APPLICATION OF SOCIAL NETWORKING IN VETERINARY PRACTICE

Ravi Raidurg

History of Social Networking Services

The notion that individual computers linked electronically could form the basis of computer mediated social interaction and networking was suggested early on. There were many early efforts to support social networks via computer-mediated communication, including Usenet, ARPANET, LISTSERV, bulletin board services (BBS) etc.

Early social networking websites included Classmates.com (1995), focusing on ties with former school mates, and SixDegrees.com (1997), focusing on indirect ties. User profiles could be created, messages sent to users held on a “friends list” and other members could be sought out who had similar interests to yours in their profiles. Whilst these features had existed in some form before SixDegrees.com came about, this would be the first time these functions were available in one package. Despite these new developments (that would later catch on and become immensely popular), the website simply wasn’t profitable and eventually shut down. It was even described by the website’s owner as "simply ahead of its time." Two different models of social networking that came about in 1999 were trust-based, developed by Epinions.com, and friendship-based, such as those developed by Jonathan Bishop and used on some regional UK sites between 1999 and 2001. Innovations included not only showing who is “friends” with whom, but giving users more control over content and connectivity.

Between 2002 and 2004, three social networking sites emerged as the most popular form of these sites in the world, causing such sites to become part of mainstream users globally. First there was Friendster (which Google tried to acquire in 2003), then, MySpace, and finally, Bebo. By 2005, MySpace, emerged as the biggest of them all, and was reportedly getting more page views than Google. 2004 saw the emergence of Facebook, a competitor, also rapidly growing in size. In 2006, Facebook, opened up to the non US college community, and by allowing externally-developed add-on applications, became the largest and fastest growing site in the world, not limited by particular geographical followings.

Social networking began to flourish as a component of internet business strategy at around March 2005 when Yahoo launched Yahoo! 360°. In July 2005, News Corporation bought MySpace, followed by ITV (UK) buying Friends Reunited in December 2005. Various social networking sites have sprung up catering to different languages and countries. It is estimated that there are now over 200 social networking sites.

Why Social Networking?

Through social networking, people can use networks of online friends and group memberships to keep in touch with current friends, reconnect with old friends or create real–life friendships through similar interests or groups. Besides establishing important social relationships, social networking members can share their interests with other like–minded members by joining groups and forums. Some networking can also help members find a job or establish business contacts.

Most social networking websites also offer additional features. In addition to blogs and forums, members can express themselves by designing their profile page to reflect their personality. The most popular extra features include music and video sections. Members can read about their favorite music artists from the artist's profile page, as well as listen to their favorite songs and watch music videos. The video section can include everything from member–generated videos on hundreds of subjects to TV clips and movie trailers.

Why your Hospital should have a Blog

These days, just about everyone has a blog, from major celebrities to your Uncle Joe. But does your veterinary hospital? Blogs are a fast, easy way to share important health information, connect with your clients and market your veterinary hospital’s services. Here are a few ways your veterinary hospital can benefit from a blog:

· Client Education: If you’ve recently seen a number of Kennel Cough, Leptospirosis, Feline Calicivirus or Parvovirus cases, a blog post is an excellent opportunity to educate clients about prevention and treatment. Posting in-depth medical information (that you may not have time to share during an appointment), including a list of symptoms, is beneficial to your clients and can help boost vaccination compliance and the need for frequent examinations.

· Promote Your Services: If you’re offering a new service or have recently purchased a new instrument (ultrasound, endoscopy) that you are eager to show off, promoting it on your blog can get clients’ and potential clients’ attention. You need to explain how their pets can benefit from your new services. Clients can’t utilize these services if they don’t know about them.

· Continuing Education: Your clients can recognize your commitment to their pets’ health when you post continuing education conferences and courses that you and your staff members attend. List some of the interesting lectures that you have attended and a few facts about each.

· Have Fun: Often, clients may only see you when their pet is seriously ill. Your blog can show them your lighter side—share funny pet stories or anecdotes about the brighter side of veterinary medicine. Post candid shots of the hospital staff or share photos of your own pets with your clients.

· Personal and Hospital Information: Weddings, birth announcements, milestone anniversaries and the arrival of new pets add a personal touch to your relationship with your clients.

· Increase Search Engine Rankings: Blogs have the added benefit of increasing your hospital website’s search engine rankings. The greater your hospital’s presence on the internet, the more often your website is picked up by Google, Yahoo and other search engines, making it easier for potential clients to discover your hospital.

