GovDelivery Social Media Marketing Case Study

Happy Monday morning! Earlier in the year, I started a regular Monday social media marketing case study. So far, we've looked at work we've done for companies like British Telecom, Microsoft, Monster.com and Sun Microsystems. All great high profile brands...

but what about smaller companies with leaner budgets? Well, the great thing about integrating traditional PR with social media marketing is that it levels the playing field dramatically for companies that are trying to get cut-through on a limited budget. If you can create great content for your targeted community, content that they really want to consume and share, on a regular basis, they will. That is basically what we do...

Here is a great example of this approach in real life...

Situation

The world’s leading provider of government-to-citizen communication, GovDelivery provides the infrastructure for government entities to communicate better with citizens and deploy Web 2.0 technologies. Despite working hand-in-hand with many government agencies and being the depended-upon vendor for digital communication with constituents, GovDelivery was relatively unknown among the Government 2.0 community, government influencers and thought-leaders.

Goal

GovDelivery came to Strategic Communications Group (Strategic) in 2008 looking to improve their awareness among government influencers and decision makers, drive corporate valuation, and generate leads from agencies and government entities looking for a better way to serve and inform their constituents.

Solution

Strategic worked with GovDelivery to establish a traditional media relations strategy designed to generate awareness for the company among government influencers and decision makers while simultaneously assisting the company in taking steps towards social media adoption. Strategic worked with GovDelivery on the creation of the Reach the Public campaign, which consisted of targeted blog writing and blogger relations outreach, in conjunction with the launch of a Twitter stream dedicated to injecting GovDelivery into the Gov’t 2.0 arena.

Results

GovDelivery’s media relations activities culminated in the placement of a byline in Federal Computer Week that positioned Scott Burns, CEO and co-founder, as a thought leader in the government 2.0 space. Subsequently, Scott was chosen to be a presenter at a Government 2.0 “bootcamp” well attended by local “goverati,” experts on the issue of government 2.0 techniques.

Strategic’s social and traditional media activities secured dozens of high-level media placements and buzz in October when GovDelivery acquired government-focused social network GovLoop, known as the “Facebook of the Feds.” In January of this year, the increased visibility and rapid growth of GovDelivery helped drive the purchase of 89% of the company by the Internet Capital Group (ICG) at terms favorable to the company’s shareholders.

Here is a link to the whole case study, along with links to the various web sites: http://gotostrategic.com/site/index.php/site/cases/govdelivery/

Listen to my Webinar- an Overview of B2B Social Media Business Applications

Last week, I had the great opportunity of serving as a speaker for a webinar hosted by the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA). There were three excellent presentations and a fascinating Q&A session. The speakers were:

Jeff Majka, Director of Marketing and Business Development, Strategic Communications Group
Gail Nelson, SVP, Marketing, BurrellesLuce
Angela Lauria, CMO, AppAssure

...and the session was moderated by Karen Leavitt, CEO, Marketing Fusion.

Download the PDF of the 36 slides here and listen to the audio here (about 90 minutes).

What do you think? Please leave a comment or drop me a line!!

As I told you here, this was the first webinar in a four part series. The next three webinars will be held as follows (mark your calendars and click on the links to register):

Enterprise Sales Support - Using Social Medial to Support the Enterprise B2B Sales Cycle
Price for SIIA Members: Free, Non SIIA Members: $35
Monday, October 5th - 1:30pm - 2:30 pm EDT
With new service-based models and the rise of "freemium", the sales cycle is getting complicated -- and every advantage counts. Social media has the potential to connect these new models to the customers that want them, but how do you implement it? Where do you start? Hear how social media can transform the way you approach lead generation and sales cycle support.

Panelists:
Adam Mertz, Product Marketing Manager, Jive Software
Jay Hallberg, Co-founder & VP of Marketing, Spiceworks

Using Social Media to Target the C-Suite and Close Deals
Price for SIIA Members: Free, Non SIIA Members: $89
Monday, November 2 - 1:30pm - 2:30 pm EDT
Many of your customers are using social media to communicate with THEIR customers. How can you tap into their social media programs? The first step to closing the deal is to conduct a social media audit of your principal prospects. How can this be completed efficiently and comprehensively for a large number of prospects? How can you facilitate social media for deal capture?

