How Dentists Can Leverage Social Media Marketing to Promote Their Practice

Art Wiederman, CPA: Hello everyone and welcome to a very special edition of The Art of Dental Finance and Management with Art Wiederman, CPA. I'm your host Art Wiederman. Welcome to my podcast. We have a beautiful sunny May afternoon here in Southern California and got a lot to share with you before we get to our very special guest today. We can talk a little bit.

I not only had our first dental CPA Academy of Dental CPA meeting in two and a half years in Napa late last month and early this month. It was wonderful to see all my friends and also got to lecture at the California Dental Association Convention and talk a little bit about that. My guest today is Dr. Ed Zuckerberg. And Dr. Zuckerberg is going to talk to you today about his expertise, which is social media marketing and also using technology in your practice. We'll get to Dr. Zuckerberg in a minute because he's got a lot of great stuff to tell you about.

But first, I want to tell you about my marketing partner, Decisions in Dentistry magazine. Wonderful, wonderful company. If you haven't looked at their magazine, www.DecisionsinDentistry.com, they have 140 continuing education courses at a very, very reasonable price and some of the best clinical content in America. Again, go to www.DecisionsinDentistrycom.

As I mentioned, our mothership, the Academy of Dental CPAs, which is now 25 member firms, we added a wonderful new firm in the state of Alabama. www.ADCPA.org. If you're looking for a dental CPA, we at I'm a dental division director at the CPA firm of Eide Bailly. I'm out of Tustin, California. We work with about 300 dentists in our office in Tustin, about a thousand throughout the firm in the western U.S. So you can get a hold of me at 657.279.3243 or awiederman@EideBailly.com.

So I'm going to start off a little bit about the couple of things. Number one, if you guys are going to be if any of you are going to be in Florida at the National Academy of General Dentistry meeting, I will be doing a full day program there in Orlando, Florida, on July the 28th. Going to spend half the day talking about metrics and a dental practice, the numbers and how we can find some profit holes in your practice make you some more money. And the other half a day is going to be a lecture on financial planning for dentists. So if you're going to be there, come by. If you're a podcast listener, I would love to meet you.

I had we had our meeting at in Napa at the Silverado Resort, played the Silverado golf course, didn't break any course records, but had a really good time. And we had some great speakers. We had a wonderful lady named Rita Zamora, who actually Rita also works in social media marketing, and she is actually the lady that introduced me to Dr. Zuckerberg, who you'll meet a minute. We had Rachel Wahl from Inspired Hygiene Talk, but one of my favorite lectures was a gentleman by the name of Alan Specter. And we're going to have Alan on the podcast coming up here. He wrote a book called Your Retirement Quest Ten Secrets for Creating and Living a Fulfilled Retirement. And it's not about how much money do you have, but what are you going to do when you retire? And that's a that's a big deal. I got several other folks.

I've got one of my clients who's a dental anesthesiologist. We're going to talk about incorporating that into your practice. We're going to be talking to our investment folks at Eide Bailly, talk about what are going on in these what's going on, these crazy markets and all that stuff. So we did that and we got a lot of that coming on. So I got a lot of great podcasts coming up for you to get into the middle.

And towards the end of 2022, we're going to be doing a three part webinar series on metrics and some management and tax planning towards the end of the year. I'll have some more details for that as we go along here, as well as a three part transition series and got the lecture at the California Dental Association Convention in Anaheim. We have a booth there every year, and I also spoke to a number of dentists on helping them buy a practice that was really fun for me.

So anyway, today, my guest and I am honored to have Dr. Ed Zuckerberg. You might recognize the name. His son Mark was the founder of Facebook. But Dr. Zuckerberg has a whole resumé behind him and has taken his second career after practicing dentistry in helping dentists with social media marketing and also incorporating technology into their practices. So I'll just tell you a little bit. I'm going to let him tell you a lot more.

Dr. Zuckerberg graduated from the NYU College of Dentistry in 1978. He actually grew up about two miles from where I grew up. We were rivals. He went to Midwood High School. I went to Madison High School. So we had a lot of great conversation about that. So from 1981 to 2013, Dr. Zuckerberg owned his own dental practice in Dobbs Ferry, New York, right outside of Yonkers, outside of New York City, where he pioneered many painless techniques to help patients who suffered from dental fears and anxiety. And he's always been an early adopter of technology advances in the field. And it was one of the first practices to convert to digital radiography and paperless records. He does that type of consulting as well as helping doctors with social media marketing issues, which he is probably as qualified as anybody in the country to do so. Dr. Ed Zuckerberg, it's an honor and a privilege to have you on the Art of Dental Finance and Management.

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: It's great to be on the show Art. Thanks for having me.

Art Wiederman, CPA: Well, thank you. And we got to know each other a little bit, I think last week or I think was last week or the week before. And so one of the interesting questions I have and we're not going to dwell on this, but you have you shared with me you have four children. As I mentioned, one of them started Facebook and did any of them. I don't think any of them are in the dental profession. Did any of them express any kind of an interest in following dad's footsteps?

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: You know, I really tried to give them the opportunity. And because I had the office in the house at one point or another, they all had a chance to help out in some capacity pouring models, you know, crafting temporaries with me or doing some lab work around the office, that kind of thing. Basic filing. They heard lots of stories about what went on in the office with patients and good and bad. My wife also worked in the office, even though she initially trained as a psychiatrist. She left her profession after ten years. I made her an offer that she couldn't refuse to come work in the home based practice to be around the children and she might have been the most overqualified, you know, office manager, but she proved to be an invaluable asset to the practice, running everything non-clinical. And really showed me how much there is to managing staff and really understanding the how to treat people as patients and really how to understand what their needs for us.

