Social Media | Funeral Futurist

Replay: Social Media Advanced Strategies for Funeral Homes & Cemeteries

December 18, 2010 By Robin Heppell 1 Comment

Part 1: Introduction & Philosophy: (8:01 mins)

Part 2: Facebook: Profiles are better than Pages (3:04 mins)

Part 3: Be Seen as the Expert… On Seniors Issues (7:29 mins)

Part 4: FAQ Machine for Maximum Exposure (13:09 mins)

Part 5: Create An Online Radio Program (6:15 mins)

Part 6: Funeral Homes: YouTube to Promote Personalization (2:35 mins)

Part 7: Compete against Online Classifieds (3:46 mins)

Part 8: How We Can Help – Done For You Package (0:58 mins)

Questions Part 1 (18:24 mins)

Anything in the pet funeral side of funeral social media?
How funeral service schools can best teach students about the positive aspects of using social media in their funeral homes?
How can I use it to generate quality Funeral, Cemetery, Cremation leads?
How do I use social media to direct people to our website?
How to use Facebook effectively in the funeral home setting?
How do I tread that fine line between being progressive and being in poor taste when dealing with social media?
Getting previous clients to “like us” on Facebook?
Where does one find the time to do all the posting?
What is proper content to share? This would be a touchy subject for me.
Being new to using social media, my question would be how to use it and how does it work?

Questions Part 2 (19:57 mins)

If you had to choose between Facebook, Twitter and Blogging which would you recommend for a funeral home and why?
What is the most effective use of social media?
How to motivate a staff that is comfortable in just going through the normal day because it’s what they have known for the past 100 years at our facility?
How can I convince older generation customers and company executives/employees to join in on the Social Media Movement?
How do I engage followers? I can get fans but getting them to interact is difficult.
Implementation of highly effective Social Media information?
How do we engage with people in a way that allows us to be relevant in the conversation?
Social media is the preferred information source for people who are turned off by broadcast messages.
How can you reach this person and deliver information without risking the dreaded “delete” button?
How cost effective is Social Media?
How to keep potential clients interested over time and how to turn that into revenue for our cemetery?
It’s easy to get all of your friends signed up as fans, friends, etc. how do you get incremental business by starting relationship with people you don’t know so they become future customers?
Does social media create more volume for the funeral home? Do you have any specific examples?

Questions Part 3 (15:22 mins)

How to turn traffic into action “preplanning,” etc?
Starting family business over (3rd generation FD) from scratch. All I have is a name that used to be the biggest in [STATE] and well-respected. Where and how do I begin?
I am most interested in finding out how Social Media can be best applied for suppliers and also, I am in an industry that is essentially a one-time purchase and one-time sell (rather than over and over such as a casket supplier). I’m having difficulties creating a vision of how Social Media can work for us (and how I can sell the idea to my boss)!
How to create an effective email marketing program?
Generating interest, and maintaining a high level of valuable “newsy” bits?

Please share your thoughts, comments, or questions below…

Filed Under: Social Media, Videos

3 X 5 Free Social Media Resources for Funeral Homes & Cemeteries

December 16, 2010 By Robin Heppell Leave a Comment

Welcome to my collection of Free Social Media Resources for Funeral Homes and Cemeteries. This is part of my Funeral Social Media Week Promotion. This promotion is in conjunction with the launch of the New & Improved Traffic Geyser Tools and Social Media Marketing Machines.

Also, don’t forget to register for my free webinar this Friday:

Advance Social Media Strategies for Funeral Homes & Cemeteries

Fri, Dec 17, 2010 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM EST / 10:00 AM to 12 NOON PST

Below I have create 3 Groups of Social Media Resources for you – that are all free to use. If you wish, please leave your favorite free social media resources in the comments section.

5 Free Funeral Industry Friendly Social Media Icons

There are hundreds of free social media icons available for download on the Internet, but some aren’t appropriate for your funeral home or cemetery website. Here is a list of my top 5 choices.

IconDock.com – Vector Social Media Icons: Classy icons in original colors and vector based so that you can scale the icons to the desired size.
IconsEtc.com – Blue White Pearls Icons: Very classy, all white with blue icons. For other colors with the white pearls design, click here for the White Pearls Icons Custom Search.
MediaLoot.com – New Social Media Icons: Original colored icons with slight embossed border.
ChethStudios.net – White Magik Social Icon Pack: Similar to the white pearl, these icons have the original colors for each social media website.
IconsEtc.com – Blue Jelly Icons: Glossy, all blue icons. For other colors with the jelly style, click here for the Jelly Icons Custom Search.

Honorable Mention: IconsEtc.com – Whitewashed Star Patterned Icons: Maybe not for funeral homes but have a cut-stone look to them and could be appropriate for Monument Dealers.

