brochure with no ability for site visitors to get a real sense of the place, a feel for the community, or to engage with the company through modern social channels.

So, among many of the strategic design elements we built into the site, we embedded their Facebook Page right into the homepage.

The plugin gives the page a dynamic social feel and shows that the company has real fans who love them, not stock images of fake seniors spouting canned marketing messages. Check out the site and let us know what you think.

If you’re interested in a new strategic social design for your website, contact us. We’d be glad to help.

Posted in Facebook, Senior Living, Website design, Websites | Leave a comment

Feed Your Facebook: Tips for Managing Your Social Media Presence in a Time-Starved World

Posted on Wednesday, May 11th, 2011 by Brian Geyser

This post originally appeared on the Elder Pages Online Blog and is authored by Tasha Beauchamp, MSc. Tasha is the Webmaster and Research Scientist for Elder Pages Online, a company specializing in Internet marketing for hospice and geriatric care managers.

The big concern about Facebook and other social media tools is that they take time.

Indeed, the purpose of a Fan page, blog or Twitter account is to develop relationships and community with your fans, subscribers and followers. Just as it takes time to have meaningful conversations, it takes time to create engaging posts. And you don’t develop trust and rapport by simply talking about yourself. Like any good friend, you need to be giving out at least as much energy as you are taking in.

You need to regularly offer content that inspires or educates your target audience. According to an ExactTarget social marketing study:

38% of Fans will UNLIKE you because your posts are boring or repetitive
24% of Fans will UNLIKE you because your posts are too self-promotional

Even as a non-profit, if your hand is always out asking for money or time, more than you are giving away information and useful resources, you will lose followers.

So how do successful social marketers create engaging content in a manageable amount of time? They become “Content Curators.” Because social networking is essentially distinguishing yourself through your content, you need to care for your social presence like a curator cares for an exhibit at a museum. (Facebook has sometimes been called “The Museum of the Self.” This makes the content curator analogy even more appropriate.)

The curator draws together pieces of art from different sources, each one a gem, and assembles them into an exhibit that as a whole inspires the visitors, draws crowds, and promotes membership to the museum. There is also a very practical side to curation: While the exhibit requires creativity, the curator does need to work within a budget and timeline.

It is the same for curating a social media site. Posts are assembled from a variety of sources, working together to create a whole that inspires and educates visitors, generates leads, and promotes LIKES, follows or subscribers. And it must all be done within a budget and timeline.

To accomplish their goals, successful social marketers follow some basic rules of thumb:

Choose a target audience and identify keywords/categories of interest to this group
Create a plan and work the plan
Post on a regular basis
Make 80% of the posts educational/inspirational to viewers (only 20% about yourself)

As an elder care professional, I would suggest that your target audience is family caregivers. Boomers are starting to robustly embrace Facebook. (According to Pew Internet data, approximately 33% of middle-age individuals are now using social networks).

Determine a list of topics that will be of interest to Boomer daughters and sons. In the realm of family caregiving, this would mean posts pertaining to the care of elders. But it also means presenting information to help manage the stress and challenges of being a family caregiver. Dementia, paying for care, and tips for handling daily life with chronic or serious conditions are just some of the many posts that would be welcomed by family caregivers.

Create a Content Calendar. According to Daniel Zarella, author of The Facebook Marketing Book, you want to plan and compose your posts ahead of time. Create a calendar so you will know what you will post on each day of the coming week. Give yourself a specific time each week to get in the social media headset, to think like a curator, and compose the next week’s posts. For truly thoughtful posts, it’s much easier to do several at once than to try spontaneously each day to say something meaningful when you are in a rush to meet other deadlines.

Facebook status updates have 420 characters (not counting any web addresses you link to)
Blogs typically have 300-1000 words, depending on how often you post
Twitter has a 140 character limit per tweet

Post consistently. You must get in the habit of regularly making meaningful posts. Each channel has a culture of its own with an expected frequency:

Facebook: once a day
Blogging: 1-5 times a week
Twitter: 3-5/day

Many people find it easiest to set a specific time aside each day to do the actual posting. (You can use automated programs, but these rank lower on the search results than posts that are submitted manually.) On a rushed day, you can simply copy/paste the text from your Content Calendar. But because this is the social network, you also want to respond to comments made on previous posts and take time to look at your News Feed and make meaningful contributions to conversations happening on the pages of allied businesses. If you are seen only to broadcast out and not to engage with others, you will quickly fall in the category of “marketing to” your audience rather than creating community and “marketing with them.”

Find content that is educational and inspirational. This is the part that takes time. You want to be sure you are posting across a wide range of topics. You also want to vary your content across the categories and keywords you identified earlier in the planning process.

Where do you find content? A recent survey of 150 marketers across many segments of the business world revealed that:

73% value original content, but are challenged by the time it takes to develop it
57% use a mix of original posts and third party content

Following the 80:20 rule, successful social marketers tend to use links to other materials for the majority of their posts, adding their own comments for flavor and personality. They save their time and creative energies for that 20% that is about them, where they can really fine tune the call to action (join our list, sign up for our webinar, come to our event, donate to our cause…). In this way, they are able to give their social networking presence the best chance of delivering a return on the investment.

Remember, a key business function of social networking is to generate leads and move people toward action that allows you to engage with them in a more personal way.

A study by Idealware indicated that companies need to spend at least 2 hours/week per social media channel in order to feel it was worth the effort. Companies that spent less than 2 hours a week were generally dissatisfied with the results. Those that spent 9-20 hours per week total, usually working across many channels (e.g., Facebook, Twitter and blogging) seemed to be the most satisfied.

You can conserve time by wisely leveraging the content of others. Mimic the workflow of successful social networkers. Link liberally and paraphrase or make commentary on the work of others. Tons of information already exists. You do not need to re-invent the wheel. You simply need to be smart about finding the info and then adding your own personality to the mix.

To learn more, visit the Elder Pages Online Blog, or Contact Us.

Posted in Best Practices, Blogging, Facebook, homecare, hospice, Marketing, Social Media, strategy | Leave a comment

Children’s Hospitals Innovating on Facebook. Others, Not So Much [STUDY]

Posted on Thursday, March 3rd, 2011 by Brian Geyser

A new study published by Verasoni, a New York based marketing and PR firm, shows that among hospitals, it’s the ones caring for kids that are kicking butt on Facebook. According to the study, children’s hospitals are building community, engaging and partnering with patients and developing lasting relationships with families on THE social network faster and better than their adult counter parts. In fact, the study concludes that most hospitals are not taking advantage of the opportunities Facebook provides to build their brands and advance their mission and business objectives. The authors also argue that hospitals that do not begin to engage on the social web risk falling behind their younger patients, doctors, and nurses who were practically born with social media in their DNA.

Here are some other key findings from the study:

Hospital Facebook Pages tend to have a high degree of interaction between the hospital and members
Members frequently connect with other members facing similar challenges
Members share stories of hope and struggle – using the Page like a virtual support group
Activities ranged from patients and their families posting videos of their experiences at the hospital that demonstrated the quality of care they were receiving to how nurses, physicians or staff helped patients during their stay at the hospital
Activity by parents in support of the hospital was high
Members posted questions and concerns – giving the hospitals public-facing customer service opportunies
Facebook also allowed children’s hospitals themselves the opportunity to broadcast their accomplishments to a targeted audience that believe in the work they are doing
Patients remained engaged on the Facebook Pages long after discharge

Major Business Implications

Facebook and other social media outlets offer visitors insights into an organization’s culture and brand experience. The brand promise shines through on these emerging customer touch points. How a Facebook Page is organized, what the Page looks like, the types of messages posted, the frequency and recency of postings, and the tone of the dialog all convey certain messages about the company (positive, negative, neutral) to the visitors. There are clear business implications here. Companies can appear warm, caring, sophisticated, engaged, open, and transparent, OR, uncaring, uninterested, distant, and self-centered based on how their Facebook Page is perceived by visitors.

Industry Examples

Here are some examples of great Facebook Pages from different healthcare industry segments:

If you know of other healthcare, hospital, senior living, LTC, home care, or hospice company Facebook Pages worthy of recognition, I would love to know about them. Please share in the comments below.

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Join the CareNetworks Facebook Page to keep up to speed on emerging social technology issues related to the health and senior care industries.

Contact us to learn about how we can help your company kick butt on the social web.

Posted in Facebook, Healthcare, Hospitals, Social Media | Leave a comment

Can Facebook Revolutionize Heathcare?

Posted on Monday, February 28th, 2011 by Brian Geyser

Facebook by the Numbers

We’ve seen Facebook’s ability to help spark revolutions in distant lands, but how can Facebook help to revolutionize the health care, senior living, home care, and long-term care industries? Let’s do some math. About 50% of Facebook’s 650 million active users sign on to the site in any given day and they rack up about 700 billion minutes a month of posting, poking, liking, sharing, clicking, researching, learning, purchasing, and interacting with friends, family, companies, and organizations. The average Facebooker is connected to 130 people and 80 community pages, groups and events – and shares about 90 pieces of content (links, videos, photos, etc.) each month. Booomers and seniors are the fastest growing demographic on Facebook and they spend about 60 hours per month online. More than half of adult women routinely participate on social networks at least weekly and healthcare-related activity is something 90-100% of people across every generation engage in on a regular basis.

Now, if you want a great example of how these numbers play out in the real world, Children’s Hospital Boston (a health care social media powerhouse) has over 510,000 fans on their main Facebook page, giving them a potential reach of at least 66.3 million people (510K fans x 130 friends per fan) every day.

