Here are some quick links to articles that provide answers  to each of these. I will later post more detail.

#1 Social media opens the door for a HIPAA violation

The blog The Realities of HIPAA in Social Media  states “Patients and family members are not covered entities under HIPAA.  So it’s not a HIPAA violation for a well-meaning daughter to post that her father received great care at General Hospital after his stroke from uncontrolled diabetes. Media and internet attorneys will also explain there is no liability for General Hospital to sponsor or even own the site on which the daughter makes the post. “

#2 “No control over what people will say about us.”

Brian Solis in his blog post The Myth of Control in New Media wrote  “retaining control, following the socialization of the Web, is nothing more than pure legend. While many companies retain control during the stages of defining and shaping messages, control is relinquished at the point of distribution. Once messages are published, they are at the mercy of consumers, peers, and influencers online and offline.”  is this a reason for fear? No…Read the rest of the article.

#3 “There’s no return on investment.”

While there has been MUCH debate about calculating ROI for Social Media, as early as 2006 a reaonable model for Calculating the ROI of blogging was published by Forrester analyst Charlen Li. There are lots of ways to calculate ROI but first you must understand your objectives.

#4 “people don’t go online when picking healthcare providers.”

Accoriding to the Forrester Report “Healthcare Consumers Continue to Migrate Online.” 78% of consumer seek health information online. The primary reason consumers goto a health plans website is to Find a doctor.

#5 “Our doctors don’t care about social media.”

In USA today and on his blog Doctors who are not on Facebook, Twitter and blogs risk becoming irrelevant;  Kevin Pho, M.D states:  “doctors who fail to embrace social media risk becoming irrelevant, as more patients flock to the web as a source of health information, rather than endure the inconvenience of a doctor’s office”  Doctors

#6 “Everyone will be on Facebook instead of working.”

OK let’s not go to extremes. Yes some will abuse the use of Social Media that is where you social media policy comes into place. The article How to Control Employees at Work offer some practical tips.

Post you comment and links to other answers and enjoy the Pink Glove Video!

Business Use

From HR departments using social media to evaluate candidate backgrounds to CEO Twitter feeds, social media is enmeshed in our business culture as well as our personal lives.

During the hiring and firing process, HR departments have the responsibility to acknowledge and consider the overall “brand” of a candidate, and whether we realize it or not, social media has created brands out of all of us. What policy do you have in place for your HR department to gather, interpret, and apply that information?

Legal Issues in the workforce

The above-mentioned HR situation could become a legal issue if an employee or candidate felt he was being discriminated against through social media research. In fact, any action a company takes based on social media information can be scrutinized. It can be almost crippling to think of all the ways social media can hurt you and your business. So where do you begin?

Talk to your lawyer. Many documents in your business may have to be revamped: non-disclosure agreements, company policy handbooks, and employee conduct expectations are all affected by social media. If you don’t have a clear plan in place, your employees can spend hours on Facebook, share sensitive information, even cause incredible backlash on your company within seconds of a poorly planned Tweet.

SEC disclosure is also an issue. As employees Twitter, update their Facebook status, or comment on blogs, they may be subtly disclosing information about their workplace, sometimes without realizing it. Employees with access to sensitive information also have to understand the responsibilities involved in handling that information- and protecting it from social media.

Should Facebook be banned?

As social media becomes more prevalent and employees feel the pressure not only to create social media accounts but also to maintain those accounts to build their own brand online. How do you monitor their social media time? Banning social media completely can be counter-productive not only to the employee’s growth in the company, but to their edge in the workplace. They can easily connect with a client on Facebook that will lead to a lasting relationship for your company.

When creating your social media plan, consider the following:

-Productivity. The amount of time your employees spend on all personal activities should be kept to a minimum, but tolerated within reasonable boundaries, just like personal phone calls. When Facebook or Twitter become their main focus, however, it’s important to let them know they’ve crossed an important boundary and the consequences that may result.

-Disclosure. As discussed above, employees should understand what they are allowed to disclose and what will not be tolerated, under any circumstance. Ensure they sign the appropriate legal forms making them liable for any damage caused to your company, and you’ll be sure they’ll watch what they say.

-Monitoring. Employees like to be trusted, and when given the benefit of the doubt, will often excel. However, good monitoring practices will help you keep your team honest and their productivity high. Have a procedure in place and make them aware of the rules.