So with our focus on patients with phobias, we were able to collaborate and really develop techniques for every single kind of phobia you could think of. And, you know, we encountered some that dentists would not even have a clue that such a phobia exists. Of course, they're all triggers of bad dental experiences. For example, I bet you didn't know there was a phobia of Highlights Magazine.

Art Wiederman, CPA: That was the one that when I was a kid, I got to color in, right.

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: Yes. And they had like among other things, they had find what's different in two pictures. And for some reason, dentists were targets of Highlight magazine. Every dentist at some point or another got bombarded with free copies of Highlights until they bought a subscription. Or if you never bought a subscription, you had free copies. You just had to tear out the advertising inserts inside in the waiting room. And we had a gal who her mother confessed had not been to the dentist since she was four, and she was now 19 and had terrible, terrible tooth aches. And my wife think my wife spent about four sessions on the phone with her, convincing her that we were, you know, really to be gentle and take care of her. And she finally got the courage up to come in and she walked into the office, and the first thing she saw was the Highlight magazine. And she immediately crumpled up into the floor in a heap and started sobbing uncontrollably. Because one of the things she remembered from her last dental experience when she was four was Highlights magazine.

Art Wiederman, CPA: Oh, my.

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: So the last time that was the last time we had Highlights in the dental office.

Art Wiederman, CPA: I was I had no idea. So let's see. After 38 years in the dental profession, I learn something new every single day. Oh, my goodness. That's hysterical. So tell us a little bit about your journey. I mean, you had your own private practice for 32 years. And tell us about your journey.

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: So. At a dental school I did a general practice residency in the Veterans Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. It was perfect for me. They had lost their oral surgery accreditation. They had a senior who was graduating, but he was overwhelmed. So he invited the general practice residents, there were three of us, to do more than the allotted half day a week of oral surgery. I wound up spending about 50% of my residency doing oral surgery, but during that year, I think I charted that I extracted over 500 teeth, including horizontal and full, bony and impactions of wisdom teeth. We did incoectomies on every root of every tooth you could imagine just to get to practice on them. Imcoectomies on roots of maxillary second molars, things of that nature.

We did the ford osteotomy is where we moved entire jaws. So it was quite a surgical platform for me. And the result is that when I went into my own practice, just three months out of my residency, I was very confident. I mean, I had the confidence of a dentist who had been in dental practice for ten years.

Art Wiederman, CPA: My doctors who go through residency seem to be not the ones that don't do it, that they're not. But they just seem to be a step above.

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: Well, I mean, it wasn't required. It wasn't mandated in dentistry when I graduated in 78. And many of my colleagues went straight into practice, of course, which meant that it did a total of five root canals in your life, maybe half a dozen extractions, and probably have of those the instructor held your hand while you were removing the tooth. So the result was that a lot of dentists did basic bread and butter dentistry and referred anything of a specialty nature out.

Whereas we I kind of kept everything in-house for a while except for I mean, I didn't have any training in orthodontics, so I didn't do any. And then did ortho, although when Invisalign came out in 2000, I was a, an early Invisalign provider and I was a premier provider for 13 years. Now I'm actually getting Candid clear aligner therapy in my own mouth and consulting for that company. So that's kind of interesting how that's come full circle.

But over the years, I started practicing in Brooklyn. We got married. Got married that first year of private practice in 1979. And my wife got into medical school in Westchester County, New York. So we moved to Westchester County from Brooklyn. I commuted, which is not an easy thing. About an hour each way. I really liked Westchester, and about a year later we started looking for a house and we found a house that was being sold by a retiring dentist who had a small dental practice in the house.

Art Wiederman, CPA: Oh, is that right?

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: And I figured I would work there a couple of days a week and four days a week in Brooklyn. Help me pay for the mortgage on the new house. And I liked it so much that about four or five years later we did a major renovation on the house, heading out to both the dental office and more living space upstairs. And in about 1989 or 90, I sold my office in Brooklyn to practice exclusively at the house where I had the opportunity to be with family at a normal dinner hour, spend time after dinner with the family, tucked everybody in, and then go downstairs and finish all my paperwork and get my work done during the optimal time for me when the phone didn't ring and there were no distractions and I was blessed with not needing a ton of sleep. So, you know, I often wouldn't go to bed before one or 1:30 and all I had to do since I had no commute was to wake up at 7:30 in the morning for an 8:00 patient and just kind of roll out of bed and right down into the office.

Art Wiederman, CPA: I've been working at home since the pandemic started for two years, and I don't miss an hour and a half round trip commute. And I get to get up and have breakfast with my wonderful wife, Lynn, who she and I celebrated our 37th wedding anniversary a couple of days ago. So I think you're five years ahead of me.

So after you got out of dentistry, you started you didn't just go and sit in a rocking chair and watch All My Children every day. You started doing a bunch of other stuff. Tell us a little bit about what you in the last eight or nine or ten years, what you've been doing.

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: Well, we always wondered where we might wind up in our so-called retirement. And I'm still waiting for that retirement to happen. You know, with four kids, you kind of like want to see how they wind up, you know, and maybe pick a geography that's maybe not your own choosing, but maybe one that's in synergy with everyone else. So I guess Mark was first to move to California in 2004 after he dropped out of Harvard and started Facebook. About a year and a half later, he convinced his oldest sister, Randy, who actually did graduate Harvard and was working in marketing first for Ogilvy and Mather and then for Forbes. And he convinced her to come out to California and run the marketing program at Facebook.

Art Wiederman, CPA: So is Mark the oldest?