Panelist:
Jim Fowler, CEO, Jigsaw

Social Media for Brand Awareness, Thought Leadership and Other Traditional PR Activities
Price for SIIA Members: Free, Non SIIA Members: $89
Monday, December 7th - 1:30pm - 2:30 pm EDT
Social media should be an integral part of your PR strategy, not just your sales function. To run a successful campaign Marketing, Sales and PR need to be integrated using today's popular social media tools. How can you effectively integrate your social media strategy across the enterprise?

Moderator:
Robert Carroll, VP Marketing, Clickability
Panelist:
Richard Dym, CMO, OpSource, Inc.

New SIIA Webinar: "The New Marketing Paradigm: Social Media in a B2B Setting"

I'm announcing a new webinar series, "The New Marketing Paradigm: Social Media in a B2B Setting", to be held over the next four months, sponsored by my firm, Strategic Communications Group, in conjunction with the Software and Information Industry Association. We will explore the many business applications of social media in a business to business environment. Some of the topics will cover how and when to use social media for:

• Lead generation
• Enterprise sales support
• Competitive intelligence gathering
• Deal capture
• Distribution partner identification and cultivation
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Executive visibility and thought leadership
• Reputation management
• Employee recruitment
• Team, culture and morale building

Click on this link for more information and to register: "The New Marketing Paradigm: Social Media in a B2B Setting"

Webinar #1: Overview of Business Applications of Social Media
Price for All: Free
Tuesday, September 8th - 1:30pm - 3:00pm EDT
Social media has already begun the transformation of how we interact, and has the potential to transform the way we do business. Understanding and effectively implementing a social media strategy can have a major impact on how businesses are perceived and how they interact with their customers. Nowhere is this more evident than the PR, marketing and sales departments. In this 90-minute webinar, you'll hear how social media tools can be used in lead generation, enterprise sales support, competitive intelligence management, employee recruitment, team culture & morale boosting, and branding & awareness

Moderator:
Karen Leavitt, CEO, Marketing Fusion
Panelists
Jeff Majka, Director of Marketing and Business Development, Strategic Communications Group
Gail Nelson, SVP, Marketing, BurrellesLuce
Angela Lauria, CMO, AppAssure

Webinar #2: Enterprise Sales Support - Using Social Medial to Support the Enterprise B2B Sales Cycle
Price for All: Free
Monday, October 5th - 1:30pm - 2:30 pm EDT
With new service-based models and the rise of "freemium", the sales cycle is getting complicated -- and every advantage counts. Social media has the potential to connect these new models to the customers that want them, but how do you implement it? Where do you start? Hear how social media can transform the way you approach lead generation and sales cycle support.

Webinar #3: Using Social Media to Target the C-Suite and Close Deals
Price for SIIA Members: Free, Non SIIA Members: $89
Monday, November 2 - 1:30pm - 2:30 pm EDT

Many of your customers are using social media to communicate with THEIR customers. How can you tap into their social media programs? The first step to closing the deal is to conduct a social media audit of your principal prospects. How can this be completed efficiently and comprehensively for a large number of prospects? How can you facilitate social media for deal capture?

Webinar #4: Social Media for Brand Awareness, Thought Leadership and Other Traditional PR Activities
Price for SIIA Members: Free, Non SIIA Members: $89
Monday, December 7th - 1:30pm - 2:30 pm EDT
Social media should be an integral part of your PR strategy, not just your sales function. To run a successful campaign Marketing, Sales and PR need to be integrated using today's popular social media tools. How can you effectively integrate your social media strategy across the enterprise?

Moderator:
Robert Carroll, VP Marketing, Clickability
Panelist:
Richard Dym, CMO, OpSource, Inc.

I'll be updating this page as we add more speakers. If you'd like to submit your name as a possible speaker, or if you have any other topic suggestions, please don't hesitate to email me at jmajka@gotostrategic.com.

Ranking the Straight to the Point Podcasts

Last week when I was scheduling a show with BlogTalkRadio (the one with Matt Langan, the Editor in Chief of GotGeoint?), I got curious and checked to see how many views the last show received on that service. I was pleased to see that 208 people have listened to my interview with Jennie Olson, the Director of Marketing at GovDelivery. That got me thinking, "what are the most popular shows I've done?" Well, here they are, in order...

Jean Foster, formerly of BT Americas, now with NeuStar- 239 views (August 21, 2009)
In my most popular audio podcast to date, I learned how Jean Foster, then VP Marketing for BT, used social media creatively to gain market share and effectively compete with Verizon and AT&T using smaller budgets and less staff.

