On the day of the release of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 in theaters, I wonder if John Lennon would have gotten in trouble today if he exclaimed that right now, “Twilight is more popular than Jesus!”

Well, at least he’d have some web stats in a nifty infographic to back it up. Here is a number that may be hard for some people to believe: There are about 8 times more Twilight (Breaking Dawn) fans than Jesus Christ fans on Facebook.

What’s crazier is that within that same demographic, there are even more Harry Potter Facebook fans. (But Harry Potter has four more movies and three more books than Twilight, you might say — not fair! That’s a fair argument…)

We have been blogging recently about how important to digital marketers the the web-savvy generation of millennials is. A new infographic from Search Engine Journal points out how connected the younger generation is as well.

…Not that there aren’t any middle-aged Moms in that Twilight Breaking Dawn category as well.

What can you do to inspire this kind of loyalty for your brand? Check out some of the surprising stats in this infographic:

Breaking Dawn Infographic Source: #Twilight Saga and Breaking Dawn Stats – SEJ Infographic

How important is it for healthcare providers to to engage patients online? Well, consider this: According to a study by the nonprofit research firm Pew Internet & American Life Project, the third biggest use for the Internet — just behind a general search and checking your email — is searching for online health information.

On Friday October 14, the Kansas City Healthcare Communicators Society is holding their 2011 Fall Conference at the St. Joseph Medical Center. Carol Dobies, President of Dobies Healthcare Group, will moderate a panel bright and early at 9 a.m. called “How to Deploy Social Media to Improve Patient Engagement,” and our very own Manager of Data and Analytics, Aaron Weber will be a panelist.

Here is a synopsis of the panel from the conference program:

Today, more than 1,188 U.S. hospitals use social networking tools – YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare and blogs. Are you using social media to increase patient engagement? Join this interactive session to discover the secrets your hospital colleagues and social media gurus deploy to get patients engaged online. Learn from panelists who will share their experiences with you and join in an audience debate about best practices in social media strategy.

Carol has some more interesting healthcare-social media facts on the Dobies Healthcare Blog:

More than 1,200 U.S. hospitals are now actively using social media sites. And that number is climbing every day. Thanks to Ed Bennett, web operations manager at the University of Maryland Medical Center (and also an advisory board member for Mayo Clinic social media), we have better insight into the scope of social media use among hospitals. Here’s the latest breakdown of the number of hospital accounts/pages per social networking site:

• Facebook: 1,068
• Foursquare: 946
• Twitter: 814
• YouTube: 575
• LinkedIn: 566
• Blogs: 149

Here at Spiral16, we have a huge number of clients currently monitoring healthcare issues online, as well as doing crisis management, brand management, and identifying influential voices about specific healthcare topics online.

Social media for healthcare may be in its infancy, but there is no shortage of resources available to help you figure out how to connect and engage with the healthcare community and your colleagues.

1. Carol also alerted us to Healthworks Collective, who posted a list of 20 Excellent Social Media Networking Resources for Healthcare.

2. You can stay abreast of healthcare happenings on Twitter by following the #hcsm hashtag.

3. Here’s an interview with Arjun Maini, Director of Business Development for MedicalRecords.com about his approach to monitoring social media and the web.

4. The UbiCare EQ Chart tracks the weekly activity and engagement level of more than 1,000 healthcare-related Facebook pages. According to the company, “It’s a good tool for healthcare marketers to use to monitor the progress of their own efforts and see where they stand relative to peer institutions, as well as glean some best practices from those that consistently achieve the highest engagement rankings.”

Image: Healthcare on Social Media News

BrandSavant is one of my favorite blogs and if you don’t read it, you should.  BrandSavant is all about the proliferation of data being generated by social media, and how to actually gain insight from this data.

It’s not enough to keep track of your brand’s followers or fans. You need to be able to use and understand the online activity for your brand or business and use this information to make business decisions.

Yesterday, my post talked about how more brands are coming to Spiral16 because of our focus on research and data. In the early days of social media monitoring, “simple and pretty” ruled the day and Spiral16 was sometimes overlooked because frankly our tool isn’t as “sexy” as other monitoring choices.

