Author: Lee Aase

Looking Back a Year

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It was just about a year ago that I got a chance to do an interview with Mark Ragan after having done a presentation at a corporate communicators conference Ragan Communications cosponsored with SAS in North Carolina. Today Mark tweeted a link to his post about it on Ragan.com, but when I viewed it I saw it had an embed code that would enable me to post it here, I thought it would be good to cross-post.

Give it a view, and then I’ll be back below with a few observations (or of course you can just skip to the observations if you’d like.)

Observations:

I’ve had a few opportunities to do return engagements, addressing groups to which I had previously made a presentation. Those are fun because they give me a chance to take stock, to see how we have progressed in the time between presentations.

This video is similar for me in that regard, because it predates the launch of our Sharing Mayo Clinic blog and our active engagement in Twitter. So it’s great to see how much has developed further in our Mayo Clinic social media efforts.

It’s also fun to see that the screen shots of SMUG that Ragan showed in the video are from the days when this blog was operating on WordPress.com instead of a self-hosted version of WordPress. One of the advantages of the self-hosted WordPress is that I’m able to embed the video you see above; on WordPress.com you have much more limited options for embedding video, so if I were doing this post a year ago I would have only been able to link to the Ragan post instead of embedding.

So it’s neat to see how far we’ve come, but also to see that the basic strategy outlined in the video above hasn’t changed.

And just last month, almost a year to the date after I talked with Mark at the SAS conference, we hosted a summit on social media in healthcare with Ragan at our Mayo Clinic campus in Scottsdale, Arizona.

I’ve done some year-in-review posts previously (in 2006. 2007 and 2008) and will plan to do so again, but Mark’s tweet provided a nice opportunity for a quick look back.

Tomorrow I’m excited to provide a look forward when I do the keynote at the Healthcare Internet Conference in Las Vegas. If you’re attending the conference, I hope to get to talk to you in person. Please to stop me and say hi. If you’re not going to be there in person, I think the tweet stream to follow will be #hcic.

Nailing 35 Theses to the Wall

As I mentioned yesterday, it was 492 years ago today that Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg. The official title was “Disputation of Doctor Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences” and its viral spread led to the Protestant Reformation that has had seismic effects in world culture for nearly five centuries, even though more Americans associate October 31 with goblins and overdosing on high fructose corn syrup than with theological and cultural revolutions.

Today I created a new page on SMUG on which I have posted my 35 Theses, entitled “Disputation of Chancellor Lee Aase on the Power and Efficacy of Social Media.” Instead of nailing them to the physical community bulletin board as Luther did, I’m posting them on the wall of a virtual university. And while Luther’s theses unintentionally sparked a revolution, mine have the goal of sparking discussion and disputation about a revolution that is already well underway.

The video I’m embedding below highlights the changes taking place in what it calls a Social Media Revolution:

I’ve seen several videos of this genre, but one thing I appreciate about this one (as opposed to the “Shift Happens” series) is that it focuses on what has already happened (which is amazing enough) instead of projecting things like “By 2049 a $1,000 computer will exceed the computing capabilities of the human race.” I also like this recent video, Did You Know 4.0…which only makes one really outlandish extrapolation at the end, but in that it was at least quoting someone.

So while the videos above provide support for Thesis #4 — Social Media are the third millennium’s defining communications trend — my 35 theses are more about describing the revolution than causing it.

What I do hope to accomplish, though, is to help health care organizations (and other risk-averse businesses and groups) understand that the social media revolution isn’t a fad, that it will affect them and — most importantly — that it can be immensely beneficial if they look for ways to take advantage of the opportunities inherent in social technologies.

I look forward to writing posts over the next month or so that will amplify and illustrate many of these theses, and to having others refine and improve them.

And since I only started with 35, there’s plenty of room for you to suggest more. We’ve got a long way to go to match Luther’s 95.

Let’s discuss!

Social Media Reformation

As I have been asked to keynote some conferences on social media in healthcare I have found it necessary, or at least desirable, to take a broader view of the topic instead of just describing our Mayo Clinic experience.

