The Communications Department

As I prepared  for a couple of trips this summer, I found myself relying on user-generated review sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp to help me make decisions about hotels and places to eat. As a result, I started to wonder about the impact of these reviews ultimately have on business. After a little research, I came across a comScore study, which included these interesting tidbits of information:

• Nearly one out of every four Internet users (24%) reported using online reviews prior to paying for a service delivered offline.
• Of those who consulted an online review, 41 % of restaurant reviewers subsequently visited a restaurant.
• More than three-quarters of review users in nearly every category reported that the review had a significant influence on their purchase, with hotels ranking the highest (87 percent).
• Study participants were willing to pay up to 50% more for a meal for a high user-review rating.

(Source: comScore and The Kelsey Group, 11/29/07)

As for the accuracy of the reviews? “Ninety-seven percent of those surveyed who said they made a purchase based on an online review said they found the review to have been accurate.”

From my perspective and the influence user-generated reviews had on my purchasing decisions, the study rings true.

So what’s a business to do? A great place to start is Google. Google your business and look for the “reviews” link. Google pulls reviews from multiple sources, so business owners can see which sites contain reviews. Also, check out the more popular user-generated review sites, like Yelp.com, TripAdvisor.com and OpenTable.com. Some sites, like TripAdvisor, allow the business owner to respond to specific reviews so readers can get both sides of the story. Once you get a sense of what’s out there, think about how user-generated reviews factor into your social media marketing strategy. 

I think this study makes a compelling argument regarding the impact of user-generated reviews on the bottom line. Businesses, especially hotels, restaurants and other service-related businesses, need to know that people are talking about them and it may be costing them a lot of money.

I recently learned that there is a significant difference between blogging and Tweeting about how to use blogs and Twitter to communicate and grow business and actually using these tools for those purposes. Here are some insights I have gained as the guy handling the Twitter account for the Holyoke Blue Sox of the New England Collegiate Baseball League. I’m filling this role right now because The Communication Department’s value proposition is that I can become either an extension of an existing corporate communications department or a virtual communications department for clients who do not have the resources to employ a full-time communications professional. My role with the Blue Sox is the latter and includes overseeing marketing and communications for the team, so I’m doing the Tweeting in the short term until I transition the responsibility to one of our several interns.

The Challenging Stuff

• It is tough to Tweet from the road. I recently had a meeting near Boston, which is about an hour-and-a-half drive each way. While it is not illegal to text while driving in Massachusetts (at least not yet), it is not something I like to do. Between drive time and meeting time, I was away from Twitter about five hours, during which time I wanted to tweet about our recent deal with radio station ESPN 1450 AM WHLL, the local ESPN affiliate in Springfield, MA. It had to wait until I got back. So much for the real-time nature of the application.
• I could not have Tweeted from the road, anyway. Most of my Tweeting is done via laptop. While I do have the Twitterberry application on my BlackBerry, it would not let me switch from @_DaveS (my Twitter account) to @HolyokeBlueSox, and I wanted to Tweet as the team, not me. I have since added the TinyTwitter application to my BlackBerry and set it up as @HolyokeBlueSox. So far, so good.
• I missed an opportunity. Before I had TinyTwitter on my BlackBerry, we had a radio interview at ESPN 1450 AM WHLL in Springfield, MA, to promote the upcoming season. Without laptop and WiFi access, I could not Tweet from the interview. So my first Tweet afterward was something like “Just finished interview at ESPN 1450 AM to promote upcoming season.” Not terribly exciting.
• I don’t make it to every game. I attend as many home games as I can, but rarely travel with the team. I like to Tweet real time game activity, but I can’t be there for every inning. So far none of our followers have said anything, but it’s a challenge. This should change when the intern(s) take over the game day Tweeting.
• I was surprised that none of the interns were using Twitter.They were all Facebook only folks. Speaks to the generational aspect of Twitter, I guess.

