Veterinary Social Networking.
If the term viral marketing makes you think of donning a biohazard suit, you’re not alone. Online marketing as we know it today has caused countless businesses to rethink their marketing strategy, rewrite go to market plans, and some have even created special teams of employees to tackle the challenge of social networking and exploit the growth opportunities these mediums offer.
If the thought of twitter makes you shutter, the only Facebook you know is your kid updating his page at the dinner table, and you think a blog is an enormous gelatinous creature oozing through the streets of a bad seventies movie, rest easy because you’re probably in the majority of today’s small business owners. Even the most seasoned marketing professionals, especially the ones trained prior to the social media boom, have been forced to learn a new way of thinking and grasp a new sense of how ideas spread.
Since the term viral comes from the scientific field, let’s examine social marketing from a scientific standpoint. R0, from epidemiology, defines the reproductive rate of a ” virus” (or sheep for that matter). To stop the transmission of a virus you need a R0 number of less than one. A number of greater than one can become an epidemic and spread exponentially. Essentially, viral marketing, attempts to establish a reproductive rate of an idea that is greater than one: R0 > 1. So the idea is to create a “meme” that is easily sharable and relevant between people. Quick side note, a meme is best defined as a talking logo. An audible business card so to speak.
There are basically eight types of social media avenues:
- Blogs
- Micro blogs (twitter)
- Social networks (Facebook, linked-in)
- Media sharing (You Tube)
- Voting Sites (digg)
- Review sites (yelp)
- Virtual worlds (second life)
Some of these are infinitely more important and have a greater impact on small businesses than others. On that note it is important to state that business size is irrelevant. There are many highly successful and highly profitable one man operations that exist and prosper strictly on the basis of a successful social media marketing campaign. Your reading this article currently on our blog which serves as our front door to our audience. For us it is an indispensable tool that we use to communicate what we know best (marketing and management) to an audience that is interested in reading what we have to say. Your practice has an incredible growth opportunity using the same strategy with this and similar tools. Your customers are online and the interested in what you have to say. So why not start communicating with them. You can start a blog right now, for free. Click here for our favorite blog engine. To get started I recommend reading other blogs first to get ideas and find your voice. I’ve included links to a few below. Really the examples are endless, just use a blog search engine and get to reading. Good luck.
http://ptmoney.com/
http://www.dolittler.com/
http://drcarrollplanovets.wordpress.com/
http://www.trail-running-blog.com/
In our live webinars we discuss this topic in more detail. Click here to view our schedule.
