Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer gives some relevant tips that are useful for any health insurance company beginning involvement in social media.

1. Develop a plan, then get commitment from the top levels of you company. You need a CEO and board behind the idea and your proposed implementation of the idea before you dabble. If not, you may have the rug pulled out before you even get started. The top level involvement will also help assure compliance with regulation requirements.

2. Be proactive about compliance. Don’t try to skirt regulation requirements simply because you’re using social media. Work closely with your compliance officers to explain social media interaction, then work out solutions that integrate best practices for compliance as well as interacting in social media. This may mean you have a pool of approved Tweets from which you can pull, or that there is a delay of hours or days in responding to some questions, but that’s part of the equation.

3. Know your Media. It’s important to know your media tools and how they are used, and then educate your team, including top executives, on how those tools work. Let
them know that corporate blogs don’t need to be on the front page of the website, for example. Also, that there can be a review and approval process for any customer-
generated content, as long as that review process is clearly stated on the blog.

Some executives won’t understand a moderated environment or how moderation works – make sure you’re prepared to explain it.

4. Have a team approach. Making a single person in charge of all social media, moderating input and making comments can be exhausting for that individual, and may cause problems for you down the road, if they go in a direction that you didn’t like. The team approach is by far the best.

5. Shorten timelines for review. Social media does, by nature, demand a kind of immediacy. This will likely involve a streamlined process for communication review. Aim for 24 to 48 hours on most comments, but allow for a quicker interface if there is a situation that demands it.

If you take the appropriate precautions and plan ahead, there is every indication that the health insurance industry could benefit from utilizing social media opportunities with their customers.

For example, there are a plethora of privacy regulations governing what can and can’t be exposed about a specific patient. When you’re on social media, you’re about as public as you can be.

In a related challenge, there is also a government regulated, complex approval system for any communication from the insurance industry to the public. Each piece of communication, including social media messages, has to complete the approval process, which can take weeks. Not the typical turnaround time for a status update!

Also, if you are attempting to answer specific questions with a medical professional, you’re taking a qualified nurse or doctor away from their traditional duties, and with many medical facilities understaffed, it may just not seem important enough.

However, there are some good arguments to be made for including social media in a health insurance marketing and information plan.

• Access — many people who are daunted by forms, lines and technical language are completely comfortable logging into Twitter or Facebook. South Carolina is looking at using social media to reach Medicaid and Medicare customers.
• Also, many people will know exactly how to find a company on Facebook, but have trouble remembering your web address. They can get questions answered more quickly through social media.
• Some Companies are Already There – with the popularity of social media, even an industry with obstacles like the health insurance industry’s will find some early adopters. They are out there, with blogs, Q & A columns, and customer service.
• The Customers are using Social Media – Customers comparison shop, seek information, and communicate with others via social media. Health insurance companies seeking to be relevant may need to join in.
• A “Friendlier” Feel. Health insurance companies have the image of being distant and inaccessible, not to mention unresponsive, in many cases. A presence in social media could soften that image.

iPhone owners are a desirable demographic for any business, but technology ones in particular. These customers like to see themselves as unique and creative, and they are generally early adopters.

If you can create a clever, functional or fun app for the iPhone, either free or paid, and connect it organically with your company and your company name or logo, then you will have a great match that will build not only your brand and brand loyalty, but will connect you to the iPhone community.

If you don’t have the expertise or understanding of development but want to reach the iPhone market, come to Webdatamation with an idea for an iPhone app, and let us take it from there.

Apple is a proprietary company, and all apps for the iPhone are sold in the Apple Apps Store. You can offer an app for free, or you can charge for it. There is no charge to you if you offer the app for free, and if you charge, then Apple keeps 30 percent of the sales price and you keep 70 percent.

There’s another possibility as well – give away a stripped down version for free, then charge a fee for a more developed, feature filled version.

It’s not a bad deal in many ways, since you set your own price for the app, you pay no hosting fees, Apple will send you a revenue check each month, and you don’t need to open a credit card account or worry about marketing.

Apple has a development program, Software Development Kit or SDK, that developers use to develop iPhone apps. Third party programs are out there that streamline the development process, not just for iPhone, but for android as well.