As more brands and businesses want to know what the online data means and how to use this data — Spiral16′s approach is gaining momentum. In other words … nerds rule.  Here is a preview of an excellent post from BrandSavant about how to choose a social monitoring tool and why a “tool” isn’t the answer:

For your brand, Twitter might be enormously important. For others, much of the content, interaction and engagement might be centered on message boards, or a few popular blogs with active commenting communities. You need to know where your customers are, before you can begin to calibrate and therefore make sense of the noisy firehose of social media monitoring.

Does this mean that you ignore a channel? Never. It might mean, however, that you weight its importance up or down in the calibration of your social media monitoring metrics, depending on how representative that channel is of your current base of customers and prospects.

Read the post on The First Step in Choosing a Social Monitoring Tool over on BrandSavant.

Does social media make sense for our company? How can we use it to reach potential customers? What are the downsides?  Where should we start? These are just a few of the questions surrounding the topic and marketing potential of social media.  In the end, one question should ultimately drive the social media marketing decision. What’s the ROI? - Go To Market Show

Last week, Spiral16 CEO Tracy Panko appeared on the Go To Market radio show to to discuss the value dynamic of social media. Listen to the archived discussion here.

Hosts Jay Liebenguth and Mark O’Renick talked with Tracy about measuring your online marketing efforts and how important it is to set tangible goals and objectives. It’s a subject everyone in the marketing and PR fields is buzzing about as the struggle to quantify online results continues.

Here’s a quote from Tracy to whet your appetite:

“The ROI metric was built as a decision-making tool for more finite decisions, like the costs and benefits of purchasing a tangible piece of equipment. Social media requires a little more work to get at the real value.”

From the Go To Market website:

Examples of returns that can be measured are share of voice and sentiment.  Positive mentions can be measured, as can the language being used to talk about your company. Trends in all of these can be tied into measurement to see the full impact of social media efforts.

Once an initiative is launched, regular monitoring and reporting will provide the data  to calculate ROI. Integrating social media with sales data and other insights can provide a more complete picture.  Adding touch points or interactions outside of digital channels increases the complexity of tracking, making the best analysis a mixture of direct and inferred actions. Call it science and art in its purest form.

Listen to the entire interview here in podcast form.

This Friday, Kansas City makes history.

America: Now and Here is a multimillion-dollar national traveling art project led by New York artist Eric Fischl and its launching in Kansas City’s Crossroads Arts District this Friday before continuing across the country.

The mission of America: Now and Here is to open up a dialogue about America through the arts. Works by national painters, playwrights, poets, composers and musicians will mix with local artists for the next three weeks in Kansas City and surrounding areas.

And…it’s free. Check out the full calendar of KC events. This awesome video explains the significance of ANHKC to the KC landscape pretty well:

According to the KC Star: The visual-arts exhibit features 106 works by 26 Kansas City artists and 52 national artists, but the total number of artists involved in the project, which includes poetry, plays, music and film, is much greater than that.

As if that weren’t cool enough? Friday night directly following the opening of all galleries is a performance by renowned musical artist DJ Spooky at 7pm.

Countless numbers of KC companies are volunteering on the project and Spiral16 has donated our web monitoring platform to help ANHKC measure the digital footprint of the project. Feel free to spread the word about America: Now and Here on Twitter using the #anhkc hashtag.

Here’s the quick and dirty:

Launch at First Friday May 6
Leedy-Volkous Art Center
2012 Baltimore Ave, KCMO
Crossroads Arts District
11am-7pm

DJ Spooky performance May 6
Leedy-Volkous Art Center
2012 Baltimore Ave, KCMO
Crossroads Arts District
7pm – 9pm

Project continues May 6 – 28
11am – 7pm
Wednesday – Sunday

Keep updated here:

Full calendar of KC events

America: Now and Here KC on Twitter

Local Event Blog: KansasCity.AmericaNowAndHere.org

America: Now and Here on Facebook

America: Now and Here on YouTube

America: Now and Here National on Twitter

National Project Homepage: AmericaNowAndHere.org

It’s a common problem: You’ve been tasked with creating an online video for your company. The thing is, you have very little in the way of budget and you think the term “key lighting” refers to the mini-flashlight on your car keys.

Luckily, the Kansas City 2011 Business Communicators Summit is here for you.

Are you wondering how to deal with crisis management in the rich new-media world? Are you curious how to produce good quality online videos for your company? Has one of your employees Twitter accounts caused you more trouble than they are worth?