If you would rather have all of your social media set up done for you, just click this button

and we would be happy to get you all set up in a week!

5 of My Favorite Free Online Social Media Tools

Ping.FM: A social media account aggregater where you can send one update out to your various social profiles like Facebook, LinkedIn & Twitter.
Feedburner: FeedBurner is a web feed management tool that provides custom RSS feeds and management tools to podcasters, and other web-based content publishers. This service is owned by Google and will also automatically take your new website posts and tweet them to your twitter account. Although other services do this as well, this set up gets pushed instantly through Google’s system – letting Google know immediately that you have new website content.
iGoogle Dashboard + Google News Gadget: By adding the Google News Gadget to your iGoogle Dashboard and adding topics that would be relevant to connecting to you and your community, all of the latest news gets sorted and funneled right into your lap. Then you can re-purpose this by sharing it on your blog, Facebook or Twitter.
HootSuite: Similar to Ping.FM, HootSuite allows you to schedule your updates in advance. I placed it under the iGoogle Dashboard because you can now gather a week’s worth of content from your iGoogle / Google News dashboard and then schedule it to be distributed out over a number of days – all with in an hour… now that’s smart social marketing!
iTunes Podcast Network: The most overlooked & powerful tool right at your fingertips. 3 to 5 years a Podcasts were for techies, but now with so many people having “pod-catching” devices including you – whether it is your computer, iPad, iPod, Zune, iPhone, Blackberry, Android, or other smartphone, you have the ability to receive and consume podcasts. As a learner, you can get the latest training on any subject – more up-to-date than any university program – my beat up iPod is literally my Online Marketing MBA! On the other hand (or in the other hand) of your potential client families,

Animoto is a great and easy way to create promotional videos

(You can even make Video Tributes & DVDs)

5 of My Favorite Free Social Media Plugins for WordPress

AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget: The AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget allows any visitor to bookmark and share your site easily with many popular services.
RSS Footer: This plugin makes it easy to add a line of content to the beginning or the end of all the articles in your feeds, for instance to display a link back to your website.
Simple Facebook Connect: Simple Facebook Connect is a series of plugins that let you add any sort of Facebook Connect functionality you like to a WordPress blog. This lets you have an integrated site without a lot of coding, and still letting you customize it exactly the way you’d like.
Social Profiles Widget: This plugin/widget allows you to insert icon links to your social profiles in any widgetized area.
WPTouch: WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress website into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects, when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Opera Mini, Palm Pre, Samsung touch and BlackBerry Storm/Torch mobile devices.

Filed Under: Check it Out!, Social Media Tagged With: facebook, funeral youtube, marketing, social media, twitter

Funeral Speaker Review: Nancy Lohman, ICCFA 2010 Convention Chair

October 7, 2010 By Robin Heppell Leave a Comment

I received this awesome voicemail from Nancy Lohman, who was the chair of the ICCFA 2010 Convention.

At the convention we pushed the boundaries a hand a live, Internet Marketing / Social Media workshop where attendees brought their laptops, connected to the WiFi and:

Created a Facebook page on the fly
Made their first “Tweet” with their Twitter account
Created their own Funeral Blog and made their first blog post (and also embedded a YouTube video) which was titled, “Why people view someone who has died.”

I even created a website so that the attendees were prepared when they arrived in San Antonio. You can see some the of introductory videos at:

www.FuneralHomeInternetMarketing.com

If you are interested in having a Internet Marketing / Social Media workshop for your members, we can set up the same workshop environment for your convention or even have it as an add-on session before your convention. For more information about workshop and presentation possibilities, please download my new, Speakers Kit.

Download Robin Heppell’s Speaker’s Kit

“Hey Rob, It is Nancy Lohman, I just called to say a giant thank you for making our ICCFA convention a success. The technology track was a hit. I can’t thank you enough for all the hours you put into the program. Everybody there just wanted to stay over and skip the banquet to just keep going with you and get the technology hints for success from you with regards to the Social Media Interaction. They were just glued to their seats and that was just in itself very cool and really cool that we hit the nail on the head with that one. I heard nothing but great things so I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you for being so committed to ICCFA and giving us as an association so much of you, your expertise and your time – just grateful…really, really grateful to be the convention chair this year and to be lucky enough to have your focus, your participation and your leadership. It is certainly one of the huge reasons why our convention was so successful. Take care. I will be in touch.”

Filed Under: Marketing, Social Media, Speaking Reviews

How Do You Track Your Market Share?

Get the Competition Mix Tracker

Part 1 9:25 mins.

Part 2 10:01 mins.

Download the 11 Page Funeral Industry Social Media Worksheet Booklet