Please join us for a Luncheon Event hosted by MSHPM at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital June 24th in Ann Arbor.
Our distinguished panelists will discuss what hospitals, health systems and physicians should be thinking about as they develop an ACO. Areas of discussion will include physician alignment, network and hospital partnership strategies, ACO structure options, legal implications and use of technology to improve patient care, control costs and meet government regulations. Click here for the details. and to register.
re:group is pleased to sponsor this event. Contact Liz Conlin, V.P. Client Services for the inside scoop 734- 320-6606 or liz.conlin@regroup.us
We are very proud to be a Sponsor for this year’s FutureMidwest 2011 conference.
If you are not familiar, FutureMidwest is a two day digital and technological education conference now in it’s 3rd year of existence. The first event took place in 2009 and helped kick start a movement that continues to draw attention throughout Michigan and the Midwest.
Not focused on just social media, the FutureMidwest program is built on helping educate business professionals, business owners, students, entrepreneurs, and companies on new business practices that compliment the current digital and technological changes.
But what does it really mean to be Midwest?
Is being Midwest limited to geographic location? Is it a state of mind? Is it a code of ethics? Maybe it’s determined by the sports team you root for?
I’ve been fortunate to travel across most of the county, and I have spent a lot of time in the Midwest States like Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana, North and South Dakota, Iowa, Illinois, Ohio, and more. Throughout all of these states I have noticed a common theme:
That regardless of the city, town, state, or geographic location, the people who make up the Midwest have an insatiable appetite to want to reinvent themselves.
They are not ones to rest on their laurels, or be tied down by the status quo or perceived limitations set by economic restrictions. This is in conflict to the general perception many have of the people who live in this region. However, I’ve seen how communities in this so called rust belt are gathering together, and redefining not only themselves, but the communities they serve.
More and more the states that make up the Midwest recognize the need to connect and share ideas.
Being Midwest isn’t about location. It is a state of mind. It’s the will and determination handed down by generations to roll up the sleeves and get to work. It is a work ethic and mentality that is not limited to just physical or industrial labor. One can work with their hands in many ways. Innovation is only limited by the imagination, and if history has taught us anything, it is that the Midwest always looking beyond the horizon.
Get an idea of this innovation in action at FutureMidwest 2011. We’ll be there along with many other great minds.
What is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the words B2B and social media?
Is it LinkedIn? What about Facebook? We could can even throw in SalesForce in there too I bet.
Tools are usually top of mind when it comes to social media. However, there is a lot more to this space than just tools and tactics. Especially when it comes to B2B communications. Notice we didn’t say marketing?
B2B businesses can take full advantage of the social web, and can do so just as well as any B2C organization.
True the customer base may be smaller, but that doesn’t mean you can’t focus on brand loyalty. Yes Mr. B2B, company you have a brand, and loyalty is something social media can help you obtain and maintain. It really comes down to who you are connected with, and by connected we don’t mean through Linkedin or Twitter. Ask any good business person what the foundation of good business is, and they will say relationships. How many solid relationships have you built offline. What about online?
This is where social media rocks.
Social media is not a tool. It is a relationship builder. Jason Falls says it best, “B2B social media is still P2P social media. The P stands for people folks!”
Trust me, we understand the need to make a buck. That’s what we are in business for, right? Or is it? Perhaps the ROI we experience through our traditional and digital communications isn’t so connected to the dollar, but through the personal connections we make. I mean, without them, we wouldn’t be making money, period.
Referrals, word of mouth, value, good products and good business all came way before social media showed up.
So don’t get so caught up in what you should do in social media. Instead, focus on:
How you are going to communicate
How you are going to show people what you do
How you will build relationships, not just leads
How you will maintain customer loyalty to your products and services
How you are going to get people to find you
How you are going to identify your marketing objectives
How you are going to be social
If you are in the Ann Arbor area this week, AnnArbor.com is hosting a FREE B2B expo this Thursday, March 10th at Washtenaw Community College.
This is a one day event focused on B2B success, economic development and entrepreneurship in Washtenaw County. A great program has been organized including presentations by Keystone Media, NEW, Power Marketing and Research, and more. You can view the entire schedule here: http://b2bexpo.annarbor.com/schedule.html.
We will also be participating on the panel discussion, Social Media: You Are Doing It, Now What?
We’ve been wondering about the fate of the coupon industry for the last couple of months.
After the success of Groupon, a lot of local retailers have launched similar product offers. AnnArbor.com has the “real deal”, ValPak recently launched a daily deal, and even some of the local media sites like CBS Detroit are getting involved. Then there’s DealGator, a similar deal engine like Groupon that searches all deal sites, and filters them based on your location and the kind of deals you want.
