Author: Lee Aase

Husband of one, father of six, grandfather of 15. Chancellor Emeritus, SMUG. Emeritus staff of Mayo Clinic. Founder of HELPcare and Administrator for HELPcare Clinic.

If you don’t shoot, you can’t score

Yesterday I did a post about the Riverland Community College 70-foot buzzer beater to defeat North Iowa Area Community College.

I also tweeted the link from my account …

…and from the @PackerFastBreak Club account.

Then I went to bed. I had, after all, gotten up at 3:30 a.m. CT in Cleveland, and it had been a long day. So I was startled when my daughter Rebekah burst into our room a couple of hours later and said, “Dad! Vic’s shot is #2 on SportsCenter!”

I thought that was cool, but didn’t know I had anything to do with it. Since Riverland Community College had uploaded the video in the first place, I thought they must have tweeted it to #SCTop10. But when I got home tonight, Rebekah told me, “Dad! Did you know it was your tweet that got Vic on SportsCenter?!”

Sure enough:

So what did I learn from this?

The main lesson is the title of this post, and it has a double meaning. Obviously, if Victoria didn’t take the shot, they couldn’t have won, and if I hadn’t tweeted using the #SCTop10 tag, SportsCenter wouldn’t have seen it.

But a few other lessons come to mind, too:

Keep tweets short and simple to accomplish your purpose. In the tweet from my personal account, I included @ mentions of various Minnesota sports journalists. That did lead to one of them retweeting and passing along to colleagues:

 

But while I had included the #SCTop10 hashtag in that tweet, having so many @ mentions probably cluttered the tweet too much for the SportsCenter gang.

Keep Shooting. If I had just left it at the first tweet, SportsCenter would likely have missed it. In basketball nobody shoots 100 percent, so don’t stop just because your first tweet doesn’t “hit.”

Provide context. I could have just tweeted the YouTube link, but by putting the video within a blog post I could give the story behind the video. I think that made it easier for SportsCenter to include the clip in its nightly highlights.

There’s no substitute for great content. This was a great shot, captured on video.

All in all, it’s a fun case study. The @SportsCenter (4.1 million followers) tweet has been retweeted 238 times, and as of right now the original video has 7,700 views on YouTube.

What lessons would you take from this experience?

Another Austin Buzzer Beater

Regular readers who know of my family’s basketball roots may have seen this post from last March about my son’s basketball team, in which his teammate, my nephew Tom, took an alley oop pass for a last-second dunk to send Austin High School to the Minnesota State Basketball Tournament.

Last night my daughter Rebekah’s Riverland Community College basketball team had a similar ending, but I was in Cleveland and only heard the play-by-play over the phone. Rebekah had a great game with 19 points and 25 rebounds before fouling out with 2 minutes to play, and with 4.8 seconds left the opposing North Iowa Area Community College made 1 of 2 free throws to take a 2-point lead. Victoria Larson took the inbounds pass, dribbled 5 times to just past the 3/4 court mark, and let fly:

Congratulations Victoria on a once-in-a-lifetime shot!

Strategy on Bringing the Social Media Revolution to Health Care


Last week our Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media released Bringing the Social Media Revolution to Health Care, a collection of essays on various aspects of health care social media contributed by members of our External Advisory Board and others who are members of our Social Media Health Network.

The book includes a Foreword by our Mayo Clinic CEO, Dr. John Noseworthy, and a special section on legal issues from our Mayo Clinic attorney, Dan Goldman. Our Center for Social Media Medical Director, Dr. Farris Timimi, wrote the Preface. With ideas and insights from 30 thought leaders in health care social media, this book will help you make the case for using social media in your organization.

You can get it on Amazon, or go to our Center for Social Media site for significant discounts on multiple copies. It’s a quick and easy read, perfect for starting a discussion in your workplace.

In addition to working with Meredith Gould on the overall project, I contributed an essay for the Strategy section. To give you a taste of what’s in the book, here is my essay:

Seven Thoughts on Social Media Strategy
Lee Aase
@LeeAase
Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media

  1. Start from business priorities and goals. Social media isn’t something to do for its own sake or because the tools are shiny and new. Think about what you were hired to do or needs you see in your organization and how these tools can help. In my case, social tools supported our media relations, my first job at Mayo Clinic.
  2. Become personally familiar with the tools. Develop deep familiarity with basic social media platforms by using them. Set up personal accounts before creating any for your employer to help you see how to best apply them for work.
  3. Start by watching and listening. Listen to what others say about your organization. Watch how others use the tools.
  4. Ask for help. People in online communities are generally welcoming of new members, particularly those who approach with a sense of humility.
  5. Pay attention to community norms. If you watch and listen and approach online connections with humility, it’s unlikely you’ll become “that guy.” Don’t act in ways wildly outside community norms for a community if you want to become a trusted member.
  6. Don’t be snowed by the purists. My friend Andy Sernovitz talks about “bloggers who blog about blogging,” for whom any deviation from what they consider the “right” way to engage online is viewed with contempt. They aren’t your audience. Don’t let purists’ opinions keep you from doing what’s right for your situation and organization.
  7. Planning is more important than plans. Think about priorities and why you’re engaging in social media, but keep the planning horizon short. Plan early. Plan often. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. The content of any plan isn’t as important as the thought process that informed its development. Our Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media works on a 100-day planning cycle. Don’t be afraid of having a similarly short planning cycle.

Strategy in social media isn’t appreciably different from other types of business strategy. You’ll address the same questions: What resources do I have? What tools are available? What could I accomplish with additional resources?

Still, here’s one key way social media business strategy is different:

Altruism pays. Social tools have dramatically reduced the cost of sharing knowledge, and the resulting relationships can be much more valuable than the knowledge itself. Keep costs low and you’ll be amazed at the benefits you’ll realize from sharing freely.

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Bringing the Social Media Revolution to Health Care: The Book

Bringing the Social Media Revolution to Health Care is the title I’ve used for many of my presentations over the last few years. Now, it’s a book, thanks to the contributions of 30 good friends who are members of our Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media Advisory Board, Social Media Health Network and our Mayo Clinic staff. See the Mayo Clinic news release and the blog post announcing the book for more information.

I listed the contributing authors in a post on our Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media site, but I want to particularly recognize Meredith Gould for her contributions. She wrote a couple of the essays, but her editing and publishing experience was essential. And she is, after all, a great humanitarian.

I will have more on the process in some future posts, but for now I hope you’ll read the book and tell me what you think of it. You can get it on Amazon (it qualifies for the 4-for-3 promotion, too), or we have bigger discounts for bulk purchases if you get them directly from the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media. All net proceeds go to fund scholarships for patients and caregivers to attend our conferences.

iPhone 5: “A whole extra row of icons”

That’s how my good friend Reed Smith deadpanned on the “amazing productivity improvement” he’s seen with his new iPhone when he was in Minnesota for our Social Media Week at Mayo Clinic.

That reminded me of some video I shot comparing my iPhone 4s with our #MCCSM Medical Director’s new iPhone 5:

Looks nice, but not worth breaking my contract that still has a year to go.