Facebook Is No Print Ad

Facebook is a place where people go to hangout, browse around, connect, and communicate. But, unlike old-style websites, radio ads, print ads, and mailers, Facebook is loaded with “hot triggers” or calls-to-action – items visitors can click on and do something with immediately (view a video, check out a photo gallery, play a game, accept a new friend into their network, or “like” a company Page). How many times have you opened up your personal Facebook page to read a message from a friend, and you end up spending the next 20 minutes looking at stuff you never intended on? This happens tens of millions of times each day to hundreds of millions of people. And, it’s almost all trackable. Pretty powerful stuff.

Facebook Empowers Healthcare Companies

So, what can health care, senior living, home care and LTC companies do with a Facebook Page? First, and foremost, they can cultivate community around their brand. Check out how Emeritus Senior Living nurtures a community of over 2,700 Facebook fans on their Page. Emeritus allows and encourages peer-to-peer interactions, one of the eight success criteria for Facebook Page marketing. The result is a flurry of word-of-mouth marketing for Emeritus from customers, prospects, and employees. Marketing that costs the company nothing – except the time to monitor and manage the Page.

Next, companies can provide unlimited support and resources to customers and prospects. Children’s Hospital Boston (CHB) has 16 Facebook Pages in addition to their main page. Each Page is another customer touch point and gives CHB an opportunity to provide targeted support to different groups with unique challenges or similar interests. Their Generation Cures Page empowers children around the world to help cure sick kids through online and community fund raising, digital media, music, and more. Their Celiac Support Group Page helps kids and families learn how to live healthy and happy gluten-free lives through engaging educational content. While not Facebook, websites like PatientsLikeMe, which offers people with specific diseases a place to connect with others like them, or Lotsa Helping Hands, which provides free online communities for caregivers to coordinate the care of a loved one, show that empowering social networks through social technology can have a significant impact on patient/caregiver experience as well as healthcare delivery.

Finally, companies can enhance their recruiting efforts by offering Facebook Pages dedicated to employment, like Catholic Healthcare West does, or a Career Center right on their main Page, like St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center does. Catholic healthcare West has over 5,700 fans on their Careers Page alone.

So, can Facebook, and other social networks and social media sites revolutionize healthcare? I would argue that the revolution has already begun. From the Mayo Clinic’s Center for Social Media to the Assisted Living Federation of America’s online community, to Twitter’s #HCSM, #RNChat, and #MDChat, there are countless examples of how social technology is slowing changing the healthcare landscape.

How about you? Tell us what you think?

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Posted in Assisted Living, Facebook, Health Care, homecare, hospice, Senior Living, Social Media | Leave a comment

Brookdale Senior Living and Social Media: One Year Later [INTERVIEW]

Posted on Wednesday, January 5th, 2011 by Brian Geyser

Just over a year ago, I interviewed Eric Marsh over at Brookdale Senior Living for the post Nation’s Largest Senior Living Company Embraces Social Media. Because it’s one of our most popular posts, and I wanted to see how things have progressed since then, I contacted Eric to get some insights. Here’s what he had to say.

Q: How long have you guys been doing SM as a company?

We have been using social media for two years. We began with a single Facebook fan page, and have grown to what we have currently — two Facebook fan pages, a Twitter account, a LinkedIn profile and a Youtube channel.

Q: Now that you’ve been using social media for quite some time, what is your total “reach” on all of your social sites?

Her are our numbers:
13,000 e-mail subscribers
328 followers on Twitter
1,138 Facebook likes across our two fan pages

Q: Has there been any change in how your company social media accounts are managed? In other words, has your SM team grown or changed from 1 year ago? How?

Our team has grown. We added an additional person who helps us manage social media, among other things. Early in 2010 we added a Facebook page for our Ultimate Chef program. Then, during each Ultimate Chef America event we blog live with comments about the competition, photos and videos.

We also added Facebook recommend buttons to all of our pages. Doing this is just another way to get our messaging out and gives our users the ability to show their friends that they support Brookdale Senior Living.

Q: How much time is dedicated to your social media efforts now compared with 1 year ago?

It’s difficult to say exactly how much time we are spending for social media. An educated estimate would be a few hours a week. We are spending a bit more time on it this year since we are now managing the Ultimate Chef America fan page as well.

Q: Has your social strategy changed at all over the past year?

I wouldn’t say our strategy changed, we just have more to manage now, which shows growth and progression. Having the Facebook recommend buttons has been positive; we have been pleased with the results thus far.

Q: Do any of your local AL communities have their own social media accounts/blogs/etc.? If so, who manages them? Who monitors/moderates them?

Our corporate policy dictates that all social media be managed by the corporate office. We allow our communities to add content to our corporate pages, but we moderate it and control it.

We understand there is value in having separate accounts for our communities but since we are such a large corporation, we have challenges that many senior living companies don’t experience. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for us to manage 560 social media accounts.

Q: In our last interview, you mentioned that several of your communities were implementing MyWayVillage. Have you found that product to be useful? How?

Yes, in our initial pilot communities, we have found that Connected Living at Brookdale powered by MyWay Village is a resounding success. We have more than 45 percent engagement on the portal, the classes are some of the best attended, and the ambassadors provide high tech, high touch for our residents and families to live a connected life. The ability to stay socially connected is very important in the overall health and wellness of our residents.

Q: Have you been able to capture leads using social media? If so, provide some data and examples of how it works.

Through the last six months we have data that shows users connecting to our Web site through our Facebook pages and submitting lead information. Although it’s limited at this time, we are excited to see social media functioning as a lead generator.

Q: You mentioned in the last interview that you use social media for recruiting. How’s that going?

Our recruiting team continues an active presence on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The importance of social media in recruiting and networking continues to grow and challenge perceptions and opinions. Our social media policy, use, strategy and recruiting methodology continue to evolve with our learning and experience. As we continue to cultivate our use of social media, it will become a more important tool in the recruiters’ tool box as well.

Q: Have you been able to attribute any move-ins directly to SM? Do you have any data or comments on ROI?

We have not been able to attribute any move-ins yet, but we are excited about the possibilities since we have seen leads begin to trickle in.

Q: Can you share some data on how SM has impacted your overall web presence (i.e. increased website traffic, SEO enhancements, improved reach, etc.)

We have certainly seen an improved reach through our efforts on Facebook. Our Ultimate Chef America competition has been a great way to broaden the scope of our marketing efforts. People may not be familiar with Brookdale but we have been able to reach them through local efforts. The same goes for the recommend buttons.

Q: Do you think social media enhances your more traditional marketing/PR initiatives/campaigns? If so, how?

It certainly enhances it. We post every press release and article that our Public Relations Manager, Holly Botsford, writes for our Web site. These postings represent another avenue for reaching those who may not be familiar with us, were it not for social media. Social media also facilitates conversations and “buzz” about our company and our product offerings.

Q: What are the downsides you’ve experienced with using SM? Do you have any horror stories or crisis incidents you are able to share?

We have been fortunate that we have not had any horror stories. The only downside I would say is time and resources. Ideally, we would love to have an entire team do nothing but social media but in the current business landscape that just isn’t possible. However, I do think we do a great job with what we have.

Q: Do you have social media policies in place for your employees? For your site visitors and community members?

Our corporate policy dictates that our associates are not permitted to represent our company through their individual social media accounts. We want to make sure that all our messaging comes through our corporate office. We do this to ensure that our messaging and branding is consistent.

Q: Do you have any interesting stories to tell related social media and residents, family members, or staff?

One of our favorite uses of social media is to promote the heart-warming stories of our residents and our associates. We think it is an important message for people to see seniors making purposeful contributions and having life-changing experiences. We also firmly believe that “our people make the difference,” and enjoy having a different venue for sharing their stories and accomplishments.

Q: Which one SM tool do you think is the best and why?

I prefer Facebook. I think it’s the best way to start conversations and receive comments. I also like how when a user clicks a Recommend button, the information goes on their profile so the message provides value-added visibility for the company.

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For more interveiws like this one, read all of our Social Media Success Series posts. To learn more about how social media can help your organization, contact us.

Posted in Assisted Living, Facebook, Internet Marketing, LinkedIn, Recruiting Staff, Senior Living, Senior Living Industry, Social Media, strategy, Success Series, Twitter, YouTube | Leave a comment

How ‘Open Community’ Applies to Senior Living, LTC, and Home Care

Posted on Monday, November 22nd, 2010 by Brian Geyser

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:

To learn more about how to put Open Community to work for your company, contact us.

Posted in Facebook, Google, Internet Marketing, Online Communities, Online Community, Online Education, Senior Living, Senior Living Industry, Social Hub, Social Media, strategy | Leave a comment

How Emeritus Senior Living Tames the Social Media Beast: Part 2 [INTERVIEW]

Posted on Wednesday, November 17th, 2010 by Brian Geyser

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.

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Posted in Facebook, ROI, Senior Living, Success Series | Leave a comment

How Emeritus Senior Living Tames the Social Media Beast: Part 1 [INTERVIEW]

Posted on Monday, October 25th, 2010 by Brian Geyser

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Most senior living, long-term care, and home care companies across the country have either started dabbling in social media, or have at least come to realize that it’s something they must start thinking about. With boomers and seniors flocking to social networks, and sites like Facebook and Twitter being adopted by every demographic, these companies are being forced to go where no senior care provider has gone before.