Since all of these local media guys have existing relationships with the businesses in the market, what does this mean for relevance of Groupon?
This raises the question if multiple coupon companies can survive in today’smarket with the same product offering?
This remains to be seen as Groupon competitors continue to pop up. Though Groupon still remains the leader of this space, the above pricing example leads one to wonder if Groupon will regret rejecting Google’s multi-billion offer. Another interesting insight is that businesses that sign up for these deals give away 35-45% of their profit to the site. Depending on the industry clients usually spend 5-10% of their profits on marketing or advertising.
If a competitor offered more favorable margins to a retailor, what’s to keep them from leaving Groupon? Would smaller niche businesses want to give up that large of a percentage? Could they even entertain that option?
This could be an advantage for local online deal-of-the-day competitors like Ann Arbor’s The Real Deal – focusing on the community aspect while offering niche retailers the opportunity to reach a larger audience.
It is probably still too early to tell. The digital coupon space could be the new retailer battleground, and it will be interesting to see how this space unfolds.
I had the pleasure of speaking at the very first WordCamp Detroit over the weekend.
My friends Todd J. List, Anthony Montalbano and their team put together a sold out program full of informative speakers, and a wealth of helpful information. Topics included picking an appropriate theme for your blog, SEO, PHP/CSS basics, video blogging, and more.
I was asked to present on a subject that we are very passionate about here at re:group – building helpful and effective content. This is something we absolutely strive for when working with our clients, and in my talk I stressed the importance of:
Having a human voice through your content
Becoming a trusted resource
Leaning on your passion
Building content people will want to share
Being present if you are going to be online
Listening
Click the bubble below to see our presentation. I also added additional helpful resources at the end:
I’d also recommend checking out the following presentations as well:
We lost our daily paper paper last July in Ann Arbor. The old Ann Arbor News was replaced by an online product, AnnArbor.com. Like many, I was chagrined. I couldn’t imagine breakfast without ink and newsprint. It just seemed strange to imagine reading the daily news on a laptop across my bowl of fruit. Not getting that dirty ink all over my fingers anymore, that would be good. But spilling coffee on my new paper? That would be bad.
I’m not a total Luddite. I’ve been a heavy online user since the pre-www days of Compuserve and Prodigy. So I’m totally comfortable in the online world. But my daily newspaper? Hmm…
I wasn’t happy about it then. I am happy now. Not with the actual digital replacement product. It’s marginal at best. Maybe because it’s marginal, I have been forced to seek out other sources of local news, information and opinion. What a revelation! I guess I never realized how much filtering was required to reduce an entire community with all of its events, quirks, warts, and diverse personalities into a daily bundle of bird cage liner, packing material and filler for my recycle bin.
Make no mistake, these new sources are not fair and balanced journalism. Most don’t pretend to be. Much is presented as fact that is, in fact, not. Articles and reader comments are often snarky, off topic, offensive, and rude. (I kind of like that part, it takes less energy than polite and politically correct). But you learn pretty quickly who has something interesting to say and who doesn’t.
What used to be twenty pages of news and a quarter page of Letters to the Editor is now snippets of news and screen after screen after screen of Letters to the Editor. I always liked the letters best anyway. The only issue I have with this new order is that the conversation tends to be dominated by an annoying few. Maybe they just have too much time on their hands, or maybe they really do know everything… about everything. You who know it all – and you know who you are – start your own blog.
And then there is the anti-everything crowd. News flash: www.antieverything.com is for sale. And the conspiracy theorists. They think I’m out to get them. (I am, but I’ll blog about that some other time.) There are the mindlessly single-minded. Is that an oxymoron? Or just a moron? Their one pet peeve is somehow relevant no matter the topic. The linkers, they think I really need 100 pages of linked minutiae to learn that the school board spent too much on pencils. And then there those I call the twits. The ones who use that incredibly annoying twitterism of using the @ symbol when replying to another poster.
But, all in all, since I’ve been reading these local blogs, news sites, pseudo news sites, rants, and journals, I certainly feel like I am more informed. I might actually be. It’s hard to tell. It is definitely more fun than the old paper paper. And I haven’t spilled anything on it yet.
Al Nalli’s building butts up against our parking lot. Every night the blue lights shine and the blues blast from the windows facing our building. It drives some of our people (who work late for the peace and quiet) nuts. I love it. Particularly when it’s got a good blues beat. Although I must admit, the guy perfecting his single snare drum hit for hours on end did get a little tiring, probably for him too.
