If you woke up this morning and thought to yourself, “Boy, I sure do miss working with Venn diagrams,” have I got a blog post for you! But in all seriousness, if you have any interest at all in how your company is perceived in the Email, Mobile, and Social Media marketing trifecta, you’ll find this Venn immensely worthwhile.

It comes from flowtown dot com, and I recommend you click that link if you’d like to see an enlarged version of the graphic below. Having a voice in Email, Mobile, and Social Media is absolutely essential to healthy growth, and this fact won’t be changing anytime soon.

So where do you fall?

Despite proven success, only 10% of U.S. hospitals and health systems are involved in social media (California HealthCare Foundation).   Even worse, few of the 10% really take advantage of the “social” side of this medium, instead preferring to simply push out messages about services, classes, and general news.  In fact, per the study, only 6% of all tweets (in the sample) were social interactions; therefore, 94% of all hospital and healthcare tweets were simply information.

This needs to change.

For social media to work, hospitals must be social.  Rather than just tweeting news, or uploading press releases to Facebook and LinkedIn (which, by the way, is still important), why not post discussion points, such as “how can we improve our Emergency Department?”, or “we’re redesigning our waiting rooms and would like your opinion regarding the furniture, carpets and wallpaper.”

This article has great information to help, so click the link below for a more thorough read:

Tactics for Achieving ‘Socialness’

There’s no doubt that people who intend to be a vital part of the workplace need to embrace social media. But there are a few groups still holding out — and they risk being quickly being left behind.

With the market taking a downturn, older adults may need to keep working a little longer than they had planned. One of the ways they can boost their perception and knowledge in the workplace is to not only participate in things like LinkedIn and other professional networking sites, but also Twitter, blog reading, Facebook and other new platforms that are rapidly emerging as useful, even necessary, workplace skills.

Social media may have started out as a way for young people to stay connected with each other, but it is rapidly becoming a necessary part of collaboration in the office. In fact, a recent New York Times article explains a large MacArthur Foundation study that finds young people are using emerging media to learn important tech skills, increase their literacy and learn how to manage their public identity. I think everyone can learn a lot from that research. Adults who don’t know how to integrate the latest communication technologies into their workday — or worse, you resist them altogether — are going to lose out.

Here’s a list the four most important technologies that every individual needs to be using:

Blogs Become a voracious consumer of blogs. Read them. Comment on them. Bookmark them. Share them with others. And if you think you have the talent for it, write one. But make it interesting and smart. Pull in web links, photos and video clips. Even just being able to talk about the things you’ve read on blogs can help build your professional profile and shape you as a thought leader, create previously unforeseen business opportunities and help you learn about things you may not otherwise.

Twitter Running a good Twitter feed isn’t easy and we’ll post some tips on how to use it more effectively in the future. But if you think it’s just about people posting what they had for breakfast you’re already way behind. In fact you can access a lot of unexpected people on Twitter. This morning I found not only the White House, but also the United States Senate, the House and more. You’ll find for-profit companies like Del Webb and not-for-profits like United Way. And with new technologies like the iPhone and Blackberry Storm, Twitter stands to overtake text messaging because it’s free and easier to manage. The point is that Twitter has already become a messaging platform to issue news, mini PR releases, and updates for everyone.

Will mastering these technologies make you better at your job? Of course not. But it may help. And you might as well get used to them because this stuff isn’t going away — that is, until something even more baffling comes along.

I find it both sad and funny that many web companies are now offering to create Social Networking pages for their clients. While Social Media pages such as Facebook and LinkedIn are good to have (heck, we’ve been creating these for our clients for awhile now), the problem is not that our clients can’t create them — it’s that they cannot manage them. The end result is that the client has a Social Networking page, but it’s useless because nobody from the client’s side has the time or knowledge to add events, photos, links, etc. When this occurs, nobody wins. The client isn’t happy. Their customers think the client doesn’t care. And the vendor simply says that they did what they promised.

We know better.

Last year, we created for our clients a variety of online tools, including Social Networking pages, E-Blasting modules, custom created blogs, CRM systems, etc. We devoted no less than two half-day sessions for hands-on training so that all who worked with the tools would be comfortable. Yet even with great tools and a great education, our clients were not actively managing the pages or sending out eblasts.

The problem wasn’t that they didn’t want to work with the tools or couldn’t, but rather that the responsibilites were foreign to them. These people charged with creating content and running the program were mostly sales people. They were used to selling face to face. Asking them to write blogs and eblasts, or to manage a Facebook page put them outside their comfort zones. Indeed, not many people are comfortable right off the bat with cropping and resizing images, writing catchy headlines for eblasts, or even writing long form content for blogs. Sales people want to sell. They want the leads brought to them because they do their best in front of people. They know little about how to generate the leads, other than through phone calls. So this reaction really shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone.

So why are companies selling this service, where they simply create the page and leave it to the client to manage? Likely because the vendor isn’t too familiar with how it works, or they are unfamiliar with how your company works.

We didn’t make that mistake. That is why in addition to effectively building Social Media pages, we also manage them for our clients by adding events, photos, stories, and links. We write and publish the blogs, write and manage the distribution of the eblasts. All with the client having final approval on everything.

Plus, we track everything we do online by inserting coded links into our writing. By doing this, we’re able to show CFOs that our work generated X number of appointments, X number of people to the website, or even X number of buyers. We create and present a report on all our activity in all online media at least once every month.

The point here is that starting a Social Networking page for your company is not a task to take lightly. Yes, it can be built rather easily. But the real key is that it must be maintained — and that’s not so easy. So if in doubt, talk to someone who knows how it works and how it can work for you.