I was in Alexandria, Virginia today for a conference sponsored by the Center for Business Intelligence, at which I’m sharing our Mayo Clinic case study on social media in health care. Here are the slides I used for this shorter case study, which was tailored to the (mostly) pharmaceutical background of the audience:
One of the points I made is that these social media tools are individually powerful in their own right, but that when combined they can have amazing interactions. And I added something to my standard series of disclaimers: “Do not drive or operate heavy machinery while engaging in social media.”
I had a fun opportunity today to speak with a group of HR staff from the Minnesota Department of Transportation. It was part of their annual HR summit, and was organized around a futuristic, Star Trek theme. It gave me a chance to refresh and revise my presentation:
These are some things that struck me while in Paris last week. They’re not necessarily profound, but just some observations of a first-time visitor.
1. Subway maps are universal and require no translation. Having been to Washington, D. C. and New York a few times, and having visited the Netherlands and London last year, my visit to Paris has convinced me that there is really only one way to do a subway map.
The labels on the stations will be in different languages, but the basic scheme is always the same. So even if you don’t speak a bit of the language, you can just watch the signs at the subway or train stops and determine whether the stop you’re arriving at was what you were expecting. I got on a train one going the wrong way on Wednesday, but it was simple to just hop off and head back in the other direction. And speaking of subways…
2. You need to open the doors manually on the Parisian subways. Unlike every other city I’ve visited, the doors don’t open automatically at each stop. There’s a lever to flip or a button to push. I think I only saw one train with automatic doors in three days.
3. Live musical entertainment on the subway is a regular occurrence. Usually it’s a guy with an accordion, with or without an amplifier. These guys jump on the train, say something in French, and start playing. The first one I saw was accompanied by a tambourine-toting young lady, who circulated the car during the third song with a cup for donations. Other accordionists worked alone.
I also saw a bigger band of musicians that had set up in one of the metro stations, and on Friday night a saxophone player surprised us on the #12 to Mairie D’Issy with a medley that ended with a Stevie Wonder number. Here are some samples:
4. I saw the coolest orange juice squeezer at the hotel. Here’s some video of it:
My friend Lucien (@Zorg20) tells me these are really common in Europe. But he says most of the time they don’t let customers do the squeezing. This was an invention worthy of Caractacus Potts, from one of my favorite movies of all time.
5. Speaking of movies, I watched Invictus on the return flight. What an inspiring film! The critics say it’s accurate. Highly recommended.
6. The Louvre is immense, but the Mona Lisa is really small. It was neat to see the Mona Lisa, but you can’t get very close, and it’s behind a glass case. Which means that instead of seeing the painting you mainly see the reflection of the crowd.
7. The Eiffel Tower in Paris isn’t just twice as big as the one in Las Vegas. It’s way more than twice as cool. It was a little unnerving being met by three soldiers in berets with automatic weapons drawn as I came to the back side of the tower, but it is quite an amazing structure.
8. The Arc de Triomphe seems like the Washington Monument in that it took a while to complete. Napoleon got it started in 1806, but it wasn’t finished until 1836. At least that’s what Wikipedia says, so it has to be true, right?
9. The Cathedral of Notre Dame also was amazing. I think creating the wooden miniature model would have been difficult enough. I can’t imagine the complexity of the full-scale construction of marble.
Here’s video of my whirlwind tour of Paris landmarks:
As I said, these aren’t particularly profound observations and they aren’t exhaustive, but they give a bit of practical Parisian flavor. You can see some of my photos from the trip on Facebook.
I’m delighted to be presenting to the Healthcare Public Relations and Marketing Society of Greater New York at a seminar this morning hosted by the New York Times. For someone who has spent a substantial portion of my career in news media relations, being able to present at The Newspaper of Record is quite exciting. I’m also looking forward to hearing about the Times’ social media plans.
My presentation this morning will be about 45 minutes, with less of an emphasis on education but more of a focus on advanced applications.
Mainly I hope to inspire some creative thinking among the participants, and look forward to the discussion we can have, both face to face but also via the #HPRMSNY hashtag on Twitter.
As is my custom, here are my slides from this morning’s presentation. I want the participants to….well…participate! I don’t want them to feel like they need to be taking notes, so the slides are here for their reference and to jog their recollections of the discussion.
Mainly, I hope we can have a good discussion, and that it can continue for at least the next few days on Twitter. And I hope we will see more hospitals implementing social media as a result.
Tonight my excellent adventure (which would make Bill & Ted jealous) continues.
Earlier this week I was in San Diego and had the opportunity to do a couple of presentations for leaders at Sharp HealthCare on Monday and Tuesday. It was nice to have a more extended time than usual for my presentations, as we had a half-hour introduction to the basics, after which one brave soul volunteered to sign up for Twitter while everyone else watched.
Then we took a break, and came back to the big picture discussion of the historic nature of the social media era, how it relates to mass media, and some concrete examples illustrating my 35 Theses.
It also was great to take Lisa along on this trip (she’s on slide #2). It was the first time she got to hear me present on social media, and we got to celebrate Mother’s Day in San Diego, Oceanside, Anaheim and Lake Arrowhead, California. Here’s where we had breakfast, on the way to church in Anaheim:
I love it when she rolls her eyes at me like that. Reminds me of my kids.