Jennie Olson, Director of Marketing, GovDelivery- 208 views (June 26, 2009)
I interviewed Jennie Olson, Director of Marketing for GovDelivery, the world's leading provider of government-to-citizen communication solutions. GovDelivery's Email and Digital Subscription Management solution is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that provides organizations a fully-automated, on-demand public communication system.

Sumir Gulati, Vice President of Marketing at Appian - 152 views (August 15, 2007)
Sumir was generous enough to share his insights on how he markets a SaaS solution to the small and medium sized business market (SMB).

Charles Gold, Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at DataDirect- 132 views (May 8, 2007)
In my first BlogTalkRadio podcast, I was lucky to hear Charles tell me how he addresses the challenges that come from marketing DataDirect Technologies, the world leader in data connectivity and mainframe integration, offering the most comprehensive line of software for connecting the world's most critical applications to data and services, running on any platform, using proven and emerging standards

Oscar Fuster, Vice President of Marketing, ePok- 112 views (October 2, 2008)
I had a great conversation with Oscar Fuster, VP of Marketing at ePok, a software company that securely and efficiently extends Microsoft SharePoint’s value to the extranet; enabling public and private sector organizations to achieve new levels of business agility, while enhancing their security and information compliance posture.

Steve Lunceford, now with Deloitte, then with BearingPoint- 101 views (February 13, 2009)
I sat down with innovative marketer, Steve Lunceford, to learn first hand how he is integrating social media into his successful government marketing program.

Ed Bursk, now with Nokia Siemens Networks- 72 views (March 19, 2009)
This was a wide ranging interview with Ed Bursk, the man behind the marketing campaigns at KORE Telematics, Nortel Networks, Alcatel/Lucent and other technology companies.

What do you think of these podcasts? Are the valuable? Should I continue doing them? Change the pocasting service? Make them live shows? Are they too tame? Not substantive enough?

Is there anyone I should interview?

Please share any and all comments, suggestions...

Covering DOD and Intel Social Media with Matt Langan: A New Straight to the Point Podcast

This month, I'm pleased that Matt Langan agreed to spend some time with me for my Straight to the Point podcast series. Matt is the Editor in Chief of GotGeoInt?, a social network for the geospatial intelligence community, founded and funded by The United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation. Matt has deep firsthand experience in setting up, growing and managing a community social network.

Matt's main points:
- The intelligence community was one of the early adopters of social media and there is deep penetration throughout intelligence and defense organizations
- A blog should be the central hub around which all other social media tools are arrayed for the purpose of promoting and distributing the content
- Content is king- without educational, engaging and entertaining content, any social media strategy is doomed to failure

Here is a link to the podcast hosted on BlogTalkRadio: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/JeffMajka/2009/07/21/Inteview-with-Matt-Langan-Founder-of-Got-GeoInt




What do think? Should community managers run their social networks like Matt does? Is your industry already developing social networks like GotGeoInt?

Facebook and.....Bing!

Tonight is not going to be normal Friday night. No, instead of heading downtown with the beautiful people and getting my "crunk on", I'll be home at my computer, along with millions of other nerds, waiting to jump on Facebook at exactly midnight to grab my custom Facebook URL. You haven't heard of this? Well, here is the link to the story on the WSJ blog and a link the Facebook blog. There aren't too many Jeff Majkas in the world but I'll be damned if I don't get facebook.com/jeff.majka nailed down...

I'll also be there to grab a URL for my agency's fanpage on Facebook...check it out if you haven't visited lately-- we just uploaded some pictures from Susan G. Komen Walk last weekend!

Hey, what do you know, there is a new search engine in town! Bing! And the initial reviews are in- generally positive- Bing! I checked it out and my initial review is - Bing!- I like it! Here is a link to Bing! and a story about the new search service.

AdAge Likes PR Now

Sometimes being late to the party has its advantages. A grand entrance, perhaps. But arriving just as the party is wrapping up is bad timing. Traditional PR is dying alongside traditional media. A new form of earned media is being born right now- do these guys get it?

Last week, Jonah Bloom wrote an interesting article for AdAge about the new-found acceptance of PR. Apparently, there was a lot of positive comments about PR from Unilever CMO Simon Clift and Union Square Ventures honcho Fred Wilson at the recent Ad Age Digital Conference. The idea here is that social media is raising the importance of PR within the marketing mix

Fred says:

"There are still a lot of marketers out there buying their media when they could earn it, and earn it a lot less expensively," he said today at Ad Age's Digital Conference in New York.

