April 27th at Tampa’s Mainsail Conference Center was the setting for the largest-ever event of the Tampa Bay American Marketing Association when Bayshore Solutions and the AMA co-produced this event bringing

• the Regional Vice President of Facebook,
• an expert from Google’s National Agency Team and
• Three Florida Marketing Practitioners

(from the Tampa Bay Rays, Sarasota Memorial Hospital, and Offshore Sailing School) together to share lessons learned and what’s working with their Social Media, what opportunities are available, and how to best put Social media to work for real business results.

There was simply not enough time to get to all the questions posed to the panel via text messaging in the Q&A portion of the event, so our panelists are weighing in on these questions currently.

Check back over the next few weeks as more expert responses are received and posted here – and feel free to leave comments or other questions you may have.

General Questions to all Panelists:

Q:    Case study presenters: did you use Facebook advertising to promote your new fan page? If so, at what point in the process did you utilize the ads?

A:    Peter Taylor – Sarasota Memorial Hospital:
Actually, we are just now planning our first Facebook advertising campaign as part of a mammography promotion that includes both traditional and nontraditional media. We have not actively promoted our fan page on Facebook yet, but intend to do so moving forward now that we feel comfortable in the medium and have established brand credibility.

A:    Doug Sparks – Offshore Sailing School:
We started using ads after our A/B testing – the web communities are finicky and continued testing is important to maximize capture cost.  A/B testing is not that expensive once it is set up and running and can be very helpful in fine tuning your message and your ad campaigns.

Q:    How important is social bookmarking in building and sustaining a social media presence?

A:    Peter Taylor – Sarasota Memorial Hospital:
An important part of the toolbox in creating an online engagement platform. Give people as many choices as you can and let them decide which social media applications they prefer.

A:    Doug Sparks – Offshore Sailing School:
I don’t have an answer as of yet.  It is complicated and we are finding that as good as out analytics are the message we are using to attract needs constant redefining. In all it is huge – and important and easily identifiable market.  Reaching it and getting it to respond without making people feel like they are being preyed on is another story and a source of a certain amount of ambiguity on the consumers part – on purpose in some cases.

Q:     I worked in marketing for a law firm where there was tremendous resistance to social media and many business lawyers are recommending very restrictive usage policies.  Do any of the speakers have internal corporate policies one could share to help ease the “risk” concerns with Social Media?

A:    Peter Taylor – Sarasota Memorial Hospital:
I’ve attached a copy of our guidelines, which have been adopted from a variety of best practices at other organizations. We tried to keep them short, concise and actionable. They are not perfect, but I think provide good guidance in context of our other governing policies. No doubt we will revise and update as social media matures.

Sarasota Memorial Hospital Social Media Guidelines

A:    Doug Sparks – Offshore Sailing School:
It has not been a problem.  The issue we are finding and having to deal with now is how employees use their own personal pages in a manner that could reflect poorly on the company.

Q:    Are any of you using mobile communications in conjunction with social media and are your websites mobile-friendly?

A:    Peter Taylor – Sarasota Memorial Hospital:
We have tried some mobile advertising to promote our ER and Walk-In Clinics, but have had limited success so far. Smartphone penetration is relatively low in Sarasota. Later this month, we will launch a new web site on an asp.net platform, which will enable us to improve formatting and access on mobile applications. Your advertising has to work across all 3 screens — TV, computer and phone.

A:    Doug Sparks – Offshore Sailing School:
Yes, we have had Bayshore Solutions design and activate an entirely different site that is geared to iPhone, blackberry and other mobile users.

Questions addressed to Google/Sam Feldman:

Q:    As a direct response marketer, how can I best build my email list from YouTube? My channel does not give me the ability to add an opt in form

A:    For driving email subscriptions there are several options:
The first is to include links to your site on your YouTube channel, where users can opt in to your mailing list. This can be done in an interactive banner, or via regular links.