-Penalties for misuse. Unfortunately, there will come a time when you’ll have to respond to misuse of social media- whether an employee simply can’t stop playing Farmville or your next merger was leaked on Twitter. Plan for this and make the penalties known to your employees to avoid surprises on either side.

The bottom line is: have a plan in place for dealing with social media. You’ll lessen your chances of being caught unaware and take a proactive step for your company.

User-generated content (UGC) online is quickly growing as the major reputation builder or destroyer for products, services and the companies that provide them. Some companies are already taking action by responding to blogs, posts, comments and tweets directly, curtailing the wildfire of negative feed back. When negative comments are posted online, health companies in particular don’t have the luxury of letting them go unanswered. However, in such a highly regulated industry most are struggling with how to engage.

Online Reputation Management

Online Reputation Management (ORM) is the awareness, research and analysis of online content and it’s effect on your brand, and the preventative and reactive steps taken to control the outcome. While literally every company in business today needs an effective ORM plan, steps can be taken now to review and understand your current online reputation and help you analyze appropriate ways to influence it.

Ignoring UGC

In the pre-internet age some believed that “no news is good news” but today that belief can mean an irreparably tarnished reputation and a significant decrease in sales. Legitimate problems, slander, and unanswered questions can negatively impact your bottom line even if you’re not aware of its presence as user-generated content spreads across the web.

At the very least, you’re missing valuable opportunities to interact directly with consumers and reinforce a positive image. Without that presence, consumers will turn elsewhere.

Steps to Take

By monitoring social media regularly, analyzing threads that pertain to you and utilizing online avenues to influence the result, you can successfully manage external effects on your online image and lay the groundwork for a positive reputation.

Monitor
First, you must have a plan in place to monitor and track mentions of your company, products and services online. Perform regular search audits on your brand. Social media sites such as Twitter and YouTube have built-in search options to help you find new mentions pertaining to your company. Google Alerts will send you an email every time your name is mentioned in a blog or website. Social Mention allows you to search across all social media platforms for the most relevant results. Use these and media-site specific search tools to stay abreast of online comments.

Analyze

Once you’ve established where users are talking about you and what you’re saying, you must determine what to respond to and how to respond effectively. Good mentions deserve your attention as well as negative press. People like to know they’re making a difference, so appreciate good comments, especially during waves of negativity. Analyze negative comments to determine if they’re legitimate, such as a bad product or experience, or if they’re simply slander. Problems should be addressed publicly and respectfully.

Slander should be addressed by politely requesting the poster to remove the comment or post your response as a follow-up. If the slanderer does not comply, turn the matter over to your legal team.

Influence

Create a plan for responding to UGC online. Have a clear system in place and make it known to all employees and vendors what they can expect from you in the event of negative press. Once you’ve identified the need to respond, simply hit-or-miss answers and inconsistent information will not benefit your company; it could in fact do more damage. Have clear roles defined for responders and hold them and yourself accountable for your reputation.

Your influence shouldn’t start nor end with responses to existing comments. Take control of your reputation by creating and regularly updating a blog, building brand awareness over social media outlets, and creating a community that you can control for consumers to discuss your products and services. Once a comment is made outside your own online sphere, you stand on the power of an established online presence and already have the forum in place for your response.

Your scope of influence should include your marketing team. A company that works together online and offline to create a strong brand will be recognized and respected by consumers. Ensure your marketing, legal, and customer service departments are aware and supportive of your online efforts.

Benefits

The risk involved in ignoring your company’s need for ORM is significant, and the benefits of ORM might surprise you:

• Build confidence and trust in your brand by delivering interesting, useful information, rewarding good feedback and building a strong customer-service team.
• Educate online users by posting follow-up information to negative press, publicize steps taken to rectify the situation and list positive results. If the follow-up steps aren’t made aware to the public, the assumption will be that your company did nothing. Take the time to inform them otherwise.
• Brand Awareness, which your marketing company works so hard to establish, can be worthless if not carried through online. By taking advantage of social media outlets and interacting with  consumers, you create a strong brand awareness in the medium that’s holding their attention in increasing quantities.

While it might not seem so important at first, user-generated content and it’s effect on your online reputation can be substantial enough to cripple even large corporations. By taking the time to plan and implement the above steps, you’ll successfully take the reigns of your online reputation back from the consumers.

