Grant shared with me the process he went through to start using social media across all their hospitals, some of the obstacles he was faced with, what social channels they are using and which one is out performing all the others and, of course, how they measure ROI. Hint…it has nothing to do with home much money they saved. 

 So, if you are interested in learning more about how social media is being adopted within the healthcare industry, take a moment to watch Grant as he shares his best practices.  

During our recent #AwarenessInc webinar series, Brian Simpson, Director Social Hospitality at The Roger Smith Hotel in NYC, shared some of his real-world experiences as the Director of Social Hospitality at The Roger Smith Hotel and heroic cancer survivor.  

Some of the topics Brian discussed during his webinar included: 

• Be Grounded: Why you need to have a grounded business before you jump into social media
•  Real relationships are built face to face
• Social Media is a tool to lower the barrier of entry but it does not replace people
• If you are not a dynamic person, the Internet will not fix that fact
• How to use social media to build your personal brand 

 If were not able to attend the webinar, a recording is available below. The slides can also be found here.  

First our very own Robin Dindayal published a very informative Facebook Places Primer piece and second, we announced the addition of Facebook Places to the growing list of channels your organization can publish out to from the Awareness Social Marketing Hub.

Pretty cool, huh?? We kind of think so

Support for Facebook Places comes shortly after we added foursquare to the Social Marketing Hub allowing marketers to publish Tips to multiple venues. Like with foursquare, you can now add your Facebook Places to the Hub and publish out content to one or multiple places in one step.

With the Hub you can also quickly generate comprehensive reports that track the effectiveness of content published to Facebook Places, so you can see how your content is being consumed, shared, commented on, and, let’s not forget, Liked. And, with the Hub’s Engage module, you are able to centralize all the comments and discussions around that content to track and respond directly from within the Hub.

This feature is going to be especially helpful for you if your organization currently has multiple venues. With Facebook Places, when a Facebook Place is created, it generates another Page within Facebook. Yes, that is another page that your organization can either choose to ignore or claim. For those of you out there who are already managing multiple Facebook Pages, now you have even more Pages to manage – yippee for you, right? Not so much. By using the Hub, you can easily manage and scale to be able to claim and manage all those Places all from one central location. Yay!

Want to learn more? Have questions for us?? Give me a shout at at cmajor@awarenessnetworks.com or via Twitter at @awarenessinc or @cmajor.

And…if you haven’t already checked out the Awareness Social Marketing Hub or you have before, but want to check it out again, please attend one of our live demo webinars where you can check it out for yourself!

Can’t make it to our webinar? No problem, just contact me and I can help you out!

If you missed part 1, don’t worry…you can check it out here 

Well…Mike Lewis, VP of Marketing at Awareness, Inc. asked him a few questions about Socialnomics and what’s been happening with the book since it was first published as well as what it means to live and do business in a Socialnomic society. Erik also shared his advice on the ingredients that go into creating a video with the potential to go viral.  

Take a moment to watch the video with Erik and Mike! There is a hilarious awkward moment at the end you won’t want to miss! 

If you would like to check out Socialnomics for yourself, Awareness, Inc. has partnered with Erik to offer you a free chapter download to get a sneak peak of the latest release of the book – download it here 

foursquare, Gowalla, Whrrl, Pegshot, Brightkite – LBS overload – oh my! I’m likely missing a boatload of LBS services currently available on the market, but you get the picture that there are a lot. If you haven’t been on some remote island or on a Carnival Cruise for the past six or so months, you are likely aware that LBS or Location Based Service is a sizzling hot topic. Even my mother is talking LBS (Oh geez…first Facebook, now foursquare!).

While there are dozens of LBS’ out there, one in paricular that has dominated the market is foursquare. With two million members and 15,000 new members joining daily, it has quickly become the new pretty girl at the party that everyone wants to be friends with. 

According to Wikipedia, Foursquare is a web and mobile application that allows registered users to connect with friends and update their location. Points are awarded for “checking in” at venues. Users can choose to have their check-ins posted on their accounts on Twitter, Facebook or both. Users can also earn badges by checking in at locations with certain tags, for check-in frequency or for other patterns such as time of check-in.    

If users check into venues multiple times over the course of several months, they are reigned the “mayor” of that venue. I have become the mayor of several venues including Bikram Yoga Studio, Red Hook Brewery, and Boloco in Concord, NH.    

While the majority of venues don’t even know what foursquare is and that they have their own mayor, there are those few businesses, the early adopters, that are jumping on the foursquare/LBS bandwagon and taking advantage of how they can incorporate this new technology into their marketing mix. Boloco is one of those businesses that is testing the waters with foursquare to figure out how they can use it. For the mayors of their individual locations, they receive a discount on each order. This is a great way to build loyalty among their most passionate barritoistas (yes, I just made that word up).    

It certainly works for me, but I recently lost my mayorship to another yahoo and working hard to get it back!   