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: He has three siblings. He's number two out of four. So Randy's the oldest. And then our youngest, Arielle, started college in Claremont McKenna in Southern California in 2007. Around the time that things started coming together, when she graduated in 2011, she had a major in philosophy, in public policy and a minor in computer science. And she wound up getting a job for a start up in Palo Alto. Yeah. So we now found ourselves in 2007 with three out of four kids living in Palo Alto. Our fourth was pursuing a Ph.D. in classics at Princeton on the East Coast, was still living nearby to us. But she was amenable to finishing up the last year of her Ph.D. on the West Coast. And her husband at the time was a techie, and my youngest daughter recruited him to work for her firm. And around the same time, Randy had her first child, our first grandchild. And I'll tell you. The kids weren't getting us out on the West Coast. But when my wife held that first grandchild 11 years ago. Almost, almost this month, 11 years ago. The night he was born. And she looked at me and said, I'm staying. Are you coming?

Art Wiederman, CPA: I've heard that. I've been to that movie before. I've heard that story. So let me go out on a limb and I know the answer. You now live in Northern California.

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: That is correct. It was about a two year transition because selling a home and a dental office in one is not an easy task. No. And I think my strategy might have included hoping that one of the kids would take over the practice, but that, you know, we did not.

Art Wiederman, CPA: Well, they I think they I think they turned out okay.

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: They did fine.

Art Wiederman, CPA: Maybe just a little bit.

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: One of my previous associates to buy the home and practice after two years. So I had a two year transition where I went back and forth and around the same time, I think it was late 2010, I got a call from Howard Farran.

Art Wiederman, CPA: Yes.

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: And I did not know Howard personally at the time, but Howard was an early adopter. As we know, Dental Town was essentially a social networking and before Facebook or even MySpace in the early 2000. And. Howard called me up and said, Hey, Ed, I figured out that Mark's dad was a dentist and you might be able to help me with a problem I'm having. I want to be friends with every dentist in the world, and Facebook's telling me I can't have any more friends. And I said, that doesn't sound right Howard. You can have as many people like your page as you want in the millions. Obama, who was president at the time, had something like 4 million fans on Facebook, you can too Howard. And he goes, Well, I got this message that you've got 5000 friends and you can't have any more. And I said, Ah, it sounds like you set up your presence on Facebook as a personal profile instead of a business page. I said, we can help you with that if you'd like. I can help you convert that to a business page.

Art Wiederman, CPA: And so I have connections at Facebook.

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: Howard was thrilled and he said, You need to write an article for Dental Tech. So in September of 2010, my article Does My Office Need a Facebook Page, appeared in Dental Tech and it was quite well received. So I got a request to do a follow up article a few months later. Well, what are you passionate about in dentistry? I said, Well, I'm a really good dentist, but I'm not going to I'm not one to teach dentists how to do dentistry. But I think I know a thing or two about the business end and integrating technology because I've always been an early adopter. I mean, I had the first IBM PCXT in my office in 1985. That was when the big computer had a ten megabyte hard drive and 512 k ram a computer that I dropped $5,000 for, plus another $5,000 for garbage dental practice management software. And that was no small money for me in 1985 as a solo dentist with only in practice for four years and a wife in medical school who I was paying tuition out of current income.

So, I mean, it wasn't, it was only about 11 or 12,000 at the time, you know, not six figures like it is now to go to professional school. But still, it was it was a big chunk. But and, you know, it was kind of I followed my gut. I followed my vision. And, you know, when I first saw the active cam intraoral camera just a few years later in the late eighties, I had one of those. I was convinced it would pay for itself many times over, helping me convince patients to accept their treatment plans when they could visualize and see what was going on better. In line with our treatment of phobic patients, we had this air abrasion unit that we put in the office of the early nineties to help us do small pit and fissure and class one carries without pain or injections. I was pretty much the first kid on the block that digital x ray in 1998.

In 2004, when I had this desire with a 25 year old practice virtually and a ton of charts with that were super thick, which I guess is a benefit and a curse. It means that you've got patients coming to you for many years and they're not switching to other doctors. But when you try and find something in a really thick chart with a ton of papers, it's brutal. And I decided I wanted to convert everything digitally and there were absolutely no systems for digital in dentistry in 2004. So I got my not my son, but my son in law to help me. And we built our own EHR for our practice. And basically scanned everything and went fully digital almost 20 years ago in 2008. CAD cam in the office.

So it became a natural for me and Henry Schein also reached out to me. A lot of dental conferences and dental schools reached out to me to lecture, which I did for years. I also worked with private offices, with dental associations, helping them with their social media presence. And I also got approached by a lot of companies with ideas for products and needed help with building their business plans, you know, helping them build a better product. Bringing in other key opinion leaders to help them grow their product and of course, help them get funding. My youngest daughter, Arielle, is now in venture capital and she helped me establish a lot of connections with companies. Who, you know, helped some of my companies that I was advising.

Art Wiederman, CPA: All right. So you're busy guy and a lot and you got a lot of information to share. And I'm excited to talk to you. I want to start talking about the social media stuff. And on your website you talk about Dr. Zuckerberg, how you want to have dentists use social media to show off some of the stuff to patients and prospective patients. It's not obvious to them when they visit an office. So what does that mean? So showing off the stuff to them, how are we going to use social media to do that? And then let's get into the discussion of, you know, how dentists should be using social media. That's what I want to talk about today. And I wish I had 10 hours to talk to you because you got so much great information.