Consumer habits are changing. More U.S. consumers are turning to the internet for healthcare information, and healthcare companies aren’t quite keeping up with online demand.

Currently, healthcare websites offer limited information to consumers, and most aren’t anywhere near the top search engine results for consumer healthcare issues. Consumers are turning to millions of other service-based sites that rank high in search engine results, such as WebMD, for healthcare information where insurance sites not only fall short- they miss the mark entirely. Even sites like WebMD are beginning to be placed in second chair to Social Networking sites. Only a few health insurance companies have recognized and acted upon this need.

As a result, health insurance websites that focus on offering information will position themselves in the marketplace as invaluable resources for consumers. As more research is done over the internet to find service, quality and cost information of doctors, hospitals and insurance plans, the healthcare industry must respond and engage those demands- or be left behind.

How to Respond

Companies thus far have poured resources into the “bread and butter” of transaction-based online tools, but have failed to serve the customer or even bring them to the table. It’s long been established that the internet is information-based, and instead of that changing as may have been predicted, it’s holding true.

Consumers want accurate information tailored to meet their questions. Fortunately, healthcare companies have access to that information- but have yet to offer it in efficient, easy-to-use tools for the web.

WebMD’s physician finder has gained amazing popularity. Priority Health also has a Find-A-Doctor tool that rates the doctors in their network.  Consumers will find even greater benefits as providers offer more specific and personalized information in a similar way. It’s not just a good idea- it’s the future of healthcare companies that want to position themselves for growth.

Engaging consumers with accurate, relevant data will not only meet consumer needs to be informed, but will create an online service level of trust in companies that take the initiative to offer more than they expect, with complete accuracy.

Engaging consumers online is as simple and complex as reading their minds. Thanks to the internet, that’s easy. Search engine data like Google Analytics show just that- what healthcare consumers are searching for. Social Media search sites like Social Mention provided insight into exactly what consumers are saying across the social web. Companies’ customer service records also provide exact questions consumers ask regularly that would be more cost-effective to answer online.

Combining these questions into one data-driven search tool is the answer. Consumers will find more information in one place and have their specific questions answered, which in turn increases company trust and consumer plan satisfaction, and causes customer-service costs to fall significantly.

As consumer demand for more then just a quote from health plan websites. Health plans will come to realize the valuable of being customer centric.

The concept of the “medical home” has been kicked around for over forty years. Yet, the flavor the is currently being debated requires that both patients and primary care physician educate themselves. Regarding how this program would benefit all parties involved. Technology is a primary reason that even now this model could possibly be implemented.

A key to the success of this program is keeping patients highly involved in their care. One online resource that facilities patient engagement is howsyourhealth.org. This website educates patients and allows them to fill out an online health survey that becomes a starting point for their electronic health records. The website does not look like a web 2.0 site or for that matter a professional website that you would expect to see in 2009. However, over 100,00 people have used this site to provide medical information to their doctors. 695 of the users of this website are female and 33% of the sites users are over 50 years old.

While much debate will continue around this model, patients will continue to have an active role in the management of their healthcare and the internet will become the hub for both patients and physicians to exchange information.

Knowledge is defined as awareness or understanding gained through experience, observation, or study. The average consumer doesn’t need to have a great deal of knowledge to take advantage of the power of social media over businesses. All they need to know is ‘I state my case (whether it is valid or not) and if enough people hear or see it then businesses react and I win.’ This Power of Social Media is many voices (consumers) and the influence of one (business).

This formula works for consumers because it does not take much for a consumer to know what triggers a business to act. However, businesses on the other hand have to know the many triggers for the many individual consumers in order to influence them to act. For businesses there are many, many, many more data points to be collected and analyzed.

Knowledge is acquired through analyzing data. When it comes to Social Media this is called “listening”. In words that Marketing Execs and CEOs will understand, this is called Market Research, better put: Market Research on steroids. Instead of surveys or focus groups this is raw, uncensored potentially unsolicited viewpoints of real people. As you listen, you learn how to use Social Media to your advantage. Gaining power when you use what you have learned from listening.

What can you learn through listening to Social Media? Businesses can learn how to select profitable new markets to enter, create a “Blue Ocean.” Through Social Media, businesses can learn how to select and attract the customers who best match their organization. Businesses can also reduce the risk and severity of bad customer service claims. These are just a few of the many things that businesses can learn from listening to Social media. The next step is to put these learnings to use.

