Marketing 101
Fifteen Minutes of Shame
By Elizabeth Mansfield
A junior from Trinity University, studying abroad, met movie actor Vince Vaughn in Budapest. They wound up having drinks and talking until the sun came up. She was so excited, she e-mailed all the details to 22 of her sorority sisters.
It was the e-mail read around the world. Her full name and photo, along with everything she had written, was picked up by online magazines, celebrity gossip blogs (short for Web logs) and Web sites all over.
It’s a silly, trivial story, but there’s a lesson in it for all of us.
Every single time you send an e-mail, post on a blog, comment on a Web site, participate in a forum or use a listserv, you are creating a public image of yourself (and your business or employer). Communicating something about yourself (or your business) to the public is marketing—in this case, image marketing.
And once you hit send, there is no turning back. No matter what confidentiality verbiage you include at the bottom, top or middle of that e-mail, there is absolutely nothing to prevent the receiver from forwarding it to billions of his or her closest friends.
Marketing professionals love the “viral” marketing capabilities of the Internet to spread buzz like wildfire, but hate that those same capabilities have cost a lot of people jobs and reputations. Take care how you “market” yourself on the Internet, and you’ll take care of your business, too.
What did you just say?
I have a blog (www.askelizabeth.typepad.com).
It’s all about
O&P. I try to stick to marketing-related topics, but now and
then I
will use the blog as a platform to air my personal views on such things
as prosthetic parity efforts or O&P insurance
coverage.
So, obviously, I think there’s nothing wrong with letting your personality and your opinions come through in online postings. However, remember that because everything posted online is available to the public, everything posted on the Web is, by default, marketing. What you write in the heat of the moment can create either a positive or negative image of yourself and your company.
For example, I recently read a blog posting by an O&P resident discussing her potential for a certain salary. If I were an employer, I might make assumptions about her professionalism from what she probably felt was an innocent blog entry. If I were a patient or a referral source, what kind of effect would her posting have on me?
What someone else writes can have the same effect, either on your privacy or your reputation. That same day I read a blog posting by the mother of a little girl in Maryland who wears a prosthesis. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) will keep you from mentioning patients’ personal information, but with one click I could read this little girl’s entire medical history and see her picture. The particular posting I read didn’t mention her prosthetist by name—but others could have.
How did I become aware of these things? I receive e-mailed alerts from Google (www.google.com) on everything that has to do with O&P. I didn’t even have to look for them. They came right to my in-box.
If you’d like to protect yourself from inadvertent
negative
Internet marketing, here are three things you can do:
- Check your sense of “Netiquette” by searching for yourself on Google. Google your business, too. See what comes up. You may find old postings that you’d be embarrassed to have customers read.
- Set up a Google alert on your business. If anyone posts anything about your business, Google will alert you and you can respond if necessary.
- Establish an electronic usage policy that addresses
employee use of
e-mail, the Internet, and software. Here are some sites you may want to
visit as you do so:
| Netiquette |
| The following information is
adapted from the book Netiquette, written
by Virginia Shea. It is available online at
www.albion.com/netiquette/rule1.html.
Remember the human. It’s very easy to forget that there is a human on the other side of that computer monitor. If someone posts something you disagree with on the listserv, would you say what you have written in your reply to that person’s face? If not, think twice before you post. Adhere to the same standards of behavior online that you follow in real life. Ethics matter. The sense of anonymity that cyberspace can provide does not mean you should lower your standards. Respect other people’s time and bandwidth. Just as in advertising, “white space” is your friend. Don’t over-post or include a voluminous amount of information if you are doing a public posting. You can always include a “for more information” link. If people want more information, they can go get it. Help keep flame wars under control. “Flaming” is what people do when they express a strongly held opinion without holding back any emotion. Netiquette forbids the perpetuation of flame wars—for instance, a series of angry letters, most of them between two or three people, which can dominate the tone and destroy the camaraderie of a discussion group. It’s unfair to the other members of the group and, although initially amusing, gets boring very quickly. Respect other people’s privacy. When e-mailing a group, use BCC. Not everyone wants their e-mail address sent out to cyberspace. Also, be careful what you say about other people. If you send a “confidential” e-mail to someone about another person, you might just be sending it to someone who doesn’t follow the “respect other people’s privacy” rule. Be forgiving of other people’s mistakes. If someone has made a mistake, give them the benefit of the doubt or try informing them privately. If the poster has given out truly erroneous information, give them the opportunity to acknowledge the mistake before correcting the poster publicly. |
If you abide by the rules of Netiquette, you have a wonderful
opportunity to establish or enhance your reputation. Search engines are
crawling the Internet constantly, looking for content and feeding that
information
to millions of people.
But you can’t just sit back and expect that you’ll reap the benefits by being passive. If you want to take advantage of good Internet marketing, update your Web site frequently. Or set up your own blog (at Web sites such as typepad.com or blogspot.com) or lens (a Web site where you catalog personal recommendations, such as the ones at www.squidoo.com). That way, you can be in control when it comes to feeding the search engine crawlers.
| Finding Yourself…on the Web |
There are over one billion
Internet users around the world. Even if you
have never been online, chances are you’re mentioned, listed,
or
blogged about on the Web. Find mentions of yourself at these sites.
|
Be careful
You have the potential to do more damage to yourself with your own
e-mails and postings than anyone can do to you, because
you’ve
written it yourself. It might not be the e-mail read around the world,
but it might just be the e-mail read around all of O&P.
Elizabeth Mansfield is a marketing consultant with Outsource Marketing Solutions LLC in Hartford, Conn. Contact her at elizabeth@askelizabeth.net.
