Last night was an exciting evening in the State of New Hampshire (Portsmouth to be more precise) as the first ever Social Media Club NH meeting was held. Roughly 170 people attended the event looking to connect, network and listen to the challenges and opportunities that social media marketing has to offer all NH industries.
I had a wonderful time at the event, got to meet some new people, connect with people that I tweet with all the time, and learned a lot about social media application in government, healthcare, education, and business spaces.
Below you will find some of my notes from the event that contain some of the more exciting comments and stats I absorbed throughout the course of the evening. Please take a look and feel free to share your comments and ideas as well. FirstTracks would love to hear what your social media challenges and experiences have been. Enjoy, and when the information for the next SMCNH meeting comes up you can be sure I will be tweeting about it and posting information and details about it right here on our website! Stay Tuned!
Speaker 1: Theresa Pare-Curtis, Director of Web Services NH Dept of Information Technology
Legal Challenges in Government in Using Social Media:
- Advertisements and Endorsements are a problem. There need to be terms and conditions that if a platform is used it won’t filter ads that they don’t agree with on their space within their platform.
- Security. Data and information needs to be secure and reliable.
- Accessibility. ADA compliance issues, needs to be accessible to ANYONE.
- Need to look at open source tools to build individual programs that work with ONLY those institutions so they can maintain control of that conversation and information in a realistic manner.
Speaker 2: Grant Sandborne – Director of Interactive Marketing at Portsmouth Regional Hospital (@PortsmouthReg)
Social Media uses and application for a healthcare institution:
- People are talking about healthcare 24/7 online (Prices, quality, rating doctors, etc) this is an opportunity to get involved
- Social Media Use Examples: crisis communications, sending out recipes, weather updates, schedule updates, ect. hospitals have TONS of content! Just need to get used to sharing it and re-purposing it (and carving out time to do it).
- Example of a use of Twitter: tweet came in telling hospital about problem with signage and then they took action immediately, pretty cool example of a practical real world use.
- A little listening goes A LONG way! Message boards, blogs, other social networks, YOU NEED TO PARTICIPATE.
- Customer Service damage control. You need to not only LISTEN, but you also need to ACT to be successful.
- Heathcare is heading toward larger online communities, while the websites will largely be used for the informational sharing of the details of what the hospital is capable of.
Speaker 3: David Karlotski, Publisher of The Wire in Portsmouth
Events Calendar System Online
Kind of an interesting take here in that there really is no main “social media calendar” system that will catalog and share ALL of the information that is going on everywhere. An interesting challenge for sure and something that I had not really given much consideration to. There are lots of websites out there that specialize in content from very fragmented parts of what they specialize in, but what if there was a way to pull ALL of that together and share it socially? Now that would a powerful app!
Speaker 4: Casey Cheshire Online Marketing Manager for Transparent Language in Nashua, NH (@CaseyChesh)
Rethinking social media for business:
- We don’t have “rules” in business social media marketing unlike healthcare but we do have to make MONEY! 🙂
- You want to hire a guide long before you hire someone to carry your bags.
- Selling is hazardous. How do you make the sale, without really tweeting the sell. How do you do that? How can you track this without actually engaging in a promotion?
- Don’t snub your fans. Companies can’t be superstars, you need to follow your fans back and participate in conversation and sharing with them.
Speaker 5: John Herman, Media Literacy and Language Arts teacher and trainer for Media Power Youth (@JohnHerman)
Youth culture in the year 2010 is different on an “EPIC” (the words of his students) scale.
- 40% of social media users are 30 and older. SMCNH are the early adapters, we are the 40% that are going to lead this change in NewHampshire.
- Most high school students don’t know what “Social Media” even means, to them it’s just life as everyday as mowing the lawn.
- Most students today text upwards of 100 times per day!!!!!
- Students are feel they are socially obligated to respond to texts.
- Most kids can text without looking at their phone and will text each other with their phone in their pocket.
- Students need to be taught to protect their integrity online.
- Class time needs to be spent on how to properly “brand” a students identity for future job search.
- School Librarian and Principal positions have been CUT from John’s school! CUT. They have NO school Librarian, there was a time when this would have been insane. And as a further illustration of the budget challenges facing the classroom they have ONE I-Pod Touch for the ENTIRE school to teach these techniques to the students.
Speaker 6: Michelle Talwani from New Hampshire Development Financial Authority (@mtalwani)
@NHCDFA invests in social media for research, spread their message, connect with supporters, build brand awareness, website site traffic, and influence the donors.
Using social media and tracking tools they have DOUBLED the amount of traffic they have been able to bring into the website. Building a following for the organization using Social Media provides new ways to solicit donations from a dedicated group of followers vested in supporting the organization.
Challenges for Non-Profits
- Buy In. Leery about it, because they don’t know about it. Look for similar examples currently in use.
- Wrong People / Wrong Skills
- IT Sophistication
- Resources and Time Suck
- Leaders don’t get it, they think it’s still just for the “kids”
- Developing a social media policy (www.nten.org – great online resources)
Speaker 7: David Hurlburt – WMUR-TV’s Assistant News Director (@DHulburt)
Adapting from traditional media to social media.
Back in the day for news we worked on the networks schedules. Back in 1980 52 million people would watch the nightly evening news. Today we have the BlackBerry, Web, Social Media, IPhone, RSS, etc and in 2008 that same evening news only pulls 22.8 million people a night. Incredible decline in a relatively short period of time. Bottom line, people can get what they want when they want it, and if you aren’t giving it to them that way then they can go and get it from somewhere else.
Next Generation Newsroom (all field reporters are not equipped with the following)
- Blackberry with camera
- Laptop with wireless air card
- web cam, skype, livestream ability
- flip cam
Thanks for reading my review and thoughts!
If you made it this far through this posting you must really be interested in social media for your business! If you enjoyed the post, or even if you didn’t please leave a comment or use the link above to share this posting if you feel like it. We love meeting new people and discussing this stuff as much as possible. And if you want more information you can visit the Social Media Club NH website and follow our activity on twitter by searching the hashtag #SMCNH.
If you would like to connect online so we can talk more about your challenges, you can find me on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or you can even do it the old fashioned way and call me at my office at 603-924-1978 or fill our our request form. No shortage of ways to connect with the people over here at FirstTracks Marketing Group!