Al and his family have been in the music business for years. He has reportedly managed and produced for a number of notable acts big and small including Lynyrd Skynyrd, Styx and Kid Rock. His father’s Ann Arbor music store was once a competitor with Tom’s Strings and Things, in Birmingham.
I think Al has at least temporarily given up on his plan to sell his property to an out of town developer, probably as a result of increased vacancy and decreased demand for commercial real estate. He has finally fixed the falling concrete and re-rented the space. The building has kept its music roots with a Rock Band School and recording studio in the basement. It kind of goes with the tattoo parlor on the first floor.
My purple cup and I cross the street every day to get our fill of iced tea at “the bar.” We all call it that. No need to use its name as we all know where we are going. We know Chris and Steve and Amy and all the staff. Walking into the bar is like walking into the westside Ann Arbor version of Cheers. Casual, comfortable, warm and welcoming, if you get a booth (a window is the best) you can put your feet up and relax.
A fair amount of business gets done at the bar. We hold our operations meeting there on Wednesdays and often have to compete with the architects, lawyers and web geeks for a space. Of course the big round table is always reserved for the Hooper Hathaway attorneys. Being daily customers is rewarded with a table complete with roasted peanuts and pitchers of iced tea waiting in the corner by the window.
Steve is worried about the new Michigan no smoking law for bars and restaurants going into effect in 80 days. He asked if we could use our research tools to determine what percentage of drinkers are also smokers. He is afraid the drinking and smoking crowd will just stay home at night. His brother Chris on the other hand can’t wait. He thinks the opposite will happen, that their dinner business will increase once the smoke clears. I probably agree with Chris, the smoke has kept me away on more than one occasion. (Research data seems to supports that too.) I did suggest that if they were worried, they might develop a customer database with all those cards they collect in the fishbowl and talk to their customers about it.
There is a lot to be said for a good, family run, neighborhood bar. People have been meeting at The Old Town, for food and drink for over 100 years. I suspect if Steve and Chris keep at it they will do just fine in the future too, smoking or no smoking.
I watch Mark Hodesh in the morning from the treadmill upstairs across the street. (He doesn’t know I am watching.) He goes about his early morning routine of opening his store, Downtown Home and Garden, putting out the plant displays, unrolling the awnings, washing down (or shoveling) the sidewalks, getting ready for the customers who stop in for bulbs, birdseed and Zingerman’s.
Mark is the consummate retailer. He has taken what was good about the old Hertler Brothers feed and seed store and grown it into a multi-million dollar business. While other businesses in town were moaning about slow sales, Mark enjoyed a sales increase in 2009. Authentic, quality merchandise, reasonable prices and good old fashioned service were probably responsible.
Mark’s windows match the season, or perhaps the season we are looking forward to. His rain barrels and seed sale are harbingers of spring yet to arrive in Michigan. Today’s display of metal art from Haiti reminds us of his (and Margaret’s) connection to the humanity of the world and the world of art. His values are as much on display as his merchandise. Whether intentional or intuitive, he applies all the core principles of building a great brand.
Welcome to Jan’s Corner. Figuratively, Jan’s Corner is my take on issues and events that cross my path. Literally, it is about people, places and events that take place in the world that is defined by the intersection of Ashley and Liberty in Ann Arbor, Michigan. OK, I may stray a bit farther than that, perhaps up to Main Street or down to 2nd or maybe even outside of Ann Arbor all together, but for starters, I thought I would focus on our corner of world.
It’s funny how you define your world. It can be the universe, or just a small place with a universe of experiences happening within it. The intersection of Ashley and Liberty is such a place. For me, it is work and work-out, breakfast, lunch and dinner, drinks and entertainment, friends and strangers. It is past, present and future. It is young and old, radical and conservative, the homeless and the very wealthy. It is effectively a cross-section of Ann Arbor at the intersection of two streets and four blocks.
The Fleetwood Diner anchors the southwest corner. It has been an Ann Arbor fixture at least as long as I have. Mark Hodesh, who now runs Downtown Home and Garden was the original owner. Open 24 hours a day, it has great greasy breakfast and the best Greek chicken salad in town. And coffee strong enough to stand a spoon in accompanied by the constant banter of Aviva and the regulars. (I always make sure to tip her well to keep on her good side.) Sometimes I wonder if the pierced and dyed crowd can recognize an old hippie in business attire.
I watch Mark Hodesh in the morning from the treadmill upstairs across the street. (He doesn’t know I am watching.) He goes about his early morning routine of opening his store, 