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: In my early lectures in 2010 through 2013 were geared at just helping dentists build a Facebook presence. Now everybody's got them, but what are they doing? And the golden years are gone for social media. The easy years, the early adopters, really reaped a lot of benefits. First of all, you can reach your audience for almost no cost. And. You know, it was kind of easy. There are a lot of tools. Patients were kind of captive audiences once they like your page, you were able to target market to their friends on Facebook, which for years was the most powerful tool that Facebook had and one that I espoused and which, you know, most of the dental public really didn't take advantage of the fact that each person on Facebook roughly has about 300 to 350 friends on average. You know, of course, you got people with a couple of thousand and then you've got Grandma may only have 20, you know, her grandkids and a couple of people she's reconnected with from her high school or college days. But 350 is a pretty good number to work with.

And that means that if you've got as few as a thousand people who are fans of your Facebook page, you've got a potential reach of 350,000 word of mouth referrals. Now I go back to the days when referrals were earned, when someone who needed a dentist happened to ask someone who was a satisfied patient of yours, Hey, do you have a good dentist in the area? You know, I'm new to the area or I don't like my current dentist or something. And they were like, Yeah, Dr. Zuckerberg's a good guy. We've been with him a while, you know, and they said, you know, and if you happen to be lucky because there was no Internet back then and they couldn't look you up and do a search if you happened to be lucky, that person happened to have your business card, which they hand to that person so they could connect with your office.

Art Wiederman, CPA: You know, it's funny because when I lecture to the dental schools now, I actually keep an old copy of the Yellow Pages. And then I talk about marketing to the young people who are at USC, UCLA, Loma Linda, Western in our area. I'll hold up the book and I'll go so how many of you look up professional services in the Yellow Pages? And I do it not because I'm expecting people to raise their hands, but it's just fun for me to look at the and they look at me. They look at me like, are you insane?

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: I don't even think I've I think they've given up. I don't even think I've gotten a mail copy dropped off.

Art Wiederman, CPA: I haven't in several years.

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: But you know, the fact of the matter is that nowadays, the key is getting likes on your social media page. And marketing techniques are geared at getting likes. And once you got a like of an individual on your page, not only do you have a way to market to them and tell them what's going on in your office, but you have a way to access their network of 350 people. And when they do, when you when you tap into their network and there are obviously lots of different techniques and ways to do that, but now you're kind of passively getting that word of mouth marketing that used to require an in-person reaction, now can occur passively just by harnessing that power of social media.

Art Wiederman, CPA: So if we're talking to a dentist who's listening now, anybody probably under the age of 40, maybe go get a cup of coffee or something. No, not really. Don't do that. But we're talking to a dentist who's first time they they've never really done any social media marketing. Okay. Where do they start? I mean, do they go to Facebook first? Do they go to Instagram? Well, what if you were consulting with somebody? What would you tell them? Where do they start?

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: You know, years ago. I would have. And I did obviously teach from scratch and advocate for the dentist to take an active hands on role. Nowadays, I think it's critical for practices to have a marketing manager in their practice. It's a full time position.

Art Wiederman, CPA: I agree.

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: I absolutely agree with you. The dentist needs to understand. So they need to listen to a few lectures so they really understand the power of social media marketing. And what I do often is dentists will reach out to me and I'll say, Look, I'm not a Freudian. You can't count on me to be holding your hand on this for years, and I can't take on that many new people. But I'll work with an office for like three months. I'll work, I'll speak to the staff, I'll speak to the doc and explain pitfalls and things to watch out for. I like never make anyone but yourself the admin of your FaceBook page. I can't tell you how many times I get a call. My office manager and I had a bad divorce and my office manager was the only one that knew the password or the way to get into the Facebook page. And I'm locked out of my own Facebook page now. I'm sorry. I can't help with that. Right? Even my friends and I know people in places at the company.

Art Wiederman, CPA: Yeah, I would think you do.

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: They can't help with that situation.

Art Wiederman, CPA: Wow. So what about what about my clients who are in their fifties and their sixties, maybe the gray hairs or approaching gray hairs. Maybe where you and I might be. Yeah, I have. You know.

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: A year ago, a lot of those people said, I'm not messing with this stuff. I'm pretty close to retirement. But look at what happened to their the stock market this year, huh? Uh huh. A lot of people are now rethinking their retirement strategy and thinking that, hey, I'm going to be working for a while. I better figure out this social media.

Art Wiederman, CPA: So what do you say? So what do you say to someone who's 50 or 60 who doesn't understand? I don't know how to get on Facebook. I don't know what Instagram is. What's how do you what do you say to them? Do they have to do this?

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: Get a young person to handhold them and walk them through it.

Art Wiederman, CPA: Exactly.

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: Okay. But the bottom line is, it's like a dentist. We are taught in dental school how to do crowns. We actually make them from scratch. The whole laboratory procedure and everything. Once we graduate, I would venture to guess that 99.5% of all dentists never make another crown the rest of their life. Use a dental laboratory, right in the same way a dentist should know best practices for social media, and it's something they can learn rather easily. But we don't expect them to be the ones doing it. They should even have their own internal marketing person or hire an outside marketing firm to handle it for them. I think that's great. You want to know what's going on and you want to understand best practices. And a lot of the younger dentists, as you mentioned, there's a big difference in the way older dentists and younger dentists approach this. A lot of younger dentists do want to do the hands on stuff. And I actually get a lot of calls from a lot of younger dentists really wanting to learn some of the finer points.

Art Wiederman, CPA: Well, if you don't know the finer points, I don't know who's going to. I think my joke is always the reason I had children was to teach me all this social media stuff you have. You absolutely got it from your children. But let's talk about we talk about a dentist connection to the community. And I've always been one, Dr. Zuckerberg, who's believed that we have to show up as human being people, not just a robot who cuts crowns, that we're involved in the community. Talk about the link between social media and the dentists connection to the community. Why is that important?