While overall spending on marketing may go up, traditional-media outlays are declining, and spending is growing on the creative and technology necessary to implement social campaigns on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Agencies have to find a way to continue to make money in this environment.

"The total amount of money flowing out of marketers' pockets to agencies won't decline and will likely go up, but the mix is headed for important changes," Mr. Wilson said.

He goes on to point out that:

The challenge for marketers and agencies, then, is to engage with social media in an authentic way, and know they are going to be punished by its denizens for any perceived spam.

Which, I think, is missing the point. The problem is earned media in the past was that were was no solid ROI for any dollar spent on PR. Yes, everyone knew that an article in a trade mag or coverage on CNBC would yield awareness and credibility, but no one on earth could track just how that turned into sales and profits.

Simon Clift is the top marketer at one of the largest (if not the) consumer products companies in the world. One of his main points is that (emphasis added by me)

"brands are now becoming conversation factors where academics, celebrities, experts and key opinion formers discuss functional, emotional and, more interestingly, social concerns," and "of course, the conversation is no longer one way or 30 seconds. ... You may want to talk about sport and just doing it, and the consumer raises the uncomfortable question of sweatshops."

That's the whole point! Ongoing one-to-one conversations isn't marketing, it is relationship selling. Selling that has to be credibly earned. That isn't a intrusion. That can be tracked over time. That you can assign a ROI to. The transformation of the PR profession from pitching media to sitting at the intersection of sales, marketing and customer service.

I just don't think either of these three fellows quite gets where we are headed.

Interview with George Spohn at Satellite 2009

One of the more interesting industries I work with is the satellite industry. Characterized by extremely large upfront capital expenditures, this adjunct to the overall telecommunications field had some hard times caused by overcapacity issues in the early part of the century. Since the onset of the war in Afghanistan, and the military's embrace of the use of civilian bandwidth to support the warfighter, along with the sudden growth in popularity in both satellite radio (XM/Sirius) and satellite TV (DirecTV- note, I am a subscriber to this fine service), the industry has been growing at a healthy solid rate.

Each year, one of the main industry get-togethers is the Satellite show held here in Washington DC. This year, I took a video camera down to the show and interviewed some of the movers and shakers in the industry. One of those leaders was George Spohn, Vice President, North American Sales & Marketing at Thrane & Thrane. Thrane & Thrane is the world´s leading manufacturer of equipment and systems for global mobile communication based on sophisticated satellite and radio technology. I've know George for years. He is one of the smartest people in the satellite industry, and I'm glad I got the chance to pick his brain about the trends he is seeing.



Go to YouTube if you can't view it here.

Were you at the show? What do you think the greatest opportunity is for the satellite industry now? It's greatest challenge?

Social media and government 2.0

There has been a lot of interesting discussions and events recently about the intersection of government, social media and web 2.0. Broadly described as government 2.0 or gov 2.0, there was even a way-cool barcamp like event, Gov2.0 camp last week. Even a traditional government IT event like FOSE was a-buzz with chatter about terms like twitter, conversation, brightkite, etc.

At FOSE, I had the privilege of interviewing two leaders in the field of marketing IT services and products to government customers both directly and through channel partners. I think you'll find their insight invaluable.

First, I sat down with Brian Grainger of SpectraLogic's federal group. Go to YouTube to view the video, if you can't see it here:



Second, I spent some time talking with Ed Bursk. Ed is a long time marketing leader behind the marketing campaigns at KORE Telematics, Nortel Networks, Alcatel/Lucent and other technology companies. Go to YouTube to view the interview, if you can't see it here:



What do you think about Ed and Brian's views of government spending priorities? Will the stimulus money actually hit the streets this year in an impactful way?

What I Learned at Satellite 2009

I've spent the past two days at the Satellite 2009 trade show. Given the overwhelming negative news these days, I'm thankful to spend some time with individuals and companies that are doing well, making money and excited about the future. The industry seems to be in a much better place than 2001 and seems poised to motor through 2009.

Here are the main takeaways:

1. Satellite operators and services companies have multi-year contracts that buffer them from somewhat from quarter to quarter fluctuations in the economy.

2. By and large, most satellite companies have remained immune to the leverage mania of the past decade and are in reasonably good financial shape.