If you use promoted videos, you can include a ‘Call to Action’ overlay, see more information here:
http://ytbizblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/use-call-to-action-overlays-to-drive.html

Finally, you can use invideo overlay ads to drive users to your subscription page.

Q:    Any B2B success examples on Google content network?

Two B2B successes on Google Content Network that come to mind are:
1. Invistic -
https://www.google.com/intl/en_us/adwords/select/success/invistics.html

2. Bomgar -
https://www.google.com/intl/en_us/adwords/select/success/bomgar.html

More stories can be found here:
https://www.google.com/intl/en_us/adwords/select/success.html

Questions  to Offshore Sailing School/Doug Sparks:

Q:    Doug talks about using Affinity for traditional media and Bayshore for online media. Is this the norm – two “agencies”?

A:    I don’t know if anyone has found the “norm” for this new era of consumer and b2b marketing. I do know that we use to believe that the traditional method of advertising in the trades, etc., would bring people to the web site by advertising that web site, now it seems that a shift has occurred and people are going to the web to find the traditional media.

Case in point – just look at what has happened to newspapers all across the country and the world for that matter. I believe this is one area were the iPad is going to have a very huge impact on marketing and advertising.  Imagine getting on an airplane, pulling your iPad out and having access to all 5 of your favorite magazines, looking at them just like you would if you held the magazine or newspaper in your hand – getting a3D view of items if an advertiser made it available. Now you don’t have to carry all the paper and ink around and more importantly, it is eco-friendly in one way – no trees were felled to make your iPad work, which is really cool.

This being said, we have noticed that pulling away from traditional media hurt us and we are using people like Affinity to keep us in the public eye, press releases, advertising placement to support the web and direct mail for niche markets.  Bayshore Solutions manages our online presence and marketing and the two fit very well together – there is symbiosis in the different approach each one takes.

Questions to Tampa Bay Rays/Tom Hoof:

Q:    Do you have a dedicated person, beside yourself, that sends out messages?

A:    As of right now, I’m the only person that is sending out the messages.  I have them planned out and they are in unison with the other messages we are sending out.   I do have several other staff members who assist me in policing the site.  They will delete anything that is not family friendly. One we incorporated this into our creative process it became very easy.  It does not take up a lot of my time during the day.

Q:    How do you integrate your media relations for the Rays with your social media initiatives? Don’t you think it is important to make the case for coverage with the Press?

A:    We have a special twitter site that is available for the press.  We use this site to send out updates.  These updates could be announcing when Joe Maddon is available for a chat with reporters, or it can be used to give a status update on a player if they are injured during a game.

Questions to Sarasota Memorial Hospital/Peter Taylor:

Q:    How do you manage the SMH president’s page blog and is it really written by the president?

A:     Our CEO writes but we do make editing tweaks and have suggested topics and researched/added details on her behalf. It’s a great communication tool. We have approx. 2000 readers when she posts, and receive some lively comments back.

Q:    How do you handle HIPAA compliance? Not compromising patient confidentiality?

A:     We ensure we have a patient’s consent before we release any personal health information or details that could potentially identify a current or former patient. Any time a patient contacts us on a social media site regarding a personal experience, we typically communicate directly back to the patient only and don’t post to the site itself.

Q:    How did you convince others in the org that flip video was ok vs. professionally produced videos.

A:     When we demonstrated how much faster we could produce a finished product, it was an easy sell. We have initially focused on videos for internal consumption but will start producing some consumer versions later this month. Once we have taken the “Hollywood” out of the production end, we will probably use both options, but we had to hijack the process to make a meaningful change.

Q:    Can you provide any insight on your twitter followers or FB members in light of SMH’s older demographic?

A:     Our Facebook membership skews 88% female, with 45-54 years the most popular age group. Talk about key decision-makers! It doesn’t get any better than that. Twitter tends to skew slightly more male, with a more balanced age split.