The Good Stuff

• Overall, handling the Blue Sox Twitter account has gotten easier. I’m online most of the day. I have my @_DaveS account open on my desktop using TweetDeckand the @HolyokeBlueSox account open using Twhirl. I have a column set up on TweetDeck for Tweets with Blue Sox so I can monitor those Tweets.
• We’re building a nice following of local folks on Twitter. It was cool to see people Tweeting about the game during the home opener.
• The real time nature is a plus. It was great to Tweet about in real time as our players were drafted during the Major League Baseball draft.
• I try to keep our Tweets interesting. I have used Twitter to give away free tickets to games, which has helped our marketing efforts. I will use it to promote our YouTube channel. I also use it to promote upcoming home games and to share information about our players.
• TinyTwitter has been an easy and effective application for my BlackBerry.
• Twitter is a different way to engage people.Interaction with individual Blue Sox fans via Twitter is different from the normal communication channels like e-mail and print.
• Twitter has been an additional channel to promote our sponsors. This has been a nice value-add that we will discuss with them when renewing their sponsorships next season.
• I learn things. One of our followers told me about a social networking site (www.holyoke.ning.com) for the city of Holyoke, which I did not know about. I have set up the Blue Sox on the site, which has connected us to a community of folks I did not know existed.
• We are where the media are. We are connected through Twitter to some of the local media outlets, which helps us gain exposure in the area. The local newspaper has re-Tweeted some of my Tweets.
• The more we Tweet, the better.I Tweet throughout the day and find that I will pick up additional followers the more frequently I tweet. Number of updates is often a factor when someone is deciding whether or not to follow you. So if we have a healthy number of updates, it becomes obvious that we are active on Twitter. People prefer to follow active Twitterers.

The Fun Stuff

• I like to keep up with the competition. We follow the other teams in the NECBL who are on Twitter and see how they’re using the tool.
• I often re-Tweet the Blue Sox Tweet through my @_DaveS account.My network of followers is bigger than the Blue Sox network right now, so I’ll re-Tweet to get the Tweets to more people. One time I did a re-Tweet and @HolyokeBlueSox thanked me for the re-Tweet. I responded that I was glad to do it. Of course, this was a conversation between me, myself and I. (I don’t recommend doing this a lot. You could lose credibility.)

This has been an eye-opening experience about the realities of using Twitter for business. As I have worked out some of the kinks, managing the account has become easier and I believe Tweeting has helped raise awareness of the team in the region, which has led to some ticket sales. As for what happens next, how does that cliché go? We’ll just take it one game at a time.

So many of the conversations about corporate communications revolve around how to do it efficiently and effectively and with impact. All critical goals, but what if we can communicate in way that can positively affect the health of the person to whom the communication is directed?

I have the good fortune to work with some friends who are committed to bringing people together to explore social conditions that are the major influences of health and illness.  (For more on their work, check out www.communitiesofhealth.org.) Working with them has given me access to some interesting thinking about the underlying causes of poor health, as well as unconventional approaches to improving health.

Recently, four articles in particular have given me pause to think about how we approach communications in an organization could potentially positively influence the overall health of an individual. (The approach also could have a negative health impact, but for this blog posting I will only focus on the positive.)

The four articles are:

“Love is Real Medicine”– In this Newsweek article Dr. Dean Ornish wrote a few years ago, he highlights studies he conducted demonstrating the positive impacts relationships have on people who had heart attacks.

“What are Friends For? A Longer Life” — A recent NY Times article highlighting a study that shows people with good friendships live longer and are healthier than those without close relationships.

“Ning Hits 1 Million Social Networks”– The one millionth social network was recently created using the build-it-yourself Ning platform.

“Whitehall II Study” — The last piece is not an article, but a study. The study was “set up by Professor Sir Michael Marmot to investigate the importance of social class, psychosocial factors and life style as determinants of disease by following a cohort of 10,308 men and women.” The study found the following:

A person’s health is influenced by the conditions in which he or she lives and works. The “Work, Stress and Health” booklet summarises some key findings from the Whitehall II study including:

• The more senior someone is in the employment hierarchy, the longer he or she might be expected to live compared to people in lower employment grades.
• The combination of high demands and low control at work predicts poor health.
• Workers reporting high effort-reward imbalance are at increased risk of coronary hearth disease and poor health.
• A healthy diet, exercise and quitting smoking all reduce the risk of disease and promote well-being.

