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Mayo Clinic Podcasts

Mayo Clinic is launching several new podcasts today. They aren’t our first foray into podcasting; we’ve been podcasting our daily Mayo Clinic Medical Edge radio program for nearly two years (since September, 2005, back before there was such a thing as a video iPod.) This has been a popular program, and in January of this year we started the Mayo Clinic Medical Edge video podcast, which is based on a weekly news insert we provide for local television stations in the United States and Canada.

The new podcasts are different, in that they are produced especially for people with interest in a particular topic, condition or disease. What’s more, they’re not limited by the mass audience appeal necessary for broadcast news. They feature in-depth discussions with Mayo Clinic physicians and scientists, and instead of 60-second packages for radio or 90 seconds for television, the podcasts can be as long as the conversation needs to be.

So, for example, the first episode of the Mayo Clinic Heart Podcast, featuring Dr. Thoralf Sundt, a Mayo Clinic cardiac surgeon, talking about off-pump bypass surgery, runs 18:30. The Cancer Podcast segment on Inflammatory Breast Cancer is 15:10, and the Bones & Muscles podcast, featuring Dr. Richard Berger discussing a painful wrist injury, the UT Split Tear, and how to diagnose and repair it, is 37:14.

That’s the beauty of podcasting; it doesn’t have to fit a particular time slot, and doesn’t need to appeal to the lowest common denominator, so people with a particular interest can get a lot of deep and meaningful information. And they can listen where and when they want, either on their computer or on an iPod or other mp3 player.
Among the other new podcasts are:

Men’s Health Podcast
Women’s Health Podcast
Children’s Health Podcast, and
For those who want to receive all of the podcasts, they can sign up for the All-Audio Podcast.

mayo clinic podcasts

For more information on how to sign up to receive these podcasts, go to this page. You will need some kind of “podcatching” software, either iTunes or something similar. But you can learn more about podcasting here in Wikipedia. The podcasts are also listed in many of the major podcast directories, including PodcastAlley, Podcastingnews and others.

I make no pretense of objectivity when it comes to these podcasts; this is a project our New Media team at Mayo Clinic has been working on for several months; I’m not a neutral reviewer. So I would appreciate your feedback. Please let us know what you think of these new podcasts, anything you see we could improve and what topics you would like to see covered in the future.

Update: Mayo Clinic’s news release announcing the podcasts is here.

Technorati: Mayo Clinic, Podcasts, Heart, Cancer, Men’s Health, Women’s Health, Children’s Health, Medical Edge, Heart Disease

Looking Back: One Year of Blogging

It was a year ago Monday that I launched this blog with three posts, the first of which alluded to mine being one of 50 million or so. Now Technorati says there are something over 70 million non-spam blogs.

As you look in the archives, you’ll note that my first posts were on July 30, 2006 and then I went dark until September 21. I wasn’t sure it would really be “OK” to have a blog, but then I got the responsibility for New Media as part of my work portfolio, so I decided to really plunge in and learn. Since then I’ve done 212 other posts, or nearly two every three days.

Here are some highlights, themes and lessons learned from my first year of blogging.

I’ve done several book reviews, including The Tipping Point and Blink! by Malcolm Gladwell, Our Iceberg is Melting by John Kotter, I Dare You! by William Danforth, Pyromarketing by Greg Stielstra, Wikinomics and, most recently, Made to Stick. I recommend all of them.

One book I didn’t review, but which has been the concept behind many posts, is David Allen’s Getting Things Done. Click here to read my thoughts on GTD.

I’ve blogged, some of them live, several conferences and seminars, including a Ragan conference in Chicago (where I met Jeremiah), the WHPRMS conference for health-care PR and marketing professionals, an Advanced Learning Institute conference in October, and a similar one in April. More recently, a colleague and I attended and presented at a healthcare marketing conference in Orlando, and last week I was on a panel at the Frost & Sullivan Sales & Marketing East 2007 event. Liveblogging is a great way to take notes on presentations, so I can refer to sites mentioned by the presenters. If it helps others, that’s a nice bonus.

I discovered that my blog was a great place to share personal and family highlights, from our Bible Bowl vacation, to my daughter Rachel’s wedding, to our electronic, multimedia Christmas letter.

