Industry Thought Leader selected to coordinate CES Summit Social Media
WEST BEND, WI – Laura Mitchell Consulting announced today their involvement as the official Digital Health Summit “Social Wizard” in the 7th Annual CES Digital Health Summit. Recruited to live tweet the Digital Health Summit, provide real time exhibitor videos and interview speakers and sponsors for Digital Health Live, Laura will combine her veteran industry experience, technical expertise, and interpersonal skills to maximize attendee and participant success.
“I’m humbled and honored to have a new role this year as the Social Wizard for the Digital Health Summit,” said Laura Mitchell. “This industry has gone from barely crawling to full speed running in the past 12 months and it’s absolutely invigorating. WebMD, Ant+, UnitedHealth Group, Misfit Wearables and Good HouseKeeping are just a few of the large players participating in this year’s Digital Health Summit, confirming that the time is here and now for a revolution in digital health.”
Laura has been featured in various panels at the CES Digital Health Summit since it’s inception, making her a natural choice to evaluate the digital health space and remark on the past decade of technology and healthcare evolution. She has spoken on various topics in previous Digital Health Summit panel discussions, and is a well-known fixture and pioneer in the technology aging-in-place market.
“Laura is a digital health and digital media expert who has a clear understanding of the entire digital health ecosystem,” said Digital Health Summit Producer, Jill Gilbert. “She fits well into our innovative force of industry leaders and content experts.”
Previous attendees may know Laura Mitchell as a founding member of GrandCare Systems in 2005, a founder of the Aging Technology Alliance (AgeTek), as a Louisville Innovation Summit board member, or as the creator and host of the 2008-11 aging and technology webinar series.
Laura owns a guerrilla marketing and digital health consulting firm called Laura Mitchell Consulting (LMC) and has been active in the digital health, aging, and technology space for the last decade. She has received accolades from many sources including Forbes, Dealerscope, AARP and the Consumer Electronics Association. Her awards include Top Women of M2M, Top 40 under 40 and Young Turks of CE. Laura speaks all over the country on a variety of subjects including disruptive marketing, technology in aging, and connected healthcare.
Social media is a confusing, difficult, time-dependent medium. With fluid cultures and user bases, it can be overwhelming for digital immigrant business owners. With all that difficulty, why should you participate at all? And if you do, how do you control your image online? Let’s talk about that.
The Good
Social media allows businesses to raise brand awareness. Never before has your business been at the fingertips of so many people. These users can share experiences with your brand with friends and family, something that traditional marketing simply cannot do. Furthermore, these positive reviews, posts, images, and videos, are then attached to your brand, visible for the entire world to see. Accumulating positive reviews makes it simple for users to find new businesses like yours to try out. Have clients in multiple countries? Have clients who speak multiple languages? Social media greatly reduces communication barriers. Lastly, social media is fast. You can create personal, one-on-one interactions with your target demographic(s) in less time than ever before.
The Bad and The Ugly
Of course, these positives do have a dark side. Negative reviews can haunt an organization for years, and these reviewers are often difficult to contact. In addition, platforms like Yelp consistently filter out positive comments, leaving businesses with low ratings not necessarily representative of the organization itself. With nearly constant access to cameras and the internet, your business could be subjected to unauthorized photography or videography. Should unflattering images of your organization appear online, mitigating the damage can prove difficult. Lastly, social media is unpredictable and difficult to control. Gone are the days of carefully constructed corporate images and ad campaigns. Your audiences decide what your image will be, and your only choice is to be–or not be–one voice in the conversation.
So why not utilize your social media to positively contribute to your message? Use it to stand on your own company soap box and share insightful, educational, and inspirational messages. Give your organization a human side and delve into the emotional side of promotion and advertising.
Still feeling overwhelmed? Let Laura Mitchell Consulting help! With over 20 years of marketing and growth hacking experience, we bring both the technical abilities and interpersonal skills necessary to make your business excel. Contact us at info@lmcllc.us.
Who needs a social media strategy? In short—everyone. In the past decade, social media has grown exponentially, surpassing traditional media as a preferred media source among millennials. Businesses have had to quickly adapt, and this rapid shift has been confusing for marketing departments everywhere. Many have taken the “spray and pray” approach to social marketing, which rarely works.
Identifying and carefully analyzing your audience is key. Messages that align with the attitudes, beliefs, and habits of a group are likely to succeed. However, grouping audiences by demographics like gender, age, and income level are strategies of the past. Having a positive experience with a brand that understands and supports your values may prove to be more important to millennials than price point. Targeting groups of people who share values on social media is easier than ever before. Opening a dialogue about issues in your industry is a great way to engage potential customers.
A major misconception of social media is that it is a one-way form of communication. An organization is not able to send out a message and hope the audience receives it in the same way that they receive traditional advertising or public relations messages. Most social media channels are two-way forms of communication. While a large part of the organization’s job on social media is to release a message, part of their goal needs to be addressing any concerns sent to them by the audience. They cannot ignore the comments or posts directed at them. They must address feedback. In some cases this may involve responding to complaints. This is called “service recovery,” and is an essential part of social media for just about any business.
Laura Mitchell Consulting offers a comprehensive social media document that includes instructions for establishing and maintaining social media profiles and related strategies. Interested in leading your industry on social media? Contact us at info@lmcllc.us.
Laura Mitchell, a marketing professional and industry thought leader in the healthcare technology space, has recently 
focused her attention on another groundbreaking project. Advanced Residential Electronic Systems, a respected textbook, has recently sourced Laura’s expertise as an industry expert and contributor. With over 10 years of experience in home health technology, Laura Mitchell brings both the technical experience and personality necessary to make a valuable contribution to this publication.