Games, from simple to more complex, are the top apps for the iPhone. With its high resolution screen and accelerometer, the iPhone is the perfect mobile gaming device. Weather, shopping and radio programs are also popular.

Smartphone apps are a great way to get your name out into the hands of the techy crowd and do some fun and subtle promotion of your product and site that people voluntarily bring into their lives. It’s a win for marketing and a win for your customer, so iPhone app development is a great way to go.

Piwik is a PHP-MySql based program. In order to get started, you have to first download this software from their website and get it installed on your own web server. It just takes as less as 5 minutes to set things up and get going. At the end of the set up process, the software generates a javascript code. You just need to copy and paste this code onto the web pages that you would want to track. There is also a plugin that would automate this process for you! Simple?

Okay, you would still probably argue that Google analytics is the most popular amongst all and that Piwik is just no big deal. However, let me mention here that alternative open source web analytics solutions have their own advantages:

The software is installed on your own server and your sensitive corporate data prevented from being exposed to third party websites
Provides a more professional look and feel, does not have to connect to a third party site for analytics
More manageable and maintainable

Piwik is one such software that not only promises, but also delivers. Being an excellent alternative to Google analytics, Piwik is unique and stands out the rest. Here is a list of features that would make you pick Piwik:

If you are a developer, you can build your own plugins with Piwik! It allows you to add and remove features. Yes, Piwik’s features are coded inside plugins!
You can publish your data in a number of formats including the most popular ones: xml, json, php, csv, etc.
The user interface of Piwik is fully customizable. Creating a report in Piwik is as easy as dragging and dropping widgets into their respective placeholders.
Easily embed graphs and charts in your website dashboard or blog
The graphs are interactive and you can view brief stats just by rolling your mouse over them!

Piwik may be a new kid on the block, but is gaining instant popularity. The official blog is updated on a regular basis and the Piwik team is trying hard to come up with more new exciting features.

I would pick Piwik for now. At 1.9 MB, what more can I ask for? You have any questions?

Have you recently noticed a wide shamble in the relevancy of your search results while you have been Googling around?

Thanks to the powerful Google LSI engine that does all that work for you. Many of you must have come across LSI and its associated mechanism but then for those of you who have not, let us take a look.

Simple indexing is a process where by a keyword is searched in an entire page and the results are presented. Frequency of occurrence of a particular keyword further streamlines the search results in the process. Thus, ensuring a proper syntax or a linear search policy is enough to produce the requested search results. However the question that arises naturally is, “How relevant are they for your search context?”

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) technology adds semantics to the existing search mechanism thereby improving the relevance of the search results. During the indexing process, the Google bot not only verifies keywords against the document being indexed, but also takes a holistic approach in determining which other documents can be linked with those keywords. Keywords may be semantically close or distant. The LSI utilizes a knowledge base of related keywords and some intelligent computing to semantically differentiate related words and accordingly improves on its indexing mechanisms. LSI thus allows a search engine to determine the overall information a page wants to project by looking for intelligent patterns in the content thus making the page more available against a particular keyword.

You will be able to leverage the enormous semantic power that LSI has to offer for the website of your organization. Improving the lexical arrangement of keywords and their related tags to an object on your page can now astonishingly reveal more improved page ranks. Not only this, the future looks good with a completely new Web 3.0 in the horizon and Google offering services that is ready to get you started right now.

The traffic in search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN is massive. You will have to go that extra mile in order to break through this traffic, and make your passage smooth. I will now discuss some of the points in brief that you should keep in mind when you plan to optimize your website for search engines.

With the increase of web traffic in large amounts on the information superhighway, listing of your webpage with a higher rank on any search engine involves a lot of research and to some extent, expertise. So make sure that apart from this post, you look around some other, similar posts so that you are very well acquainted with the process of SEO. I would advise you to get suggestions from an expert if your website involves a niche list of viewers and you are very particular to move up the ladder faster.

While optimizing your website for search engines, most often you tend to snazz it up with a lot of graphics and flashy animations. What you forget in the process is that your website will take more time to load compared to others. This may lurk off visitors from your site. Avoid the use of images and graphics that take time to load. Have an easy to load design for your website to increase the hits for your site.

