Mediaboss Marketing

You wouldn’t walk up to a co-worker’s cubicle and challenge him to do 25 sit-ups on a typical workday, but you might challenge him online if your company was using one of the new social media platforms designed to encourage employees to stay (or get) in shape.  Or you might find that challenge in your own inbox, or an offer to go for a bike ride after work.

A growing number of companies are banking on social media to boost the participation rates in their employee wellness programs. As it is, about 90 percent of companies (with more than 5,000 employees) use the web to deliver their wellness programs. For example, one employee wellness company, ShapeUp, has a Facebook-like platform, where people invite “friends” to participate, create “teams,” and can log their own fitness and weight control efforts and see how they’re doing compared to others in their company.

“The prime motivator is the social accountability we engender,” said Dr. Rajiv Kumar, founder and chief medical officer of ShapeUp. The “friends” can be a powerful motivating force, especially when everyone can see how much (or little) you’ve done each week.

“We believe this peer accountability, which is stronger than accountability to a faceless HR department, can be as powerful, if not more, than financial incentives,” Kumar said.

According to ShapeUp’s research, about 30 to 50 percent of employees at their client companies participate in their social media wellness program compared to, say, a typical walking program, for which 15 percent participate, or a weight loss program, for which about 8 percent partake.

Other studies explain why social media may help motivate people to exercise more or lose more weight. These studies show that peers have a big impact on your health behaviors. When people are losing weight around you, you’re more likely to lose weight, and when they’re quitting smoking, you’re more likely to quit too. But it can also go the opposite way - when they eat donuts, you’re likely to do that as well!   

ShapeUp makes fitness and nutrition challenges and the teams compete against each other to see who can walk the furthest (measured with pedometers), bike the most miles, lose the most weight, eat the healthiest, and do the most sit-ups. Employees log their efforts and accomplishments daily or weekly. If you don’t enter your log for a few days, you may get a friendly nudge from a teammate. On the other hand, when you run a 5K or simply go for a long walk, you might get a round of cyber high-fives from your teammates.

One of the best aspects of these social media wellness programs is that they are like Match.com for exercisers. You can crowd source a cycling partner, jogging buddy or someone to play tennis with.  If your company isn’t doing social media wellness, you can check out Fitocracy and Daily Mile, direct-to-consumer websites that use the same concept of social media to help people meet their fitness and nutritional challenges.

Laurie Tarkan is an award-winning health journalist whose work appears in the New York Times, among other national magazines and websites. She has authored several health books, including "Perfect Hormone Balance for Fertility." Follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

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How social networking can boost your workout

Internet Dental Alliance, Inc. (IDA) announces social networking tools and dental marketing strategies designed to find new patients and maximize dental practice marketing success.

(PRWEB) February 23, 2012

Internet Dental Alliance, Inc. (IDA) announces its new dental marketing strategy that allows doctors to meet prospective patients where they gather on the web. Social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter and Yelp are the most popular way for people to ask their friends for recommendations and share information online. In response, IDA created dentist social networking tools that can be easily integrated with any social networking profiles that a dental practice may already have.

The success of social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Delicious, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Orkut, WordPress, LiveJournal, TypePad and others means that social networking tools need to be included in every dental practice marketing plan. However, successful social marketing requires maintaining an active presence, which can be overwhelming (or impossible) for busy doctors.

"That's why IDA designs customized dentist social networking strategies that are easy to implement. For example, websites and portals can be completely integrated into a dentist's personal or professional Facebook profile," says Jim Du Molin, dental patient marketing consultant and founder of Internet Dental Alliance, Inc. "Individual Facebook pages can be built for each market segment a doctor wants to target, including geographical locations, and specialties such as dental implants, braces & orthodontics, Invisalign ©, dentures and wisdom teeth."

Each dental website page is designed so that new patient prospects can be strategically sent to the practice’s social networking profile pages for social proof or more information. Twitter feeds and Yelp reviews are good sources for testimonials from existing patient. LinkedIn listings and YouTube playlists are good ways to provide more information about dental specialty areas such as cosmetic dentistry, orthodontics, periodontics or sleep apnea.

"Since most web visitors will have profiles on their own selection of social networking sites, displaying a variety of social networking tools on your dental practice website makes it easy for them to do some dental marketing for you," adds Du Molin. "Referrals are the most powerful kinds of advertising. Patients can spread the word to family and friends by email, or by using their own Facebook pages, blogs or other online networks they’ve joined."