On the media front, this has been the year of the buyout and layoff, particularly with newspapers. That has lots of implications for people like me who work with news media.
My biggest surprise, though, was a post on a related topic, when Dr. Max Gomez lost his position as the on-air doctor at WNBC. I began to notice that this post was getting visits every day, even several months after I wrote it. Then I noted that my WordPress.com dashboard was telling me that “Dr. Max Gomez” was a phrase people were using to find my blog. I thought, wow, are people searching for Dr. Max Gomez on Technorati? That must be how people are finding it, right?

I was surprised when I did the search in Google and found what you see below:

Somehow my blog post ranked ahead of Wikipedia’s entry on Dr. Max in Google!

I found something similar with my review of John Kotter’s penguin parable. Which just does go to show that blogs are naturally built for search optimization.

Most recently, I’ve been amazed by Facebook, which has led to several other posts.

It’s been a great year of learning, and while I’ve invested some time, the financial cost has been zero.

Where else but the blogosphere can you learn so much at no cost?

I’m looking forward to continuing my education!

Technorati: Blogging, Lessons, Social Media, Book Reviews, GTD

Book Review: Made to Stick

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip Heath & Dan Heath, is the best book I haven’t read.

It would be the best book on communication I have read; if I had read it. I listened to the Audible audiobook version instead.

From the urban legends about the business traveler being drugged and one of his kidneys harvested and razor blades in Halloween apples, to JFK’s moon mission challenge, to successful campaigns against teen smoking, movie theater popcorn and Texas litterbugs, Made to Stick is rich with examples that illustrate, as their subtitle say, “why some ideas survive and others die.”

The author brothers identify the main problem people have in communication as “The Curse of Knowledge.” Typically when we are making a presentation, for example, we are speaking about something we have studied extensively and consequently know well. The Curse of Knowledge is that we can’t remember what it was like to not understand. We forget the listener or reader.

Made to Stick: The Essence of SUCCESS

The antidote to The Curse of Knowledge involves shaping your ideas and your presentation of them according to a checklist that (almost) spells SUCCESS. Sticky ideas, the Heaths say, tend to have many of these traits:

Simplicity – Be relentless in boiling down to the core of the idea. As the authors quote a defense lawyer, “If you make 10 points in your closing arguments, the jury won’t remember any of them.” Make one main point. Extra material isn’t just superfluous; it’s harmful. Maybe Conrad Black’s legal team should have taken this advice.

Unexpectedness – Surprises, like Jared Fogle losing more than 200 pounds by eating at Subway, or one serving of theater popcorn having more saturated fats than a full day of unhealthy diet, get attention and get people talking.
Concreteness – don’t use vague phrases like “maximizing shareholder value” because these aren’t guides to action. The more concrete you are, the sure you can be everyone is understanding. And concrete details, especially in storytelling, contribute to credibility.

Credibility – sometimes this comes from authority, and sometimes from anti-authority, like a lifelong smoker telling her story of getting emphysema in her 20s. Some of the most powerful credibility comes from the audience, as they experience and interact with the idea.

Emotion – Involving people at an emotional rather than an intellectual or rational level increases memorability. That’s why international relief charities ask you to adopt a particular child instead of giving to a big pool.

Storytelling – Instead of reams of statistics, boil the essence of the idea into a story. Or better yet, be on the lookout for a story that makes the point. That’s what happened when a Subway manager noticed Jared’s weight loss.
I hope this review encourages you to check out Made to Stick for yourself. As the authors’ web site says:

Made to Stick is a book that will transform the way you communicate ideas. It’s a fast-paced tour of idea success stories (and failures)—the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who drank a glass of bacteria to prove a point about stomach ulcers; the charities who make use of the Mother Teresa Effect; the elementary-school teacher’s simulation that actually prevented prejudice . Provocative, eye-opening, and funny, Made to Stick shows us the principles of successful ideas at work—and how we can apply these rules to making our own messages “stick.”

Check out the Made to Stick blog, too. It has an interesting post relating to medical school teaching that demonstrates how presentations can be tailored to be more sticky.

YouTube Copyright Law Video

If you don’t understand Copyright law, one way to learn about it is on Wikipedia. But a better way to have the concept “stick” is through this excellent YouTube video (thanks for pointing it out, Dennis)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJn_jC4FNDo]

Disney is one of the most aggessive defenders of copyright; in this video Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University shows that copyright isn’t a blanket protection, but that there is a space for fair use.

