I had an opportunity last night to present at a Webinar sponsored by the Public Affairs Council on integrating social media into your Web strategies. At least it felt like night, because I was calling in from the Netherlands, where I have been for some Health 2.0 conferences. It was 8 p.m. my time, but only 2 p.m. EDT.
Here were the slides I presented (which have some resemblance to my typical presentations, but also have some new wrinkles):
One of the questions raised was about how you get the executives of your company to accept the risk of being involved with social media. My response was to highlight this video targeted at United Airlines, which had nothing to do with whether the company had decided to be involved in social media. It was completely the decision of a disgruntled passenger.
“Control” over your brand messages is an illusion.
Dr. Bas Bloem, the third speaker at REshape (#reshape09), shared a portion of this entertaining video in his presentation on Health 2.0: What it is and what it isn’t. You’ll get a kick out of this:
Dr. Bloem is doing some interesting work with ParkinsonNet, being piloted in Holland but planning to grow internationally. I see some strong parallels between this and the work Dr. Victor Montori is doing at Mayo Clinic with diabetes patients.
When I first named our august institution of social media higher education, calling it Social Media University, Global was a bit of overstatement. Yes, through the world-wide Web it did have the potential for global reach, and I did already have some visitors from other continents, but clearly our institutional naming (and my self-designation as “Chancellor”) was, as the English say, “cheeky.”
Over the ensuing months the “G” became more deserved, or at least less ridiculous, as we reached the point at which we had SMUGgles from every continent (except Antarctica). We have continued to grow, with now more than 700 people having joined the SMUG group in Facebook.
But it’s one thing to have a global reach via the Web; it’s another to personally visit other parts of the world. Starting tomorrow, SMUG will officially become a little more global in reality, as I am at the airport in Rochester right now traveling to the Netherlands for two presentations. I will be arriving in Amsterdam at 9 a.m. Sunday morning and taking a train to Nijmegen, where I will participate in a series of events led by Lucien Engelen, including Reshape09 and the Health 2.0 Challenge. On Thursday we will go back to Amsterdam, where I will be presenting at the first international E-Mental Health Summit, and then I’m spending the night in London, where I will be visiting British media on Friday morning before returning to Minneapolis.
I look forward to an interesting adventure, and will be regularly reporting on the events here and via Twitter if you follow me.
If any of you have tips for international travel, or about the places I’m visiting, I would appreciate any guidance.
At the #mayoragan09 conference earlier this week I participated in a “30 ideas in 30 minutes” panel, which was intended to provide rapid-fire, practical applications and next steps to take for people interested in incorporating social media into their health care work.
My first tip (after the obligatory “Get a Flip”), was:
Get an iPhone.
I suppose I shouldn’t have been, but I was somewhat surprised at the murmur that comment created. And in the Q&A session, I got this request:
“Could you upload a Flip video about why I should get an iPhone, so I can use it to make the case with my boss?”
My other tips, two of which require some expenditure and others that are free:
Get a Flip video camera (or something similar.) Cost is $150-$230 MSRP, but you can get them cheaper.
Join Audible.com, which is an audio “book of the month” club. Listen to any books you can find from Clayton Christensen, Malcolm Gladwell, or Patrick Lencioni. And of course get Chris Anderson’s book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, for free. Cost is about $15/month.
Get the “Bump” application for iPhone, which lets you exchange contact info with other iPhone users with a fist bump. Free.
Create a blog as a “dark site” for crisis communications. Use wordpress.com to create a private blog, which you can make public should a crisis arise. That could save you 15 minutes or so in setting up a way to communicate broadly via the Web, which in a crisis could be precious time savings. Free on WordPress.com.
If you do anything at all in continuing education for your professional growth, you may spend $1,000 or more for conference registrations, plus travel expenses.
How sad would it be to pay for a conference registration to learn about social media tools, and then to not spend the relatively smaller amount it takes to get hands-on experience?
At our #MayoRagan09 health care social media summit yesterday, Angie Anania from HealthONEPresbyterian/St. Luke’s Medical Center in Denver told her story of using Twitter relating to a surgical procedure, and the collaboration she did with the local CBS affiliate. I asked if she would be willing to share her experience more broadly, so here it is, compliments of the Flip:
I think her point about collaborating with local media in a win-win application of social media tools makes lots of sense. What do you think? What other examples of this have you seen?