Dental practice lead generation is an important online marketing strategy for increasing dental practice size, so New Patient Portals are designed to invite web visitors to share the information they find with their own online contacts. Each page is embedded with a selection of links, creating social networking and bookmarking opportunities for patients on hundreds of different sites. Since new social sites are constantly appearing on the web, the list is regularly updated to include the newest online destinations.

About Internet Dental Alliance, Inc.

IDA is North America's largest provider of websites for dentists, email patient newsletters and dental directories, and completed development of its unique LeadFire technology in 2012. Internet Dental Alliance provides dental practices with online dental marketing services such as websites and newsletters, find-a-dentist websites, and other dental management advice and resources.

###

Julie Frey
Internet Dental Alliance
888-476-4886
Email Information

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Dental Marketing Strategy: IDA Announces Dentist Social Networking Tools to Engage New Patients

It's a social network for people you haven't met yet, but it's not a dating site. Or so they say.

My welcoming committee on Badoo.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET. Faces and names blurred for privacy.)

There's a social network oozing into the U.S. that you probably haven't heard of yet: Badoo. I hadn't.

But this network has, I'm told, 130 million users around the world, with about 6 million in the U.S. How did that happen? And will it play in Peoria? Here's the story, in two parts.

Part 1: The high-minded theory
Badoo is a social site, but it's no Facebook. Where Facebook is the network of your friends (even if you define "friend" loosely), Badoo is a network for friends yet to be.

But neither is Badoo, strictly speaking, a dating service, according to CEO Andrey Andreev and CMO Jessica Powell. Rather, Badoo is designed to connect you to people nearby whom you don't yet know, for whatever purpose you like. As Powell says, it's like the offline world. "There's always the potential for flirting or dating, but along the way you might just make friends, or meet people you want to introduce your friends to."

Like Facebook, Badoo's design encourages people to keep coming back. "With a dating site, if you go there and are successful, you don't come back. In Badoo, you come back," says Powell.

Badoo is also a location-based social service. It's designed to help you find people nearby who share your interests, and there's a strong smartphone app. It's pitched as great if you're looking to hang with someone in a new city you're visiting, or connect with people at an event.

Powell told me that about 50 percent of the conversations on the service lead to real-world meetups, and that under 20 percent of the site's usage is around dating. These are both very interesting numbers for an online connection service.

I would say my conversation with Andreev and Powell went well. I was envisioning using Badoo to connect with cool people at crowded events like the Maker Faire, or maybe at industry conferences.

Then our meeting ended, and I tried the service.

Part 2: The low-down reality
The initial impression I got when I signed to the service: man, this is creepy. Immediately after signing on, with no photo or information in my profile, I was told that four women wanted to talk with me, one of whom was 382 miles away. Why? I was a blank box with nothing but an age and a location.

Use Badoo to find nearby people open to talking or meeting.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET. Faces and names blurred for privacy.)

Actually, the entire sign-on process tells you a different story than the one the CEO and CMO told me. This is a photo-based dating site. About the only question you need to answer to get active on the service is if you want to meet a girl or a guy (or both) and their age. There is no concept of groups or networks of friends. Even the part where you enter in interests, to match with other users, is relatively obscure.

Then there's the revenue model: the service is free, but only to a point. To be featured on the top of the site's or the app's navigation bar as a nearby contact, you have to buy credits. To activate "super powers" (which allow your messages to go to contacts more quickly, among other things), you either pay with credits or contacts: you can invite other users to Badoo and the service will check your social networks for matches if you authorize it to do so. Other features require payment, too, and you can't do much before you bump into pay-me blocks. Otherwise, you'll feel hemmed in.

A site that's similar in some ways, HowAboutWe, feels more platonic than Badoo. And HowAboutWe has very clear dating mission.

Badoo appears to be all about the hookup. Now, there's nothing wrong with that, and it's a reasonable business to be in. There is, after all, one thing that people will always want, and one way or another, pay for.

And I do respect Powell's assertion that in Silicon Valley we tend to like the sterile, or as she put it, "desexified" product. Humans are needy, messy creatures, so why not build businesses that serve that reality?

The challenge is that if you have a sexy product, there's very little else that can bloom underneath it. Powell disagrees with this and said in an e-mail after we talked, "Dating only represents about 20 percent of how users make use of the site. I think Badoo is successful (far more so than dating sites, which are smaller) because it's not prescriptive. We give you the tools to meet people, then you decide what you want to do....I think most people go with some sort of 'romantic' hope, but along the way, they have all sorts of entertaining, flirty, and fun encounters."