But how can senior care companies leverage these tools to best serve their business interests and their customers? What tools work best and what strategies are proving to be most fruitful? To answer these and other questions, we go right to the very creative people and innovative companies in the industry, like Emeritus Senior Living, who are helping to define how social technologies work in the senior care space.

Q: When did Emeritus start using social media, how did you get started, and what were your initial objectives?

We started our initial social media efforts back in June of 2009. Like many companies utilizing social media for the first time, we first had to really organize our thoughts and brainstorm some ideas on how we can best utilize social media as a tool. I came on board with Emeritus as the online marketing specialist in July of 2009 and started putting together a general strategy around social media. We knew right off the bat that social media shouldn’t be used as a marketing venue to convert leads, but rather we took on an approach to use social media to engage with our customer. The questions we asked were “what kind of content do our customers like to see? How do we engage with our viewers? How do we take the feedback provided by our viewers and leverage to our benefit in creating marketing initiatives?

It took a little while to get things rolling but soon our objectives really became clear. Our main goal is to use our social media outlets for brand reputation management, build an online presence, and build a reputation of being an authoritative figure in the industry. If you look at our website, we’ve continually been building out our resource section with a glossary, guides, various resources to not only help residents and potential customers, but to draw in those who may be simply looking for some information. By utilizing our social media outlets to really promote these new resources, we were able to build a following.

Likewise, we found that our social media profiles created a great opportunity to connect with our employees out in the field, as well as build relationships with 3rd party partners who help promote some of our great content and resources we provide on our social media sites.

Q: What social media tools do you currently use? I see you have a corporate blog, Facebook, and Twitter. Do you have others? Do any of your individual communities have their own? If not, why not?

We are currently using Facebook and Twitter as our main social media venues. We do have a corporate blog that we update regularly with resources, events from communities, as well as our Brain Health Blog we run in partnership with Dr. Paul Nussbaum, a leading expert in brain health.

We also have a LinkedIn profile that is closely managed and run by our human resources department. This is to really connect with employees as well as 3rd party vendors who we may work with in various ways.

Likewise, our YouTube channel is something we recently started building in. In partnership with Dr. Vicki Rackner, an expert in doctor-patient relations, we are working towards creating a resource video library that touches on topics from care giving, health, and other topics. We also work with other departments at Emeritus to promote videos for employee candidates and to provide a visual look at our company culture.

As for Facebook and Twitter for our AL communities – We currently encourage all of our communities to use our corporate Emeritus Facebook Page instead of creating their own. We found that we get great engagement from viewers when we post more localized resources and events on our corporate Facebook Page. It really provides for an online community that is not just for corporate marketing purposes, but does a great job of reaching out to the local markets as well. Likewise, we realize that Facebook and Twitter provide many ways for current or previous customers and employees to respond to occasional negative feedback on our services. We want this to be as open as possible. We feel that by having a centralized profile where anyone can write their experience, we can address these issues openly and really show that we care about the feedback. We manage our social media outlets closely to make sure all issues are addressed.

Q: There seems to be quite a bit of fan participation on your Facebook Page. How do you make that happen?

When we first started our Facebook page, our main goal was to get our fans to participate and give us feedback as often as possible. We found that something as simple as directly asking our fans to give us feedback on various topics definitely helped. On any given resource, news article, or event we post, we try to ask what their thoughts are on that topic. For example, we provide a brain health assessment test on our website that gives visitors a quick assessment on how healthy their brain is. What we’ll typically do is promote the brain health assessment test on our social media sites and end the promotional statement by asking participants to share what score they received. Our viewers are genuinely interested in what we post, our job is to get them to tell us what their thoughts are on what we post. By doing so, we’re actually able to adjust our strategy accordingly by posting topics that we’ve found are more popular.

Another thing we strive for is being current with our communities’ events and being timely with our updates. Being timely is very important as we receive great participation and engagement from our fans after an event at a community. For example, say a community hosts an Alzheimer’s related event. We’ve found that people who attend the events follow our Facebook Page and are happy to see photos and event details – and they will often engage with us.

We also run contests on our Facebook page pretty regularly. On a seasonal/quarterly basis, our marketing team creates a contest around a topic that we feel are seasonally appropriate. For example, we had a very successful contest this past Valentine’s Day by asking participants to share a story of how they or their parents met each other. We had some great stories with that one! It is such a great way to get fans to engage with us, and it also doesn’t hurt that its free! We usually get a nice kick in number of fans during these contests.

Q: Who manages your corporate social media accounts? Do you have a social media team? How much time per week do they spend on SM?

Our social media accounts are all managed by me. We do not have a specified social media team but I work very closely with our marketing team, as well as the communities to obtain the best resources, events, and news stories to post on our social media. Social Media is really only a small part of our online marketing initiative so I don’t spend too much time on it. Perhaps a few hours per week. It really helps that I have the support of our marketing team to always provide photos and fresh resources to provide!

__________________________________________________

In Part 2 of the interview, you’ll learn about ESL’s total online reach, lead generation results, ROI, SEO, how social media enhances ESL’s traditional marketing efforts, social media downsides, and policy issues. Be sure to subscribe to our blog via RSS or email to make sure you don’t miss it.

Have you seen the CareNetworks YouTube video? Check it out and share with your friends…

Posted in Assisted Living, Case Study, Facebook, LinkedIn, Senior Living, Social Media, strategy, Success Series, YouTube | Leave a comment

Social Media Makes October 2010 Cover of Long-Term Living Magazine

Posted on Wednesday, October 20th, 2010 by Brian Geyser

Back in March of this year, Provider Magazine featured a cover story called “Social Media: Taking the Plunge” which outlined how assisted living and retirement communities are leveraging social technologies like Facebook and Twitter to engage customers and prospects. Now this month, Long-Term Living Magazine has a cover story on social media use in the long-term care industry. The article points out that social technologies are beginning to help senior living and LTC companies reach a broader audience and, perhaps more importantly, to change the perception of aging and retirement living.

In the article, Redstone Highlands Senior Living’s Director of Fund Development, Barb Hall Christner says, “You have a huge audience, whether it’s local or abroad, because you can reach so many individuals.” Christner suggests that by consistently updating Redstone’s Facebook Page with useful or visually interesting content, and then syndicating that content out to Twitter and other social networks, “not only does Redstone improve its image to those who follow or those who are interested in its services, it also assists in changing the misconception random surfers have about the lifestyle of seniors.”

Beyond Marketing

President of CRL Senior Living Communities, Ari Weinberger, who was interviewed for the article, says CRL uses a combination of traditional communication channels and newer social technologies to communicate with and stay connected to families. CRL uses Facebook and Twitter updates, monthly e-newsletters, monthly calls from executive directors, a family login page on their main website, and video calling “Skype Terminals” where residents can see their family members while they talk with them.

Fears About Bad Press and HIPAA

Companies reluctant to “go social” often state that they fear people saying bad things about them in a public forum, or they worry that an employee may violate HIPAA by posting protected health information on a company-sponsored site. For this section of the article, I was the “expert” being interviewed. Here’s an excerpt:

Brian Geyser, founder and chief social media strategist of CareNetworks, LLC, a new media consultant for long-term care providers, argues the one thing companies must have in place before transitioning online is a social media policy for employees, as well as guidelines for visitors and community members. In an e-mail interview, Geyser lays out an exact rundown of his suggestions.

“The employee policies, or employee rules of engagement, should cover the company’s (1) philosophy about engaging on the social Web; (2) expectations for appropriate participation on both company and non-company owned sites; and (3) consequences for violating the rules,” Geyser writes. “The general governing rule should be, ‘If you wouldn’t want your supervisor, your mother, or a judge to see it, don’t post it.’”

You can read the entire interview here.

Conclusion

It’s clear from both the Provider Magazine article and now the Long-Term Living Magazine piece, social technologies are beginning to have a significant impact on the industry and are here to stay. To learn more, join our growing Facebook Community for insider tips and conversation on social media in our industry, or

Posted in Assisted Living, Facebook, HIPAA, Interview, Senior Living, Social Media | Leave a comment

How Senior Living, LTC, and Home Care Companies Can Avoid The Online Community Ghost Town

Posted on Monday, August 30th, 2010 by Brian Geyser

An increasing number of senior living, LTC, and home care companies are using social technolgies like Facebook, Linkedin, Youtube, and Ning to engage customers, employees, and prospects and to build a community presence on the web. Companies like Terrace Communities and organizations like ALFA are leading the pack in this space. One of the biggest challenges companies face is lack of involvement and participation from community members. Launching a Facebook Page is pretty easy. Building a vibrant engaged community around your brand on Facebook or any other community platform and extracting value from it is hard.

There are lots of mistakes companies can make with their new online community sites. These blunders can produce “ghost town” communities with nothing but virtual crickets and tumbleweeds representing the brand – not good. So how can your company avoid the virtual ghost town senario? Here a few pointers:

Build community around your members, not your brand. Remember this: your online community is not about you, it’s about the members. Focus most of the activities on what is important to the members. Be community-centric, not brand-centric. Increased involvement (and probably sales) will likely be a nice by-product of this approach. To quote social media expert Chris Brogan, “To me, the new unit of business should be relationships. You get more fruit from an apple tree if you nurture it and pick apples when it’s ripe, instead of uprooting the tree and forcefully shaking the apples into your barrel. It takes a bit longer, but you’re a farmer and a steward, not a machinist.”

