The vision for this blog is to create a community of harmonious professionals across the care continuum who encourage each other in exploring digital media as a way to support businesses and families dealing with elder care.
Written on April 26th, 2011 by tasha
As a general rule, Facebook is the place to connect with your customers. The goal is to offer posts that are educational and inspirational such that people who are your clients (or could become your clients) are motivated to LIKE you and have your “bon mots” appear on their News Feed once a day. This is called B2C (Business-to-Consumer) social networking.
But you can also use Facebook as a way to network with your referrers and allied businesses. Most professionals think of LinkedIn as their Business-to-Business (B2B) network. And for “talking shop,” LinkedIn is the more appropriate venue. But your referrers may or may not be on LinkedIn. With only so much time in the day, they may simply have chosen to devote their efforts to one social networking channel, the one where their customers go: Facebook.
There are ways to reach your business audience on Facebook while also connecting with your consumer audience.
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Written on April 12th, 2011 by tasha
The big concern about Facebook and other social media is that it takes time. Indeed, the purpose of a Fan page, blog or Twitter account is to develop relationships and community with your fans, subscribers and followers. Just as it takes time to have meaningful conversations, it takes time to create engaging posts. And you don’t develop trust and rapport by simply talking about yourself. Like any good friend, you need to be giving out at least as much energy as you are taking in.
You need to regularly offer content that inspires or educates your target audience.
According to an ExactTarget social marketing study:
Even as a non-profit, if your hand is always out asking for money or time, more than you are giving away information and useful resources, you will lose followers.
So how do successful social marketers create engaging content in a manageable amount of time?
Written on April 6th, 2011 by tasha
I was recently doing some research on adherence and ran across this “old friend,” a favorite study (Bogardus and colleagues, 2004) that demonstrated the value of getting the family caregiver on board.
We all know that non-adherence is a big issue in elder care. This was formerly referred to as “non-compliance,” but the term smacked of paternalism and has since been replaced with “non-adherence,” recognizing that the patient’s role is much more active than that of a compliant servant to the whims of medicine.
This Yale University study was conducted with 176 patient/family caregiver dyads at a geriatric assessment center. The focus was to specifically understand the family caregiver’s impact on adherence and presumably outcomes over the course of a year. Patient/family dyads went through the clinic’s standard assessment procedure, after which the family caregiver was asked to participate in a phone interview a week later and then a year later.
