March, 2009 | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Honoring a Mayo Clinic Innovator

Dr. Earl Wood, who helped Mayo Clinic pioneer heart surgery and also invented the G-suit that made high-altitude flight and space travel possible, died this week at age 97. You can read about him and see a documentary about his work here on the Mayo Clinic News Blog.

As I was searching for some related links for that post (as part of my “day” job), I came across the documentary you see below, which won the “Legacy Award” from the Minnesota Historical Society’s Greatest Generation Film Contest in 2008. For technical reasons, I couldn’t embed this in the News Blog post, so I decided to do it here, to honor a great inventor who made a difference.

Inventing the G-suit: The Life story of Dr. Earl Wood from Dusty Road Productions on Vimeo.

Yammer 111: Twitter-Yammer Integration with #yam

Thanks to @tomburket for the heads up this morning on this new Yammer feature, as described in the Yammer blog:

You can now import your Twitter updates into Yammer, using the #yam tag. After linking your Yammer and Twitter accounts, any tweet (message posted to Twitter) that contains the #yam tag will be automatically imported into your Yammer network.

The Yammer blog gives instructions for how to do this. It’s really simple. Tom got the tip about the new feature, which was announced yesterday, from @steverubel.

Initial thoughts:

This was really easy. I got the direct message from Tom about this on Twitter at 7, checked it out a couple of minutes later and adjusted my Yammer account settings. Then I sent a test #yam tweet at 7:08.

It works well. My test #yam tweet showed up in my Yammer feed at 7:09. Here it is (click to enlarge):

This will be good for Yammer. It makes it much more likely that #yam will be a trending topic in Twitter search, at least as people test it, which will increase Yammer’s visibility in the Twittersphere.

It may also be a practical way to ensure that messages you are sending outside your company are also communicated to work colleagues. For example, there may be things I tweet about that don’t interest my team members at work. Hard to imagine, I know. But if they follow me on Yammer, and if I tag posts with the #yam tag if I want to be sure they get them, I can share both externally to the world and specifically to teammates…without having to go to Yammer and send a separate message. It could increase the signal-to-noise ratio for my colleagues, while also making it simpler for me to share information.

Assignment:

Join Yammer if you haven’t. (See Yammer 101)
Adjust your Yammer account settings to add your Twitter account name. (You do have a Twitter account, right? If not, check out Twitter 102)
After you’ve completed the first two steps (and any necessary remedial studies!), send a tweet with the #yam tag (in Twitter) and watch it show up in your Yammer feed.
Share your thoughts about this new Yammer feature in the comments below.

Is SxSW Swamping TwitPic? Or is TwitPic just Unreliable?

Until yesterday, my experience with TwitPic had been quite good. If you’re not familiar, TwitPic is a utility that lets you upload pictures from your iPhone (if it’s available for Blackberry, please let me know) to Twitter using clients like Twitterific or Twittelator, and publish a link to the photo as part of your tweet. TwitPic was profiled in Twitter 121.

For example, it worked well on Saturday when I attended the Austin boys’ section semifinal basketball game at Rochester’s Mayo Civic Center, and uploaded a picture just after the game started. Here was my tweet:

And the photo was just as I had expected.

But yesterday I experienced something, as Monty Python would say, “completely different.”

I snapped a picture of a slide from presentation I was watching, and uploaded it with this tweet:

Let’s just say the photo my Tweeps saw when they clicked the link wasn’t what I had uploaded. (The second time it worked.)

A similar thing happened a bit later when I took a photo of a a former colleague during our dinner:

Here was the photo that showed up:

That picture doesn’t look anything like Chris! And it gives the impression that he was having digestive difficulties. 😉

I’ve heard that all the iPhone users at South by Southwest (SxSW) 2009 have overwhelmed the network capacity at the location with their Tweeting. Do you think this might have had anything to do with the TwitPic failures I experienced yesterday? That maybe lots of pictures were being uploaded at once, and somehow the links got switched? Have you had any problems with TwitPic?

I know that based on this experience I’m going to be extremely reluctant to upload work-related photos to TwitPic, until I find out what caused this problem and what has been done to resolve it. If you can’t trust that the photo you’re uploading will be the one linked in your Tweet, how can you use TwitPic?

TwitPic = FAIL

Patients and Social Media

In many ways, SMUG has been my personal laboratory for learning about social media and how I can apply these tools to my work at Mayo Clinic. I’ve been able to experiment with blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other platforms with my personal accounts, which then helps me see how they can be used for a health care provider like Mayo Clinic.

