I had the wonderful opportunity yesterday to help arrange a return visit concert for Marlow and Fran Cowan to the Landow Atrium in the Gonda building on our Mayo Clinic campus in Rochester. You likely remember them as the couple whose piano duet became a YouTube sensation last year, and led to their appearance on ABC’s Good Morning America.
Below is a playlist from our Mayo Clinic YouTube channel, which concludes with their reprise of the number that led to world-wide attention for this couple. He just turned 91 last week, and she’ll be 85 in July. We should all be so spunky, at whatever age we are.
Last week, I got a direct-message tweet from Amber Smith (@AmberSmith), a reporter from Syracuse, NY. I had met Amber previously (because of Twitter) and we have interacted via Twitter, and she was tweeting because she had seen some chatter about one of our Mayo Clinic videos being among the most-tweeted videos on Twitter. It’s about continuous chest compressions, a kind of CPR that doesn’t involve mouth-to-mouth.
This story is another example of both Thesis 9 and Thesis 33. The original video was produced as part of our Mayo Clinic Medical Edge news program for television stations, and the story ran in 2008. Now, because of the power of social media, it has gone viral, which has led to more mainstream news coverage, which will undoubtedly increase the YouTube traffic. And as a result, more people who are untrained in mouth-to-mouth CPR will be aware of the continuous chest compressions alternative.
I hope you will take a couple of minutes to watch the video above, and also to read Amber’s story. Then I hope you will share this post (or the video) with your friends via email, or Facebook, or Twitter, or however you like to spread the word.
…or at least one life. After the presentation I did Thursday in Minneapolis for Aging Services of Minnesota, Kris Glaros Hanson came up to me and said that my presentation to the group last September had significantly changed her career plans. I asked if she’d be willing to tell about it on camera, so here is her story:
I look forward to seeing how Kris puts her SMUG training to work on the site she will be launching, theseniorconnections.com.
If you’d like to share your SMUG experience, either your thoughts about one of my presentations or the online curriculum, please do so in the comments below. If you’d like to write a recommendation for my on LinkedIn instead, that would be great too. Here is my public profile.
And of course I welcome your constructive suggestions for improvement, too.
I had a fun opportunity to be interviewed earlier this week as part of this story that ran on KTTC TV in Rochester Thursday night:
I also kind of broke my general rule about not initiating friend requests with females under 30 because Lauren Hardie, the reporter, mentioned SMUG in the story, and that she had some additional video of the interview with me on her Facebook page. So if you want to see that snippet, go see Lauren’s videos.
I have the delightful opportunity this morning to present on social media for the Marketing and Communications Conference for Minnesota State Colleges and Universities. I’m even going to get to meet a real-life Chancellor, James McCormick. I’m thinking I might ask what it would take for me to get SMUG accredited, but a more realistic goal would be to avoid have Chancellor McCormick (or one of his colleagues) tell me it’s OK to still use the title Chancellor for my office in this tongue-in-cheek university.
I think we’ll have a lot of fun with this, and hope to post some video later from the event.
Meanwhile, I think it’s pretty exciting that they have a Twitter hashtag established for the conference: #madmn. Please feel free to follow a long and chime in. I’ll be getting started about 9:15 a.m. CST, just after the real chancellor gets done with his greeting.