Last week,  at the National World War I Museum at the Liberty Memorial in Kansas City, KC/IABC‘s conference answered those questions and many more.

Dealing with social media crises, questionable business ethics, and producing great company videos for online distribution are common issues in today’s workplace. I’ll present some more helpful highlights from the day-long event here. (Friday’s blog was about how to get blog traffic and keep readership.)

Avoid shooting interviews outdoors – You must have control of your light and audio.

Making Online Video for Your Company With A Small Budget

The class on basic tips in creating online video was presented by Darren Mark and Kevin Schwarzenberger from Scenic Road Productions, and they did a fantastic job of giving you a tip-to-tail snapshot of DIY business video.

Darren and Kevin recommended Flip, Nikon, and Canon as brands with consumer-grade cameras that shoot good video. An optical zoom is always better then a digital zoom, and something with audio and iris controls is a plus. Storage is a big problem, so get an external hard drive so your video doesn’t take over the rest of the data on your computer!

Tips for Shooting Interviews

1. Blank walls are ugly – Go for something with depth of field in the background.
2. Avoid shooting interviews outdoors – You must have control of your light and audio.
3. Never shoot in front of a window – Rather, have the window shine light on their face.

Tips for Shooting Non-Interviews

1. Shooting outdoors is great for everything else because video can look more polished with outdoor light.
2. The tripod is your best friend – Don’t pan if you can avoid it and keep the shot level.
3. If you must use handheld, don’t use the in-camera zoom – Just move closer to the subject, keeping your elbows against your body for better balance.

The Unpaid Journalists of the Future – When Bloggers Attack

Kelly McBride calls the Fifth Estate an “opportunity and a threat.”

Have you had a run-in with a member of the media who blogs from his parent’s basement and caused you a big headache? Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute gave a very interesting lecture about the rise of what she is calling the “Fifth Estate.” She called these online firestarters an “opportunity and a threat.”

Bloggers and new media members who see themselves as outside of the mainstream or official media can be considered members of the Fifth Estate. When United broke someone’s guitar and didn’t solve one man’s problem, 10 million people found out about it.

Kelly offered a couple of helpful dos and don’ts if you or your company becomes a target:

Don’t be defensive.
Don’t ignore it.
Don’t fight it with spin or misinformation.
Do respond immediately.
Do apologize and/or admit error.
Do it personally and publicly.

What To Do When Business Waters Get Murky

Have you ever had that little voice in the back of your head tell you something’s not right? Eric Morgenstern of Morningstar Communications hosted a great breakout session about business ethics called Your Professional GPS: Navigating the Twists and Turns of Business Ethics.

The shoreline of ethics is constantly shifting and Eric’s overall rule about that situation (in analogy format, of course) is “When walking on the edge of the ethical ocean, don’t let your knees get wet.”

Good advice from Eric Morgenstern: "When walking on the edge of the ethical ocean, don't let your knees get wet."

The session was very interactive and full of practical situations and sharing, but the one part of the conversation that probably applies to most companies right now is the rise of social media and what that means for employees. Here’s a rule for all employees of a company to remember:

Don’t Be An Idiot: Everyone Adheres to the Code of Conduct

Whether its laid out in specific writing or not, chances are that if you say something that violates your company’s code of conduct rules — you know, that little piece of paper you signed when you got hired and never fully read — you can be fired. It’s as simple as that.

Companies that deal in social media at all should have something built into their codes and those that don’t probably still have the legal precedents to fire you.

Always remember that you are representing your company, especially if you are a business communicator. It’s really just a simple case of thinking before you write something on any social media account or personal blog you may have.

Also, don’t forget that employers are now using social media as a screening device. So you better think twice before posting your profanity-laced diatribe about Lady Gaga’s new song.

Are you wondering how to keep readers’ attentions on your blog?

Generating traffic to your company blog and keeping it has never been more important and yesterday I learned some new strategies on how to do that. Will I succeed in using them correctly here in this very blog? Let’s find out!

I’ll share some of the valuable things I learned yesterday in this very post, which is optimized for today’s time-pressed readers.

Thursday at the National World War I Museum at the Liberty Memorial in Kansas City, the 2011 Business Communicators Summit answered those questions and many more. Sponsored by KC/IABC, the conference featured keynote speakers like Ann Wylie of Wylie Communications, , who inspired me to take a crack at something new right now.