3. The government continues to buy a huge amount of commercial satellite capacity.

4. Satellite capacity is at 90% utilized and there isn't a big number of new satellites going up in the next few years so pricing power and margins will remain good. There is no glut, like in 2001.

5. With utilization so high, current issues are interference mitigation and squeezing every last drop of data through the pipe.

6. Communications on the move (COTM) is again a hot application for both the military and commercial customers. I particularly liked the AT&T CruiseCast in-car satellite TV.

As with the FOSE show, I interviewed a number of people about their take on the show, hot trends, etc. We'll be polishing those up over the next few days and releasing them out into the wild...

Brand New Straight to the Point Podcast with Ed Bursk

I've been interviewing marketing executives as part of the "Straight to the Point" series for almost two years. One guy I've been working hard to schedule is Ed Bursk. Ed is a marketing consultant who has worked with numerous technology, networking, telecom and government IT companies in his career and has a wealth of knowledge and best practices. His experience includes Nortel Networks, Alcatel/Lucent, KORE Telematics and others. Take a listen to the interview and let me know what you think?

Social Media Is Sales

Social media is direct sales, sales support, customer service, advertising, public relations, and marketing. All in one. This fact is being increasingly proven in real world environments, especially sales and customer service. Here is the story from InternetNews:

Enterprises may be late adopters of social media, but a new effort by Salesforce aims to make it easier for companies to tap into the trend for customer service.

The company today announced a Twitter extension to its Service Cloud, the company's customer service solution.

The news marks the Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) CRM giant's most recent foray into social media. Last year, the company began showing off Force.com for Facebook, an application that lets enterprises build applications in Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) that take advantage of Facebook's social features and massive audience.

But there's demand in particular for customer service solutions because there's pain in the call center, said Alexandre Dayon, senior vice president of the customer service and support division at Salesforce.

Customers no longer go to companies to solve problems because the existing tools prevent it: Automated phone help is often seen as confusing, while Web knowledge bases are filled with irrelevant information and e-mail takes too long.

Instead, customers frequently abandon the telephone and the corporate support infrastructure and go to Google, Facebook, Twitter and to community message boards to get their answers. In response, companies are aiming to follow them to the Web, and some already have.

Forrester analyst, Jeremiah Oywang says in his blog, Web Strategy, referring to Twitter that-

Although they have not directly said it, I think Twitter can go further than this, they could be their own CRM system, by perhaps offering their own analytics system to brands, that will help them to track and manage the conversations within the 140 sphere. This has tremendous opportunities for Twitter should they create their own brand management system that they can resell to the world’s companies to monitor, alert, track, prioritize, triage, assign, followup, and report on the interactions with brands. The myriad of authority based tools will need to be incorporated, as some users have a larger network and are therefore more influential than others. On the other hand, they just might leave the firehose open for the incumbent CRM companies to take advantage of –and miss this opportunity, hell, Scoble is already expecting brands to contact him when he has a major life event. Either way, with a recent funding amount of $35mm, they’ve enough run rate to first manage growth, then prepare for monetization.

There are a few layers when it comes to how Social CRM can evolve, I’ll save that for a future post. On a related note, this is one of the key findings from our many interviews for the upcoming report: The Future of the Social Web.

Customer service integrating social media feeds is a good thing. However, I thing the real value of social media comes when you tie it directly into the sales cycle. When the sales cycle is nothing more than a natural extension of the real, open individual interaction between a prospect and a company, then we'll have realized the ROI of social media.

The Old World is Gone...The New One is Here

It's an exciting day in the business world as Congress pummels the CEO of AIG, a company they own, the Federal Reserve announces that it will engage the supercharger on the nation's printing press adding $1.5 trillion (!) to the financial system and news leaked that IBM is thinking about buying Sun Microsystems, reversing a nearly 20 year trend focusing on software and services.

The understanding of the world we developed over the last 10 years of what was possible, of what was expected behavior has been radically transformed. Newspapers are going bankrupt, trade magazines are no longer credible and social networks have passed email in popularity. This disruption is affecting nearly every aspect of our personal and professional lives.

So.....imagine my surprise when last night I attended a seminar on state of the art government marketing practices...and no one talked about social media...as if everything was exactly the same as it was in 2004. Hard to believe really, given that buzzwords like Gov 2.0 have been on everyone's lips as of late. It's clear that there needs to be yet more education on the measurable (read: $$) ROI of social media and how to integrate it into an overall marketing campaign.

