LAS VEGAS—Vision Monday held its first annual Click Conference, titled “Social Climbing: How the New Media Can Transform Your Practice,” sponsored exclusively by Hoya Vision Care, yesterday morning in the Venetian, and included a panel of expert speakers on the impact of social media.

“Click was conceived when it became obvious the transformation that our business culture and personal lives are undergoing thanks to the Internet was also something that was going to have to be managed for our vision care businesses,” said Vision Monday’s Marge Axelrad.

“The electronic message here, and with Click, is to find ways to drive patients into the eyecare provider’s office. Social networking is an exciting opportunity for our practices and Hoya is proud to be the sponsor of this conference,” said Gregory Hicks, OD, of Hoya.

Speaking to the more than 200 attendees, Axelrad, who moderated the panel, added, “the web is now an integrated part of how patients learn about eye health, eyecare, how they find you and how they connect with you,” before introducing the Conference’s keynote speaker, John Garnin, senior sales manager of YELP.com.

“Your customers are using social media, you should be using it too,” said Garnin. “It can seem a little scary, the Internet can be like the Wild Wild West sometimes, but you can optimize it to help grow your business. Consumers value customer opinions, in fact 78 percent of the public values a recommendation from a product user. As a business, you need to take advantage of the review concept and you need to be looking at it, because people are talking about you and you need to own it and be participating in the discussion,” added Garnin.

Panelist, Nathan Bonilla-Warford, OD, FAAO from Bright Eyes Family Vision Care in Tampa, Fla, agreed: “Social media equals real life relationships and those relationships get people in your door and people in your door, buzz about your business, means revenue.”

“Having a website no longer means you are innovative,” stated panelist Kelly Kerksick, OD, director of professional services for Vision Source. “The opportunity now for eyecare businesses is to differentiate ourselves and that is accomplished by how we integrate social media tools, like Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, etc… It helps us get to know our patients in a less formal, more personal way, in addition to providing us with an easier way of tracking metrics because of the immediacy of social networking’s interaction with patients,” concluded Kerksick.

Brad Childs, a panelist and optician from Eyetique in Pittsburgh summed it up this way, “social media needs to be put in that tool bag of marketing tricks because it is another way to drive people through your doors. It’s a platform to stay in front of your patients. You may ask the question – ‘How much time is social networking going to take?’ Well, my response is – ‘How much time do you need to invest in your business?’ Because the answer is one and the same. Everything we do is designed to accomplish one thing—get patients in our doors.”

To see pictures of the Click Conference go to VisionMonday.com