Find your champions. Seed the community with members who are committed to its purpose, who care about the community, its members and its mission. Find employee champions who are dedicated to the cause and empower them to participate.

Keep content fresh and relevant. Know what your members want and deliver it on a regular basis. Post fresh content to the site twice a week, add photos and videos every other week, start or join a discussion several time per week.

Be informative. Offer interesting content that will help members solve their problems. What are the biggest problems your customers and their family members face? Provide content related to those problems.

Build a reputation as an expert. In your staff, family members, and residents, your organization has many experts in many fields. Allow these people to share their expertise in the forums or in a blog post.

Be persistent. You can’t expect to build a large vibrant community overnight. Online communities are like marathons, not sprints – gardens, not fast food joints. Nurture, and keep at it.

Welcome new members and encourage them to participate. Send new members a personalized welcome message, make them feel at home, and teach them how to get involved. Avoid sending canned welcome messages.

Create interactions and contributions around your services. Foster opportunities for customers, prospects, and staff to talk about your brand. This is called “social commerce” and it can be a powerful tool to drive interest AND sales.

Focus on inspiring, not perspiring. Don’t worry so much about how many people are visiting the site, how many members you have, and how many prospects who visit the site convert to sales. It’s more important to focus on creating authentic emotional connectedness, interesting conversations, and a sense of purpose within the community. The rest will take care of itself.

Have a good community manager. Your community manager can help with everything listed above and can be a catalyst for growth and a partner for success. What does a community manager do? A lot. Here’s a list.

What other things can you think of that will ensure the success of your online community?

Like this post? Here are more like it:

Need Help Building, Growing, or Managing Your Online Community? Hire The Guy Who Wrote This Post.

Posted in ALFA, Best Practices, Facebook, Online Community | Leave a comment

New Facebook Page Marketing Guidelines and Benchmarks [REPORT]

Posted on Wednesday, August 25th, 2010 by Brian Geyser

This new report issued by Altimeter Group can help senior living, LTC, and home care companies make the most of Facebook. The report, based on input from 34 industry vendors and consulting agencies, outlines eight criteria for determining the success of Facebook pages from companies’ perspectives, and in doing so provides a useful set of general guidelines for marketers managing or launching Pages. Here it is. Enjoy.

The 8 Success Criteria For Facebook Page Marketing

View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.

For industry-specific guidance and support with your social media or online community initiatives, drop us a line. We’re here to help.

Posted in Best Practices, Facebook, Guidelines | 1 Comment

Join Our Growing CareNetworks Facebook Community

Posted on Friday, July 30th, 2010 by Brian Geyser

If you’re a fan of CareNetworks, you follow our blog, you’re a senior living, LTC, or home care professional, or you just love social media and want to learn how to apply it to your senior care business, the CareNetworks Facebook Community is for you. This small but growing community is where we post interesting content, share tips and resources, and dialog with our fans and friends. Join us by clicking the image below. We’ll see you there!

You can also visit us on:

Thank you!

Posted in Facebook | Leave a comment

BrightStar Care Shines Using Social Media Tools and Strategy [INTERVIEW]

Posted on Friday, July 23rd, 2010 by Brian Geyser

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 social technologies. If you would like to have your organization included in this series, contact us.

For this interview, Jennifer Hill connected with Erin Schmidt, Marketing and Communications Coordinator for one of our favorite socially savvy companies, BrightStar Care. BrightStar was just featured in our new Social Media Video, which you can view here.

Interview

Q: What is your company’s primary goal of using social media?

A: Our primary goal for social media is two-pronged: we seek to “get found” by and add value for individuals, families and organizations who/that may need us (providing helpful content, serving as a resource), and then earn the trust of qualified leads that will convert into client business for our 150+ locations nationwide.

Q: What types of social media tools do you use and why did you choose them?

A: We maintain an active presence in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and publish our videos to YouTube.

Twitter: Twitter serves as a great engagement platform as well as a river of information to stay on the pulse of what is being talked about in our industry.

Facebook: For starters, one of our target audiences (women aged 55+) is the fastest growing demographic on Facebook, but beyond that the platform allows for a lot more interactivity, better means of identifying where key audiences may be engaging and the ability to share multiple forms of content.

LinkedIn: LinkedIn has been important to our staffing and recruiting efforts, in both identifying qualified candidates to fill more skilled positions as well as key referral sources. But overall, the ability to serve as a resource in the Q & A forums is a value not to be ignored, as we view this type of activity as spreading seeds throughout the Web to help those in need to find us.

Q: Are you planning to expand your social media reach?

A: Yes, everything we do, both online and offline, is geared toward increasing our overall reach. In fact, we have seen significant incremental growth over the past six months and, with new features and functionality rolling out over the next six months, we predict that this will continue to grow.

Q: How much time do you invest in social media per week?

A: At the Corporate level, we invest no more than five to ten hours each week, but this does not include the time we’ve taken to create a series of “Inbound Marketing” webinars we’ve created to train our franchisees on how to leverage social media, online listening, link building, etc. to ramp up their online presence.

Q: Have you seen a return on your investment?

A: While it’s difficult to monetize the value of “reach,” having a captive audience of qualified leads with which to create multiple touch points has had a significant value in and of itself. In addition, a growing portion of our Website traffic comes from the various social media platforms and we’ve recently added some additional means to track these visits through the sales funnel on the back-end to calculate ROI from a dollar standpoint. Here are some interesting statistics:

Worth noting: we endured a Website re-design in February, so these numbers may be the result of a number of factors and not just social media.

Reach. Our current reach is over four times what it was six months ago – equating to an average of just over 500 contacts per month.
Website traffic. Site traffic is up by just over 20% in the past six months (potentially due in part to our other new Website changes), but the number of social media referrals to our site has quadrupled in the past year.
Lead base. We’re still evaluating the impact of social media on our lead generation.
Marketing costs. Aside from our time, social media is free, so the improved Web traffic and significant growth of our reach has cost us very little compared to other marketing initiatives.

Q: How do you measure the success of your social media strategy?

A: Primarily, the number of Website visits (and, soon, the number and quality of leads) and reach (number of blog subscribers, Twitter followers, LinkdeIn connections, Facebook fans, YouTube subscribers).

Q: What are your biggest challenges?

A: One of the biggest challenges has been conveying the benefits of leveraging social media to our franchisees and, again, the issue of “monetizing” reach.

Q: Who manages your social media initiatives?

A: At the Corporate level, our social media strategy is devised and executed upon by the marketing department.

Q: In regards to content, what do you think is a good strategy?

A: We’ve experimented with a few different things, but we love the idea of recruiting guest authors and tapping other industry experts to contribute. We’ve also set up an online listening station to gather content ideas in addition to taking common questions individuals, families and organizations have to inspire our content.

Q: Do you think that companies are apprehensive about using social media because of HIPAA restrictions?

A: Yes, absolutely.

Q: Does HIPAA effect the way that you use social media?

A: The privacy of the individuals, families and organizations we care for is of the utmost importance to us. We are certain never to provide any information that may be remotely sensitive and/or confidential. This methodology is woven into the fabric of all that we do at BrightStar, both online and offline.

Q: What new features do you see your company using to help expand you social media outreach in the coming months?

A: We’ll be rolling out the ability for our franchisees to add up to five pages to their local Websites in addition to the ability to blog, which will undoubtedly ramp up their local social media efforts and, thus, contribute to our national strategy.

Q: do you view social media as a PR tool in addition to a marketing tool?

A: Absolutely! In addition to being able to publish content and interact with our target audiences, social media is a great means of highlighting key happenings via a public facing platform.

Q: Do you have any PR examples?

A: From time to time, our franchisees will get some media coverage and we’ll use our blog to feature these stories and publish them to our social media profiles as a means of giving them some additional “push” (and, of course, kudos).

Q: Finally, Do any of your C-level executives use social media? Why or why not?

A: Many of our executive team members maintain an active presence on LinkedIn and some on Facebook and our CEO is on Twitter. But LinkedIn makes the most sense from a networking and business perspective. In fact, our executive team’s collective presence on LinkedIn has generated just over 1,000 Website visits in the past six months.

Like this post? Read more like it here:

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Posted in Best Practices, Blogging, Case Study, Facebook, HIPAA, homecare, Inbound Marketing, Internet Marketing, Interview, LinkedIn, ROI, Social Media, Stats, strategy, Success Series, Twitter, YouTube | Leave a comment

Using Facebook to Increase Senior Living Community Tours [Example]

Posted on Friday, July 23rd, 2010 by Brian Geyser

I was recently contacted via Twitter by Arbor Company Senior Living who informed me that one of their communities recently had three tours directly related to leads that came in from their Facebook Page. Here’s the tweet…

Posted in Facebook, Inbound Marketing, Senior Living, Twitter | Leave a comment

Five Examples of Social Media Use in Home Care and Senior Living

Posted on Monday, June 28th, 2010 by Brian Geyser

These days, an increasing number of senior living, home care, and LTC companies are using social media to reach out to social customers and prospects. At CareNetworks, we’re always on the look out for companies who are innovating in this space and who are helping to shape social media best practices for the industry. So we scanned the web and found five companies worth taking a look at.

1. Senior Helpers. This non-medical home care company has a well designed website that acts as their social media hub with active outposts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. They also have a WordPress blog
where they post generic articles about wellness, aging, and care giving. Their reach is pretty significant with 2,302 Twitter followers, 488 Facebook fans, and thousands of views of their many YouTube videos.

