O&P Almanac: Fifteen Minutes of Shame

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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:
   

   
      
      

   • www.epolicyinstitute.com/d&d.html
   • www.amanet.org/books/catalog/
     0814471889_5RULES.htm
   • www.clearswift.com/news/news
     letter/0503/0503_ECchecklist.htm

   
    

 

   

      

   

   

      

   

 
 

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.                      Sign up at www.google.com for Google alerts that will send an e-mail whenever your name or business is mentioned. ZoomInfo (www.zoominfo.com) is a Web site that creates automatic professional summaries about people from information gathered on the Web. Are your patients, customers or employees blogging about you? Search over 40 million blogs at BlogPulse. (http://blogpulse.com/search.html) LinkedIn is another online professional directory. (www.linkedin.com) If you’re certified, check to see that ABC or BOC has all of your contact info listed correctly. (www.abcop.org, www.bocusa.org) Do you have a Web site? Are you thinking about getting one? If you’re checking domain name availability, you might want to check the WayBackMachine (www.archive.org/web/web.php) and see who had that site before. You never know what kind of site www.greatlimbs.com might have been!

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.

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