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: You know, practices changed a lot over the years, and technology has a lot to do with it. It's really made our way of doing practice much more efficient. So for example pre 1998 before I can convert it to digital radiography. If I had a new patient schedule and I had to have a full series of X-rays done, I would have about 15 minutes of downtime. Where I can do an exam, but I really don't know the guts of what's going on and tell the assistant who took the X-rays or if I took them myself. They had to get put through the machine to be developed. They had to be mounted and whatnot. And that 15 minute time often was an opportunity to develop some rapport. Learn a little bit about the patient and have the patient learn a little bit about you. Now things are very businesslike. The patient really doesn't get to spend a lot of time with the doctor.

That's not businesslike, you know, really just getting right down to work because our systems are so efficient that services that are not the actual practice of dentistry are delegated to other staff members and women that sits down is ready to anesthetize and start working right. The Facebook page of a practice often becomes the opportunity for the office to really highlight certain things that are going on in the practice or behind the scenes stuff that the patients may not really know about the practitioner. You know, maybe offices. Lots of my offices, for example, do stuff like they shut their office down for a week each year and they take the entire staff to Haiti to do missionary work or pro bono dentistry on people in Haiti. The patients who have to wait for an appointment may find out. But if you're in between a cycle, you may not even know that the office does that. And that's something that the office wants to broadcast on their social media page. If you've got staff members who are doing, you know, great work at the local church or synagogue or anything interesting, you know, are highlighted as staff members, you know, maybe a unique hobby that a staff member has. I had a doctor in the state of Washington who used to raise horses.

Art Wiederman, CPA: Mm hmm.

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: Maybe 50% of the content on his Facebook page was about his racehorses. You know, it's a lot of his patients were interested, and it was his way of not bogging down too much time in the practice with stories by letting them know what's going on with his horse racing stable on his Facebook page. So.

Art Wiederman, CPA: Yeah. So go ahead. I'm sorry.

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: It's another doctor of mine who I do some work for now who's a periodontist down in Pompano Beach, just got nominated for a community service award because he was on his way home from the office one day and he saw somebody slumped over behind the seat of a car, an elderly gentleman. And fortunately, the door was open and he was able to detect that the person was, you know, not breathing. And he immediately called 911 and started CPR. And he got nominated by one of the people in the community for being an outstanding neighbor, citizen, whatnot. So I'm in the process of helping him craft a little social media story on how to show that side of the doctor, you know, and that what the you know, what things they may not know about the doctor outside of the office that portray a human side when the patients see the human side of the doctor and the staff members, they connect and relate better to the staff members and feel. More of a bond with that practice.

Art Wiederman, CPA: We had a client in the CPA practice, Dr. Zuckerberg, and he was, I believe it was in the state of Utah. And he had found out about a young 13 year old boy who had been horribly bullied at school and beaten up. It was horrible. And so they found out about it and the practice decided and obviously the mouth was just totally destroyed by these horrible, horrible bullies. So this doctor, completely for free, reconstructed this young, young man's mouth. And they used social media and they told me they got 500 new patients in six months. Yeah. I mean, that's what you're talking about, right?

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: Is I know what causes that. So, you know, one patient a year that they do a complete makeover, you know, start to finish and all pro-bono and they get publicity from the local press. They get lots of applications from people who want to be the candidate for the next year. And, you know, it shows that the office is concerned and that they're not you know, it's not all about money that they really, you know, have a good side, good heart to the side to that. And it also, if the staff is involved in the project and even brainstorming ideas, it's as if maybe it was the staff's concept, an idea to do a pro-bono case like that every year. Now the fact that you implement it and shows that your staff is empowered, they listen to them, you take suggestions from them, and it makes the staff. Feel better about working in that practice, too.

Art Wiederman, CPA: So what are some of the. And then once we get through this topic, I want to ask you to talk a little bit about what you're doing and maybe how some of the folks might be able to reach out to you. But what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see dentists making in their social media marketing?

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: So I see a lot of options as using canned content that doesn't relate to their practice. You know, kind of like, you know, did you know, like bland facts about gum disease or bland facts about, you know. Toothbrushes and. You know, sometimes. You know, filler contact is good. You want to be you want to have content out there in front of the public. But that's not the kind of content that people are going to engage with. They may look at it, glance over it, Facebook. On Facebook to succeed content is king. You need to get people to engage with their content and engaging means they need to like the post, they need to comment on the post, they need to click on the post. If the post is a link to an article that you find interesting or they need to share the post with their friends. Those are the only actions people can take that Facebook can actually measure as engagement. And. Obviously Facebook is a public company. They earn money from users seeing ads charging advertisers a premium for ads. And the place where people see content is called their news feed and the average person has 350 friends and another 75 to 100 businesses that they follow. That's 450 or so different sources that are putting content into their new newsfeed. And Facebook needs to put some kind of order. To the content that they see to make their experience on Facebook enjoyable so that they will stay on the site longer. The longer they stay on the site, the more money Facebook makes in terms of advertising. Right. So the way Facebook does that is by assigning each content, each piece of content gets a score, and the score for each person is different. It'll be based on, you know, who you use, what content you see might be based on how often you interact with a particular person or business page. If it's someone in your family who you mark as a close friend, obviously you're going to see them their content at the top. And if it's an advertiser or a business that you are a fan with, who boosts the content on the page by paying money that will get the content to be seen by more people. But the way to do it effectively, even if you're paying for it and even if you're not, is to have good quality content that people will engage with and that Facebook can measure the success. Because even with good content that we don't pay for, that we don't boost. If we then decide after running it, say, on our page for a week and we see that it gets a lot of engagement and we now decide to boost it, to get even more engagement and go beyond just having the people who are fans of our page see it, but go out to the people who have their friends to see it by extension. Then Facebook will actually reward us for having good content by charging less. For a that post, which has what we call warm content or established proof, you know, proof content that people have will engage with this content and Facebook will charge less for that than cold content, which has no measurable engagement stats for Facebook to go by.

