Personal | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

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.

Privacy begins at home

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Last week when I was in the Netherlands (See “Putting the ‘Global’ in SMUG”) I had the opportunity on Wednesday to help lead a couple of master classes on Web 2.0 for health care communicators from UMC Radboud, one of six academic medical centers in the Netherlands, in Nijmegen.

I often like to demonstrate Skype and its videoconferencing capabilities (and the fact that it’s FREE) in my presentations. It’s one thing to say, “Skype is like the video phone in The Jetsons.” That gets heads nodding. But it’s entirely different to show just how easy and cool it is. So I have sometimes Skyped with my daughter Rachel and granddaughter Evelyn, and also have done videoconferences with Darrin Nelson (a Mayo patient from Rochester, NY who shared his story about robotic heart surgery here, here, here and here on Sharing Mayo Clinic.) In those cases I had sent messages on Facebook (for Rachel) or Twitter (for Darrin) to arrange the times for our conversations and to ensure that they would be available.

Our Wednesday morning master class in Nijmegen went off flawlessly, as @JohnSharp and @CiscogIII and I tag-teamed as teachers, but in the afternoon they had to head back to Amsterdam, so I was on my own (along with my host, Lucien Engelen.)

I was doing fine until I got to the reference in my slides to Skype, and then I got what I thought was a great idea: I went to Skype and saw that my lovely wife, Lisa, was on-line.

So (on the spur of the moment, not to mention a classic case of y-chromosome poisoning), I decided to just “surprise” Lisa with a Skype call without advance warning. I’ll let the Facebook conversation she started tell the rest (click to enlarge):

Lesson Learned: Privacy isn’t just something to be concerned about from a HIPAA perspective. It begins at home.

And a special note of thanks to Lucien for providing his own peace offering (although he personally had done nothing to offend), in the form of this beautiful bouquet of roses, pictured below next to my now fully showered bride of nearly 25 years.

A Present for Evelyn

Our family is in Grand Rapids, Michigan this weekend visiting my daughter Rachel, her husband Kyle and my granddaughter Evelyn, who turns one today.

Evelyn got to open one of her presents Saturday night when we arrived, as she sat in the lap of her Aunt Rebekah. This is one of those priceless moments that’s a great reason to have a Flip video camera (or something like it):

Because we won’t know the baby’s gender for at least several months, we’re thinking we will refer to him/her as “Thermie” for short.

If I would have know what the news was going to be, I would have been focusing more on Bekah than on Evelyn.

This is another example of how you can embed video from Facebook in a self-hosted WordPress blog, whereas you can’t in a WordPress.com blog.

Meanwhile, here’s the video we shot a year ago right now, when we welcomed Evelyn to the world. She’s changed quite a bit:

Lisa and I have been truly blessed, and are looking forward to Evelyn having a sibling and to becoming serial grandparents.

My Third Anniversary

Today I celebrate three years of blogging. It was on this date in 2006 that I wrote this brief post about being one of 50 million blogs tracked by Technorati. A year later, when I did my first anniversary post, I had just been getting into Facebook. That led to some opportunities to do training sessions on using Facebook, including the Facebook 101 presentation that became the inspiration for rebranding this blog as SMUG. And so a year ago today I looked back on another fascinating year, as I had “found my voice” in helping people learn how to use social media, and particularly how to develop business applications.

The year since that point has been amazing. It’s really telling to look back on some of my previous posts and to see how my thinking has changed over time. And in my work I’ve been involved in some significant new projects, most notably the launch of our Sharing Mayo Clinic blog.

Our Tweetcamps have also been fun and interesting, and it’s been gratifying to have so many people from outside of Mayo participating. Aside from Sharing Mayo Clinic, I think for me the biggest development of the last several months has been getting much more engaged with Twitter, and I appreciate all the people I’ve met through the #hcsm and (to some extent) #hcmktg chats. Having this video go viral after embedding in our Sharing Mayo Clinic blog was a delightful experience, especially getting to meet Mr. and Mrs. Cowan and their daughter, DeDe, when they went to appear on Good Morning America. That whole experience was really special.

It seems odd to think that the next year could be as interesting and exciting as the last one has been, but all signs point toward a continuing adventure. Next week, for instance, I’m going to be doing a Webcast with Ragan Communications about our Mayo Clinic experience, and I’m hearing that we have 1,500 people registered to participate. And in October we’re hosting and cosponsoring a Health Care Social Media Summit with Ragan at Mayo Clinic in Arizona. It’s unlikely we have another viral video in the works, but then again we didn’t see the last one coming either.

Thanks to everyone for reading, participating and Tweeting, and I look forward to another interesting year.