Tag Archives: social media
Ideopia Showcases B2B Marketing Work
A new b2b mini site from Ideopia showcases business-to-business marketing for clients in the medical equipment, industrial manufacturing, private aviation, business newspaper and restaurant categories. Ideopia’s philosophy as a B2B agency is to emphasize creative work that make complex to commodity products interesting and entertaining to prospects. The projects highlighted on the site include a web design for Hamilton Caster, an ad campaign that helped a business newspaper eliminate its competition, and a branding campaign that injected new life into a mature product.
The site also gives prospective clients a peek at Ideopia’s broad tactical capabilities, which include web site design, public relations, social media, advertising and web marketing.
Ideopia’s b2b accomplishments include 19 years of successive growth for a medical equipment manufacturer; a 40-fold increase in sales for a national computer hardware distributor; and sales and market share growth for clients through two recessions.
More information about Ideopia/B2B is available from new business director, Mike Bober, at 513-947-1444.
Eight Risky Hospital Marketing Procedures
- Envision your hospital as a conglomeration of separate companies or rogue states, e.g. radiology, oncology, ER, orthopedics, and our favorite, “The Open MRI Toaster.”
- Show lots of doctors in your ads. Doctors with their arms folded. Doctors with patients. Doctors with other doctors. Doctors with weird medical devices or doctors in scrubs. All available to you and your competitors on the nearest cheapo stock photo site.
- Use a safe tagline or positioning theme. Keywords and phrases: caring, extraordinary, we care more, our docs are smarter, excellence, (blank) for life, patients come first, your health comes first, we’re number one, blah, blah, blah.
- Assume it’s marketing’s job to sell whatever products they’re given. Refuse to act on consumer research, or don’t perform any at all, and deny marketing a seat at the table where real decisions are made.
- Position your hospital as the experts in a single field: The baby hospital. The heart hospital. The largest colon hospital. The niche positioning is a house of cards next year when your competitors pull ahead in the rankings.
- Ignore social media because you can’t control it. Pssst, your doctors and employees are already tweeting it up, so might as well listen join the conversation.
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Pander to internal constituencies rather than serve the huge healthcare information needs of your patients.
Ignore the fact that patients are smarter than they used to be. They have Web M.D., access to doctor and institutional reviews, drug interactions, and morbidity rates for various procedures.
Twitter Research: Go with the Crowd.
One of the biggest 
casualties of the recession is market research. Some marketers, like Ideopia, have turned to Twitter for directional information on ideas before making a full-blown commitment. Before you get crazy about confidence levels and standard deviations, let’s be clear: This isn’t a substitute for a quantitative study or even a focus group.
What Twitter offers is insight into how your followers might behave. For example, you might tweet a teaser about an event, “Want to see cows play hockey? Let us know.” Let’s assume that your Twitter following fairly accurately mirrors your target audience. So if you have 1000 followers and none of them reply to or re-tweet your post, you may have a dud on your hands.
Another strategy is to pit two ideas against each other to see which one catches. Twitter research allows you to take the temperature of your idea by crowd sourcing your followers. Give it a try!
Internal-Only Twitter Clients Thrive in Workplace
Looking for someone to grab lunch with? Tweet it. That’s what employees at a division of LG Electronics do, using BizTweet, the company’s internal-only version of Twitter.
In an age where companies and organizations face irrelevance for not using Twitter, companies like LG have found their social media niche developing unusual applications.
The informality of BizTweet has helped foster a positive culture within the company. Employees there tweet meeting updates and chat about customer support, as well as the occasional aside on traffic or sports.
In the healthcare industry, professionals may use Twitter internally to bid on work shifts, share patient trends and tweet live from medical conferences.
The possibilities are endless. Do you use Twitter outside the normal broadcast norms? Tweet us @Ideopia. Let’s get the discussion started.
Think Social Media is Free? Think Again.
Before you take an accounting of the true costs of social media, consider what expectations you have of a program. Is it just to get your feet wet? Are you counting on it for customer service? Do you expect to drive traffic to your website? Calibrate your budget accordingly.
Strategic Leadership (Monthly)
What are the goals of your program? What are the metrics? How will it be managed? Who is your target audience? How will you grow or engage your audience?
Tactical (Daily)
Who will create content? How often? What are the rules for acceptable posts and Tweets? How will you achieve economies of scale by deploying the same content across multiple platforms?
Monitoring (Daily)
How will you monitor and respond to interactions on social media? Friend requests?
Analytics (Daily – Monthly)
What are you measuring? How frequently? Will you analyze response to content, e.g. a LinkedIn Group? How will analytics affect decision-making and content?
The software for social media may be free, but the meatware is not. Effective social media programs require investment, brains and tenacity.