Today I met with Guy Finne and John Murphy to discuss using Facebook for a high school career festival. I will be posting here about that when it happens next month, but for now here’s a picture of John and Guy.
Category: Health Care
Social Media 203: YouTube Video Annotations
Annotations are a great new beta feature available on YouTube. They enable you to add text to your videos, and to have that text linked to a specific action on YouTube. I first saw this in some of the BarelyPolitical videos, and thought perhaps this was a premium feature.
It turns out it’s available to all of us.
For an example, I decided to use a video we did yesterday about the first large study of breast cancer detection using molecular breast imaging as an alternative — or at least as a supplement — to mammography. It turns out that molecular breast imaging found about three times as many cancers as mammography in this group of women. You can read more about the study here on the Mayo Clinic News Blog, and we also have links to some photos and resulting news coverage.
Here’s the screencast of me adding the annotations last night, which also shows how you can add annotations to your videos:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc3RY1UEaQQ]
And if you want to see the finished product (and perhaps even subscribe to the Mayo Clinic YouTube channel), here it is:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve0FT9s3fXc]
The only real drawback from the publisher’s perspective is that the annotations can’t be linked to a non-YouTube URL. It would have been nice to be able to link directly to the blog post where the video is embedded, so viewers can get more information. But I’m fine with that, since I could add the link in the video description field.
From my perspective, the major advantage of YouTube annotations is that they offer a standardized way to add descriptive text, such as Dr. Hruska’s title, without requiring either expensive studio-grade video editing software or a lot of time and effort. The annotations are plain, but they also are crisp and functional. It takes only a minute or two to add these annotations. And if this is the standard on YouTube, anyone who uses it can have confidence that it will be seen as consistent with how Web video is done.
What do you think?
Blogging 401: LifeSource Blog on Organ Donation, Transplant
As Chancellor of Social Media University, Global I enjoy getting to do Extension Classes, on-site presentations with organizations interested in getting involved in social media.
I did one of these in May with LifeSource, the organ procurement organization for the upper midwest.
Even more than doing the presentations, though, it’s especially gratifying to see organizations move forward with their social media projects.
That’s why I was so delighted to get a note from Becky Ousley, saying that LifeSource was launching The Source, its blog for news and conversations about donation and transplantation.
Today’s post announces the LifeSource activities associated with the Minnesota State Fair, and its booth where people can register as donors. They’re planning lots of updates from the “Great Minnesota Get Together” as people stop by to share their stories.
In addition to having hosted the extension class, Becky and her blog co-author Susan are long-time SMUGgles, participating in the on-line learning opportunities available through SMUG.
Our goal with SMUG is to have people who have participated here launch their own blogs, particularly for business or organizational use. As they do, we’ll profile them here in the Capstone Projects section, the 400-level Blogging courses. And this will give others a chance to see what their fellow SMUGgles are doing.
Please join me in visiting the LifeSource blog and congratulating Becky and Susan on pulling together everything they’ve learned into a first-class blog for a great cause.
And if you’ve started a blog or are planning to do so, please let us know so we can profile you, too.
Facebook 302: Facebook for Medical Support Groups
Sites like CarePages and CaringBridge have been developed to meet important needs for hospitalized patients and their families and friends.
But Facebook, as a powerful general-purpose social networking site, may prove to be an even more useful alternative to these dedicated patient communication sites.
I will start by describing the very real needs CarePages and similar sites meet, and then discuss how Facebook can meet those needs.
Continue reading “Facebook 302: Facebook for Medical Support Groups”
Mayo Clinic Social Media Update
As I Tweeted earlier today, I had an opportunity this morning to provide an overview of Mayo Clinic’s social media activities to another division within our department. One of the things I enjoy about doing presentations like this is that as I update previous versions I can see where we’ve made progress in the intervening time.
Coincidentally, a Mayo Clinic colleague — Nancy Jensen — who leads our Public Affairs division in Florida and also is extensively involved in cancer communications nationally, asked me to provide an overview of what Mayo is doing in social media for a discussion board on which she is a member. It’s a group of cancer communications contacts for academic medical centers. She also thought it would be good for them to get a taste of SMUG and some hands-on social media education, so I decided it’s time for another update here.
Since my last Mayo Clinic social media progress report in May (which I would encourage you to check out for background), we have three significant developments:
- Our Mayo Clinic YouTube channel has been significantly upgraded. We’ve been able to get the look and feel customized to closely match mayoclinic.org, our main Web site for patients, and we’ve added playlists to group some of the similar videos and highlight them. Currently we have featured our Mayo Clinic Medical Edge videos and the video testimonials and personal stories we shot at the Transplant Games with the Flip.
- We’ve started a Mayo Clinic News Blog. We still have some refinement to do, but it serves at least two good purposes. First, it enables us to provide video and audio resources to journalists on a password-protected, pre-embargo basis, which should help us get more news coverage. Second, when the news embargoes lift, we take off the password protection and make those same resources available to interested members of the general public. And the videos we put there can discuss the research stories in much greater detail than would get into any mainstream media news story, which is a great service to potential patients.
- Finally, in just the last two weeks (coinciding with the Transplant Games), we established a Mayo Clinic Flickr account. The first application was to make photos available to the participants who visited our booth, but we’ve also created sets for photos of our campuses, and it seems the next move might be to put photos there that accompany our news releases.
Nancy also mentioned that it would be good for me to discuss some things a smaller communications unit, perhaps with three or fewer members, could do. It’s easy for people to look at the resources Mayo Clinic has, and think that these tools are just for the bigger players.
That would be a mistake; the truth is just the opposite. Here’s why.
Social media tools are a great democratizing force. They enable anyone to create content and distribute it worldwide (and also get feedback from users.) Kids can do this in their basements or dorm rooms; as communications professionals we certainly are capable of learning social media.
On a related note, the cost of participating in social media is extremely low. Through wordpress.com, you can get a blog with customized look and feel, mapped to a domain or subdomain of your choosing, and with the ability to deliver your podcasts, for $45 to $55 a year. A Flickr account with unlimited bandwidth and storage costs $25 a year. A Facebook page is free, and if you work for a non-profit, so is a YouTube channel. You may need to pay someone to do the blog and YouTube customization if you don’t have that in-house capability, but if you have a corporate Web site those design elements would be fairly easy to match. And you can get a Flip video camera, with tripod, for less than $200. A digital still camera also can be had for that price or less, and you already have computers capable of using these tools.
You can learn more about how to use these tools for free. That’s what Social Media University, Global is all about. You can enroll here and then go through step-by-step, hands-on courses in general social media, blogging, podcasting, Facebook and other topics. All it takes is your time.
In the end, that’s the real potential cost for social media: it takes some people and a commitment to be involved. But I would submit that these tools provide leverage for you to accomplish your other work, and that by using them you will get better results in less time. And they also provide an opportunity for you to leverage the involvement of others in your organization, outside of your public affairs or communications group.
Tell your story! How are you using social media?
In the comments below, please share your stories and examples of how you’re using social media in your organization. I’d like to see them, and I know Nancy’s fellow cancer communicators would enjoy them as well.