Personal | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Another Joyous Occasion

As I referenced in my previous post, the Aase family had a big week with the birthday of our granddaughter, Evelyn, and my son Jacob’s marriage on Saturday to the former Alexi Iler. Here’s a video snippet from the beginning of the wedding, featuring Evelyn as Flower Girl and Alexi walking down the aisle with her father, Steve:

A few hours later, the newest Mr. and Mrs. Aase departed the church for a honeymoon in North Carolina:

It was a wonderful wedding and we’re so proud of and happy for Jacob and Alexi.

Joyous Occasions

This is a big week for the Aase clan, as my son Jacob is getting married today. I will follow up with a post with some more wedding-related photos, but here are some highlights from the events leading up to the big day.

The wedding provided a reason for my daughter Rachel, her husband Kyle and our two grandchildren, Evelyn and Juday, to make the trip to southern Minnesota from western Michigan. It also happened to be right at the time of Evelyn’s second birthday, so we had a family party for her on Wednesday night at our home. Here are some highlight photos (click to enlarge):

Here’s the big finish, in which her father, Kyle, helped ensure that as of this moment she has NO boyfriends:

Last night we had the rehearsal for Jacob’s wedding to Alexi Iler at the church in La Crosse, WI. Jacob’s favorite food is steak, so that was our main course, and I got to grill 13 boxes of No-Name steaks:

More highlights coming soon.

What a difference in four years!

It was four years ago today that I started a blog called “Lines from Lee” with this post.

So much has happened in that time, and I have documented the progress with highlights posts on the first, second and third birthdays of my blog.

So this is my fourth in an annual series related to how blogging and involvement in social media has changed my life. I do more of a personal year-in-review sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas, which is the time when I thank God for his many blessings to me and our family (such as our two grandchildren, and my son getting married next month.) More reflections on those in December.

The last year has been so crazy, it’s hard to know where to begin in recounting it.

Trips to the Netherlands (with a brief stop in London) and Paris, my first ventures outside North America, are a good place to start. But visits for presentations on social media to Miami, Indianapolis (twice), Omaha, Washington DC (twice), Idaho, Arizona, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Green Bay, Madison, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, New York (thrice), Pittsburgh, Boca Raton, San Francisco, Orlando, Boston, Cooperstown, San Diego, North Carolina, Des Moines and Lake Ozark, Missouri as well as several trips to Chicago and various points within Minnesota have been memorable too. So were the videoconferences to Zurich and Toronto.

I can’t even begin to mention all the great people I’ve gotten to meet, because it would take all day. And since I’m writing this on the bus on the way to work, I have to move it along. Especially with the announcement we made this week of our new Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media. We’ve got lots of work to do as we get this ramped up. As you might imagine, I’m seriously jazzed about it.

When I got back from New York on Wednesday after the announcement of the center, my team at work had a celebration ready, complete with balloons, gluten-free treats and a new sign on my office door (click to enlarge):

(I’m pretty sure our brand standards group isn’t going to let us use that poster officially.)

What a team! I do want to mention them: Joyce Groenke, Dana Sparks, Joel Streed and Laurel Kelly. They’ve been the core group for our syndication and social media team, and they also help tweet on our @MayoClinic account.

And our broader media relations team, led by Karl Oestreich and including Traci Klein, Amy Tieder, Bob Nellis, Rebecca Finseth, Elizabeth Rice, Bryan Anderson, Kevin Punsky, Paul Scotti, and Lynn Closway have all contributed to our social media efforts (particularly YouTube videos related to research news.) It’s hard to know where to stop with this, but Hoyt Finnamore, Cory Pedersen, Linda Donlin, Kathy Barbour, Evelyn Tovar and Julie Janovsky-Mason have done great work with social media on our internal communications team, too, as have our education, research and marketing groups.

The idea has been not to have a huge social media “silo” but to instead get everyone in Public Affairs using these powerful tools to do their regular work. To infuse social media thinking and strategies into everything we do. And with our new Center for Social Media, we aim to provide training and resources to all 56,000 employees at Mayo Clinic while also offering some of those same tools and guidance to other health-related organizations.

Tonight I’m going to have another new experience, as I will be doing a live TV interview on Almanac, the weekly public affairs program produced by Twin Cities Public Television.

In my previous career I frequently accompanied my employers (government officials or political candidates) to the tpt (not sure why they don’t capitalize) studios for their guest appearances. It’s going to be really weird to be the guy sitting between Erik and Cathy for one of the early segments of the program, which airs at 7 p.m on channel 2 in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.

If you live in Minnesota and can get channel 2, I hope you’ll tune in tonight at 7. I hope I don’t look too much like this:

“We don’t buy any green bananas”

Words of wisdom from Marlow Cowan, the elder half of the “Octogenarian Idol” piano duo whose YouTube duet at Mayo Clinic…

… has been viewed more than 7.2 million times as of this morning (and which led to their appearance on ABC’s Good Morning America as well as NHK, the national TV network in Japan.)

Marlow is now well past octogenarian status (he’s 91), and his wife Fran celebrated her 85th birthday yesterday. My wife Lisa and I were honored that their daughter, DeDe Shour, invited us to join them for the surprise birthday celebration at their home in Ankeny, Iowa (click any of the photos to enlarge):

We got to see some pictures from their very full life together…

…and then also join their family (even some great-grandchildren) for dinner at the Country Kitchen in Des Moines.

At dinner, Marlow and Fran reflected on how their lives have changed in the last 15 months since their video went viral…

…how they’ve renewed connections with former students and members of the touring youth musical performance groups they hadn’t heard from in decades. They’ve had numerous requests for concerts, but travel isn’t as easy as it used to be. Marlow and Fran both expressed their gratitude to God for their 63 years of marriage and the many blessings he has given them. They see their performances as a way of serving him by sharing those blessings with others, so they do as many as they can.

Marlow said they have certain stipulations when they agree to a concert, one of which is, “They’ve gotta have a back-up act in case something happens to us. We’re not getting any younger, you know!”

At their advanced ages, he said they’ve also developed a couple of rules for their personal lives: “We don’t buy any green bananas. And we eat dessert first.”

Words to live by.

Cooperstown Memories

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking to a meeting of human resources leaders from the Hospital Association of New York State (HANYS) at the Otesaga Resort Hotel in Cooperstown, New York. It’s a beautiful and historic facility (I have posted some pictures below), and I enjoyed getting to interact with the HANYS group.

But one reason I was really looking forward to the trip was the chance it gave me to visit a place I had dreamed of for about 40 years, the Baseball Hall of Fame. I unfortunately only had about an hour to case the place, but here’s my video report:

It isn’t exactly the SPAM museum, the tourist attraction in my hometown of Austin, Minn. (located just 4 blocks from “Old Main”), but still is definitely worth the trip. Below are some photos, first of the Otesaga, and then the baseball shrine (click to enlarge):