Art Wiederman, CPA: So if a doctor Dr. Zuckerberg, if a doctor wants fee for service patients or they want I was talking to a doctor, a client of mine who was telling me that when he was doing his social media, he was focusing and targeting people who had this type of insurance or that type of insurance. And I guess you can do that. But if you're targeting like fee for service patients, there are ways to do that on Facebook.

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: There are ways to target, for example, people who work for a specific employer. If you notice, you've got someone from a particular job and maybe they you know, maybe they've got a terrific dental plan. And they refer one or two people. And so now you've got like three people from the company in the page. In the practice, you can run a campaign and target only employers of that company in the campaign. And. You know, you can even work with the H.R. person from that company and say, Hey, we've got a few of your employees here. I'm willing to offer this incentive or that incentive if you, you know, maybe want to work with me and people come in and looking for, you know, referrals to a local business, something like that. There are all kinds of ways that we can target people in geographic locales, people who are highest socioeconomic status, homeowners, people with higher levels of college degree, you know, that kind of higher educational level. And so in that way, via our targeting programs, we can select an audience is also, you know, something that Facebook is touting right now, which is called lookalike audience. So the success of a lookalike audience starts with getting as many. Patients of your practice. On your Facebook page. And one of the tools that I find that very few dentists are using which they should be using is called the custom audience creation. So you can basically extract data. And this is all anonymous. You're not you're not giving anyone's information out to Facebook or anything else. And so you extract the file from your practice management software of all the cell phone numbers of all the patients in your practice. And you create a custom audience of that. Group of all your patients and you upload it to Facebook and Facebook will take these. The cell phone numbers. And match them with existing Facebook users with those cell phone numbers who are going to be your patients. Okay. And this is all free to do. And now you have a custom audience that you can market to, which are people who are already patients of the practice. And you can incentivize them. A lot of times it's just a question of not even thinking about liking your office Facebook page. And when they're on Facebook and they'll get in their newsfeed, a message from your office encouraging them to like the page. It won't take much for them to stay abreast of what's going on in the office, so they might explore the page and see the content there. And if they think it's worthwhile, they'll like the page. And once you've got them. As a fan. Now you have the ability to market to them and market to their. Friend basis, there are 350 friends. But beyond that, Facebook will take your. Your fans. They'll do a comparison across other non-fans of your page who fit your parameters, say your geographic area of your practice, and they will pick out characteristics of other people who are like your patients. So if you've got a predominantly, for example, of predominantly, you know, high net worth income kind of patient base and your practice. The lookalike audience that Facebook is going to create for you is going to be patients with similar characteristics.

Art Wiederman, CPA: So there are ways to do this. There are ways if I'm looking for HMO patients or for lack of a better term, welfare dental patients, I can find them. So Facebook is an incredibly I mean, I knew this, but an incredibly powerful tool. I don't have to advertise for your son's company. It does pretty well on its own. But the fact is, is that I think a lot of people don't know this and working with someone like and I mentioned Rita Zamora again because she's my dear friend and she's the one introduced me to you and she's absolutely amazing when it comes to social media marketing. Someone like that knows all this, right, Dr. Zuckerberg? And that's who we need to get to work with it.

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: Absolutely. Rita is an incredibly great knowledge resource. Yeah.

Art Wiederman, CPA: So let's take a second because again, we're hard to say. We're getting towards the end of our time together, talk a little bit about. What do you do. How dentists can get a hold of you, what you do. And quickly, you have a you have one of the companies you're working with that you're very passionate about. So talk about how people, you know, what do you do to help dentists? I know you've been very kind with your time to lots and lots of dentists across the country. And also this I know that there's a product is being developed that that regarding the link between periodontal disease and Alzheimer's, which is horrible. Talk a little bit about that for a second.

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: Sure, I'd love to. So obviously during the pandemic, I haven't been out lecturing for quite a while now. I was out in October in Phoenix at the Dental Economics Conference, and I've been doing a lot of virtual stuff, but most of the work I'm doing now the last three or four years is working with startups. And about a year ago. I got introduced to one company that. You know, really, I literally had to hold myself from falling off my chair. You know, having been a dentist. Every dentist knows that there's an oral systemic connection. We've all seen people who didn't take care of themselves, you know, who suffered from some diseases that, you know, obviously it's not a large enough sample size and we don't do research in our offices. But I've seen women with bacterial infections in their mouth lose babies prematurely in the seventh month. I've seen people with fulminating periodontal disease in their thirties and early forties who refuse treatment. Then I found out that they passed away from a heart attack at a ridiculously early age. So, you know, we have a strong premonition and we were all taught about the bacterial nature of periodontal disease. But until I met the work, I met the team at Keystone Bio and understood the work they're doing, focusing on one particular bacteria. For a modest change in balance. Commonly referred to as gender balance or in some cases, just PG. As the name of the company Keystone Bio comes from the fact that the bacteria pigeon devils is the keystone pathogen of gum disease. And there are over 10,000 research articles on pigeon devils going back 70 plus years. We've known for a long time it's a bad mother. You don't want this. But yet many of us have, you know, over 50% of all adults over age 30 have some form of gum disease. Over age 65, that number goes over 80%. And PGD rouse the key virulent bacterial pathogen that drives most of these systemic reactions. And the way that it does, it is finally understood. But if you asked me, put 100 dentists in a room. I would doubt that more than one really would understand the current pathway, which through the work of Keystone Bio and hopefully the work that I'm doing now as their chief digital officer. More and more people are going to come to understand this and that the bacteria itself thrives in the math. It lives in the periodontal pockets of people with gum disease. It's an anaerobic organism. It's very comfortable in the biofilm, in the subject of tissues. But what the bacteria itself does is it releases loads and loads of outer membrane vesicles filled with toxic proteins that travel through the bloodstream. Throughout various parts of our body where it does all kinds of damage. It's these toxic proteins can cross the blood brain barrier where they enter the brain. And cause all kinds of blockage of neuronal transmission would lead to dementia and Alzheimer's disease. They travel to the liver where they impair the body's ability to perform glycogen synthesis, which is why diabetic patients are very hard to control their insulin properly when they also concomitantly suffer with periodontal disease. We have a corollary correlation or proof between gingivalis and digestive cancers like oral cancer, esophageal esophageal cancer, colon cancer, colorectal cancer and gastric. We have links with rheumatoid arthritis. We have links with. Atherosclerosis and all the associated heart attacks and strokes and whatnot. So the bottom line is the mouth. Is the source for this bacteria. And just go in here, Dennis, while that can lower the load of the bacteria PG. Because in effective scaling and route planning will actually lower the load of PPG for up to three weeks. A simple prophylaxis can lower the load for about a week. But the bottom line is the toxic proteins of pgx are always circulating through the bloodstream and poisoning us. So I'm real.

