This morning a surgeon told me social media was a double-edged sword. This was after I inadvertently scared him and most of my Twitter followers and those I follow with the ‘Bad Rumors’ scam. That is what is so insidious about this scam; it preys on our fears.

Last night I received a DM from a surgeon I follow on Twitter and who follows me. He told me there was a bad rumor going around about me, and instructed me to click the link to read the posts. I’m a small business owner working in an industry built on reputation. How could I not be curious about what was being said? I clicked the link. Twitter asked me to sign in (even though I thought I was) and when I did, there was nothing to be found. An empty link. But, I had taken the bait on a phishing scam. By morning my followers were sent the “Bad Rumor” message from my account and I apparently lost 20 pounds on an accai berry diet (they use the hijacked accounts to post spam).

I call this a virus because of its spread pattern, but it’s technically a phishing scam. The scammers dangle a bit of enticement and a link to one of your accounts. But really it’s a link to a site they control, camouflaged to appear like the Twitter sign-in page. Or your email sign-in or your Facebook sign-in. In some cases even your bank sign-in. You put in your account info and then the scammers have control of your account. They hijack it and spam your friends with messages of weight loss success or a site where they want to inflate the click rate. And it can get much, much worse. If you use a common password for your accounts, the scammers will have access to all those accounts too.

What can you do to protect yourself?
- If you clicked the link, change your password now.

- Make sure you use separate passwords for your accounts. The best practice is a different password for each account. A less secure, but easier to implement strategy is to create categories for your passwords: financial, social, email, shopping.

- Become familiar with scammer strategies. Scamtrends.com stays pretty current; if you run into something a little phishy, trust your gut and check this site. Snopes.com is primarily a great reference for urban legend debunking, but can also be a good source for scam info.

- Learn to recognize rhetoric. Vague, impersonal messages are not my writing style, and with hindsight, I see that it’s not the style of the surgeon who sent me the ‘Bad Rumor’ message. If it sounds too good to be true, or in this case too awful, take a moment and consider if it’s written in the style of the sender, and if the message fits the medium.  If I hear an actual bad rumor, I’ll let you know through a more direct and personal medium, like a phone call or email.

The internet can be fraught with hidden danger, but we will continue to learn, grow and spread our message of patient education and marketing you.

Be aesthetically smart!

Sneak peek of our latest product – REVENEZ 1, an affordable web-based app that manages patient expectations, markets your practice and saves you time.

Whenever anyone talks about marketing or advertising, the term target audience will usually pop up. What is a target audience? How do you find out who “they” are? And why should an aesthetic surgery practice even care?

The target audience for your practice is the group of patients or potential patients most likely to be interested in and able to afford the type of services you offer. They should be the patients you want to attract with your marketing communications, not just the type who already respond to your messages.

You should be able to identify these patients by looking at their lifestyle, including occupation, income, where they live, their ages, their ethnic background, and even how they spend their free time, energy, and money! You need to try to get inside their heads to understand what motivates them to seek your services. Are they wanting to gain self-confidence or looking for the competitive edge in a job interview? Do they want their pre-Mommy body back?

You and your office staff should have a pretty good feel for the answers to these questions gathered from their daily interaction with patients. You can also get up-to-date information on plastic surgery patient demographics from websites such as ASAPS (www.surgery.org) and ASPS (www.plasticsurgery.org) and other online resources. You can also ask patients for the info in online polls offered in your e-newsletter. Keep it fun and patients will respond.

Just remember, in order to effectively market to your target audience, don’t simply identify who they are. You need to make sure you are sending them the message that they want to hear and can understand quickly.

Wishing you aesthetic beauty in all you do!

Candace Crowe

“I NEVER THOUGHT MUCH OF MARKETING. Practices do it in my area: billboards, magazines and things like that, but I’ve never had to. I’m not sure what good it would do me or where I should start – if I decide to – and how much is “fluff”? When is good, good enough? Do I really need great design? What do I need, and what is best for my practice? I’ve had a fairly busy practice until 2008. Things are a little slow now, but we’re making it. It would be nice to have a few more bookings, but I’m hesitant to start marketing.”

These are questions and concerns I hear weekly. For an industry that historically has believed marketing is wrong, these are legitimate concerns. “Everybody’s doing it” just doesn’t fly with me. And as you’d imagine, just average design doesn’t either.

My industry, the advertising and marketing industry, still really doesn’t know the plastic surgery industry deeply enough to always do you the best good. It is even more difficult because each practice is so unique. For some, you’ve found that a cable TV buy generates calls. For others, your website is your top dollar producer, and for yet others, your patients are your best advocates.

The most important thing I can tell you is that your marketing needs to resonate with your target audience. PATIENTS ARE ATTRACTED TO PHYSICIANS AND STAFF WHO COMMUNICATE VALUES AND PERSONALITY TRAITS SIMILAR TO THEIR OWN. Any marketing effort you engage in needs to be a trust builder, a genuine relationship builder. It’s got to be emotionally beautiful, respectful, just right for the personality of the practice, and the very best quality you can afford.

SO, WHEN IT COMES TO YOUR MARKETING, WHAT IS FLUFF? FLUFF IS A WASTE OF MONEY. Fluff happens when you don’t know what your goals are for each particular marketing effort. Fluff is not having an emotionally engaging and beautiful brand. Fluff happens when you have to do a project over, you don’t use vendors you can trust – or you don’t take time to understand your contract and what you’ve purchased. Fluff is spending too much money on external marketing when you already have a good-sized database of loyal patients who love your practice. Fluff is not looking at your consultation process through the eyes of a patient. Fluff, to me, is marketing efforts that don’t produce. Fluff is a waste of money.

Let me encourage you not to be afraid of marketing but to be purposeful about your brand, and especially, to be aesthetically smart. Give me a call, I’d love to hear what you think is fluff.

Candace – 877 884 7676

If you are among the many practices who have discovered the value of keeping in touch with your patients through regular emails and newsletters, you are most likely getting a nice return on your investment. Permission-based email marketing is relatively inexpensive and is a great way to build long-term relationships with your existing patients and gain referrals of new patients.

But, how can you really measure the effectiveness of your email campaigns if you don’t have a great reporting tool? If the phone rings and you book consults, that is an obvious indicator that your communication worked to some degree. However, you can’t see the total picture unless you have a robust reporting feature that provides you with the details on who opened your email and what links they clicked on. How many people never received your email because it got caught in spam filters or how many bounced out because of bad addresses? REVENEZmail.com offers an email newsletter service that offers those reports, so you can accurately measure the effectiveness of your efforts and realize the potential of email marketing.

Wishing you a beautiful day!

Candace Crowe