Hospital Social Media Governance Survey

Communications and marketing professionals who are in charge of managing the social media presence for hospital systems frequently find themselves in a difficult position as leaders of specialty groups, residency programs and other entities within the system clamor for their own social media accounts that carry the enterprise brand.

In theory these accounts should contribute to overall organization reputation, but if they aren’t well managed they could dilute the brand through inactivity or even become flash points for controversy.

Back when I led the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network (#MCSMN), which brought together social media leaders and users from health care, we heard these concerns regularly.

Now as I’ve moved into a third career while also continuing to work in digital health in my of counsel role with Jarrard, Inc., I’m excited to be working on a project to help health care social media colleagues compare notes and perhaps identify best practices for managing these sub-brand accounts.

One of our Jarrad clients, Ashley Anderson of Cedars Sinai, has commissioned a research project to gather input from colleagues on how their organizations are handling social media governance issues. Some of the questions include:

  • Which department has primary responsibility for your organization’s main enterprise-level presence on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and any other social media platforms?
  • What other departments have a role in using or contributing content to these enterprise-level accounts?
  • How many employees contribute to your organization’s social media accounts (i.e. content development, strategy, planning, community management, etc.?)
  • How do the sub-accounts contribute to and support the organization’s overall brand?
  • Is there a strategy or methodical approach behind the sub-accounts?
  • How do you measure and/or prove the success of the sub-accounts?

Ashley plans to share the results of the survey with the participants, so all will be better equipped with data from peer institutions to help guide their internal governance discussions.

Here’s the survey.

If you are responsible for managing social media in your hospital or hospital system, I hope you take a few minutes to participate.

Starting My Second Revolution

It was 10 years ago this month that Minnesota Monthly, the magazine formerly published by Minnesota Public Radio, included me in its story called The Revolutionaries: 12 Minnesotans who are changing the way we think about the world—and its future.

I had started Mayo Clinic’s social media program as part of my role as manager for media relations, beginning with a makeshift podcast in 2005 and then branching into experiments with blogs and the various social networks.

By 2008 we were on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn, and also had a news blog that eventually became the Mayo Clinic News Network.

I understood that as Mayo Clinic’s reputation had been built for 150 years through word-of-mouth, these platforms would be ways that word would spread between people in the 21st century.

While the rest of the world uses youtube to post videos of their cats curled into shoeboxes, Lee Aase is using the medium—along with Facebook, Twitter, podcasts, and blogs—to upend health care as we know it.

Minnesota Monthly, February 2012

Along the way I met up with co-belligerents as we created what would become the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network, and we even wrote a book called Bringing the Social Media Revolution to Health Care. Meredith Gould, Ph.D. was our editor, and besides Farris Timimi, M.D., my great friend and medical director for social media at Mayo Clinic, our contributors included

That was a magical time, as we experimented together and encouraged innovative applications of social media to promote health, fight disease and improve health care.

I have many fond memories from that revolutionary movement, and now I’m excited to help start another one through HELPcare and HELPcare Clinic.

Instead of a health care communications revolution, it’s a revolution in health care practice. My experience in the former has equipped me for this next one.

So has my personal health journey.

HELPcare is my new venture that provides metabolic health coaching, education and peer support for people who want to turn back the clock on their health through lifestyle changes.

HELPcare also provide management services for HELPcare Clinic, a new direct primary care practice my dear friend and high school classmate, David Strobel, M.D., opened in our hometown of Austin, Minn. on Feb. 1.

In just its first month of part-time operation, HELPcare Clinic already has more than 200 members, and positive newspaper and TV feature stories in our local market.

Today we’re announcing HELPcare Clinic’s Corporate Membership program, which gives small businesses who can’t afford ACA-compliant insurance a way to support their employees’ health and well-being.

Direct primary care is a growing trend. Likewise, many people are finding a low-carb, ketogenic diet combined with intermittent fasting is enabling significant health restoration.