Art Wiederman, CPA: I'm sorry.

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: The way to heal this and cure this and stem the volume of people suffering from these maladies. Is that actually eradicate PPG? And there's no antibiotic to get rid of it. Scaling is only temporary as it comes right back. But Keystone Bio has developed a monoclonal antibody which binds to the peg and actually eradicates it. And there is actually a phase one down in the UK in 1995, believe it or not. It was a very small sample size. Only 20 patients were in the study. Ten patients got scaling in route planning and sailing injections, and ten patients got a migraine or rode version of this monoclonal antibody back in 1995. The ten patients who had the sailing, in addition to scaling and route planning, returned almost immediately. Of the ten patients who had the murine monoclonal antibody score entered into their subdivision of tissues after the scaling and route planning, the earliest reported return of Pgx was nine months.

Art Wiederman, CPA: That's wonderful. So study. Oh, go ahead.

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: Image at Keystone Bio had developed the human chimeric form of the monoclonal antibody. They've got all the intellectual property associated with it. They've got drug trials for phase one safety and efficacy, starting right now in Australia. And if all goes according to schedule. We could have this product. In a few years, maybe 2025, and that dentists and hygienists, in addition to doing their prophylaxis and scaling and route planning, will be squirting this liquid into the pockets and probably twice a year. And eradicating pig forever.

Art Wiederman, CPA: Well, that is absolutely wonderful to hear. If our listeners wanted to get a hold of you, either helping them maybe with some social media issues, Facebook issues, or just wanted more information about this, how would be the best way for them to get a hold of you? And we'll put this into the show notes also.

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: Yeah. So I can be reached by email at DRZ for Dr. Z DRZ@PainlessDRZ.com or on my Facebook page, which is Painless Social Media.

Art Wiederman, CPA: And on your on your website or on your Facebook page, people can find where you might be lecturing in the future too.

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: Yes, my website is www.PainlessDRZ.com, but as I mentioned, I have no current dates scheduled for my lectures, but I will when I do have virtual lectures that are open to the public. I will put that up to most of my lectures to close group so that marketing like for example, if I'm lecturing for Banco, Banco will advertise it. Last week I lectured, two weeks ago I lecture to the Baltimore County Dental Association. So typically groups like that will do it through their own groups. I do some study groups for, you know, oral surgeons and periodontist and orthodontists and whatnot that want to put together see programs for their own. So that around referral base and whatnot. So if that's a kind of a closed group kind of thing, I let them do the marketing, but that's not quite a reach for me, would be through my website.

Art Wiederman, CPA: We might we might want to get you in front of our academy, a dental CPA group, because what you've got to say is absolutely amazing. I got a couple minutes left. I'd love to talk to you for days because you and I, you and I, I think the first time we talked on the phone, it was like an hour and a half is just wonderful. I bond with people from Brooklyn for some reason better than others. I don't know why, but anyway, I know that. And again, I don't have a lot of time but embracing technology. I know that's one of the other things you've been doing in your second career. Why is it important for dentists, especially, you know, doctors who really want to grow and improve their practice? Why is it why is embracing technology so important? Maybe some thoughts on that and then we'll kind of wrap this up.

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: You know this to. Obvious benefits that come to mind the actual benefits and the perceived benefits. So let me talk about perceived benefits. When I was practicing in New York, there was a an oral surgery duo that I referred the bulk of my oral surgery patients to. And they ultimately had a practice divorce because one of them was much more progressive and wanted to put a lot of money into technology. And the other one didn't. And they were both great oral surgeons. And I initially divvied up referrals, you know, I said, you know, any my email, you know, we got here Monday, Tuesday, got to him, you know, that kind of thing and I never got any negative stuff come back about it. And one day I had a patient who had previously had the wisdom teeth on one side of his mouth, removed them, and he needed the wisdom teeth on the other side or both. And I gave her the card for the surgeon that I had referred for the others. The less technology technologically proficient one. And she saw the card and she said, Is there someone else you can refer to? And I said, Sure. But do you mind telling me if there was a problem with the. The last time? I. I don't have any notes indicating the healing seemed to go really well. She said he was a great doctor and. You know, everything healed fine. There was no problem at all. I was just taken aback that coming from your office, which is so space, age, high tech. And I went there and he had a pump up in the air, the chair with his feet. And when we left, the receptionist actually typed our receipt for us on a typewriter. I hadn't seen a typewriter with.