2. Adeste In-Home Care. This welcoming site is definitely one of my favorites. The non-medical home care company has an awesome blog
that is updated multiple times per month with search-optimized articles such as, “Questions to Ask Before You Hire a Companion Agency for Your Elderly Parents.” The blog provides great information and tips, especially for people whose parents need home care. On Twitter, they post tons of informational articles to over 1,550 followers. I was also very impressed with the list of resources they provide. They suggest support sites like Senior Information Network and SeniorNet to help family members feel comfortable and confident with their decisions. Their Facebook page seems to be new with very little content and only a few fans.

3. Emeritus Senior Living.
This national senior living company has definitely made a dent in the social media world. They have one of the best senior living Facebook pages
I’ve seen with over 1,440 fans. There are tons of images of different events they’ve held or conferences they have attended. It includes discussion boards and personal testimonials about the transition into senior living from both residents and family members. I was also impressed by the “Ask the Expert” portion of the website. Viewers can ask Dr. Vicki Rackner, M.D. any question and have an answer within 24 hours. Emeritus has partnered with an agency called Aging with Grace that seniors and their loved ones can call with questions and see what others are asking. They also have a Twitter page with about 345 followers.

4. Provision Living. This senior living company website includes links to developing Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn pages, as well as a tab dedicated to their Senior Assisted Living Blog. The blog is updated often and keeps readers informed on current events and happenings in the each of the companies communities. Blog readers have the option to e-mail articles or share them on Twitter, Facebook, Digg and LinkedIn. The blog’s most popular article to date is “Green Tree at Post Road Opens New Units and Adds Jobs.”

5. Senior Living Communities. While this senior living company has a Fledgling social media presence, what they seem to do very well is video. For example, Donald Thompson, the company CEO, has a series of video blog posts where he talks candidly about everything from the cost of living in one of their communities to the company’s stability over the past 21 years. The videos are very well done, except for the fact that there doesn’t seem to be a way to share them across the social web – big mistake! Additionally, the company’s Facebook page is not very engaging and doesn’t take advantage of the great videos they produce. This is a good example of missed opportunity where a company has great social objects (videos) to share, but no way to easily share them on social sites.

If you find other senior living, home care, or LTC companies experimenting with social media and they’re worthy of writing about, let us know about them in the comments section below. Also, we welcome your feedback on these sites!

To learn more about how we can help you build or enhance your social media presence, contact us.

You can also join our free Online Marketing Community for marketing professionals and executives in senior living, homecare, LTC, and hospice. Just click the image blow:

Jennifer Hill
is currently at senior at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York. She is a Communications major concentrating in Public Relations and Journalism and minoring in Psychology. You can connect with her on Twitter on LinkedIn.

Posted in Best Practices, Blogging, Facebook, homecare, Senior Living, Social Hub | 1 Comment

How Social Media Can Empower Senior Living Companies [Case Study]

Posted on Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 by Brian Geyser

I write a lot about senior living and social media here at CareNetworks and I love how social technologies are transforming the industry for the better. Case in point:

I recently discovered Senior Living Residences (SLR) via Twitter and I wanted to share what they are up to because they have a pretty advanced presence on the social web and we can learn a lot from them about how senior living companies can leverage social media for the good of the company – and their constituents. First, their website homepage (shown below) is very well designed with a good mix of relevant information, nice placement, and opportunity to connect with the company via Facebook, Linkedin, blogs, and YouTube. It also provides ample opportunity for visitors to easily share content from the page with their friends using Add This.

I love the “Unscripted Videos” section which demonstrates both the utility of YouTube and the power of “word-of-mouth” marketing. With a flip camera and a little creativity, senior living companies can produce an unlimited stream of entertaining, helpful, and informative, videos to share with the world. Done right, these videos can provide proof that you, as a company, are who you say you are.

The SLR Facebook Page is very well done. The landing page highlights their various senior living communities with contact information and links to each community. They also showcase the SLR CEU Program and list employment opportunities using separate tabs for each. Content from their various blogs is posted automatically to their Facebook Page along with videos from YouTube and calendar events from across the entire company.

But my favorite aspect of the site is the Alzheimer’s Care Blog. This is a fantastic resource for members of the SLR community (residents, family members, staff, prospects, etc.) and the general community who are caring for people with dementia. Content for the blog is produced by staff from across the company’s ecosystem – which is a fantastic example of how to leverage champions from within your organization to create great content for your various social sites.

Social media empowers senior living and other senior care organizations by giving them tools to connect, communicate, and share in ways never before possible. These tools provide an opportunity for companies to engage their audience, build trust and credibility, and be part of the conversations that are taking place both on and off the Web.

There are many more examples of senior living, LTC, homecare, and hospice providers who are pioneering the use of social media on my blog. If your organization is using social media successfully and you would like to be featured on this blog, contact us. Is your company using social media? If not, why not?

Posted in Employment Branding, Facebook, hospice, LinkedIn, Recruiting Staff, Senior Living, Social Media, strategy, Success Series | Leave a comment

Home Care Company Creates Social Media Hub

Posted on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 by Brian Geyser

At Home Personal Care, a Utah-based home care company that we’ve covered here before because of their amazing Twitter prowess just launched a new website with an impressive amount of social media integration. Noelle Kurth, who heads up AHPC’s coroporate marketing and communications activities was intimately involved in the sites planning and design.

At Home Personal Care Website

Notice the many ways a visitor to the site can easily connect with the company and share site content with their various social networks. Right from the front page, a visitor can get information about the company and its services, sign up for a company newsletter, subscribe to their blog, connect with the company on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, add social bookmarks and much more.

The site is simple, clean, and easy to navigate with social connectivity built into every page. It’s built on a powerful but easy-to-use open source platform called Modx which provides a simple content management system (CMS) allowing Noelle to add, edit, and manage site content herself anytime, from anywhere.

I suspect the combination of this well-designed new site and Noelle’s keen understanding of how to use social media for business, marketing and PR purposes will serve AHPC well in the coming months and years. I’ll be connecting with Noelle in a few months to get an update on how the site is help AHPC with business.

Related Posts:

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For more on how your company can benefit from social media and online community, contact us. You can also join our free Online Marketing Community for marketing professionals and executives in senior living, homecare, LTC, and hospice. Just click the image blow:

Posted in Facebook, Social Hub, Social Media, Twitter | Leave a comment

For Immanuel Senior Living, Social Media is a No-Brainer [Part 1]

Posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 by Brian Geyser

This is the latest post in our Social Media Success Series, which features interviews with innovative senior living, eldercare, home care, and long-term care providers who are using social media as a business/marketing tool. If you would like to have your organization considered for inclusion, contact us.

For this post, we interviewed Roxann Rogers Meyer, Director of Sales/Marketing  for Immanuel Senior Living, the leading provider of senior living in Nebraska.

1. What online properties, aside from your website, do you own/operate and how long have you been using each?
We’ve been using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn since October 2009.

2. Do you have a blog?

We do not have a blog right now, but it’s something we’re looking into launching in the near future.

3. Why did you choose each of these particular social media tools?

Because social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are where our target audience is searching and these are the tools they are using. As a retirement community, Immanuel Senior Living is in the midst of a perfect storm. The 2000 census found that there were 35 million Americans at the age of 65 or older. In addition, the U.S. Census Bureau projects that by the year 2030, approximately 71.5 million Americans will be over the age of 65. That means the percentage of people 65 or older will more than double from 2000 and will make up nearly 20% of the entire projected U.S. population. In addition, adult children and prospects are actively using these popular social media sites to network and gain information.

According to a digital marketing firm iStrategyLabs, from January to July of 2009, the number of Facebook users older than 55 jumped by more than 500 percent. In addition, people 35 to 54 now are the largest age group on the site, accounting for 28.2 percent of users in this country.

For us, it’s the opportunity to connect with these people and show them what kind of lifestyle they or a loved one will have if they choose to come live in our community. It’s also an opportunity to educate the general public on senior issues and aging.

4. Why haven’t you launched a blog yet?

We decided against blogging right from the start because while it’s important to have a social media presence, it’s also important to put out fresh content on a regular basis. We felt if we launched our social media sites & also started a blog—that would be a lot to handle all at once. Right now we are going through a brand study and once we’ve completed that, we will make those decision about when to launch the blog. As for content, ideally, we would like several blogs from various perspectives including a day-in-the-life of a resident, from a CEO’s perspective as well as health care.

Immanuel is the leader in senior housing in our area, so we have a lot of expertise on a variety of topics. We are considering using WordPress to build a blog, and then linking it to the homepage of our website, but that too is still in the developing stage.

Immanuel Senior Living Homepage

5. Who manages your social media sites?

Our corporate marketing assistant, Lora Ullerich.

6. How much time does it take Lora to manage your social media activities per week?

She usually checks in several times a day, tries to tweet/retweet at least once a day and post fresh content on Youtube and Facebook once a week. It’s something that you continually have to keep up and not just post and ignore.

7. Are your senior executives planning to use the social media tools you’ve chosen?

We have asked some key members at each of our communities if they are interested in joining in the social media conversation. People like activity directors, wellness managers, health care directors and others who can provide some interesting insight into the day-in-the-life of a senior living community. The key again, is, someone who can consistently provide fun, interesting content that is also meaningful for our audience.

Immanuel Senior Living YouTube Video

8. How are you using each tool and who are you trying to reach?

Again, we’re trying to reach prospective and current residents along with adult children to educate them about the lifestyle at Immanuel Senior Living and to gain insight on how we’re doing.

