It seems that everywhere you turn these days, someone is promoting social media as the lowest cost, highest impact marketing channel available for small business owners. And that right there is a problem. Far too many people ARE promoting this idea — many of whom are those likely to benefit if you make use of their media channel, enroll in their social media class, or hire them to manage your social media for you.

But what is the reality? A recent study reported by eMarketer (http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007956 ) shows that only 42% of small business owners who use social media marketing are receiving sales leads from Facebook, 36% from LinkedIn, and 16% from Twitter. That’s a pretty poor showing from a marketing channel that’s being touted as so effective.

Her conclusion:

There is still no “silver bullet” solution for marketing your professional services at zero cost in your spare time. You still have to invest time and money to identify likely prospects, follow up with them to deepen relationships, and have sales conversations that expose you to rejection. And that will be true no matter what new technology for marketing is invented next month or next year.

A brief outline of social media marketing goes like this:

Your Blog Post

->post to Twitter/Facebook

-> Followers click to learn more

->They like your ideas and think you’re helpful

-> They sign up for a free report to get more information

-> You send a newsletter with more useful stuff

-> Followers like you even more

->You offer a program/product

-> Followers buy because they now know, like and trust you.

I’m very pleased to announce that my online CE course in Digital and Social Media Ethics for Psychotherapists has gone live!

This course will teach psychotherapists to
• Describe social media and summarize several popular social media sites and services.
• Distinguish between one’s personal and professional activities on the Internet.
• Identify the ethical challenges that may arise from engaging in activities on the Internet.
• Develop strategies for minimizing risk of ethical violations on the Internet.
• Appraise their use of e-mail, record-keeping, and mobile computing devices to prevent confidentiality breaches.
• Construct a social media policy for one’s office to address potential boundary issues with clients.
• Review the different approaches and attitudes towards social networking between therapists and clients.
• Discuss the relevant ethical issues as they pertain to therapists’ web sites and social networking profiles.

Facebook, twitter, Yelp, LinkedIn, and the like, all covered.

Worth your browsing time.

The posts are here.

Keely Kolmes (Photo by Thomas Roche)

What’s your background? What do you do now?

Before becoming a psychologist, I was doing computer consulting and had been fairly immersed in online culture since the early 90′s. I also had interests in sexual health and behavior and had worked previously at the National AIDS Hotline. I went to graduate school for my Psy.D. in 1996 with the dream of working in college mental health and working with students around issues of sexual behavior and identity. I’ve spent eight years working in college mental health, and started my private practice two years ago. Now, I’m doing private practice full-time and I work with a lot of sexual minority clients (LGBT, poly-identified, kink-identified) on a variety of issues including anxiety, depression, relationship concerns, and sometimes sexual issues. I see individuals and couples in my practice. I also offer consultation and trainings to other mental health professionals on managing a professional presence on social media and also in working with sexual minority clients.

What’s been your approach to managing your social media presence?

After starting my private practice in 2008, I wanted to use social media for marketing purposes, but I found it problematic to use my personal accounts to do this since I did not want to lead clients back towards my personal life. In February of 2009, I created my professional Twitter account which felt like a big relief. I was able to take up space online in a completely professional way and keep my personal tweets confined to a locked and private account. Shortly after this, I also created a Facebook Fan page for the purpose of experimenting with Facebook ads. I have opted to keep my LinkedIn profile non-public since I would prefer for people not to be able to browse my contact list. But I do participate in LinkedIn discussions and groups.

Mostly my approach to social media is to participate when I’m moved to do so. I blog when I have a topic I feel passionate about. I tweet when I read things that interest me. And I try to interact a reasonable amount without it pulling me away from other activities. I share things when they excite me and I love finding other people’s resources that are valuable to pass along.

How did you get to 16,000 twitter followers and how does your Twitter/social media presence affect your practice?

Twitter lists categories of suggested users and I found myself listed in their Health category this year. After that, my follower count jumped up a great deal. It’s hard to say how Twitter alone affects my practice. I have never had a new client say they found me through Twitter. Most of my followers on Twitter live in different cities or different countries. I think Twitter expands my reach globally, rather than locally, which is good for helping to establish my reputation and letting other people know about me, but I’m not sure it translates directly into referrals.

However, Twitter has enabled me to connect with other mental health professionals who are passionate about technology and social media. It’s greatly enriched my professional life by leading me to professional collaborations with clinicians in other states and countries who I would not have met before Twitter. Since I love research, writing, and collaboration, this has been of great value to me. I see Twitter as a place for me to engage in professional exchanges with other folks in mental health, although occasionally students and consumers of therapy ask me questions there.

What’s the story behind the Social Media Policy posted on your site?

Last March, I first began to consider therapists encountering client information on the Internet and how that might affect treatment. At that time, it seemed there was a lot of worry from therapists about clients searching for information about them online, but very little being written about what impact it might have on therapy when therapists found client information online. I started developing my research instrument to explore this subject.

In my research proposal I acknowledged that future therapists might need to include items in informed consent such as whether or not they Google their clients and how they respond to interactions with clients online. Through my research and my consultations with other professionals, I began to hear of how many different boundary crossings were occurring via the Internet. This helped me to shape my ideas about what to include in my Social Media Policy.

I saw the Social Media Policy as an opportunity for me to think through my policies and consider why I had adopted them and to articulate this in a language that was understandable to clients. Demystifying the therapy process for consumers has always been of interest to me. I also know that clients might not otherwise know what to expect unless they intentionally or accidentally crossed paths with me online. I believe that in a number of years, all therapists with Internet access are going to have to start including Social Media information in informed consent, and I would not be surprised if the APA addresses this in the near future. I just consider myself an early adopter of the Social Media Policy. But since I think a lot of professionals may not even know where to start, I also wanted to offer this document as a gift to the profession for people to copy, share, or modify to fit their own approaches to clinical care.

