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.
I look forward to a great discussion, as I understand the registration for the session (and therefore the interest in the topic) is strong. I will be tweeting about it using the #raqc hashtag. I invite you to follow the discussion there (although I’m not sure how much live-tweeting there will be), or share your comments and questions below.
My presentation is from 7:50 to 9 a.m. CDT, so your related tweets during that time would help to demonstrate the power of social media.
This is not a post about “How I created a viral video and you can, too.” It’s simply a story that I think you will find interesting, and from which you can learn. Your mileage will vary, but there are some worthwhile lessons for anyone interested in using social media from a business perspective.
At Mayo Clinic, we have been actively exploring and adoption social media tools. We did our first podcasts in September 2005. We set up a Facebook fan page in November 2007 and our Twitter account in April 2008. We’ve been actively uploading to our YouTube channel for a bit over a year, and have developed several blogs over the last 18 months or so.
We took a major step in January by establishing Sharing Mayo Clinic, our culture blog. This gave us a place to publish feature stories that don’t fit in our news blog or podcast blog.
With that as background, here’s our first viral video story:
On April 7, 2009 I got an email (a few of them actually) alerting me to a charming video featuring Marlow and Frances Cowan, an elderly couple from Ankeny, Iowa. The Cowans had been recorded doing a piano routine in the atrium of our Gonda building in Rochester. I thought it was fantastic, so I decided to embed it in Sharing Mayo Clinic. As of that time, the video had been seen 1,005 times since being uploaded in September 2008. By the next day, it was up to 3,805 views (click to enlarge)…
I took a half day of vacation yesterday to do a presentation on use of social media tools in election administration for a conference sponsored by the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute. Given my early career background in politics and government, it was a fun opportunity to stretch my basic presentation a bit beyond health care and general social media training.
I was really pleased with the response, and the Q&A period was great. I was introduced to one barrier to social media use that was new to me, though, in that some of the city and county officials present are concerned that using Facebook or YouTube in an official capacity will put them in violation of data practices regulations. State laws require government bodies to archive data for potential legal discovery, for example, and the concern is that a local jurisdiction can’t compel Facebook to maintain data practices in keeping with state law. I plan to devote a full post to this later.
But first, I wanted to share a testimonial from Pat, one of the conference participants. She came up to me after the presentation and was particularly enthusiastic about what she had learned. Kind of made me blush. But since I had my Flip along (as Karl Malden used to say about American Express: “Don’t leave home without it”), I asked if she would be willing to share her reactions on video.
I’m experimenting with the Flip HD camera (instead of standard definition) and how to best encode video to display on various platforms, so I’m going to upload this to the SMUG group in Facebook, too. If any other SMUGgles would want to upload a video to that group, or leave a comment here or on the SMUG wall, about your experiences in social media or your reactions to what you’ve learned through our University, it would be mose welcome.
My grandma would have called this fishing for compliments. Andy Sernovitz would call it word-of-mouth marketing.
Below is the presentation I’m scheduled to deliver on Friday, May 29, at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, as part of the Innovations in Election Technology conference:
It’s always fun for the SMUG Chancellor to visit a real university for which students pay tuition. But they’re not going to give me an honorary doctorate or anything. Hopefully they’ll at least politely applaud.