Art Wiederman, CPA: Smith Corona, probably. Yeah.

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: And when I asked to get the email receipt, the receipt emailed to me, she said, we don't do email. So I just I'm sure he's a good doctor, but I'm just concerned that he's not up with the latest technology. So that's perception. Yeah. Patients perceive doctors who use technology to be more proficient than doctors who don't. Yeah, I totally agree. Do a great crown using a contraband impression or rubber based impression, sending out to the laboratory and sending the patient home with a temporary crown and whatnot. You can still do a great clown that way, but there's something that's a wow when the doc scans the truth in the mouth and sends the patient home with that permanent crown the same day that they want to go and talk to their friends about it. I had this incredible experience at the dentist and what they're not going to believe what happened and whatnot and. Is the care better? Maybe. But the patients certainly think it is. So, you know, there's no doubt that certain technologies clearly can make us super efficient. So one of the companies I'm advising now, and as dramatic a change as CAD Cam was for me back in 2008, to want to, you know, deliver same day, crown and inlays, veneers and whatnot to patients who in the past had always had, you know, had to wait with, you know, for lab temporaries and whatnot and get injected a second time to get now, as great as that was. The company that I'm working with now is. Figuring out how a robot, a robotic arm. Can contain the handpiece and actually do the preparation based on using artificial intelligence to produce the perfect crown of preparation from a plan that we developed from the patients, you know, condiments that we scan of the tooth pre-operative plan. And what this means is that dentists in the future. Well now. Exactly. What? That. Preparation is going to look like before the robot has even cut the truth and they can have the crown made up before the patient even comes into the office. Workflow if you use CAD cam in your office is a patient comes in, they get anesthetized. That prep prepares the tooth by hand manually. Doc may scan the tooth or doc may leave the opportunity to go treat another patient while the assistant scans the tooth. The doc has to approve the scan and the and the virtual crown. It gets sent to a milling machine in the office where the crown gets mailed in about 15 minutes. Then the doc fits the crown polishes or glazes the crown in the office and then bonds at it. And the patient's in the office for about 2 hours. Maybe the doc has seen a couple of other patients during that time also, but it's kind of a little bit stressful and a little bit back and forth. So the future workflow. Is. The patient comes in the doc and ascertains as the patient snaps the robotic arm onto the tooth. In about 5 minutes, the robotic arm is prepared. The crown. Snap the robotic arm off the crowd is already on the bracket table because we know what the shape of suit's going to look like. We fit in. But on the truth, the patients are out of the office in a half hour total with brand new crap.

Art Wiederman, CPA: So what you're saying is I shouldn't start a dental lab today. Maybe that's not a good business model going forward. Oh, my gosh. Oh, I wish I could talk.

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: NASA traditionally slow to adopt technology. When I created digital radiography in 1998, I thought we'd have 90% adoption within ten years and ten years later it was only about 25%.

Art Wiederman, CPA: So it was funny. Dr. David Hornibrook I don't know if you know David DAVIES, one of the premier cosmetic dentists in the world, and I know David really well, and I had David speak to our academy at Del CPA meeting in 2005, and I said, What do you think dentistry is going to look like in ten or 15 years? He says. I think dentistry will not have to deal with impression material in ten or 15 years. Now we're not quite there, but we're moving that way. So, I mean, there's all kinds of stuff going on. Dr. Zuckerberg, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you for your valuable time to share with our audiences one more time. What's yours? What's your website if they want to send you an email or something?

Dr. Ed Zuckerberg: My Facebook page is Painless Social Media and the website is PainlessDRZ.com.

Art Wiederman, CPA: If you would stay with me till after I take the program out. I got a couple things I got to say at the end. I appreciate it. Ladies and gentlemen, that was fantastic. I mean, that was a virtual, you know, what to do with social media and some great words from someone who's got a lot of insight into the dental profession. And again, not going to get much better insight into Facebook and social media. Again, go to our partner Decisions in Dentistry magazine www.DecisionsinDentistry.com fantastic clinical content.

In fact, Dr. Zuckerberg, I've got to connect you with them to talk about this this new product you've got. We'll have to talk about that when we get off the get off the interview www.DecisionsinDentistry.com. If you're looking for a dental specific CPA my motherships the Academy of Dental CPAs www.ADCPA.org.

My firm Eide Bailly we handle close to a thousand dentists do a really good job of it. And my humble opinion, my number is 6572793243 and my email is awiederman@EideBailly.com. That was really fun for me to do. And this interview is fun as all mine are. We've got some great stuff coming up in the next couple of months, some really, really good stuff that's going to help you. But I want to leave you with this today. And this was a key to what Dr. Zuckerberg said, ladies and gentlemen. The key is you do not did not buy the dental school just to fix people's teeth. You're about people's total health. And if you're not making your practice, mission and goal to make people totally healthy, then you might want to think about changing it. Because as you heard, the links between period periodontal disease and almost every affliction you can think of, it all starts in the mouth and people don't know that. So if you're not doing that really, you know, start doing that and stuff. I don't mean to be lecturing you, but it's in a lot of, you know, this, but that's the way it goes. So anyway, everybody, I want to thank you for the honor and the privilege of your time and listening to my podcast. We have thousands of people every month are listening to our podcast. We're getting really good results. Send me an email if there's somebody you want to hear. And with that, my name is Art Wiederman Dental Division Director at the CPA firm of Eide Bailly, saying thank you so much for listening to the art of dental, finance and management with Art Wiederman, CPA. And we'll see you next time.