The year is 1975. Television broadcasters, radio stations, and newspapers comprise the media landscape. They are the information gatekeepers, the few people responsible for determining which stories are newsworthy, where and when they appear, and how to spin each story. Most Americans have no choice but to consume this secondhand information, completely reliant on these traditional media sources to shape their understanding of world events. The only sources of primary information come from social networks. No, not those social networks. Private access to the internet is still many years away. Instead, these are actual networks of people talking to one another.
The year is 2015. Television, radio, and newspaper are all rapidly declining. Information gatekeepers no longer exist, and each and every person has the capability to create their own news. Large groups of people are more accessible than ever before, and news now goes “viral”. Primary information is sought after, even preferred, to the carefully constructed news crafted by broadcasters. The internet is a pervasive part of daily living, and the social networks we’re all familiar with have become the young person’s news channel.
So, what changed? A new generation with a desire for unbiased, unfiltered news content began to dominate the market. Technologies allowing for personalized news content combined with a growing distrust for traditional media have created the perfect social cocktail for social networks to thrive. This rapid shift away from traditional media has left businesses across all industries flustered.
Laura Mitchell Consulting works closely with businesses caught in the transition away from traditional media. We can help your business better understand how to use social media to drive traffic to your website, generate sales, and ultimately create a higher return on investment for your marketing efforts.
Interested in working with Laura Mitchell Consulting? Contact us!
Laura Mitchell Consulting has just grown by 33%! We are proud to announce that we have added a new member to our growing team of marketing professionals. Acting as a Digital Strategy Consultant, Elizabeth Hintz started with Laura Mitchell Consulting on November 16th. Focusing primarily on social media, Elizabeth will be a valuable asset for both Laura Mitchell Consulting and our growing base of clientele.
In her previous positions, Elizabeth has focused heavily on guerrilla marketing-that is, generating engagement without having any allocated funds. Having worked for both private sector and nonprofit organizations, Elizabeth brings a wealth of experience and a unique understanding of emerging media. As described on Laura Mitchell Consulting’s website:
Elizabeth is a rising talent in the marketing world, but already has several years of experience in digital marketing and instructional design in multiple organizations. Elizabeth is also a razor sharp ninja who graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay at the age of 19 with a degree in Organizational Communication.
Elizabeth has already hit the ground running, outlining a social media and marketing plan for our own brand. We are very excited about what Elizabeth has to bring to the table as she joins Laura and the rest of the LMC staff.
Another staff member, Scott Feldstein, is currently the Brand Manager at Laura Mitchell Consulting. Scott’s biography on our website captures his personality well:
Scott is a writer, speaker, musician and Jedi master. As Brand Manager and Copywriter, he uses his creativity to effectively communicate your company’s purpose and values to just the right target demographic. In addition to 15 years of experience in technology, Scott has studied psychology, religion, education and computing and holds a master’s degree from Marquette University.
Scott’s recent work has been largely focused on developing the new Laura Mitchell Consulting website (lmcllc.us) in addition to managing existing accounts and sorting through prospective clients. Nick Mitchell, Laura’s partner-in-crime, has been working closely with Scott to develop the Laura Mitchell Consulting website and other websites for clients. Nick’s strength is his highly technical understanding of complex systems. He is a software developer by trade and acts as the development branch of Laura Mitchell Consulting. Nick offers expertise in the latest and most innovative trends in software development:
He has experience in enterprise application life cycles, back-end architecture, and web design/programming. Other skills include requirements gathering methodologies, technical support, Extreme Programming methodologies, object-oriented design/patterns, testing, database design/administration, and system administration. He acted as lead developer for digital health technology industry pioneer, GrandCare Systems. He remains a GrandCare Fellow and maintains his powerful wizardry.
Last but certainly not least, Laura Mitchell is a pioneer and thought leader in the aging/technology industry. Widely recognized for her innovative, agile marketing, a deep understanding of the digital health ecosystem and broad industry connections,, Laura speaks all over the country about aging, technology, healthcare technology, marketing and anything else that someone lets her start talking about.
This strike team of experts is ready to serve you and your business for all of your branding, messaging, social media, website, strategy and software development needs. For more information, please visit us at lmcllc.us, or e-mail us at info@lmcllc.us.
Why do messages fail? Many businesses are often left wondering why they failed to reach marketing and social media goals.
Performing a careful audience analysis and aligning marketing messages with the values and beliefs of that audience nearly ensures success.
Yet, in a world where social media allows nearly any user to create a profile and interact with your brand, messages are received by wider audiences than ever before.
This unprecedented diversity means that any message that can be mocked or misinterpreted will be—and the results can be devastating.
So, what happens when a brand’s message is misaligned with the intended audience? Let’s take a look one monstrous example.
In September of 2014, DiGiorno Pizza made arguably one of the biggest branding blunders in history when they jumped on the viral hashtag #WhyIStayed. This hashtag allowed victims of domestic violence to tell their stories, but the brand used the hashtag for some shameless self-promotion. After nearly immediately deleting the tweet, DiGiorno Pizza was bombarded with angry messages and spent the next few days paying for their mistake.
So, what went wrong here?
A generally well-liked, respected brand joined a trending topic on Twitter, and may have irreparably tarnished their image.
Aside from utterly failing to investigate the trending topic before chiming in, DiGiorno Pizza misunderstood the tone and seriousness of the campaign. Lacking in preparation, DiGiorno Pizza created a message that was horribly misaligned with the company’s young, diverse Twitter following. As a result, DiGiorno Pizza may have lost customers for good.
The pitfalls of messaging and language in marketing are plentiful and widespread, and LMC can help your business avoid them. Want to know what your marketing strategies say about you? Let’s chat! Contact us here or email us at info@lmcllc.us.