How Veterinary Hospitals can Benefit from Social Networking

MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn – every month, it seems, there’s a new social networking website on the Internet that everyone is talking about. One may even already be using some of these sites to connect with old friends and classmates. But social networking sites have many applications apart from establishing personal and professional connections. Adding your veterinary hospital to MySpace, Facebook and other social networking services is a fast, easy way to promote your veterinary practice, improve your search engine rankings and connect with clients.

Search engines increasingly are turning to social networking sites for search results, and the more relevant information you have on your MySpace, Facebook or LinkedIn account, the better your rankings. The higher your search engine ranking, the easier it is for potential clients to find your website, make appointments, and come to your veterinary hospital. Having a social networking presence makes it easier for current clients to recommend your hospital to friends in their own social networks, further increasing potential client opportunities.

Social networking can also be used to strengthen your relationship with clients. Often, your only interaction with clients may be when a pet is seriously ill. Sharing inspiring or funny anecdotes on your blog or candid photos of the staff allows you to connect with clients and build a rapport in a less-stressful, more positive manner. Media outlets are also turning to social networking sites in search of sources for news articles. Maintaining a social networking presence keeps you on reporters’ and bloggers’ radar – which may result in media coverage of your practice. Because most social networking sites are free, they present an excellent method to easily and inexpensively market your practice.

What to Look for in Social Networking

The phenomenon of online social networking—made extremely popular by MySpace.com , has evolved to include more than the teenage stereotype looking to expand his/her network of online friends. People of all ages and backgrounds have discovered that they can enrich their lives through the contacts they make on a social networking website. The criteria used to evaluate Social Networking websites are:

• Profiles- The heart and soul of social networking sites are user’s personal profiles. It’s like their own Internet sanctuary, a place where they can express their thoughts and feelings, post photographs and show off their network of friends. The most popular social network websites put a strong emphasis on the user’s profile, making it easy to use yet still reflective of the user’s personality.
• Security- The Internet can be a dangerous place to post personal information. All social networks should provide the ability to set profiles to private in some way or another. Additionally they should have the ability to report and block users.
• Networking Features – A good social network goes above and beyond just allowing users to post profiles and update pictures. Additional features should include music sections, video uploads, groups and more.
• Search- The object of a social network is to find friends and expand relationships. Top social networking websites allows members to search for other members in a safe and easy to use environment. Common search functions include search by name, city, school and email address.
• Help/Support- Most social network sites are self-explanatory. However, in the off-chance a user needs help, there needs to be some way to contact the webmaster or answers in a FAQs section.
• Legitimate Friend Focus- The growing trend for social networks is to communicate and keep in touch with people you already know. No one wants to be inundated with unsolicited spam friend requests. The best social network sites keep profiles and search options private enough that the only people that can find you are the ones actually looking for users in their own school or neighborhood networks. Even with a completely public profile, users shouldn’t be bothered with more than a couple of unsolicited comments or messages.

Which Network Should I Use?

Social networking is all about building connections, between friends, co-workers, customers, colleagues, business partners and you. How you build those connections varies depending on which service you use. MySpace and Facebook are two of the most popular and well-known social networking sites. There are an estimated 124 million users on Facebook and approximately 246 million users on MySpace.

Facebook started out as a networking site for college students but has since opened access to everyone. While anyone can open a personal Facebook account, there are limitations for organizations and companies. Unlike personal accounts, companies and groups cannot actively add other Facebook users to their network – instead, personal users must find a company’s page and add it to their own account. Once you have set up your account, you can post photos of your clients and pets, send out invitations for hospital events and start discussions on message boards that are open to all Facebook users. You can create your own account at www.facebook.com by selecting “Create Facebook Page”.

MySpace is open to everyone and members can create fully customizable pages. Bands, artists, businesses and organizations use MySpace and there are no restrictions on who you can contact or add to your network. MySpace allows you to change the layout and design of your page (Facebook does not), as well as post photos, send out invitations and maintain a blog. You can create a MySpace account by going to www.myspace.com. The demographics for each site vary. MySpace users tend to be younger, with many users signing up as teenagers. Musicians also make up a large faction of MySpace’s member base. Facebook tends to attract users in their late-20s and older, as well as business professionals.

: Orkut is a very popular social website in India. Profile of you and your clinic/hospital would be a better option than the above two.

Blogging sites: Maintaining a blog is an excellent way to stay connected with clients about medical information and hospital events. Sharing a hospital blog with clients is like “pulling back the curtain” and showing your clients what daily life is like at the hospital. There are many free blogging services out there, but some of the best include Blogger (owned by Google), WordPress and TypePad. All you need for set-up is an email address. All three sites have a very user-friendly interface that can guide you through the posting process.