I was also told, "Dating is a popular initial use case, and we expect the U.S. to follow the pattern of our other high-usage countries, where the uses broaden out over time and as the site scales."

My exposure to Badoo has been brief, but to me it seems like a gritty, real connection service, not the ongoing social experiment that I was eager to try before I experienced what it really was. Perhaps Badoo will expand beyond "flirting" in the U.S., but I can't imagine going back to it for anything but that.

Badoo raised $30 million from Russian investor group Finam in 2007. Powell told me the company has an annual run rate of $150 million, from about 1 million paying users every month.

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Badoo blazing a new path in social networking?

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Posted 23 February 2012 10:30am by Steve Richards with 0 comments

It’s easy to assume social networking is the domain of the young.

Generation Y might have grown up with social, but there’s a growing number of people over 60 for whom social media is every bit as important.

People over the age of 55 are the fastest growing group joining Facebook, according to research from Nielsen - and a survey by Kantar Media’s TGI MobiLens claims that people over 50 are more likely to use social networks on their mobiles than people under 30.

The 'over 65' group spends a reported 42 hours online every month, more than any other group. 

Research from myvouchercodes also suggests that 20% of grandparents are on a social network, of which 71% are part of Facebook, mostly encouraged by younger members of their families. Let’s hope their grandchildren remember that when oversharing on their status updates.
  
To help older people get online, Age UK is running a series of ‘Myfriends online’ weeks (the next one is coming up on 19th to 25th March). It’s also encouraging Facebook fans to become a digital champion and help an older friend, relative or neighbour learn how to use new technology.

Social media channels designed specifically for an older audience are springing up, from the purely social online communities (like Southwark Circle a neighbourhood-based community that aims to connect older people who live close to each other) to the more commercially-led, such as Saga’s online network, where people can discuss anything, with a few pointers towards pensions, insurance and holidays. All things that Saga sells, incidentally.

Plus, social channels can aid social change: Grey Pride, the lobby group championing rights for older people, uses an online community, forums, Twitter and blogs to campaign for a minister for older people. Gransnet – the offshoot of Mumsnet but for grandmothers – launched in 2011 with support from Nintendo and Pearson; it too combines social networking with campaigning and political clout, reflecting the power that this market has, both in terms of spend and influence.

And don’t assume that apps are the domain of the young, either: in a move of pure brilliance, Saga has launched a teenage slang translator app called ‘Woteva’, to help work out what your grandchildren (or children for that matter) are talking about.

Clearly, age on its own is no barrier to technical ability, and social media and online communities can be an incredibly effective way to reach an older audience, often with high spending power. Our population is aging – 40% of the UK population will be over 50 by 2035, according to the ONS - and so social media use within this group will only increase. Ignore it at your peril.

Internships for the 60+? Why not?

Steve Richards is MD of social media agency Yomego and a guest blogger for Econsultancy.

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Social and the grey market

By Jeremy Kirk
IDG News Service (Sydney Bureau)
February 23, 2012

SYDNEY - Mobile network operators are facing a decline in SMS (Short Message Service) revenue as their customers increasingly use apps for alternative messaging services such as Facebook or WhatsApp, according to a new study released on Wednesday by analyst Ovum.

Ovum estimated that operators worldwide saw a $13.9 billion decline in revenue last year due to the use of IP-based social messaging services, which amounts to about 9 percent of their total messaging revenue. In 2010, the decline was $8.7 billion, Ovum said.

SMS and MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) are the most important non-voice revenue streams for operators right now, said Neha Dharia, a consumer analyst with Ovum based in India.

But consumers, particularly so-called early technology adopters, would rather use Blackberry Messenger than send an SMS, Dharia said.

“Messaging is a very key revenue stream that is being impacted,” Dharia said. “People have begun to reduce their SMS usage.”

Services such as Blackberry Messenger and WhatsApp use a device’s data channel or Wi-Fi to send the message. Smartphone users frequently have inclusive data plans, which means they can potentially avoid SMS charges by using those applications to communicate.

Operators have seen the problem coming for a long time, Dharia said. One solution is for those companies to offer their own messaging services, using the Rich Communication Suite (RCS). RCS is a set of specifications for enabling IP-based features such as instant messaging, video, file transfer and presence capabilities on mobile devices.

Efforts have been under way for years by operators to implement RCS, and it is starting to appear in the market, Dharia said. Operators need to introduce the technology quickly, she said. Operators will also look to replace lost SMS revenue from other growing sources, such as mobile broadband services, she said.

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Operators face SMS revenue dip due to social networking