I think the synergy between an affordable, membership-based medical practice that provides unhurried, unlimited primary care services in concert with lifestyle coaching that equips members to address underlying causes of disease will be powerful.

Hopefully even Revolutionary.

Introducing the SHSMD Social Media Network

With my retirement from Mayo Clinic last month we decided that the time had come to sunset the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network. I had envisioned and launched #MCSMN in 2011 as a connection hub and learning space about social media in health care for not only Mayo Clinic staff but also colleagues nationally and even worldwide.

All of the services were available to Mayo Clinic staff at no charge, while external members had both free and paid options. We also hosted annual conferences on health care social media, and even international conferences in Australia (Brisbane and Melbourne) and Dubai, United Arab Emirates and two virtual conferences with the Society for Health Care Strategy and Market Development (SHSMD).

We had a good run with #MCSMN and it aligned with Mayo Clinic’s history and values, but with my retirement it was time to reassess whether it should be a priority for my successor. Social networking and social media is important for health care organizations, but hosting an external social media network for health professionals isn’t exactly Mayo Clinic’s core business.

As a membership organization of the American Hospital Association, this IS very well aligned with the SHSMD mission.

Many members of #MCSMN expressed interest in having a space to stay connected, and so I’m glad to announce that SHSMD has established the SHSMD Social Media Network to meet this need.

I’m committing to participating regularly, and I hope you will join and help to create a vibrant and mutually supportive community.

How to Join

If you’re already a member of the broader SHSMD community it’s easy to join: just go here and once you’re logged in, click the Join Group button at the top.

Everyone who participated in the #MayoSHSHMD Virtual Conference this year already has a SHSMD membership!

For those who didn’t, SHSMD Executive Director Diane Weber has gotten the AHA IT team to create a mechanism so non-SHSMD members (even our international colleagues) can participate in this group within the SHSMD community too, but it takes a few additional steps.

If you’re not currently a member of SHSMD:

  1.  First set up a FREE account with the American Hospital Association (SHSMD is part of AHA) by clicking on Register/Login Button, then “Create an Account” at aha.org.

2.      Log in at shsmd.org using your new credentials.

3.      Click this link to sign up for the community.  It will seem like a checkout cart with $0 purchase.

Once you have completed those steps, go to the SHSMD – Social Media Network group and click the Join Group button.

I hope my health care colleagues with an interest in social media will take advantage of this opportunity to stay connected and continue growing together.

The #MCSMN Story (11): Audio Companion

Just out this morning is a discussion with Chris Boyer and Reed Smith on their touch point podcast as we review and share memories from the last 10+ years.

As they titled it, “What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been: A Conversation with Lee Aase”

It was great to swap stories with these guys who were part of our original External Advisory Board, contributors to Bringing the Social Media Revolution to Health Care, and who were in our 2014 Class of #MCSMN Platinum Fellows.

If you’ve enjoyed this series I think you’ll find our discussion interesting too.

The #MCSMN Story (10): The Star Wars Team and Mayo Clinic Collaborators

Dr. Farris Timimi and I have been blessed with consistently outstanding team members working with us on the Mayo Clinic social media team.

In some ways I think of our team over the years as a symphony, with three distinct movements.

Our original social media team continued until the end of 2014, with Tony Hart joining the team to support CME promotion in Oct. 2012. The first of our members to move on was Susana Shephard, who took a role with the Mayo Clinic Care Network, and about a year later Jason Pratt went into business full time with his brothers.

At about that time, as our newly consolidated Communications Division was engaged in strategic planning, we renamed our social media team to have a broader focus than only social media, and with an emphasis on continued leadership in innovation.

We became the Social & Digital Innovation team.

Those of us who are of a certain vintage remember the 1980s national defense strategy called the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, aimed at shooting down incoming nuclear missiles, which also was known as “Star Wars.”

Thus our SDI team took on a catchy moniker: The Star Wars Team.