How to Win the War on Readership

Even as I try to pass on some of the valuable information I got from Ann Wylie about keeping eyes on your blog, I’ll be trying to use her advice. Please keep in mind: It’s my first try!

Writers are fighting the war against information overload. Ann Wylie tells you how to win.

The writer’s enemy, Ann says, is information overload. And she’s right. There are tons of headlines screaming at us all day on Twitter, news sites, Facebook, etc. Which ones are people going to stop and read? First, you are fighting to even get noticed. What will people read first?

Two things stick out from the pack:

1. Information people can use to live their lives better

2. Entertainment

The Feature Style

Ann challenged us all to abandon the inverted pyramid style of writing and go for a more feature-style brand of writing and use the story form, even in something as straightforward as a press release. According to a study by the Readership Institute, this improves readership, satisfaction, and ease of reading.

Feature style writing has a clear beginning, middle, and end and stresses the benefit one can receive from the post over all else.

More great ideas for improving the readability of your writing:

1. Moderation in word count - The more information you give readers, the less decisions they read.

• A paragraph should be about 42 words and a sentence is good at about 14

2. Make your copy scannable – When people see copy, they become a 30-second reader, a 3-minute reader, or a 30-minute reader. Try to appease all three.

• 500 people will read the headline
• 250 people will read the image cutline
• 100 people will read the actual copy

3. Three things that increase an audience’s reward:

• Features – This is what we as business communicators usually write about.
• Advantages – This is the reason a feature is important.
• Benefits – Always lead with this; this is what the features and advantages actually do for you!

Lastly, make sure you end you blog post with a kicker!

Here’s mine: This post was originally going to be about all the great sessions at BCS. About halfway through, I realized that would break almost every one of Ann’s rules, so I went back and deleted half the article! Never fear, that stuff will be featured soon — it will all appear in later Spiral16 blogs.

Was this article helpful to you? Were you able to digest it or scan it easily? If so, you can thank Ann Wylie for that.

Her workbook from the speech is available here.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of appearing on the newest talk show in Kansas City, the Go To Market Show, on 1510 AM. Their motto is “Let’s Talk About Driving Business.”

Thanks to hosts Jay Liebenguth and Mark O’Renick for inviting me on to talk about all the benefits that companies can receive from being able to collect and measure analytics from across the Web. Hopefully it can give businesses a good idea of the many opportunities there are in the social media and web monitoring space. Internet research should be driving your business decisions the same way that traditional research is now.

It’s exciting that more companies are starting to understand the value of this kind of data, and Jay and Mark were very tuned in to the subject as well, adding insight of their own. Hopefully, the radio segment provides a good introduction to the concept and ideas behind web analytics for businesses.

Listening back to it, I’m noticing I talked a mile a minute and am wondering how much coffee I had that morning. (Also, thanks to Mark and Jay for cutting out all my “uh”s.)

My segment was titled “Wealth of Information” and you can listen to it here: Go To Market Show 2/23/2011 – Eric Melin discusses social media monitoring

Here’s the synopsis from the Go To Market website:

Discussing social media monitoring is an ever-changing proposition that matches the fluid nature of the online environment. Through Web and Mobile channels, content is discussed across a wide range of sites. From Facebook and Twitter, to an almost endless landscape of blogs, bookmarks, forums, networks, news, comments, images, video and more.

Leading monitoring tools, like Spiral16, constantly morph and evolve the process of gathering, analyzing and reporting data toward the end goal of providing a more complete and accurate picture of what’s being said and who’s saying it.

Read more and listen to the segment here.

Go To Market Show on Twitter

Go To Market Show on Facebook

Here is a highlight reel, so to speak, of Brian Solis‘ inspiring talk at Explore and Engage, which just finished up here in Wichita. There’s a lot of great stuff here for social marketers and I’ve laid it out an an easy-to-read format.

One thing he focused on was determining influence by topic and the difference between social capital and actual ‘influence.’ If you inspire someone or something to act, that’s a lot more important than having lots of inert Twitter followers. Make sure you’re looking at the context of what’s being talked about online, and not just who’s broadcasting.

Hope you find these notes useful!