So we’ve established a Mayo Clinic YouTube channel, a Facebook page, and several podcasts and blogs — including, most recently, Sharing Mayo Clinic.

As of Friday the 13th, however, I’m also approaching social media from the patient perspective: yesterday I was diagnosed as having celiac disease.

So what did I do to find good information about how to cope?

My first step, of course, was the celiac disease section on MayoClinic.com.

And I recalled that my team at work had produced a TV story about living with celiac disease, which is also on our Mayo Clinic YouTube channel:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGmWf0et4hg]

But I also turned to Twitter, and was amazed at the response.

@KimMoldofsky re-tweeted my call for help:

Bonnie Sayers (@autismfamily) alerted me to the #gfree hashtag and the Gluten Free Twitter Party she’s hosting on April 3.

@FrannLeach shared a Gluten Intolerance group on Squidoo, along with some recipes.

Kayla Eubanks (@BallinOnABudget) told me about Pizza Fusion, and Nina (@lovingyouiseasy) pointed me to @wholefoods and @KarinasKitchen. Karina’s “The Morning after the Diagnosis” post on her blog was particularly helpful. Kristie S. (@KristieTweets) had a couple of suggestions, and Tom Stitt (@tstitt) helped me get an answer as to whether Coke is OK (it is!) I also found out about lots of resources available at celiac.com.

And because I Tweeted about it, my celiac disease diagnosis also was posted to my Facebook profile:

…which led to several Wall comments (including a couple you see above that came within a half hour of my Tweet), and also some messages in my Facebook inbox. And I also found a Celiac Disease group in Facebook.

Some people are justifiably concerned about potential dangers of self-diagnosis through the Internet, but once a diagnosis has been made, social media tools are extremely powerful means of getting information and gathering support.

As I write this, I’ve had my diagnosis of celiac disease for about 34 hours, and the learning about the condition I’ve been able to do in this time has been amazing.

And out of this experience, I’m also going to be getting my wife Lisa (@LisaAase) to use her Twitter account to participate in the #gfree discussions. She set up her account nearly two years ago, but has only done a dozen updates. And right now I’m her only follower. But now she has a reason to use Twitter, and I think she’s going to find it helpful in learning how we deal with gluten in our family diet.

Twitter 130: Listening with Twitter

In Twitter 107, I compared two desktop applications for improving your Twitter interactions: Tweetdeck and Twhirl.

In this course, I will take you through a case study of what can happen when you listen and engage through Twitter.

Several months ago, I set up a Twitter search for the term “mayo clinic” and subscribed to the RSS feed. And frankly, for quite a while the feed wasn’t all that interesting. Mayo Clinic wasn’t mentioned very often on Twitter, probably because Twitter’s earliest adopters skewed younger and male, at least as compared to the typical health care consumer or decision maker.

That’s recently changed quite a bit, though, especially as Twitter has reportedly grown by 33 percent in the last month. While the Tweet volume is still nowhere near what Comcast experiences, for example, we’re at least seeing a dozen or more Mayo Clinic tweets a day.

So as I set up my Tweetdeck to be more intentional and regular in listening on Twitter, I created one pane to monitor the “Mayo Clinic” search. (I had previously used the Twilert service, which sends you a daily email with the tweets that match your search criteria, but wanted to be more responsive than a daily email digest would allow.)

I was somewhat surprised last Sunday night to see the following Tweet from a gentleman named Tom Vanderwell, who goes by @tvanderwell on Twitter:

I wasn’t sure what to make of this. Was that a negative comment or a positive one? So I replied to Tom’s Tweet with:

Much to my relief, Tom’s response was:

After clicking through to Tom’s Twitter profile, I found out he was from Grand Rapids, Michigan. As we exchanged replies and eventually direct messages, I mentioned that I was going to be at a conference in Grand Rapids this Wednesday. It turns out the convention was right across the street from his office, so we arranged for a real-life meeting Wednesday morning (a picture from which I posted, of course, using Twitpic).

In a future post I will profile Tom and how he’s using social media in his mortgage banker business, particularly with his Straight Talk about Mortgages and Real Estate blog. But for now, let me just say that we had a delightful conversation and were able to connect in a way that wouldn’t have been possible without Twitter.

What’s your favorite example of a Tweetup? When have you been able to meet someone in real life, either a brand-new friend you made through social media, or someone you’ve known virtually for a while but only later got to meet face to face?