From early 2015 through much of 2019 our Star Wars Team was comprised of the members pictured in the header of this post. This was the second movement of the symphony.

In addition to Makala Arce, Shawn Bishop, Stacy Theobald and me from the original team, we were joined by Shea Jennings, Taryn Offenbacher, Audrey Laine Seymour and Margaret Shepard. Shea took on the CME role after Tony Hart moved to Marketing, while the other three were focused on serving Mayo’s Arizona, Florida and Minnesota campuses, respectively.

As Taryn and Audrey Laine accepted other positions in 2019 we added Jessica Saenz (Arizona) and Robby Weber (Florida) to the Star Wars Team, with Amanda Roe supporting Neurosciences, and they along with Stacy form the team’s ongoing nucleus. With my retirement, Ron Petrovich is back leading the team into the symphony’s third movement, coming full circle from when he was the second person hired when we launched our major expansion in 2010.

Beyond our core team, until COVID-19 intervened we had several part time supplemental staff helping with Mayo Clinic Connect moderation and involved in client-funded social media projects: Lisa Lucier, Justin McClanahan, Ethan McConkey and Kanaaz Pereira. They contributed significantly to the overall work, and in the COVID era the work of our volunteer mentors for Mayo Clinic Connect has been essential to maintaining a healthy community.

Over the past decade we have seen well over 700 Mayo Clinic physicians join the social media revolution by creating Twitter accounts, and scores if not hundreds of key collaborators have advocated for social media adoption within Mayo Clinic.

Just as we benefited from an External Advisory Board we had a parallel Internal Advisory Group that met regularly to serve as a bridge from the Center for Social Media to the units and interests they represented.

Given the sheer number of individuals I won’t link to all of their Twitter bios, but I just want the world to know that what they saw the Star Wars Team doing in social media on behalf of Mayo Clinic was enabled by so many contributors:

  • Media Relations colleagues like Karl Oestreich, Kevin Punsky, Traci Klein, Ginger Plumbo, Sharon Theimer, Rhoda Madson and Tia Ford.
  • Our attorney, Dan Goldman, and Mayo’s domain master, Brian Kaihoi, as well as Monica Seven-Ziebell and John Bloomquist.
  • Marketing allies including Veena Nayar, Elizabeth Rice, Melissa Bear, Cindy Elliott, Elizabeth Klein and Jeff Warnock.
  • MayoClinic.org leaders and staff over the years, including Matt Feyen, Jay Maxwell, Les Polk, Joyce Even, Brian Laing, Tom Pankratz and more.
  • Communications leaders like Amy Davis, Annie Burt, Karl Oestreich, Fran Lynch, Jason Fortin, Suzanne Leaf-Brock and Bryan Anderson, as well as their teams.
  • News and employee communications teams that developed so much of the content we shared on the Mayo Clinic accounts.
  • Physician champions including Drs. Daniel Cabrera, Angela Mattke, Amy Kotsenas, Sharonne Hayes, Vincent Rajkumar, Justin Kreuter, Halena Gazelka and dozens more.
  • Internal Advisory Group advocates such as Gene Dankbar, Jeremy Jensen, Andy Tofilon, Laurie Wilshusen, Elizabeth Harty, Jane Jacobs, Brent Bultema and Yue Dong.

I could go on all night as more of these champions come to mind, but I have resolved to publish this post before midnight CDT, while I am still technically employed by Mayo Clinic.

I’m getting down to my last hour.

I have often said I was blessed to be in the right place at the right time to lead Mayo Clinic’s exploration and eventual embrace of social media. Because of Mayo Clinic’s stature and the support of our leaders, we had an opportunity to play a role in encouraging other health care organizations in their social media journeys.

With the help of the people listed above, and many others, I think we made the most of it.

As I look forward to starting my third career, I’m overwhelmed looking back and remembering so many people who have been so important in these last 21 years, and particularly the last 11.

My cup runneth over.

Tomorrow I’ll share one part of what I have in the works for Career #3.