Category: Conferences

Spreading the Word on Social Media

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ve got a full schedule of travel with conferences, panels, webinars, workshops and the like. I’ll be showing and telling about our work in social media at Mayo Clinic, and also implications and applications for others in health care and beyond. My schedule is below. Based on what I’ve seen from the registration (and speakers/panelists) at the events, I’m going to be highly stimulated by the experience. 

This week I’m going to Washington, DC on Wednesday and Thursday for the New Media Academic Summit at Georgetown University. It will be quite an experience for the Chancellor of a mythical university to interact with real-life Ph.D. professors. I’m on a Thursday afternoon panel.

Next week I’ll be in Phoenix on Monday and Tuesday at the Healthcare New Media Marketing Conference. On Wednesday afternoon I’m part of a panel sponsored by the Chicago Chapter of the American Hospital Association. On Thursday I’m participating in this free “Meet the Experts” Webinar (with @EdBennett, @JennTex and @BrianCharlonis) and then presenting to the Association of Organ Procurement Organizations’ annual meeting in St. Louis. And on Friday in St. Louis I’m doing the keynote (and a workshop) for HESCA’s 50th International Conference on Health & Science Communications.

In my spare time I plan to meet with some TV and radio station news and program directors to talk about our Mayo Clinic Medical Edge syndicated programs and news resources.

This is the most intense travel schedule I’ve had, but it just seemed to work out that these events were in reasonable proximity. And clearly we’re in a time in which the interest in social media is high, particularly in health care.

Of course I’ll be tweeting along the way, so you can follow (and participate in) the conversations. If you’re in any of these communities (or will be at any of these events) and would like to meet, drop me a note (or a Tweet).

Rochester Area Quality Council Presentation

Here is the presentation I’m delivering this morning to the Rochester Area Quality Council, a local affiliate of the Minnesota Council for Quality.

Engaging Your Customers (and finding new ones) Through Social Media 

View more presentations from Lee Aase.

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.

Chancellor Commendation

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.