Online Reviews Coming To Facebook?

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Think Yelp and Google Reviews are tough to manage and ripe for abuse? Facebook is reportedly testing a rating system for business pages. This could pose a whole new arena to both promote your business to prospective patients and clients and get notices of poor performance advertised to potentially hundreds of thousands of locals who might see your page as well. The system will feature clicking on stars from 1-5, but will require a comment to go along with the review.

Facebook will not allow for anonymous reviews, so unless people are willing to create accounts just to knock a business and then kill that account, a business is unlikely to get competitors and ex-employees bad mouthing their businesses.

Special thanks to Erin Ryan of Soshable.com

 

By |2017-05-22T11:11:31-07:00May 3rd, 2013|Social Media|Comments Off on Online Reviews Coming To Facebook?
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Your Social Media Roots

Are you and your company reaching out to customers and potential customers with social media? The answer is probably a resounding yes. Of course the level of your involvement varies from business to business, but rest assured social media will be an ever growing part of a two-way conversation between the public and your company. This infographic from VerticalMeasures shows us how we do and should interact online.

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By |2017-05-22T11:11:31-07:00March 5th, 2013|Social Media|Comments Off on Your Social Media Roots
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Email 2012

emailsHow many emails did you receive last year? What? You forgot to count? That’s OK….who can blame you? According to Cue, a mobile app that helps organize emails and schedules, you probably got about 5,579 emails (the average in 2012). You also probably sent out 869 emails. I can say I beat those averages exponentially.

The number of emails words written by the average person in 1012 was 41,368, which about the same amount of words contained in the novel The Lord of the Flies, though I doubt most of us were as eloquent in our writing as William Golding in our emails.

A few more email trivia points while we are at it. The average reply time lengthened in 2012 to 2.5 days from 2.2 days in 2012. The busiest hour of the day for emails is 11:00AM and the busiest day of the week is Tuesday. The most popular emoticon? : )  typed together constituted over 50% of all emoticons sent.

By |2017-05-22T11:11:31-07:00January 4th, 2013|Social Media|Comments Off on Email 2012
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Imagery Rules Social Media

When USA Today was first published in 1982 it forever changed the face of newspapers. Until that time, images were use sparingly and color even more sparingly. USA Today really shook things up not only with short easy to read stories, but with lots of photos, graphics, colors and graphs. Online today, the same thing can be said for successful brand engagement. This infographic from MBooth demonstrates how graphics rule the online world as well.

By |2017-05-22T11:11:31-07:00September 18th, 2012|Social Media|Comments Off on Imagery Rules Social Media
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Recently a friend told me their colleague’s email had been hacked, or compromised. It seems every week there are news stories of this website or that being hacked and emails compromised. Now, no website or digital file is totally secure. A skilled hacker can bypass even government secured databases as you’ve no doubt read in the news. In recent months passwords for such sites as Yahoo! Voice, AOL, E-Harmony, Gawker, Formspring, Plenty of Fish, and Linkedin have been compromised.

cyber thiefNow, let me share a little bad news. You can do everything right and the determined and skilled hacker will find a way in, just as securing the doors and windows to your home won’t keep the most determined burglar out. However, taking a few modest precautions with your digital life can prevent the majority of intrusions and losses. Most hackers are looking for low hanging fruit, just as most burglars are looking for homes or cars that are quick and easy to rob.

First and foremost, secure your computer with a good anti-virus product. A good number of passwords and data are lost through malware installed on a computer through programs you might have inadvertently installed by opening an email or clicking a link. Programs like key loggers are small and easy to load and phone home (wherever home is) easily. What might you think if you saw a 16 digit number come across your screen, followed by a 4 digit number and then a 3 or 4 digit number, but a credit card complete with security code.

I can hear a few of you smugly saying out loud you are immune as you have an Apple […]

By |2017-05-22T11:11:31-07:00July 17th, 2012|Social Media, Web Design|Comments Off on 12345
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Blogging for Buyers

We are often asked why someone should blog. After all, there are close to 165 million blogs by some accounts. What could you possibly add to the cacophony of information out there? The answer is, a lot. Let’s start with the fact that no one expects you to be the next Hemingway or Faulkner. No one expects you to be the next David Pogue, Ariana Huffington, or Walt Mossberg either. They have full time jobs writing….you have a full time job running an optical practice.

