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 July 27th, 2011 by tasha
“Media advocacy” is the strategic engagement of the mass media to further a social or public policy initiative. A superb example of this was the On Our Own Terms documentary by Bill Moyers. When the series was aired on PBS, a companion website with Community Action pages was launched to support a media advocacy campaign to raise awareness concerning the need for increased public and private discussion of end-of-life care.
With promotion by the local media, many communities organized public showings and in the following months a movement began that resulted in over 360 end-of-life coalitions forming throughout the country. I remember my coalition in Eugene, Oregon identified transitions of care as our biggest issue and worked to create more connection and communication between providers. We were not alone. Across the country, other coalitions were also looking at the problem of continuity. Now, nearly 10 years later, improving care transitions is a top initiative for Medicare. I do not think that is coincidence.
In the next few months, I see several exciting opportunities for media advocacy around elder care issues. There are some special doorways open to us.
Written on July 12th, 2011 by tasha
“Location, location, location.” While most elder care providers do not seek to drive traffic to the office (you are a service not a place), your brick-and-mortar physical location is becoming a key factor in how high you place in “local search.” All three of the major search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo!) now have some form of local search: the little square near the top of a results page that has pointers on a map and then a list of the businesses noted.
50% of people who get to a website from a search engine, get there because they clicked on a link in the map.
Businesses pay lots of money to get optimized so that their company website comes up on the first page of a search result, and preferably in the first 3 “organic” links. They also pay money to appear in sponsored links (which only 20% of searcher pay attention to.) IT’s difficult to get on the first page when you are competing with every U.S. business on the Web.
Know how much it costs to get listed in the map section? NOTHING! It’s free! And you are only competing locally, not with the thousands of others who offer services like yours across the nation.
In my last blogpost, I talked about the advantages of local search and where to sign your company up on the 3 main search engines. Not surprisingly, though, there are ways to register that will boost you to the top of the list by the map. (You guessed it. Everyone wants to be one of the first three listed in that portion of a search result.)
In this blogpost, I’ll be talking about how to register for local search in a way that is most likely to put you at the top.