: This social networking site is focused on building professional connections for business collaboration, job opportunities and employment searches. A “company directory” feature is still in beta; however, creating a LinkedIn account for you is a good way to connect with other veterinarians and scout out potential hospital employees. You can create an account at www.linkedin.com

Flickr: A photo-sharing site operated by Yahoo, Flickr lets you upload photos and share them with other users. With Flickr, you can create a slideshow of hospital photos, share a gallery of clients’ pet photos and more.

Google Picasa: This is another photo-sharing site which offers upto 1GB of free storage. Web Albums is a new feature wherein photos can be grouped into albums with captions for each photo. These albums can appear as a slideshow on your blog or website. Advanced face recognition technology can also help you ‘tag’ photos i.e. add the names of people seen in the photo to the caption automatically! A Gmail account can be used on picasaweb.google.com

YouTube: YouTube lets you upload and share videos with other users. Some veterinary hospitals use YouTube to share video tours of their practice, while others use the site to share appearances on local television with clients and friends.

Microblogging and Social Bookmarking: Other popular social networking sites include Twitter, Digg, Delicious and Reddit. Twitter is a microblogging site – users write short posts, limited to 144 characters. Posts can be about anything, from updates on what you’re doing at the veterinary hospital to providing links to interesting articles, photos and more. Digg, Delicious and Reddit are all popular social bookmarking sites, which allow users to read, share and discuss articles, information and photos on the web.

What Do I Do Next?

For many of these services, creating an account takes only a few minutes – long enough to fill in some basic information and add photos. But once you’ve created an account, what’s your next step?

First, flesh out your profile. Put in as much relevant, useful information as you can – your hospital’s website address, a list of your services, hospital hours and local areas that you serve. The goal here is to connect with people, therefore a dynamic, interesting page containing good and relevant content is more likely to attract visitors. On MySpace and Facebook, you can add any number of media, including video clips from YouTube, photo slideshows from Flickr, links to your blog, and more. Maintaining these accounts is easy and frequent updates (about once a week or so) keep visitors coming back to your pages.

Once your profile is set up, start looking for friends. MySpace allows you to search for other users with a variety of parameters, from searches based on geographic location and age to queries based on interests and career fields. Share your MySpace or Facebook pages with clients and encourage them to connect with you. Build up your network by connecting to people in your area, local animal organizations and animal lovers. Join relevant groups on MySpace and Facebook and get involved in discussions about veterinary health and pet-related topics. When you answer questions, make comments and provide useful tips to other users; they will be inclined to visit your page and learn more about your practice.

Networking Safety Tips for Adults

There is a lot of discussion and information about how to keep teens safe online, but there isn't much discussion about how to keep adults safe. The consensus may be that because someone is an adult, they already know how to stay safe online. Adults can be just as vulnerable as kids, especially those who are not accustomed to online networking.

· Don't Reveal Too Much: When you join a social networking website, most ask for a username, gender, country/state and zip code. This information is usually displayed on your personal profile. Revealing more information such as your last name and address is not recommended since it is impossible to know the mindset of every person who views your profile. For example, if you describe where you live in detail or reveal where you work and your zip code is already posted on your profile, with a little digging, someone could track you down even if they only knew your first name. It just takes one person with criminal intentions to put you at risk.

· Be on Guard: Don’t let your guard down and reveal too much about where you live even if you have friends in your online network and you feel you can trust them. You never truly know whom you’re communicating with until you meet them face-to-face and spend time to get to know them. Many networking members keep a layer of anonymity by creating a unique username (one that doesn’t resemble their real name) you can even register your account with an alias and phony location. Just make sure you read the networking website’s Terms Of Service before you register with phony information; some sites may take exception to this and if you are caught, they may delete your account.

· Always keep in mind that personal information, comments and photos that you post on your personal profile are viewable by the public even if your profile is limited to your circle of friends. Someone in your network could share your webpage address or contact information with people you don’t know and those people could share the information with their friends and so on.

· While you are chatting online, be wary of people who want to know intimate details about you or seem too eager to meet you in person.

· If, after a period of time, you decide to meet someone from your network, make sure to bring a friend and meet in a public place. Plan on your friend accompanying you for the entire meeting since introductions and a few minutes of chitchat is not enough time to get to know someone. As an extra precaution, bring a friend along for the next few get-togethers.

· Social networking websites allow you to express yourself, share ideas and interests, chat with friends and meet new people. Just remember that following a few precautions will go a long way to protect your privacy and safety.

Social networking is a powerful, inexpensive marketing tool. More people are turning to the Internet when they look for a new veterinarian. An established social networking presence can improve your search engine rankings and present vital information about your practice to scores of potential clients.

Excerpt from 'Information Technology in Veterinary Science' (2009), New India Publishing Agency, New Delhi. ISBN 978-81-908512-4-4. More details here.