Another important thing is that; make sure you study the existing competition. First, make a list of keywords that defines your product (or service) the most. Additionally, come up with as many keyword combinations as possible. Think from a viewer’s perspective. Think about the process in which viewers will use keywords to gain information about a particular product or a service from a search engine. After you have prepared an exhaustive list, use them in different meaningful combinations and search those words using the most popular search engines like Yahoo, Google and so on. See the number of matches you get for the keywords you are interested in to judge the competition. Always keep in mind that your website must have content which matches the keywords, because ultimate content of your website is what the search engines give priority to.

So, is there anyone who wants to optimize his or her own website for the search engines? Well, do not waste any more time and start with your SEO plans immediately, as, the higher the ranking of your website in the search engine pages, the better the prospects you will see in your business!

After attending the workshop I felt a renewed sense of purpose as a search engine marketer towards challenging my clients to focus on and improve their conversion rates, I wanted to provide some of the highlights in my next few columns. Conversion defined

Why do we get blank stares whever we talk about ‘conversion’ to executives? Perhaps this clear definition will help aid us in the future:

Conversion is the process of successfully achieving the primary objective of a specific page or website.

There are a few key concepts in that definition I’d like to emphasize that all too often overlooked by some marketers.  The first being ‘process’, rather than a single event. The second being ‘primary objective’.  Get a group of marketing and sales people together in a room for a web strategy meeting and ask them each to state the primary objective.  Too often we blow by this critical step in a rush to tackle easier, less meaningful issues.

The ratio at which visitors achieve the primary objective on a webpage is called the conversion rate.  Quite simply when we increase the conversion rate, we are more profitable and successful.  So why don’t we spend more time in this area?  I think a lot of us give up too early, giving it our best attempt, instead of seeing it as an ongoing process by which sometimes we succeed, sometimes we fail, but we always learn.

The scientific secret conversion formula

What I am about to reveal to you is highly confidential.  Many a man has literally gone insane trying to unlock this mystery.  Seriously though, Dr. Flint McLaughlin has developed, patented, and graciously shared with us a heuristic to help make sense, and practically, methodically attack the opportunity to improve our conversion rates.

The conversion sequence:  C = 4m + 3v = 2(i-f) – 2a

If you are like me, the first time (and second and third time) I was presented with this ‘formula’ my stomach rose to my throat as anxiety of failed math exams and chemistry experiments reemerged in my mind.  RELAX. Let’s break it down:

C= The probability of conversion. That’s easy enough.

m= Motivation of the user. This is basically how badly they want what you have, and the reason they want it.  This is the element you have the least control over.

v= Clarity of value proposition. This is probably the most important element because you do have control over it. I’ll be writing about this next month in detail.

i= Incentive to take action. What are you offering to stimulate a desired action.

f= Friction elements in the conversion process. Anything that impedes the visitor from taking action. Common friction causes are forms with too many fields, or confusing options/choices.

a= Anxiety about entering information. This could be things like testimonials, an award, Better Business Bureau logos, etc.

A little less art, a lot more science

All too often ‘enhancements’ are made to a home page, or landing page, because some creative person, an award winning agency, or the executive with the highest authority (or that executive’s nephew), suspects such a change will help make an impact.  And while there’s no doubt being creative, possessing outstanding copywriting skills, or just having a uncanny knack for going with a gut instinct can help lift conversion, if you are looking to mitigate risk and get real results, these should all be things to pull from, as work through this clear and linear conversion sequence.

Working with, and through this conversion sequence will put purpose and defensible rationale behind the changes that you’ll be making to your pages in the future.

Learn. Apply. Get results.

You’ll be amazed at how differently you approach a page when you’ve got a framework to guide you. I think you’ll also be surprised and pleased with the results that you can achieve with this methodology. In the next few columns I’ll be focusing on one or more aspects of the conversion sequence, starting with the ever-important “Clarity of Value Proposition”.

In the meantime, I invite you to get your best (or worst) landing page, and using the conversion sequence featured in this article, begin to ask, “How clear is my value proposition? Where is there unnecessary friction on this page? Who are the people coming to this page?  Why are they here? What do I want them to do on this page?”