So to harness the power of Social Media you need to understand that many voices to become the influencer. For businesses this means that you have to get many voices to influence others that you feel are worth doing business with. To do this you must listen, learn and act. Contrary to popular belief, knowledge is not power. Power is the wise use of knowledge!

Kevin J Dean

This article highlights the fact that businesses today are in need of two big things when it comes to doing business in this age of engage. Those two things are Insights into conversations that are taking place on the Social Web and Education on how to deal with the insights that they find.

For those who want to “dabble” there are plenty of free tools and hours worth of blogs that they can comb through. However, this does not scale for larger organizations. Larger organization will need to know what is happening not just on one single site, but what is being said anywhere about a topic of interest. Therefore, they will need to partner with organizations such as SOMA and ManoByte to help them gain insights, learn, and act.

ManoByte continues to lead in educating organizations regard the power of Social Media Marketing to grow businesses as well as Social Media Analytics best practices.

Previously we outlined the 8 levels of Social Media Analytics as being:

1. Standard  Reports
2. Ad hoc Reports
3. Query / Drill down
4. Alerts
5. Statistical Analysis
6. Forecasting
7. Predictive Modeling
8. Optimization

In this blog post we will discuss the second Level of Social Media Analytics Reports, Ad Hoc Reports. In the realm of Social Media Analytics, Ad Hoc Reports should help you define When & Where are the conversation occurring?

The Where

Knowing “Where” conversations are occurring is extremely important. This information can help you identify the appropriate Social Media sites where the majority of conversations that are of concern to your organization are occurring. Once you know where there conversations are occurring; now you can participate appropriately. Remember Social Media involves two-way communication and active participation.

The When

Knowing when conversations are occurring helps you determine if customers are responding to new product or service releases? Decreases in conversations over a certain time period can identify a PR or Marketing issue. Analyzing when conversations are happening can help to answer why increases or decreases in sales are occurring. Effectiveness of Marketing and Adverting campaigns be identified by comparing online chatter happening during comparative time periods.

Type of Level 2 Reports

Reports that would fall underneath the category of Level 2 Social Media Reports would include:

• Conversations by URL
• Conversations by Domain Name
• Conversations by Social Media Type (I.E. Photo Sharing, Blog, Microblog, Video, Forum)
• Conversation by Date
• Conversion Comparison of Date
• Conversations by URL by Date
• Conversations by Domain Name by Date
• Conversations by Social Media Type by Date

Taking your organization to the next level with analyzing data collected from across the Social Web means putting it into context of when and where. Having this king of Social Media Analytics can help you in making better marketing and advertising decisions that connect you with those who are truly interested in your products or services.

This article I would like to begin a dialogue regarding Level 1 Standard Reports. Standard Social Media Analytics Reports should focus on what conversations are occurring. This will help solve the problem of know what your customers or potential customers are talking about.

List of Standard Reports

1) Post by keyword search - This should be a list of post that are found across the social web by keywords. Perhaps the most common report that can be easily found today by using Google Blog Search or Social Mention

2) Count of Tags – Each Social Media Post can be tagged by the author or others once a post has been identified in your search grouping how each post is tagged can be extremely beneficial.  You can identify tags from any post using the tag cloud generator.  The tag clod should be include in this standard report. The report should also include averages.

3) Keyword comparison – No doubt you are interested in more than one keyword. Therefore it would be good to compare which keywords are performing better then others. This would be similar to what you can find using Google’s Adsense Keyword Tool with the difference being that you are looking at data returned from your data collection process that was used for the other standard reports.

4) Posts by Person - Social Media Analytics Standard Reports must include who. Keyword by person and Tag by person. After all what is Social Media without the people.

Connect the Social Media Analytics databases

Through the use of the many search tools available you can perform a keyword search to find what is being said across the Social Web about what is of concern to your organization. This is the first step. Those who are serious about Social Media metrics for their organization are going to quickly come to appreciate that they are going to need a Social Media Data warehouse. There are tools that assist in the collection and reporting on of this information, however as I will discuss these tools though sophisticated do not complete the picture. All of this information then need to be tied back to your CRM (customer) and ERP (sales) databases.

In this article Social Media Analytics Maturity Level 1 – Standard Reports I mention 4 reports that should be included at this level. I will discuss what I feel should be included in the other levels later. Please provided much feedback!