9. Do you have a social media strategy?

Our social media strategy is to inform and respond to issues regarding Immanuel Senior Living, the senior living industry and those affecting seniors.

10. Are you getting help from outside professionals or are you trying to do it all on your own?

Staying on top of the current trends in social media involves research, attending conferences/webinars, and looking to experts in the social media realm who continually are putting out fresh content and answering questions.

11. Do you have a social media policy or set of guidelines? How are you addressing HIPAA?

We are currently working on one. We are looking at what other industry experts are doing and then fine-tuning it for our purposes. Since we’re not talking about a senior’s health issue, there’s not necessarily a HIPAA violation–at the same time, our resident’s privacy is something we take very seriously. For some videos, we do have consent forms signed and make sure our residents feel comfortable being part of the story. If they don’t feel comfortable, we do not feature them in the story, video or picture. Each community is the resident’s home and we are fortunate enough to work there.

Part 2

Be sure to read Part 2 of this post where Roxann provides insight into the realities of social media time management, success measurement, and ROI; and shares some real-life stories about how Immanuel is benefiting from their social media efforts. Stay tuned by suscribing to this blog via RSS or email.

Contact Information

Roxann Rogers Meyer, Director of Sales/Marketing

rrogers@ihsi.org 6757 Newport Ave. Suite 200 Omaha, NE 68152

__________________________________________________________________________

For more on how your company can benefit from social media and online community, contact us. You can also join our free Online Marketing Community for marketing professionals in senior living, homecare, LTC, and hospice. Just click the image blow:

Posted in Customer Service, Facebook, Guidelines, Policies, ROI, Twitter | Leave a comment

Senior Living, LTC, And Social Media: What To Expect In 2010 [Part 2]

Posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 by Brian Geyser

In Part 1
of this series, we reviewed some of the important lessons we learned in 2009 from the world of social media as they apply to the senior living and long-term care industries. In this segment, we will look at lessons learned from interviews I did with real people within senior living and LTC companies who are actually using social media applications to drive business and improve the customer/prospect experience; and we look ahead to 2010 – the year that companies will “go social.” To read all of the interviews in the Social Media Success Series, click here.

2009: What We Learned From The People Doing It

The vast majority of senior living and LTC companies are not currently using social media. However, we are seeing a lot of evidence that this will change in 2010. Everyday, new blogs, Twitter accounts, Facebook Pages, and online communities are being launched by companies across the country in every segment of our industry.
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn seem to be the tools of choice right now in the industry. Blogs and branded online community sites are close behind.
Most companies are attempting to dip their toes in the social media ocean by using internal resources. A few have hired professionals to launch their social media campaigns, or to take existing campaigns to the next level.
Senior living and LTC companies are very interested in using social media tools to listen to what customers and prospects are saying, as well as to join in on the conversations.
Social tools are helping companies build relationships with customers, prospects, partners and referrals sources.
Several companies are using social media tools for recruiting and employer branding purposes.
It often takes a team of people within each organization to manage the social media work load.
Keeping up with advances in social technology is one of the biggest challenges companies face.
Many senior living and LTC companies are hesitant to get into social media because they fear the things people may say about them online. They also worry about privacy and HIPAA issues.
None of the companies we interviewed had formal social media policies or procedures in place.
Companies are using social media to position themselves as online resources where customers and prospects can obtain helpful information about the challenges they are facing.
Content creation and community management are two major challenges for companies in our industry.
None of the companies we interviewed are particularly focused on ROI. They tend to be more interested in building relationships and brand awareness at this point and looking at social media as a long-term investment.
Several companies are going all out and allowing residents, family members, and staff to post to their sites.

What To Expect In 2010

Based on trends in our industry and others, we can expect 2010 to be the year that senior living, homecare, LTC, and other eldercare providers begin adopting social media on a large scale. ALFA is dedicating resources to it, AARP has a major social media presence – including an online community, heck, even the Pope is getting in on the action!

The bottom line is that websites alone are no longer enough. The new social Web demands that companies use social tools to listen, communicate, engage, dialog, publish, support, respond, and, most importantly, build trusting relationships with customers. Here’s a bonus SlideShare presentation from my favorite new media analyst, Jeremiah Owyang. Enjoy.

Social Media Trends for 2010

View more presentations from Jeremiah Owyang.

To learn more about using social media and online community for business, contact us. You can also join our free online marketing community specifically for senior living, home health, LTC, and hospice providers.

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Posted in ALFA, Facebook, LinkedIn, Online Community, Twitter | Leave a comment

Senior Living, LTC, And Social Media: What We Learned In 2009 [Part 1]

Posted on Wednesday, December 30th, 2009 by Brian Geyser

This was the year that senior living, long-term care, homecare, and hospice providers began experimenting with social media. Social tools like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn; blogging/publishing platforms like WordPress; and white-label social/group networking platforms like Ning and Groupsite have started to penetrate these industry segments and are slowly beginning to change the way these companies are doing business. Even ALFA, the Assisted Living Federation of America, launched a social media initiative this year and is active on multiple social sites.

Since August when I launched this blog, I have posted many articles about companies in our industry, both small and large, that are beginning to use social technologies to derive business benefits. Some posts feature interviews with industry insiders who share their experiences and offer great insights into what’s working, and what’s not. Other articles provide information, tips, and resources designed to help your company navigate the social media landscape. In case you missed any, here is a list of my Top 10 Most Popular Posts for 2009:

What We Have Learned: A Year In Review [Part 1 of 2]

Below is a summary of important lessons from the world of social media as they apply to the senior living and long-term care industries, along with links to more detailed content if you want more juice:

Social technologies are transformative and are here to stay. The statistics are mind blowing. This video drives that point home.
The static, brochure-style website is going the way of the dinosaurs. Dynamic, interactive websites that encourage dialog and participation and help you build relationships with customers and prospects is where it’s at. If you don’t have social and community-building elements built into your website, it’s time to rethink your online strategy.
Your customers are online, in a big way, and they love social networking and social media. This video from MSNBC is one example. The fact that seniors are Facebook’s fastest growing demographic, by far, is another.
Many experts, including myself, believe that social media/networking can and will have a profound impact on the quality of life of seniors living at home and in retirement communities – allowing them to stay connected to friends and family like never before. This study from the University of Alabama, and others like it, aim to prove that point with real data.
Social media can be used for employer branding purposes and to help you recruit top talent. Sites like LinkedIn and Twitter can help you attract and engage both management and care staff. Branded online communities, like the one over at Terrace Communities, can function as a recruiting tool by posting jobs in the discussion forums and asking prospective employees participate in the online community during the interview process.
Privacy and HIPAA issues, while important in our industry, should not prevent companies from adopting social technologies. With the proper strategies, policies, and guidelines in place, senior living and LTC companies can safely participate on the social web.
A company blog is a critical tool in the social media tool box. It can drive traffic to your site, position your company as a trusted resource, and help you build community on the web. Whether you have a company blog or have yet to build one, these articles can help with your blogging strategy.
Keeping up with the fast paced world of social media can be a job in and of itself, and presents as one of the biggest challenges for companies in every industry. New tools and applications enter the market every day. For companies in our industry, these 7 tools are the best place to start.
Most senior living and LTC companies I’ve interviewed believe that social media ROI is difficult, if not impossible, to measure. Lucky for us, a couple of smart social media pros have shown that this is not necessarily the case. These articles cover the all-important ROI issue.

In part 2 of this series, which will be published next week, I will summarize what we learned from the interviews I conducted in the Social Media Success Series.

Build Your Social Media Presence In 2010

Thinking about starting a company blog? Interested in getting into social media but don’t know where to start? Fascinated by the prospect of online community? Contact us. CareNetworks is the only company dedicated soley to providing social media strategy and solutions to senior living and LTC providers.

Brian Geyser, APRN-BC, MSN is a clinician, consultant, educator, blogger, social media strategist, online community manager and the founder of Carenetworks, LLC. He blogs regularly here at Carenetworks.com and would love to connect with you on Twitter, Linkedin, and/or Facebook.

Posted in ALFA, Blogging, Facebook, Groupsite.com, HIPAA, LinkedIn, Online Community, ROI, strategy, Twitter | Leave a comment

Even My Local Farmers Market Is Kicking Butt Using Social Media

Posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 by Brian Geyser

So I’m wandering around the farmers market at Bishop’s Orchards in Guilford, Connecticut, where I occasionally shop for produce, and posted throughout the store are these signs asking me to become a fan of Bishop’s on Facebook, and that if I did, they would donate $1 to a local charity. Being a social media guy and a true fan of Bishop’s, I decided I better check it out.

When I got home, I unpacked the produced, jumped on my laptop in the kitchen, and headed over to Facebook to look up Bishop’s Fan Page. When I got there, I was frankly astonished at what I saw. Little old Bishop’s Orchards Market, the relatively small grocery store where I like to get fresh produce after riding my mountain bike in the woods, had 5,036 fans. Holy crap! Not only that, their Facebook page was very active, pretty sophisticated, and had a very engaged fan base.

Bishops uses their Facebook page to keep customers and fans informed about events, sales and other items of interest. They regularly post photos of customers and organize charity events and fund raisers for local sports teams and community organizations. They keep fans engaged by holding contests and promoting their Facebook page on their website and in their store.

