Facebook has more than 500 million active users. Twitter recently announced that it had topped 200 million accounts. According to ComScore, 1 out of every 8 minutes of the average online user’s internet time is spent on Facebook and 22% of Fortune 500 companies now have a public-facing blog that has at least one post in the past 12 months. These statistics, as well  events in Egypt and Tunisia during the past few months, validate something that many people have known for quite some time—social media is powerful.

Sure, political upheaval does not directly correspond with the healthcare universe, but the same principles apply. Social media offers bi-lateral participation, gives voice to anyone with an internet connection, and effectively removes the “smoke and mirror effect” that big marketing budgets can create—and that can be scary for healthcare customers. Maybe that’s why so many organizations continue to resist a corporate Facebook account or allowing executives to tweet on the firm’s behalf.

The free exchange of information can certainly appear—when applied to your business—to have its disadvantages: The popular masses don’t like your new logo? A big national account had a bad experience with your product or service? Your hot-headed sales rep was rude to a well-known executive, active in the blogosphere? The rest of the industry will soon know.

But it goes both ways. If a CIO at a large hospital complained about your customer service on Twitter, you can find out—and quickly address that customer’s concerns. If a doctor mentions in her blog that your application isn’t configured for her processes, you can have a team examining the problem within hours. Conversely, if a new client writes a nice post about your product on your Facebook wall, thousands of users will see it. Another wrench in your toolkit, participation in social media instead of relying solely on one-way traditional marketing, offers significant benefits. If your company doesn’t have an outlet for interaction, prepare to be ignored as the crowd starts talking to someone else—and that someone else is likely your biggest competitor.

It’s also natural to second guess social media’s usefulness. Your customer base is a C-level, older audience and only Generations X & Y use Twitter? Not anymore. According to Pew Research, social networking site usage grew 88% among Internet users aged 55-64 between April 2009 and May 2010. Not participating will no longer maintain the status quo—it may actually hurt your existing sales as competition engages your healthcare customer base. If you haven’t yet entered the world of social media, or are just a fledgling user, don’t worry. It’s not too late—yet.

Trackback: A trackback on a blog is a notification that a particular entry has been linked to by another blog. This lets the original author know who is reading his or her post, adds legitimacy to the post by showing relevance, and provides readers with additional sources of information on that particular topic. Trackbacks generally appear at the bottom of the post, near the comments section, and provide a snippet of the linking post. Trackbacks are a great way to foster good will between like-minded bloggers, and they allow each blog to benefit from the other’s traffic in both the short and long term. Also, your site’s SEO will be improved by having inbound links present in several different locations on the Web.

Past Words of the Week
Twitter Grader, Authority, TweetBeep, Compete, Astroturfing, WEGO Health, BackTweets, PDR.net, socialmention, Twazzup, Health Exchange, Health Tweeder, DIDGET, Thoora, Google Buzz, bit.ly, E-patient, Alltop, mHealth, Augmented reality, OpenID, ROI, #hcsm, Medpedia, Almost.at, Hashtag, FollowFriday, Beta, Microblogging, Sidewiki, Meta tags

Twitter Grader: We have discussed many ways to monitor how Twitter activity is spread and what impact it can have. But how does all of this reflects upon the user, and how does the average tweeter stack up against his peers? Twitter Grader uses a combination of traits to apply a grade of 1-100 to any Twitter user. Factors such as number of followers, strength of followers, update frequency and amount of retweets are used to create a score, which is then compared to other Twitter users. That is, a user with a grade of 85 has a higher score than 85 percent of the users who have been graded.

Past Words of the Week
Authority, TweetBeep, Compete, Astroturfing, WEGO Health, BackTweets, PDR.net, socialmention, Twazzup, Health Exchange, Health Tweeder, DIDGET, Thoora, Google Buzz, bit.ly, E-patient, Alltop, mHealth, Augmented reality, OpenID, ROI, #hcsm, Medpedia, Almost.at, Hashtag, FollowFriday, Beta, Microblogging, Sidewiki, Meta tags

I remember my first experience with a URL shortener. While browsing a thread on a popular forum about Ultimate Frisbee, my sport of choice during college, I came across a post linking to an older discussion on the same topic. But I hesitated when I noticed the link was to something called TinyURL.com with a few numbers and letters after the slash. Where is this going to take me? I hope it’s not spam, I thought before I clicked through. When I landed safely on the old thread, I quickly put two and two together: this is some sort of service that makes http://groups.google.com/group/rec.sport.disc/browse_thread/thread/c0fa74cf7c46cd57# appear as http://tinyurl.com/2ace2bt. But why?

Just a few years (and over 100 different URL shorteners) later, there are more answers to that question than most healthcare marketers can keep up with.

For the average consumer, the most popular and practical use for these shortening services is to fit links into Twitter posts. With a 140 character limit, posting a link with 80-100 characters seriously handicaps the tweeter’s ability to post his thoughts. The improved aesthetic quality, as demonstrated above, is another popular reason to shorten a URL. When posting on a forum or in the comments section of a blog, where in-text linking is often not available, using a shortened URL gives your post a cleaner look that is more pleasing to the eye of the reader.