What is social media doing to us as human beings?
Given us a platform, voice, new distribution network that’s outperforming news, broadcast
But you have to make sense out of it
Engage or Die! – started as digital Darwinism
Rallying cry for change – huge business impact
Businesses are leaving, changing. Adapt!
Businesses no longer competing for future, they’re competing for relevance
Think broader
It’s the end of business as usual
Social Media will not save you. What is your investment? What do you hope to accomplish?
Find out why/how this transparency/engagement matters to your business
Failing to plan is planning to fail.
This is about finding your own answers.
The future of business: listening, learning
It’s about YOU becoming an influencer – creates authority, leads, sales, etc
Thought leadership!
No brand is an island – social media reverses everything
Web 1.0 – Content
Web 2.0 – People
THE NEXT WEB – CONTEXT
Now – the new move is from the social graph to an interest graph
Context is king.
You have to apply contextual relevance in order to have relevance
Interest graph : Gravity is a tool for this – our 3D VIRT is so similar!!
Calls the fact that only 6% of tweets get RTed ‘social distortion’
Twitter measures resonance scores – how often does something stay mentioned?
Social engagement – switching from spikes and valleys of traditional marketing to constant engagement
Product place price promotion – 4 Ps of 60s marketing People is the 5th element
The future of business isn’t created—it’s co-created. ‘democratization of brand’
Distance between you and yr customers measured by shared experiences
Brand equity is culmination of these shared experiences
Influence is the ability to inspire desirable and measurable action and outcomes
Visa, MasterCard looking at the social graph to measure your credit risk
Influencers can help you reach other markets
Correlation between influence and ‘reach’? not as much as you’d think
We are one of the diverse tools that measure this
Influence and social capital are very different
Social Objects are the future of marketing – tweet, blog post, video – something you introduce
Paid Media – Earned Media – Owned Media
Shared Media – build network or platform for feedback
Sponsored Media – celebs get $40,000 – $100,000 per tweet
Transmedia storytelling – Beatles’ Yellow Submarine – this is the social object!
Creating entry points for social consumer in their domain – to take outside of your company’s domain
Follow @TomForemski – ‘every co is a media co’
Engage attention where attention is focused, NOT your company’s website!
Increase your digital footprint through media franchises – ideas and audiences are everywhere, not where you think they are
You can’t just wire your social sites to each other – mass broadcasting sucks

Well, it’s finally here.

Today “The Social Network,” or ‘the Facebook movie that won’t be advertising on Facebook,’ arrives in theaters and everybody can finally see what all the fuss is about.

Is it the movie that will tarnish Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg‘s public image once and for all? Is it the movie that will herald social media’s ascendence to the throne of mainstream media?

Well…(even though the film is not 100 percent accurate) nobody will ever accuse Zuckerberg of being a sweetheart, but I think he and his company will survive. After all, Facebook has gone way beyond a networking website where college kids can find out who’s dating who. It’s now pretty much integrated into the fabric of our daily lives.

As far as cementing social media in general as a hugely influential, life-changing dynamic…it does do that. But in a way you may not expect. It’s not all touchy-feely about social media and it doesn’t even approach the idea that social media can affect global change (an idea that “Blink” author Malcolm Gladwell certainly doesn’t agree with).

More than anything …

“The Social Network” illustrates the primacy of innovation.

The movie isn’t about Facebook. It is a whip-smart examination of societal structures in general. As I said in my movie review, “It’s about the destructive tendencies of power and how different success looks now than it did even 10 years ago.”

None of that success is possible without an idea. Whether that idea came out of resentment, jealousy, and bitterness (like the movie suggests it did for Zuckerberg), it doesn’t matter. What matters is the idea itself and how it grows; how it’s applied.

Thanks to the Internet and its lightning-fast integration into every facet of our culture, it is possible for a perfect storm of technological innovation and big-picture creative thinking to make another game-changing contribution to society.

And, as “The Social Network” points out, it could come from anywhere—even the dorm room of a drunk Harvard computer genius with a huge chip on his shoulder.

The widespread adoption of social media is a pretty big idea and companies are still struggling with how to react. “The Social Network” skirts the power of social media to illustrate instead the the supremacy of big ideas. Businesses need to be prepared for and open-minded to continued online innovation.

If you would have told business leaders five years ago that this college phenomenon called Facebook would become the future of demographic data-mining, they’d laugh at you.

Who’s laughing now?

(Image from Osliving.com.)