E-Blasts Are Low-Cost But Bring High-Impact

Your patients receive e-mails every day from many businesses. Shouldn’t an e-mail, at least once in a while, be from your practice? This is how my practice ensures e-blasts to patients have an impact–even when they aren’t opened.

A Way to Manage Your Practice's Social Media Posts With Buffer

How Google Trends Can Work for You

Mouse-Be-Gone! Helpful Tips on Social Media Shortcuts

Finding Business Reasons to Use Snapchat

Give Patients a 'Virtual Tour' - And Add In a Scavenger Hunt for Fun!

Contactually: A ‘Personal Assistant’ To Manage All Your Contacts

By Alan Glazier, OD, FAAO

ROCKVILLE, Md.—If you’re like me, you constantly think about the people in your contact list, with the best intentions of contacting them periodically to let them know you’re thinking of them, conduct further business, keep them in the loop as to relevant goings-on etc. But with our busy schedules and huge contact lists, it isn’t always realistic to do so.

Introducing Contactually, which is a personal assistant for your professional (and personal) contacts. Contactually analyzes the relationships in your contact lists and automatically prompts you to reengage with the people you deem important who may have “slipped off your radar.”

Get Your Skills and Expertise Endorsed on LinkedIn

By Alan Glazier, OD, FAAO

ROCKVILLE, Md.—Getting people to "recommend" you as a professional on LinkedIn has always been a powerful tool. The recommendations on the well-known professional social network enable people to "find" you for the services and products you want to be found for within the LinkedIn network. These recommendations "label" your brand in the LinkedIn network, and to give you a "boost" in what I call "Searchial Marketing."

Searchial Marketing describes how the actions you undertake in the social media world help LinkedIn and, ultimately, Google to better place you in their search for the keywords and key phrases you hope to be found for when people search for the services/products you offer in your geographic vicinity.

Giving vs. Getting Information: How the Internet Is Used in Your Office

By Alan Glazier, OD, FAAO

ROCKVILLE, Md.—Whether we were brought up near California beaches or not, we all surf...the internet that is. When we are surfing the internet for work purposes, we are usually "getting" information, looking up stuff or entering data.

In our office, we use the internet in all these ways, but in our practice we also use it to find and give information to our patients at many other junctures, and we also use it as our own public relations tool.

Using Facebook 'Sponsored Stories' to Boost Your Social Media Efforts

By Alan Glazier, OD, FAAO

ROCKVILLE, Md.—While getting “likes” is one goal of internet marketing, I’ve been asking people lately “how’re getting likes goin’ for ya,” intimating that most people don’t know what to do with “likes” or even why they’re important for that matter. They just do it because people are telling them they need to be doing it.

Effective Facebook campaigns are supposed to be geared toward attracting “friends of friends.” Those are people who connect to you because of a friends “like” or recommendation. These “likes” are seen as more valuable as they come through a perceived trusted acquaintance and as a result are more likely to take some kind of action through your page, anything from “liking” it to generating a new customer from it.

A Resource for Compelling Facebook Content

By Alan Glazier, OD, FAAO

ROCKVILLE, Md.—If you are feeling compelled to use social media to market your business, chances are you are not alone.

It's no surprise the first thing that pops into mind when starting out on the social media marketing route is Facebook. A community with over 700 million members, it's an internet unto itself, and most of your customers are acting within it. No surprise it can be important to have a presence there, and knowing how to have an active and effective presence is important to your marketing success within this platform.

Mixing Business With Pleasure: The Evolution of the ‘Meetup’ in Eyecare

By Nathan Bonilla-Warford, OD, FAAO

TAMPA, Fla.—There is no question that the Internet has improved our ability to communicate quickly with people wherever they are. We can now develop close working and friendly relationships with individuals we have never met in person. As our online business relationships have grown, it has become even more important to make contact with these people in real life, too. Fortunately, there is a way to do just this: the social media "meetup," an in-person gathering of people who frequently connect online to discuss a shared interest.

Meetups are not rare or exotic. They happen in every city, every day. In fact, the Dictonary.com definition of meetup includes the typical example of "a meetup for new moms in the neighborhood."

Identifying Customer Opinion Leaders and Getting Them to Spread the Word

By Alan Glazier, OD, FAAO

ROCKVILLE, Md.—What type of advertising is better than word-of-mouth advertising? Enthusiastic word-of-mouth advertising. What's better than enthusiastic word-of-mouth advertising? FREE enthusiastic word-of-mouth advertising. This is why it is so important to have a system in place to identify and track those customers who potentially could be a megaphone for your practice — those customers who are likely to sing your praises to others, between friends, among family, on social media and the internet in general. We call these customers "Customer Opinion Leaders", or "COLs". Do you know who your "COLs" are?

Using LinkedIn Recommendations to Generate Business

By Alan Glazier, OD, FAAO

ROCKVILLE, Md.—If you stay away from using social media marketing suites like Facebook or Twitter to generate new business because you are concerned interacting with potential patients via these tools might be perceived as less than professional, consider using LinkedIn.

April 16: Keep Up the Fun and Connect With Patients on 4sqDay

TAMPA, Fla.—Today is April 16, 2012, the third Annual International Foursquare Day. Frequently shortened to “4sqDay,” the day is observed by millions of social media fans around the world as their “first global social media holiday.”