Find Keely Kolmes at her website, drkkolmes.com, and on twitter: @drkkolmes.  Her Social Media Policy is here.

Marina London, LCSW writes about social media at iWebU and helps people with it at emphasisweb.com.  She talked to

What’s your background? What do you do now?

I started off my career somewhat conventionally. BA in psychology from Yale University, MS in Social Work form Columbia University, psychiatric social worker at New York Hospital, private practice and then a 15 year career as an Employee Assistance Program executive. Started of as Clinical Director for a national EAP ended up as a VP of Operations for another one.

I was an early technology adopter from the get go and was in charge of IT at many of the EAPs I worked for being that rare bird – a clinician who understood computers. Since 2005 I have been the Web Editor for the Employee Assistance Professionals Association. Since 2008 I have been training clinicians on how to understand and use social media to grow their private practices. I have presented at numerous local, national and international conferences on this topic. My next major gig is an all day workshop at the Psychotherapy Networker Symposium in March 2010.

I write an award winning blog http://iwebu.blogspot.com and my Twitter is twitter.com/iwebu. I continue to maintain a rather peculiar skill set (for a social worker) which includes HTML coding, web site design and content writing, as well as other assorted geekery.

What do you see as the most important steps non-tech-savvy clinicians can take to help build their practices?

Step one is to do a ruthless inventory of your skills and your available time, as this will inform your level of involvement. If you don’t have the requisite skills, hire someone to teach you or do it for you. For example, if you only have 15 minutes a week to devote to social media, and find writing to be an excruciating process, don’t blog.

The second step is probably still to have a well designed and well written website. It does not have to be big or full of bells and whistles but it should state clearly:

· Your credentials
· Your areas of specialization
· What is unique about you as a practitioner
· Your publications and presentations if applicable (articles you have authored, speaking engagements)
· How to contact you
· How to find you (e.g. directions to your office)

The third step is to get involved in social media. This can be overwhelming because there are literally dozens upon dozens of social media “channels”, from Ning to Facebook, from LinkedIn to Twitter, from blogging to less known ones like BlogTalkRadio. The important thing to remember is that there are three levels of involvement in social media, from observer, to commentator, to content producer. So let’s say you are a good writer and have something to say and you are thinking about blogging. Step one: read blogs. Step two: read and write comments on other people’s blogs. Step three: write your own blog.

What are the most common tech missteps you see?

On the web site side of things, I still see a lot of poorly written, unprofessional looking sites with bad photography. Clinicians should hire professional photographers – especially for that all important head shot, retain a copywriter if they can’t write web copy, and hire a designer to ensure a professional look. It’s not that expensive and it’s worth it.

On the social media side, I see a lot of clinicians who jump to step three as stated above and then call me in a panic. For example, they launch a Twitter account, tweet once and then have no clue what to do next. Using social media to build a practice is completely different than doing it purely for social purposes. So before setting up a Twitter account, it is important for professionals to follow other clinicians on Twitter, direct message them and articulate a set of goals for the tweets, for example “I want to become recognized as an expert on EMDR for adolescents.” The tweets should be focused around that goal, and you should follow people on Twitter in a purposeful manner. Who can help you further that aim?

If you’ve done all of the above, how will you know it’s working?

Well with respect to the website you may not. Sure you can do (or have someone do for you) some Search Engine Optimization stuff and some Google Analytics to see how many people visit your site. Reality – as one of my favorite new media experts has said – “Having a website is like having a billboard in the desert.”  In other words, unless you actively drive people to your site using other forms of social media, that’s not how you are going to build your practice. You need a website because pretty soon the phone book is going to be totally obsolete and plus, having a website gives you gravitas.

With respect to social media, you have better indicators. How many followers do you have on Twitter? How many people subscribe to your blog? But it is not just about the numbers. It can be about quality. Any day I would prefer to have 10 serious and well connected new followers on Twitter rather than 100 people who absent mindedly clicked “follow.” Clinicians need to remember – you are not Ashton Kutcher trying to hit 1 million followers on Twitter. You are trying to get relevant colleagues to refer to you, new clients for your practice, a booking to speak in front of the local PTA, etc.

Forget about complex analytics, a simple question to new clients, “How did you hear about my practice?” will tell you a lot.

Any other words of wisdom you’d like to add…?

If clinicians are serious about using new media to promote their practice, they might be interested in a concept that I developed called the “Social Media Marketing Triangle.”

I had the idea after I heard my contractor talking about the “kitchen work triangle” as he attempted to remodel my “vintage” kitchen into something more 21st century. He kept harping about the need to have an invisible “work triangle” created by the arrangement of the sink, the stove and the refrigerator. It seems that the placement of these three elements in relation to each other is intrinsically connected to designing an efficient kitchen.

It got me thinking – maybe the key to promoting a professional practice on the web is an invisible “triangle” that you create on the Internet by cross referring between at least three web platforms.

Take, for example, your website, your Facebook page and your Twitter account. What if the strategic placement of any three social media elements in relation to one another is fundamentally connected to successfully marketing your practice on the Internet? So, your website refers to your blog, your blog refers to Twitter, your Twitter account refers back to your website.

In any event, a website and two other social media outlets is about the max that most people can handle and do a good job with. Though I professionally use and lecture about many social media channels, I personally only use two to promote my work.

For more information on how you can use social media and other technologies to grow your practice, read my weekly “web secret” at http://iwebu.blogspot.com. For daily secrets on all matters web for the non-geeky clinician, follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/IWEBU.