So, many of you might be saying to yourself…yeah so what does this mean for my business? And even if I did care, how do I begin to leverage foursquare and other LBS platforms within my organization? If this is the case, then I encourage you to tune into the next Awareness, Inc. webinar on 8/11 “Foursquare for the enterprise, a brave new world” with Jason Keath, founder of Social Fresh, a social media education company. Some key takeaways which Jason will discuss during the webinar include:  

• Asking the right questions before using foursquare for business
• Experimenting with foursquare as a user first
• Listening to customers through foursquare
• The basic marketing pieces of foursquare (tips, specials, badges)
• Extending offline community through foursquare
• Integrating foursquare marketing
• How to train for foursquare
• Promotion of foursquare marketing

 Hope you can join us. To register for the live event (which will be recorded and available on demand later) click here. 

It’s time that businesses stop thinking of social media as a separate function and instead view it as a part of the entire organization! I couldn’t agree more with this statement from

During Leslie’s webinar “Social Media Success Starts with You!” she shared how to bring social media into your organization and, more importantly, how to support it.

When talking to people about incorporating social media in their overall marketing strategy, I often like to play off the famous “Field of Dreams” quote and tell people ”just because you build it, it doesn’t mean they will come.” This is exactly what Leslie was stressing in her presentation. Setting up your multiple channels such as a Facebook page, Flickr and Twitter accounts are a great first step, but that’s it. It’s just just a first step and the easiest one. The hard part is managing those accounts and, as Leslie pointed out, you have to nurture them and help them grow or success will be hard to come by.

Along with discussing some huge hurdles many organizations are faced with, other key takeaways from her presentation which can be viewed below include: 

• Stop tripping over the social tools; focus on a handful and master those before moving on to the next shiny thing
• Social media is not new; its the same thing we used to use for business, but with prettier, more attractive packaging that is easier to use
• Did you know that social media was born in 1978?
• Social media buy-in from the top down is crucial for its success in any organization
• Companies need to give their employees flex time to use social media tools to help promote their business
• The customer is not always right
• How do you manage it all?

The slides including the additional links Leslie added post webinar can be found on her Uptown Uncorked site here: http://uptownuncorked.com/2010/06/29/social-media-starts-with-you/

Video and slides can be downloaded here: http://www.awarenessnetworks.com/learning/webinars/poston

I was recently asked to keynote the final presentation at the NH Travel Council’s Governor’s Conference on Tourism in Portsmouth, NH. My focus was (shock, surprise) social media. But instead of just talking about social media, which frankly, I think there is too much talk about social media and not enough doing,  I decided to share some real examples of organizations within the travel & tourism space who are doing social media and doing it well.

I have to admit, I was really nervous about this presentation. I mean, I have spoken before, but never as the “keynote” and certainly not for a whole 60 minutes! So, in preparation for my big keynote debut, I leveraged my network and put a call out for some great examples of travel & tourism organizations having success with social media. I got several responses, one of which was from The Children’s Museum of New Hampshire.

Being familiar with The Museum from working with them for one of my NHTweetUp events and because they are local, I chose to include them as one of my featured case studies. So, I took my kids and my video camera and made my way to The Children’s Museum to speak with Heidi Duncanson, director of marketing for The Museum.

I was impressed. Really impressed with how Heidi was spearheading The Museum’s social media efforts. With their Facebook Page and Twitter account combined with their email newsletters (what BlueSky Factory calls the “Social Glue”), The Museum is able to connect with its members while building and nurturing their community.

During my video interview with Heidi (click below to view), she shared the Museum’s social media strategy along with some great examples of how just simply listening resulted in a visit from an out of town travel blogger who then wrote about her experiences within her blog that caught the attention of several other travel writers.

In later posts, I will share some other great examples from my presentation including my talk with Taste of Portsmouth about their social media efforts including their involvement with Foursquare Day in Portsmouth.  Please check back for that.

Hope you enjoy my video interview with Heidi. In case you are wondering who those two little cuties popping up in the porthole of the submarine are – they are my girls!

Know any organizations actually jumping in and doing social media and doing it well? Shoot me a note here or on Twitter @cmajor to let me know. I am always looking for great examples to capture and share.

TechKaraoke SXSW Photo Credit: Wayne Kurtzman @WayneNH

Despite the fact that I completely lost my voice during the conference, I did manage to sing with the help of my pal, Margot Bloomstein, who carried the vocals as we belted out The Violent Femmes “Blister in the Sun” with the live band. Not sure how great we sounded, but it was pretty awesome to have the fans blowing our hair in true “80’s big hair” fashion. Hey, I felt like a rock star for a good 3 minutes!

So, here is the video with Jen where I found out a bit more about her company Pinqued why she colored her hair pink.

Thanks Jen and Kate!

Want to learn more about how USATODAY.com is using social media to connect with its readers and share content?  Brian Dresher presented “More than just the news. A social media case study” during a recent AwarenessInc webinar. The complete recording can be accessed here.