But what separates the different shortening services, and why is it important for healthcare marketers to choose the right shortener? The number one thing that public relations professionals have to answer for with any social media campaign is still ROI. The popular Twitter client HootSuite provides stats through its proprietary short link ow.ly. Any link posted with HootSuite is automatically converted to the ow.ly format, and stats are kept for each tweet that is sent out. Bit.ly, the most popular service with 3.4 billion links created in March of this year, has developed a fairly robust measurement system. As discussed in a past Word of the Week feature, with a free account, bit.ly users can keep up with the number of clicks that each created link has received. The service is also integrated with Twitter, which allows users to see each time the link is tweeted and retweeted. Your boss is bound to be less skeptical about Twitter when you let him know how many page views one tweet can generate, in addition to regular traffic.

If a company can successfully carve out a creative niche on the social Web, it immediately has a leg up on the competition. TinyURL gives users a simple way to achieve this. Instead of using the randomly generated sequence of numbers and letters, users can create a custom name for their link. For example, check out http://tinyurl.com/dodgepr!

Some companies have taken the next step when it comes to URL customization. If you follow the New York Times Twitter feed, you’ve noticed their custom nyti.ms URL format. Companies such as Amazon (amzn.to), YouTube (youtu.be) and CNN (on.cnn.com) have also taken the leap into URL customization. In addition to the obvious advantages in integrated marketing and branding that this presents, it is also a way to reduce the creation of spam links. While a bit.ly link could take a Web surfer just about anywhere, you can be confident that a nyti.ms URL will lead to a safe destination and an interesting piece of news. There are a couple services out there that allow anyone to get in on URL customization. Awe.sm can be used for free as a traditional shortener, but starting at $99 a year, the service also hosts custom URLs and provides stats through Google Analytics. Bit.ly is also getting into the custom URL business with bitly.Pro, which is still in beta.

Regarding the title question, it appears that the revolution is still going strong. As long as Twitter keeps growing, the demand for short links will continue to exist. But the folks at Twitter recognize this, as evidenced by last month’s announcement that the company will be launching its own URL shortener. According to the company, “forcing [users] to leave twitter.com to shorten a link is absurd.” Some speculate that bit.ly could be acquired by Twitter, while others feel that the most likely candidate for the job is Twitter’s own twt.tl, which is currently being used to secure links sent via direct message in light of recent phishing scams. Could this signal the end of an apparently thriving revolution?

Once this transition is complete (and assuming that Twitter stays in-house with its choice of link), it’s likely that only a handful of other shortening services will survive. Bit.ly, with its popularity and upcoming Pro offering, ow.ly, with its inclusion in the popular HootSuite client, and TinyURL, with its reputation as the original, all stand a good chance of survival, but the hundreds of other services out there may have finally met their match.

Last month Twitter unveiled its latest feature – lists. This new feature provides a way to organize the people you are following and a way to find new accounts on Twitter – including people that may be experts in a certain subject or interested in the same hobby as you. The idea for lists on Twitter came from Twitter’s own research about what features were popular of external tweeting clients such as TweetDeck, and lists became one that Twitter could build to help make the micro-blogging agent more user-friendly.

Although this is Twitter’s equivalent of a Facebook “Group,” it will certainly impact the way healthcare marketers use Twitter. With this additional option for Tweeters, marketers and communicators can create lists for upcoming trade shows, groups of media experts or lists of successful healthcare-focused Tweeters. Along with the ability to group the people you follow on Twitter together in a list, all lists can be made public so that you can show others who to follow. In addition, Twitter clients such as Sesmic Desktop have already adopted the Twitter lists feature into its own software to help users keep up with the latest options from Twitter and not just to features that an external platform can offer.

Despite all of the early success people are seeing with creating lists – such as lists of PR experts, celebrity Tweeters and others – it is going to take time to find out how people actually use these lists and how to effectively leverage them for marketing purposes.

If you are still uncertain about why Twitter lists will be valuable or how to use them effectively, Mashable has a myriad of posts about twitter and the many features it uses, including information about Twitter’s latest feature.

How do you think you can leverage Twitter’s new lists for your marketing efforts?

Earlier this year, Google announced its latest product, Google Wave, and positioned it as a revolutionary way to communicate and collaborate on projects. Although not much was known about Google Wave in the first few months after the announcement, executives did share that Google Wave would give users the following features:

• The ability to share documents in multiple formats. Much like Gmail’s share feature, text documents, videos, maps and other files can easily be transferred without the worrying about file size;
• Real-time collaboration allowing users in different locations to edit documents simultaneously and discuss the edits;
• Replay options that allow new members to replay conversations and see how the project evolved over time;
• Natural-language capabilities which provide word suggestions and spell check; and
• Options to extend Google Wave invitations to others and to embed one wave in another.

With these features and the brand power of Google, hundreds of thousands of people signed up to beta test Google Wave and in late September the first 100,000 people were invited to join the Wave. From that invitation, Mashable published a short video about the features they had been able to test and how they predicted it being used.

Even though the platform is still classified as a beta, and it is not open to the general public, discussion has already started about how this platform will transform communication. So how will this new network change the way that healthcare marketers work? For all marketers, it means that edits and work can be done more instantly and with full disclosure about how the project got to the point that it is at that moment. With the replay feature, everyone who is invited to the “wave” will have a full understanding about the scope of the project, and a way to see what options have already been tested on the project. Since people can invite others to Google Wave, people who would not typically work on the project could be asked to contribute ideas, which could help take the project in a different direction.

These changes to healthcare marketing are certainly not going to be the only ones that occur because of Google Wave. As more comes out about the features and applications of the platform, people will continue to find new ways to use Google Wave as a marketing tool and develop new approaches to marketing because of it.