Month: August 2009

Mayo Clinic Social Media Webcast

This afternoon I’m scheduled to present a Webcast on our Mayo Clinic experience with social media. The handout we provided to registered participants was somewhat abbreviated (leaving out some of the intermediate steps in the closing case study), and I added a few other slides after Friday morning, when I had to submit the handout.

If you haven’t yet registered for this FREE webcast, you can still do so until noon CDT today (8/4/09). Go here to join.

Here is the updated slide deck, and I’ve also included some key links below:

Mayo Clinic Social Media Webcast

View more presentations from Lee Aase.

See the Press page for some of the stories about social media in health care for which I have been interviewed, including the Forbes.com story from last week and the resulting Information Week piece from yesterday, as well as the interview with Lee Odden he published yesterday.

Our Mayo Clinic blogs include Sharing Mayo Clinic, which has links to the rest of our social media platforms, including the various blogs and our Facebook fan page, Twitter account and YouTube channel.

Here is the link to the Wall Street Journal Health Blog post that incorporated our YouTube video. Here is a recent post on the Mayo Clinic News Blog with both downloadable audio and video clips and a YouTube video. And here is the post where we embedded the “Octogenarian Idols” video.

I hope you will feel free to ask your questions or make comments either below or via the #mayoragan hashtag in Twitter.

If you’re interested in healthcare use of social media, please consider registering for this social media summit Mayo Clinic is hosting and cosponsoring with Ragan Communications. It will be at our Scottsdale, Arizona campus in early October. I think we have a strong faculty and it should be a great gathering of people with a common interest.

Please be sure to vote in the SMUG seal contest, and if you want an example of the SMUG curriculum, the Podcasting courses give you a good taste. See the front page for more of a SMUG overview.

Lee Odden Interview

I was honored last week to have a chance to be interviewed by Lee Odden, a fellow Minnesotan with a cool first name who also has one of the top PR, marketing and SEO blogs. Here is one of his 10 questions, along with my answer, published this morning in his post, “Social Media Interview: Lee Aase of Mayo Clinic”:

Do you test specific social media tactics or do you go full on with a social media strategy for each initiative? Knowing what you know now, what approach would you recommend that companies take when they’re starting out?

I recommend what I call the “MacGyver Mindset,” named after the TV character played by Minnesota native Richard Dean Anderson. Look at the tools and resources you have available and how you can adapt them to meet your communication and marketing goals, and empower staff to explore.

Focus first on the free platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, mainly because that’s where you will find communities already gathered. This also enables you to prove your concepts before deciding whether to launch a community of your own.

Strategic thinking can be an excuse for inaction, and just as it’s easier to alter the direction of a moving car than it is to get one started from a dead stop, I believe it’s best to build social media momentum through low-cost experimentation and iteration.

Read the full interview here on Lee’s TopRank blog.

Healthcare Social Media Events This Week

I’m taking three days off for travel this week, and look forward to a big virtual event on Tuesday and interacting in real life on Wednesday and Thursday at some interesting healthcare social media events.

  • On Tuesday, I’m going to be in Chicago for some meetings and then to present a Webinar for Ragan Communications based on our social media experience at Mayo Clinic. Registration is FREE and open until noon CDT on Tuesday, August 4, so there is still time to sign up if you’d like to join. The Webcast runs from 2-3 p.m. on Tuesday. I will be tweeting using the #mayoragan hashtag.
  • On Wednesday, I will be in Indianapolis for the Eli Lilly Web 2.0 Summit. I understand there will be about 20 outside presenters for this event, which is for Lilly employees, so I look forward to an opportunity to meet some folks face-to-face with whom I’ve previously only conversed via Twitter. Not sure what the Twitter hashtag will be, but if you follow me on Twitter (always a good idea!) you’ll discover it soon enough.
  • On Thursday, I’m in Omaha for a breakfast with the American Marketing Association’s healthcare interest group. Contact Megan O’Dea if you want more info.

The interest in social media among healthcare communicators, marketers and medical staff is extremely high right now, as this story from Forbes.com indicates. For example, I understand that more than 1,500 people have signed up for the Ragan Webinar. They aren’t all necessarily involved in healthcare; some may be from other industries. So, I’m looking forward to that “broadcast” opportunity to reach a large and widely dispersed group, but the in-person meetings will also be great, allowing more in-depth discussions.

And speaking of in-person discussions, if you’re involved in health care and interested in social media, I hope you’ll consider attending the social media summit Mayo Clinic is hosting and co-sponsoring with Ragan in October. It will be on our Mayo Clinic Scottsdale campus. I’m excited about the faculty we’ve assembled and I’m confident it’s going to be a great couple of days in which we can all learn from each other.

Minnesota Social Media Innovators List

SMInnovatorBadge

In the last 10 days or so, Arik Hanson took nominations for a list he called “Top 20 Minnesota Social Media Innovators.” It was a neat project, and looking through the nominees introduced me to a lot of interesting people I haven’t yet had a chance to meet, since I live about 100 south of the Twin Cities. And I’m glad he opened the list beyond the Twin Cities area, so that we who live in what used to be called “Greater Minnesota” could be considered.

Yesterday he announced the list, and I think the best thing about it is he sorted it alphabetically. 😉

As Arik says, one strong message from this project is how vibrant the Twin Cities/Minnesota social media community is. I haven’t been able to attend the MSP Social Media Breakfast yet, but I understand the attendance has been in the hundreds, and look forward to getting there sometime soon. And earlier this month we had about 120 people attend a social media seminar sponsored by the Rochester (Minn.) Chamber of Commerce.

This is also something of the power of social media; you don’t have to live in a huge media market like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago or San Francisco to use social media tools creatively and effectively.

Thanks to Arik for undertaking this project and introducing me to some people doing really interesting work, and I’m honored to be included.