Don’t get me wrong: I actually think our Mayo Clinic experience in social media, and the story behind it, is probably the most important contribution I can make to the discussion. After all, philosophy is cheap. Anyone can pontificate on what “should” be done, but having a concrete story to tell of how social media have actually been implemented is more valuable.

But sometimes it’s helpful to also be able to generalize from the specific, to help elucidate underlying principles that the specific examples illustrate.

As I was preparing for Healthcamp Minnesota and that keynote, I was drawn to develop some basic principles for healthcare social media. And being of a Reformed Christian background, I couldn’t help noting that we’re coming up on Reformation Day, October 31 (other folks call that day “Halloween”), which is the 492nd anniversary of the day Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church door at Wittenburg, Germany.

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His “post” was entitled:

Disputation of Doctor Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences

And it began as follows:

Out of love for the truth and the desire to bring it to light, the following propositions will be discussed at Wittenberg, under the presidency of the Reverend Father Martin Luther, Master of Arts and of Sacred Theology, and Lecturer in Ordinary on the same at that place. Wherefore he requests that those who are unable to be present and debate orally with us, may do so by letter.

Because of a technology that had been developed relatively recently, the Gutenberg printing press, Luther’s theses went “viral” and changed the course of history. They were translated from Latin into German and spread throughout Germany within two weeks, and throughout Europe within two months.

So although I have no delusions about the relative import of my thinking compared with Luther’s, tomorrow I’m going to post my own set of theses relating to social media, and will invite your feedback and participation, or even disputation.

There won’t be 95 of them (but there will be more than the five I outlined at Healthcamp MN), and I’m confident the publication of these theses won’t require me to go into hiding in a castle in Germany (although, come to think of it, that wouldn’t be the worst thing!)

Just as technology gave viral reach to timeless truths as recovered by Luther, today’s social technology will enable these social media theses to spread rapidly (if they’re any good). It’s a testament to the advance of technology that within two days of publication (based on what I see in my Google Analytics), these theses will likely have been read on six continents.

Luther’s theses had eternal significance for people’s immortal souls. Mine might just help you better understand the communications and marketing landscape, and thereby achieve some of your more temporal goals.

Luther wanted to start a discussion or an argument, even though he was fairly convinced he was right. I likewise hope to spark discussion with my social media theses, and some of that will take place starting Monday in Las Vegas at the Healthcare Internet Conference. But to paraphrase Luther’s request, if you are unable to be present and debate orally with us, I hope you will do so by Tweet, comment or blog post.

Check back here tomorrow for discussion and disputation.

“Technology makes things possible. People make things happen.”

If you follow the Tweetstream from Jacqueline Fackeldey (@FackeldeyFinds) you may not get a lot from it (unless you’re one of my new friends from the Netherlands) because she mostly tweets in Dutch. But when I attended ReShape09 in Nijmegen, I had a nice opportunity to chat (in English) with this advocate of what she calls “human to human marketing.” When she used the phrase that is the title for this post, I thought it would be great to have her talk about it on camera and share it with the SMUGgles:

Meredith Gould: Great Humanitarian

Here’s a little story about the power of Twitter and the communities it helps to create, and the nice people it enables you to meet.

Earlier this week I attended the e-Patient Connections conference in Philadelphia, where I presented our Mayo Clinic social media case study.

Unfortunately, when I got to the airport (I had to leave just after lunch), I realized that I had left my Flip video camera on the podium at the conference. The video below tells what happened next, and expresses my gratitude:

The conference was a great chance for me to meet lots of great Tweeps with whom I had only interacted via Twitter and our blogs, including, in addition to @MeredithGould, @danamlewis, @daphneleigh, @philbaumann, @ePatientDave, @whydotpharma and @SusannahFox. I met several more with whom I hadn’t interacted previously, but look forward to getting to know in the coming months.

Thanks to @kevinkruse for organizing a great conference, and again to Meredith for her Philadelphia airlift.