Technorati: YouTube, Copyright, Fair Use, Disney

“Cheers” for Medical News

Imagine a medical news community where journalists aren’t bombarded with irrelevant story pitches. Where they don’t receive the dreaded “Did you get my email?” phone follow-ups from PR practitioners. Where journalists have quick and easy access to sources they trust. Where public information officers and PR staff understand each other’s needs and interests, and come together in a common space of mutual respect. “Where everybody knows your name…”
“People say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one…”

Well, I am the only one right now, but I’m dreaming that might change. In an earlier post, I mentioned that I had created a new group in Facebook for Health & Medical Journalists and PIOs. But having listened to part of Made to Stick (highly recommended; my review is forthcoming), I was compelled to change the group’s name to: “Cheers” for Medical News.

Journalists have the Association of Health Care Journalists. PIOs have PIONet through Newswise. These are fine organizations, but they have their limits. Though journalists can be collegial, they naturally compete with each other to get the story first. Likewise PIOs and PR practitioners have an interest in pitching their stories and getting their subject experts featured.

“Cheers” could be the place where individuals from both groups come together to meet. Sometimes it would be a public conversation, much as the ones Norm and Cliff had when they left their bean-counting duties and their appointed postal rounds. Other times journalists working on enterprise stories, and PIOs “pitching” ideas, would be like the countless, nameless others on the show having private conversations at the side tables and in the anteroom.

Journalists are exploring how they can use Facebook, and a group called “Journalists and Facebook” has grown to over 900 members in about a week. Here’s the story behind it. With 31 million members, and growing 1.2 million per week, Facebook has both critical mass and privacy flexibility that could make it a Commons for medical news.

I believe the “Cheers” for Medical News group in Facebook could bridge the gap between news media and public relations by creating a community of mutual respect and trust.To join the group, a person would need to be approved by an administrator, either as a medical center PIO or a journalist. ( I’m looking for other administrators to help approve new members, by the way.)

When a big story is breaking, a discussion of angles and sources could take place out in the open on the discussion board, “around the bar” in the Cheers metaphor. Everyone could chime in. If a reporter is enterprising a story, on the other hand, she might send a private message to PIOs at certain institutions asking for sources.

Likewise, a PIO with an embargoed news release could send a notification and link to the release through Facebook (although EurekAlert works fine for this right now), or could pitch an exclusive to a particular producer or reporter through a Facebook message.

Messages would come by email. If you think someone is spamming you with irrelevant pitches, you could block his messages through your Facebook privacy settings. People who continually behave badly could be banished from the group. The result is you could reclaim the value of email; you would know the messages you get through your Facebook groups and friends would be worthwhile.

Journalists are legitimately frustrated that they are overwhelmed with story pitches from people who don’t take the time to know their beats or what kinds of stories interest them.

Media list companies exist to build distribution and pitching lists for news releases, and often hype their services with phrases like, “We’ll show you how to score big coverage…” as if media relations was some kind of predatory dating game, and we were a bunch of Sam Malones.

Through the web 2.0 service Facebook, people in the health and medical news community can set a higher standard. PIOs and journalists need each other and have mutual interests that could be achieved by coming together in one place:

Journalists who are part of the Cheers commons could also establish their own secret Facebook groups, and could send source queries just to those individuals, quickly and easily. By putting their beats, interests and how they prefer to receive story pitches in their Facebook profiles, they would get more worthwhile story ideas from PIOs.
Academic centers could put their news release distribution lists in Facebook, in a similar secret list. They could even distribute embargoed releases this way, and would be sure that only credentialed journalists would have access. If someone broke an embargo, they could be removed from the list. And unlike PR Newswire and other services, distribution through Facebook would be free. It’s Wikinomics at work.

ProfNet is a good service that enables journalists to cast a wide net, to send out an All Points Bulletin in the search for sources. Facebook would be a way to create more helpful, meaningful relationships.

I know about meaningful relationships formed through Facebook; my daughter met her husband there. They were both in college in Wisconsin, and he was searching for people with an interest in Theology. They met in December 2005, and I walked Rachel down the aisle on December 30, 2006.

We’re not talking anything that meaningful with our version of Cheers. But if there’s interest, we could create a digital health journalism “watering hole,” which would, I think, be a worthwhile thing.

What do you think?

Technorati: Health, Journalism, Medical, Facebook, PIO, PR, Cheers, Association of Health Care Journalists