After reading these and other writings on the connections between relationships, stress, autonomy and health, I am left wondering if health improvement could be an effective goal and measurement for a company’s communications strategy. If the anwer is yes, how could we achieve something like that? Other questions to consider include:

• With social media becoming a larger part of corporate communications strategies, is it possible to leverage them in such a way so they become a mechanism for people to form genuine friendships? What would that look like? Should an employer encourage these kinds of relationships?
• How can a company use an application like Ning to create a platform for communications that give employees a sense of autonomy and control? What kind of control would a company have to let go of to make this happen?
• How can knowledge of the benefits of relationships and autonomy influence a commuincation strategy and implementation?

I am sure there are more questions and implications from thinking about communications as a driver for improving health, so feel free to post them here. In the meantime, I will keep searching for the study that shows hanging out on Facebook has better health benefits as hitting the treadmill. You never know. This stuff is always developing . . .

I am moderating a panel discussion and facilitating a breakout session at the half-day workshop “Online Impact. Tapping Twitter, Facebook & Other Tools To Grow Your Business”

If you’ve ever wondered about the biggest social media tools of the day, what they are and how to use them to grow your business, then this is the place to be.

For more about the event, including agenda and presenter information, check out the event page at www.onlineimpact.eventbrite.com.

Hope to see you there!

I had the pleasure of attending the first ever Podcamp Western Massachusetts this past weekend. While I could only make it for the half of the full day podcamp, I did come away with some useful learnings and insights. Here are five of them.

1. Social media gatherings are positive experiences.The purpose of the podcamp was to bring people together who have a common interest in social media. One of the fundamental behaviors of social media online is to share thoughts, ideas and knowledge with one another in a free and open manner. This remained true during our face-to-face time together, too. Helping with this experience was the use of the Unconference format, which allowed for a free-flowing agenda defined by the interests of the group and the opportunity for attendees to opt-in to workshops that have the greatest appeal to the individual.
2. This social media stuff is real and significant. This isn’t really a learning for me but a reinforcement of what I have been experiencing over the last year or so. The folks at podcamp represented a wide range of occupations, economic status and life experience. They also represented a wide spectrum of social media and technical expertise. And yet there were so many stories of how they were engaging or being impacted by social media on a daily basis — from doing business to connecting with people they would never have met without these social media tools to driving cultural change.
3. It’s still all about relationships. I attended a workshop about using social media to promote  yourself and your business and one of the first comments was that interpersonal relationships remain the primary driver  for success. This idea is of particular interest to me because I’m trying to get a better understanding of the effects — positive and negative — social media has on authentic relationships. And as the podcamp helped prove,  there is no substitute for face-to-face interaction. There are plenty of online tools to facilitate the workshop topics covered at podcamp. However, there is real value in coming together as a group and seeing and hearing one another in person.
4. Twitter is hot. There was a lot of discussion about Twitter during the time I was at podcamp. It appeared to garner the most interest, leading to its own Twitter 101 session. While the discussions included information on what it is and how to use it, there were several discussions on why we use it. With Twitter growing so quickly and making its way into the mainstream, the information and networking on Twitter has the potential to grow in value and importance. I say has the potential because the downside is that it also is growing in spam and losing some of its “purity,” as a cottage industry of ghost Tweeters seems to be growing, too.
5. Attend more social media gatherings. Podcamp was a great experience and as mentioned in the first learning in this list, social media gatherings generally make for a positive and worthwhile time. And with social media evolving and changing at lightening speeds, attending an event is a great way to keep up with what’s going on in the social media world. So be on the lookout for social media podcamps, Tweetups (gatherings of local folks on Twitter) and other social media conferences.

For more learnings from folks who attended Podcamp Western Mass, make sure to check out the links on the Wiki.