Until next month, keep pressing forward!

Todd Miechiels is a business-to-business internet marketing consultant. His website is www.miechiels.com. The Strictly Business column appears Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.

This method is critical for successfully connecting to people, especially online when you have no physical cues to tell you about a person. In essence, you have to lose your own identity at first, in order to get a better idea of how to best connect to someone new. When you approach a potential link partner, you know very little about that person except for a few clues picked up in the analysis of the site that he or she controls. Your best bet is to pick up that information as quickly as possible, because you have a very limited amount of time to make or break that connection.
Personas makes use of the ethnographic method in SEO and are intensely valuable. This process helps you learn about your audience and mindset, and the resulting personas can help you to compare the output of your efforts to the target market in question. It’s commonplace to use personas in areas like usability and social media, but they also can be a tremendous help when written specifically for link development. An audience IS an audience, after all.

Writing personas

To get started on writing a few personas, you have to think about your target audience for link building, in the same way that you’d think about it for anything else related to marketing. Who are these people, what are their age groups, what is their “culture”, what will speak to them and open up the connection in a positive manner? If you’re in doubt about your target audience, talk to the owner of the site you’re working on. Once you get basic information, start to dream up a few actual people who fit the profiles that you have, and flesh them out as much as you can.

A typical persona should contain as much identifying information as possible without being so unique that it cannot be used to speak to a larger group. That’s the tricky part, but you can overcome it by imagining common characteristics of users (they like punk rock) rather than specifics that will only fit a tiny percentage of your audience (they like early Avail). Start out by identifying a few different segments of your audience, writing a persona for each. Once you have these, take one and read it until you can get into the mindset of it, and write your link request accordingly. Remember that this persona represents your target link partners, so make use of language and references that this group will respond to, and adjust as needed.

Sample persona

Below is a persona created by one of my link builders for use on a restaurant review site:

Caren is a 43 year old mother of 3. Her children are 15, 17, and 21. Before having children, Caren obtained a degree in elementary education and taught until her second child was born. Since then, she has been a stay at home mom. She has been in charge of cleaning, cooking, carpooling to and from soccer and rugby practices. Her oldest child is attending a university in the city. Her husband is the local family doctor and can still be found making house calls. Caren’s happiness comes from her family and baking. She bakes often and makes the occasional trip into the city to check in on her oldest child.

This persona does make use of some serious specific. However, that’s just so we can get into the mindset of knowing how to approach someone like Caren. If you take the basics, you’ll see our target market for link building here, which is a woman in her 40s who wants a few restaurant suggestions for when she’s in the big city every now and then. We hope to approach the Carens of the world in such a way that they will find it in their hearts to link to our site. Thus, we probably aren’t going to speak to them as if they’re college-age males who are heavily into sports. We also can make more informed decisions on other relevant sites to approach for link building once we’re in Caren’s mindset, as we think about other interests that someone like Caren might have. Once you have the basics (woman in her 40s making a few trips to the big city), you’re well on your way to identifying other types of interests that Caren might have. Armed with this information, your link building efforts should be just the slightest bit easier.

If you want to see some excellent graphics and analysis explaining Web 2.0, subscribe to Ross Dawson’s blog, Trends in the Living Networks.

A New Conversation

Social networking has removed many of the obstacles that got in the way of better understanding prospects and customers, and serving them. Here are a few insights from trying to stay up with how Web 2.0 is changing how companies interact with prospects and customers:

• Overbalance the scales with offers of knowledge, not sales hype. Instead of blasting out PDFs that tell prospects how great your company is, think about setting up weekly webinars where you invite in an industry expert that freely shares their knowledge of what’s working in the area your products, services or software deliver value. Before you dismiss this as just for the Fortune 1,000 realize that industry experts need PR coverage too and often you can get them do these in exchange for promoting their practice.
• Define a Web 2.0 strategy now for your company and start executing on it fast. The two best bloggers in this area are Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li of Forrester who write Groundswell. These two authors, through their analysis of social networking and the Web 2.0 landscape, continually show how transparent and more connected previously isolated social networks, both in private and commercial areas, have become. What also emerges from their analysis is that when Web 2.0 technologies are used for connecting with customers, sales hype is dead. Informative, knowledgeable content that solves a complex question or problem for a customer is all that matters. Blogging to deliver solutions to customers in the form of knowledge generates real leads. It takes some companies a year or so to see any sales from this, yet it is hardly time wasted. These companies have changed how relevant they are to customers by delivering significant value without first asking for an order. Sales follow knowledge.
• Consider your own YouTube University. Getting a channel on YouTube to upload videos that can be inexpensively produced is another approach to gaining a reputation as a company willing to share knowledge with potential and present customers. The development of your own YouTube University also needs to have periodic updates, fueling new traffic in the process. It’s a fairly large resource commitment to make, yet getting your best product experts onto your own YouTube channel can increase your company’s credibility across the industry and with prospects.
• Work with any channel, technology or services providers to offer them participation in your trade shows and events, and vice versa. This works well as many partnerships have overlapping customer bases, yet have their own unique market segments as well. Developing this type of partnership significantly reduces the costs of trade shows and increases face-time with prospects, a critical part of lead generation.
• Understand that Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) AdWords is only as effective as your landing pages, lead management process and continual managing of keywords. Google has delivered some exceptional tools in this area during 2008, including the ability to optimize a landing page design by testing it iteratively before its launched. This is the largest lead generation strategy for many technology companies, and their continually improving of landing pages and key words generates significant results.

Knowledge Is Power

I’ve not spent years studying lead generation, yet what I have seen is that many companies are still doing very well with leads despite news about the economy this year.I’m convinced it’s because they have worked very hard using the strategies discussed here to get and stay relevant to prospects and customers. They’re delivering more knowledge, value, insight and intelligence than anyone else.

As a result, they’re trusted more and sales happen. Lead generation cannot be reduced to a series of causal factors; it all begins with trust in your company. In a Web 2.0 World, earning and retaining that trust is much more about offering insight and knowledge first.

Delicious will show the which users are linking to (bookmarking) which URLs, sorted by most recently bookmarked.  Go here:

http://delicious.com/url/

Enter your company URL, or whatever URL you want.  Click the arrow to get your results.

Here’s where it gets fun.  Delicious feedifies that results page, so you can subscribe to a feed for any URL, and by doing so, whenever someone bookmarks your site at delicious, your feed will have that new link at the top of your feed.

Make it even better…The feed option is nice, but for those of you who have already used it, it’s also lacking in a couple key ways. The feed links show the Delicious username, but nothing more. The link will always be you company URL, since that’s the URL you searched for. So, if you click the link the Delicious RSS feed gave you, you always end up right back at your own URL. This is big fun, but not very useful.

Here’s how to make that delicious feature far more useful. Once you have the delicious search result, notice you have a search result URL string that’s unique. Open another window and head over to the always trusty TrackEngine.com.  If you don’t have an account, get the free account now.  Then, take the Delicious URL string for your URL search and Track it.

By doing it this way and not relying on Delicious’ own RSS feed version, now you will receive a private email from TrackEngine any time a Delicious user links to your site, and that email will include of the entire delicious page results with the most recently bookmarked username at the very top of that page, highlighted in blue.

If you’re brave, don’t wait until after your publicity/link building campaign to do this. Get a baseline link count before you start.

The obvious limitation here is that this is only useful as a peek into the bookmarking activity at Delicious.  The world is bigger than Delicious. But…as you go through the process at Delicious, you might notice you can do similar things with other bookmarking and social media tools.  Wondering if your site has been tagged by anyone at Technorati?  Set up a Technorati Tag Alert.

Even Google Alerts can be tweaked and then re-tweaked in a away that will then send you almost real time blog mentions of URLs.  Keyword search Google Blogs for link:yourURL.  Toggle the search result by clicking over on the right side where it says “Sort By Date“. Now look back to the far left where it says Blog Alerts.  Click Subscribe. Bingo.

You now have three separate email alerts ready to notify you of new links, in near real-time, from blogs (Google), tags (Technorati), and bookmarks (Delicious). And you can’t beat the price.  Free.

Now what?

As those alerts arrive, take them and forward them via email to your clients.  Those emails become real-time proof that your link building and content publicity efforts are working.