Your patients and customers come to you because you have something to offer the shop or practice down the street doesn’t. It could be free parking. It could be your life-size poster of Lady Ga-Ga in a pair of the hottest new sunglasses. It could be for your expert opinions and advice. Why not share that experience and expertise with potential patients and customers in addition to your current clientele.

Blogging can be boiled down to curating and creating. There are times you will want to sit down and write something from scratch, giving your expert take on a particular subject, whether that be macular degeneration or the newest from Maui Jim. Feel free to discuss why you believe something should be treated in a particular way from the research you’ve conducted or why these new sunglasses are the best thing since the last great thing. There are other times you will take the work others have done or written about and you will present it to your readers (with attribution of course) and add your two cents worth…or 4 or 6 cents worth.

You want to blog because Google and other search engines want new content to index and each blog post […]

By |2017-05-22T11:11:31-07:00March 26th, 2012|Social Media|Comments Off on Blogging for Buyers
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The Set Up

Much has been written about setting up a Facebook page. With over 850 million active members, it’s been done just a few times… The subject however keeps coming up. As recently as SECO and again at Vision Expo East we heard from many optical shops and optometrists who have yet to set up a Facebook page, or have yet to set them up correctly that we thought it worth giving a quick recap to setting up a business page and add to that setting it up for the new timeline structure all business pages will be converted to at the end of March.

Let’s start with the type of page you have. Many businesses have made the mistake of setting up a “friend” or personal page for their business. This is a violation of the TOS (terms of service) for Facebook and your page could be deleted without notice by Facebook, throwing away hours of your hard work, making you go through everything all over again. So let’s set up our page correctly.  Point your browser to http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php. You will see a page that looks like this:

 

If you are a manufacturer, you would pick the Brand or Product button on the upper right. If you are an ECP, pick the Local Business or Place button on the upper left. For demonstration sake, we will pick Local Business or Place. We then get a drop down box with categories. We picked Health/Medical/Pharmacy and then filled out the information in the boxes provided for our business.

By |2017-05-22T11:11:32-07:00March 14th, 2012|Practice Managment, Social Media|Comments Off on The Set Up
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How Pinteresting

Have you heard of Pinterest yet? Tag….now you have. What is Pinterest? You could ask the nearest twenty something female, or read on. Some have called the site a female Tumblr. Pinterest is a visual bulletin board social media site. Members create any number of their own boards . The subjects of these boards are as wide and varied as the over 4 million registered users could possibly imagine, from food to funny, beaches to brides, tattoos to TV shows. Users pin photos they find interesting to their boards with very brief description or caption for each photo. Users can now sign in with their Facebook login and their pins can be shared with their Facebook friends in their timeline too.

Once you have an account (which currently is by invitation only, though not hard to get an invitation from the company either), you create a board or boards of your interest. You can always create more boards or delete old boards. You then pin images to your board(s) with your short captions. If the image is shared from a website, the link back to that site remains with the photo for all to see (can we say backlink?). You can also repin someone else photo to any of your boards and the link back to their board as well as the source link follow onto your page.

So, you might be asking, what the heck does this have to do with my eye care practice? Don’t I have enough to worry about with Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Linkedin? Yes, your social media plate might seem a little full, […]

By |2017-05-22T11:11:32-07:00February 1st, 2012|ECP, Social Media|Comments Off on How Pinteresting
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Social Media 101

We work with a number of eye care professionals who all want to participate in social media to help build their practices. There is no shortage of great social media sites. The question is almost always asked about what site does what and for whom? We saw a picture similar to this a while back explaining several of the top social media sites in a somewhat humorous albeit indelicate manner and thought we would update it with a few more sites and share it with you. We hope you get as many smiles out of it as we did.

By |2017-05-22T11:11:32-07:00January 30th, 2012|ECP, Social Media|Comments Off on Social Media 101
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