Have you come across people that seem to be completely disconnected from the transformation that's occurred in PR and marketing in the past few years? I'd love to hear your war stories...

I Want My Health Care Easy

Imagine a time when you can log onto Facebook, click on your Doctor's profile, schedule a appointment for the next few days, fill out a quick form with a list of what's ailing you, happy in the knowledge that your medical information will be electronically transferred to his medical and office software for quick diagnosis and easy billing.

Facebook's easy to use, consumer friendly medical insurance app would monitor the Doctor's invoice, the insurance company's payments for any errors, while anonymous data about your condition, diagnosis and treatment would be sent to the CDC so it could monitor for pandemic flu and other diseases.

All of this would happen with a few clicks of the mouse.

Science fiction right?

Electronic health records (EHR) have been talked about forever and a day it seems. I remember sitting through a compelling presentation at the AeA four years ago about EHR. Microsoft and Google have SaaS offerings already up. Everyone agrees that EHR will be consumer friendly, increase reporting, preserve privacy, save Doctors money- so why doesn't happen?

Probably because the whole healthcare industry is so fractured, non-functional and distorted by haphazard government regulation that something this, well simple, has to wait until everything else wrong with healthcare gets fixed first.

How messed up is it? Here are five healthcare experts talking on a NYTimes blog with five different takes on healthcare reform. They each have an axe to grind but none of them seems to have a holistic solution.

What do you think? Even given that the President is setting aside $600B for health care reform, will it work? Can it work?

Social Media and Government Marketing Best Practices from Steve Lunceford

One of the best parts of my job is that I get to talk every single day with talented marketers. Talking shop with these experts is a joy and I could do it all day long. Over the past few years, marketing and PR have undergone the most significant transformation since the mass adoption of the Internet, and possibly since the invention of advertising funded mass media in the 19th century.

Most amazing to me is that the whole industry has seemingly embraced change in the space of two to three years. Given the poor reputation of PR flacks and marketing people, you'd think that we'd be stuck in our ways with our heads in the sand. But no, nothing but continual innovation. Look at the auto industry for an example of folks that just can't quite admit the world has changed- something they've known for decades.

One of the most innovative marketers out there is Steve Lunceford, the Director of Global Communications for BearingPoint. Steve's main responsibility is to support BearingPoint's engagements with government agencies. "Business to Government" marketing has always been one of the areas of marketing most resistant to innovation. But even here, under the leadership of people like Steve, social media is being used to generate real, measurable results.

I sat down Steve to learn first hand how he is integrating social media into his successful government marketing program.

Please listen to the podcast interview we recorded last week.

Related links:
http://GovTwit.com – BearingPoint’s government Twitter directory
http://BearingPoint.com/GovTube - New Thinking In Government video series
http://Twitter.com/dslunceford - Follow Steve on Twitter
http://ProReporterTips.com – Steve’s personal blog

What do you think of Steve's strategy and tactics? Would you do the same thing or do you have a different approach to government marketing? I'd love to hear what you have to say! Please leave a comment...

(...and full disclosure, BearingPoint is a client of my employer, Strategic Communications Group)

Health Care and Social Media

One of the most interesting areas where social media will make an impact is in the health care industry. Most people would readily admit the last two groups to adopt any technology are lawyers and doctors. Of the two, I think that the doctors, and the larger healthcare industry, will be much more rapid adopters of social media. Here is why:

- Government regulation: healthcare reform, medical process management, electronic health records are all trends that, for better or worse, are pushing technology and healthcare workers together. It's easier to adopt social media when you are already using a mobile device, PC or laptop to view professional development videos, process medicare forms, view/send patient records and run your hospital/HMO/personal office.

- Generational shift: as the Baby Boomers move into retirement, they will create openings in senior management for people who are comfortable using technology to communicate transparently with peers, co-workers, vendors and customers.

- Customer demand: patients have adopted social media with amazing rapidity. They are now used to communicating with their service providers in a community type environment where the corporation's voice is merely one among many. Smart companies have mastered this new viral, less controlled communications environment. Less nimble companies have fumbled this opportunity to recreate relationships on a stronger basis, and have suffered sales and market share effects. Organizations as diverse as insurance companies to hospitals to medical device companies to professional associations will have to master social media in order to communicate effectively with their stakeholders.

What do you think? Am I off base? I'd like to get your feedback. Leave a comment below or feel free to fill out a quick three question survey I running on the use of social media and the healthcare industry http://tinyurl.com/6fscao