Bishop’s clearly has someone at their company who manages their Facebook Page because the content is always fresh (kind of like their produce) and the fans are clearly engaged. While Facebook itself is free, the person who is managing their Facebook Page is not. That person has to take time to develop and evolve Bishop’s Facebook strategy, regularly post relevant content to the site, respond to fan comments, promote the site to new fans, and create engaging campaigns to keep existing fans coming back. That is the investment Bishop’s is making in building, growing, and maintaining their online community. Are they getting a positive return on this investment? All you have to do is take one look at their Facebook Page to figure out the answer:

Through their Facebook Page, Bishop’s has direct access to over five thousand customers that voluntarily signed up to follow the company’s activities on a social media site. I think ROI has been established.

This is a great example of one business building community using a popular social media tool. Now if Bishops can do it, every senior living and senior services company in the country can too. Whether or not you use Facebook, or another social media tool depends on your strategy, which I will cover in more detail in future posts. Great work Bishop’s!

Related Posts

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Brian Geyser, APRN-BC, MSN is a clinician, consultant, educator,
blogger, online community manager and the founder of Carenetworks, LLC. He blogs
regularly here at Carenetworks.com and would love to connect with you
on Twitter, Linkedin, and/or Facebook.

Posted in Facebook, Online Community | Leave a comment

7 Best Social Media Tools For Senior Living And Long-Term Care

Posted on Monday, November 30th, 2009 by Brian Geyser

As we’ve seen from my Social Media Success interview series and related posts, innovative senior living and LTC companies are beginning to discover the many benefits of social media and online community. These early adopters are paving the way for everyone else as they discover what works, and what doesn’t on the social Web. Based on these posts, I’ve compiled a list (not in any particular order) of the top seven social media tools for the industry, along with some descriptions of why they made the list and how they can help your organization.

Social media is not a panacea. Your online presence and activities won’t replace the relationships you build with residents and families and the great work you do in the physical world. However, used properly, these tools can accelerate your growth by helping you expand your online reach, attract and engage new customers, build relationships with prospects, and participate in the online conversations. Here’s the list:

Twitter. Noelle Kurth, Marketing Director for At Home Personal Care in Mesa, AZ showed us in this post that Twitter can be an easy, powerful, and free tool for networking with other professionals, broadcasting news and information about your company, recruiting, and building brand awareness. Twitter can help you build a community around your brand as well as keep you on top of important industry news and events in real time. By syndicating content from your blog or website to Twitter, you can build a following, enable sharing of your content, and drive traffic back to your website.
Facebook. If there is one place online that you can bet many of your customers and prospects are hanging out, it’s Facebook. Building a Facebook Page is a smart move for companies in our industry because it allows you to tap into an existing popular online community of boomers and seniors that’s growing by the minute, literally. People who already have a Facebook account (and there’s only about 300 million last I checked) can easily follow and engage with your company. The best part is that they can easily share their love for you with their friends. Like Twitter, Facebook Pages can be used to syndicate blog content, post news, information, and events, and share other multimedia content (like YouTube videos) with your followers. And like Twitter, Facebook can be used to help with employer branding and recruiting.
Linkedin. This is THE social network for professionals. If you’re a senior living or LTC professional, you should have a free Linkedin account. Linkedin allows you to build a professional network, share content, post job openings, research prospects, join industry groups, participate in forums, scan industry news, and much more.
Blog. These days, a company blog is an essential tool in the online arsenal. I review the details of why you need a company blog in this post, but the bottom line is that a blog is a fantastic tool for building community, and for many companies, it can serve as a social media hub. Content and links are currency on the new social Web, and a blog allows you to publish content and distribute that content to your social media outposts like Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin. From there, your community can share your content with their friends – driving traffic back to your blog and website organically. This is called inbound marketing and it’s much more powerful these days than in-your-face interruptive marketing. Another creative way to use a blog is to build one for your customers to use, like Beacon Hill Retirement Community did. You can check out an example of that here.
YouTube. My friends over at Brookdale Senior Living do some good stuff with YouTube. Here’s an example. YouTube makes it very easy to publish video content to your Website. If you have a blog, it’s even easier to take your YouTube videos and embed them right into your posts. Video is an incredibly powerful medium, and with little or no money, you can create fantastic video content that your Twitter and Facebook fans will love (and share).
Branded Online Community. For a more comprehensive social media solution (and here’s the shameless plug for my business), a branded online community like the ones built by Terrace Communities and Living Well Assisted Living At Home may be your best bet. Branded online communities have a distinct advantage over using, say, Facebook to build community in that you have much more control over the platform, the features, the branding, the ads, and the content. Most community platforms include a blog and discussion forums and some, like the ones mentioned above, come with community calendars, file cabinets, and photo galleries – all of which can be syndicated to your social media outposts like Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook. Learn more about branded online communities here.
Email. Yes that’s right, I said email. Email is actually the largest and most popular (by far) social media and online community platform in the world. If you think about it, anybody who uses email has an address book filled with the contact information of people in their various networks – and they connect, communicate, and share with their networks via email all the time. Tools like eNewsletters using platforms like MailChimp and ConstantContact can be a great way to stay in touch with your customers and provide them with interesting news and information (with linkbacks to your site or blog) that they can pass on to their email networks.

While all of these tools take proper strategy, resources, and time, the potential benefits to your organization, your customers, your staff, and your prospects are clear. Social networks and social media are fundamentally changing the way your customers and prospects learn, evaluate and ultimately make decisions. Social tools like the ones mentioned above are increasingly influential in marketing and sales practices. Customers seek evidence online to validate decisions and get instant feedback from their peers through social networks. By joining the conversation and giving people an opportunity to connect with you online, you have the ability to educate, inform, support and engage your audience in new ways never before possible. Are you using social media?

Related Posts

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Posted in Blogging, Email Marketing, Facebook, LinkedIn, Online Communities, Social Hub, Social Media, Twitter | Leave a comment

Nation’s Largest Senior Living Company Embraces Social Media [Interview]

Posted on Friday, November 6th, 2009 by Brian Geyser

This is the latest post in our Social Media
Success Series, which features interviews with innovative senior
living, eldercare, home care, and long-term care providers who are using
social media as a business/marketing tool. If you would like to have your
organization considered for inclusion, contact us.

Brookdale Senior Living is the largest owner/operator of senior
living communities in the U.S. serving over 52,000 residents across the nation in a variety of settings. They are a leading national provider of
senior-related services employing over 32,000 associates nation wide. For this post, we interviewed Eric Marsh, Brookdale’s Web Content Manager.

Brookdale Senior Living Website

Interview

1. What online properties, aside from your website, do you own/operate? We as a company have really embraced the idea of using social media, and have explored many different options. Currently we are actively using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn.

2. Why did you choose those? We chose these for for a couple of different reasons. These social media sites are those that have received the most buzz, and have the largest audience at the moment. The idea of social media is to see what people are discussing, connect with them by contributing to the conversation and hopefully act as a resource for someone in need, and, ideally, building a relationship with them. We believe these four sites target who we’re trying to connect with to have a conversation. That said, we always have an eye out for other venues, and do not intend to limit ourselves.

3. Who manages them? I take charge with our company’s social media sites, such as the Facebook and Twitter accounts. Ray Swatzell, Recruiting Systems Manager, and Lindsay Elias, Staffing Coordinator, take care of the recruiting sites, such as our LinkedIn and Facebook recruiting pages, which we’ve just started constructing. Some of our associates have professional pages on Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, and use those separately from our company sites.

4. How much time does it take to manage per week? It’s hard to say how much time, because every day is different when it comes to social media. We post all of our press releases as well as senior living news that we feel is noteworthy. We also keep our ear to the ground for people mentioning our brand or senior living topics so that we can read about or comment further. We try to keep up with the conversation and manage our sites as often as we can so we are able to connect with people quickly, rather then letting time go by and their questions go unanswered.

5. How are you using each and who are you trying to reach? Twitter has been utilized to connect with other senior living professionals to discuss trends and hot topics. It has been a beneficial tool for broadcasting company and industry news. It’s also useful for our recruiters to announce our open positions and it is also a good tool for learning about what others are saying regarding our brand and senior living.

Facebook is a great way to connect with people of all ages, since it’s become available to everyone. Our recruiters have joined numerous Facebook groups and pages to help recruit for specific candidates. Some of these groups include “Allied Health Jobs Available,” “Jobs & Vacancies Announcements!” and “Careers.” Facebook is also useful as a branding tool as well as a place for Brookdale associates to connect.

Linkedin has become a valuable recruitment tool, due to the fact that you can find qualified people, post jobs, and connect on a professional level. Our recruiters use it as a tool to recruit
first-rate employees. We just started this for our recruiters; we also
have a Brookdale Senior Living group on Linkedin and most of our
company uses it.

6. Do you have a social media strategy? Our social media strategy is to inform and react to issues regarding Brookdale Senior Living and the senior living industry.

7. What is your primary goal for using social media? Our goal is to provide information to those seeking it regarding Brookdale Senior Living, its affiliates, its programs, our individual communities and/or our industry as a whole. Our goal is to drive people to our Web site so that they can learn more about what our company offers for their needs.

8. Are you planning to expand your social media reach? We are definitely interested in exploring new sites in social media. Right now a few of our communities are exploring social media by using MyWayVillage, which provides our residents with a way to connect with their families, share their stories, and manage their daily schedules. We’re really excited to see how it progresses.

8. Are people responding? People who would have not normally connected with Brookdale are taking notice. We have made our presence known on these social networking sites, and people who are searching for our services or our industry as a whole are finding us.

9. What are your biggest challenges so far? There’s only so much you can do with the visual content of these sites, since they’re formatted to look the same as other pages and “tweets.” Keeping our information up to date is the best way to insure our sites reflect our brand integrity, and it can take up quite some time.

10. Did you have to try to convince someone at your organization to try social media? Yes, not everyone is aware of the many benefits of social media. Many people think that social media is just for teenagers to gossip or for family members across the country to connect, but it’s much more. There are many ways social media can benefit a company and their individual goals.

11. Are employees on board with your efforts? Relationships are key; many of us have connected with numerous employees who have added Brookdale as “friends” or “connections” to foster and grow relationships across the miles.

12. How are you measuring success? We use a variety of tools to measure how many people are being directed back to our main Web page, but mostly we’re just pleased when we can reach out to others through these sites to inform them about Brookdale, whether it’s a future resident, someone in the industry or someone wanting to work for us. We also measure success by looking at the increase in followers for each of our social media platforms

13. What’s the one piece of advice you would give other senior living, home care, eldercare, or dementia care companies about getting into social media? Social media can be as powerful as you want it to be. It just takes time and effort to grow your presence. Some companies put up a profile just because they read that it’s important, but if you don’t do anything with it, you won’t get anything in return. Set goals and take the time to nurture and grow your social media endeavors.

Takeaway Points

The people you want to reach are online. Brookdale understands that the people they want to reach are using sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Linkedin; and they regularly engage on those sites where their audience hangs out. This helps people both find and connect with them online.
Social media can help with recruiting. Free tools like Linkedin and Twitter can help you find and attract top talent.
Social media helps you broadcast your message. Social media tools can be a great way to broadcast your newsletters, calendar events, press releases, company information, and helpful content to the world for free.
Social media helps you listen. Using social tools, you can find out what people are saying about you, your organization, and your industry – then respond accordingly.
The big social media sites and tools are limiting. Sites like Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook can be good, but can only take you so far in terms of branding and functionality. If you want to step up your game, you should consider building a branded online community for your website. Learn more about that here.
You get out what you put in. Social media and online community are not fast fix solutions or get rich quick schemes. To do it right, you’ve got to commit, devote resources, and be persistent. Done right, the rewards can be far more than just monetary.
Video Rocks. If you really want to impress, use video to engage your audience. Brookdale has an entire YouTube channel with tons of great video content for all to enjoy. Here’s a sample:

For more information about Brookdale, contact:

Holly Botsford
Brookdale Senior Living
Public Relations Manager
6737 W. Washington St., Suite 2300
Milwaukee, WI 53214
414-918-5314
hbotsford@brookdaleliving.com

You can also connect with Brookdale on:

Other Posts In This Series

Special Offer

For a free live social media readiness assessment for your organization, fill out our contact form and put the words “Brookdale offer” in the message.

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Posted in Employment Branding, Facebook, Interview, LinkedIn, Social Media, Success Series, Twitter, Video | Leave a comment

Blog, Twitter, & Facebook = Big ROI at SeniorsforLiving.com

Posted on Sunday, October 4th, 2009 by Brian Geyser

This is the third post in our new Social Media Success Series, which features interviews with innovative senior living, eldercare, home care, and dementia care companies who are using social media as a business/marketing tool. If you would like to have your organization considered for inclusion, contact us.

In this interview, Gina LaGuardia, Editorial Director at SeniorsforLiving.com shares some fantastic insights about how they are using Twitter, Facebook and a company blog to drive traffic to their Website, establish strategic alliances, nurture relationships, listen to and learn from others in the industry, extend their online reach, and build brand awareness.

Company Profile

SeniorsforLiving.com is a free consumer service that helps seniors and their families research, evaluate, compare and connect with quality assisted living, independent living, retirement communities, and other senior care providers.

Interview

1. What online properties, aside from your website, do you own/operate? We have a Twitter and Facebook account, plus a company blog on our Website.

Website

2. Why did you choose those? My personal experiences on Twitter have been immensely successful and edifying to my professional growth, so it made sense to try this for our business as well. As for Facebook, the statistics show tremendous growth in usage by baby boomers and seniors, and that’s our target audience. Our blog is our main content “voice.” Though we typically publish new features on our “Articles & Resources Page,” our blog — consistently updated five days a week — enables us to talk about current topics within the senior housing and senior care space/boomer trends/etc.

3. Who manages your blog, Twitter & Facebook accounts? I’m the editorial director for the company and I manage them. I have two bloggers who contribute to the blog, and I manage all posts. One blogger is a public policy coordinator for the Alzheimer’s Association and a former activities director at an assisted living community; the other works in health care.

4. How much time does it take you to manage the accounts per week? We are active on Twitter at least five days a week at various points throughout the day and night. We are in the process of allocating additional time to our Facebook group. On the blog, we update posts everyday, so it’s a full-time effort.

5. How are you using each and who do want to reach? Twitter has been an invaluable source for connecting with other professionals in our industry who have similar interests and target markets. Although many of our followers may be perceived as “competition,” the potential for establishing business development and affiliate relationships has far outweighed any of those concerns. We are also primarily utilizing Twitter and Facebook to deploy content from our blog and establish a working partnership with other blogs and sites that provide content around similar issues.

One project I am particularly proud of that has developed from our initiative on Twitter is our Seniors/Boomers: News You Can Use blog carnival, which ensures high page views with each installment and numerous linkbacks (great for SEO), as well as increasing our blog readership and keeping us abreast of topics being discussed about senior housing/caregiving/boomer issues, etc.

We also regularly feature guest bloggers’ contributions on our blog based on synergies either between our two companies and/or the sharing of a common interests/goals. We do not pay for guest blogs, but we typically “blog post swap” where we also contribute a post to their site/blog. Without our blog, we wouldn’t have much “meat” to engage our SM followers with, so I’d say that is the means to the end. The tool I most enjoy and from which I personally derive the most value is Twitter.

6. Do you have a social media strategy? We definitely have a strategy — that is, to use social media to engage potential users and/or those who care deeply about seniors. As I mentioned, the relationships we have made has served to enhance our business, hone our editorial message, and enable us to emerge as a leader among online senior housing/senior care directories.

7. What is your primary goal for using social media? To increase branding for our site across social networks, establish ourselves as a content leader in the space, and affiliate with those who are equally passionate about seniors and providing the best care for loved ones.

8. Are you planning to expand your social media reach? Yes, we are planning to increase our footprint on Facebook in coming months and are considering LinkedIn as another avenue for expansion.

9. Are people responding? They are, and those with whom we have connected have proven helpful both in terms of expanding our base of knowledge about issues related to senior housing and senior care and in expanding our audience. Social media is truly a community of colleagues and friends. The key is to find people with whom you share interests, goals, and passion. For us, we regularly watch the #seniors, #boomers, and #caregiving hashtags (on Twitter) and conduct those (and related) keyword searches. What may begin as a business initiative to garner a mass to whom you can share news of your services, offerings, products, etc. will turn into a group of people you respect, rely on for information, advice, and insight, etc. It’s truly an amazing thing to watch evolve and flourish!

10. What are your biggest challenges so far? There is a time issue…. The best cultivation of social media, in my opinion, is enhanced by an adequate investment of time.

11. Did you have to try to convince someone at your organization to try social media? The management of SeniorsforLiving.com has been very supportive of our social media efforts, and the rewards are plentiful — from increased site visits and SM referrals to connecting with our partners and clients online.

12. Are employees on board with your efforts? Yes, although I am the only representative Tweeting at this time.

13. How are you measuring success? We are monitoring success via page referrals from the SM sites, linkbacks to content hubs, feedback from clients and users, etc.

14. Can you tell if your social media activities, including the blog, have actually affected your bottom line? Have you garnered actual paying customers because of your blog, twitter or facebook accounts? We have certainly reaped an increase of traffic thanks to those users who have discovered us via our various SM endeavors. Additionally, the linkbacks garnered as a result of SM are very effective for our SEO initiatives. We have also made quite a mark with our partner communities and providers who are watching our SM efforts and seeking us out as they climb aboard themselves.

15. What’s the one piece of advice you would give other senior living, home care, eldercare, or dementia care companies about getting into social media? Social media should be an important aspect to your online marketing plan. The potential to connect with customers and potential customers is ever evolving and never ceases to amaze me. Smart companies will not only converse with others about their services and offerings, but about the everyday challenges of senior housing and senior care. It should be about relationship building, not drumming up business.

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For more about senior living online communities and social media, visit carenetworks.com. To ensure you get more post like this delivered right to you as they are published, subscribe to our blog.

For more information about SeniorsforLiving.com, contact:

Doug Johnson | EVP-Sales & Marketing | Seniors for Living | P: 212-490-6290 x227| F: 212-490-6296 or visit them online at SeniorsforLiving.com, Twitter, or Facebook. My thanks to Gina LaGuardia for taking the time to share her amazing insights!

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When Will Senior Living Websites Evolve?

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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.)?

Q: Have you been able to capture leads using social media?

Q: Have you been able to attribute any move-ins directly to social media? Do you have any data or comments on ROI?

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Q: Do you think social media enhances your other marketing/PR initiatives/campaigns?

Q: What are the downsides to using social media? Do you have any horror stories or crisis incidents to share?

Q: Do you have social media policies in place?

Have you seen the CareNetworks YouTube video? Check it out and share with your friends…

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