Speaking Engagements

I’ll be out on the road quite a bit in the next month, spreading the word about social media tools and their application in health care, and sharing our Mayo Clinic experience and perspective. If you’d like to participate in any of these conferences, I’m sure the organizers can get you details on how to join.

I look forward to getting to meet a lot of folks in real life after only having interacted via Twitter.  If I’m going to be in your area, I hope we can Tweetup!

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):

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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.

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Wisconsin AAF Presentations

I have the pleasure today of doing presentations in Green Bay and Madison, Wisconsin for local chapters of the American Advertising Federation. Here are my slides for the breakfast presentation in Green Bay and the noon luncheon in Madison. You can follow (or contribute to) the Twitter discussion at #AAFWI.

American Advertising Federation Presentations

View more presentations from Lee Aase.

I welcome your comments and questions. And if you’d like to get more in-depth learning about social media, see the Enroll Now page.

Near the end of the road…

After an intense travel schedule in the last couple of weeks that took me from Minnesota to Sun Valley, Idaho to Salt Lake City to Phoenix/Scottsdale to Minnesota to Milwaukee, Wisconsin to the Netherlands to London to Minneapolis to St. Louis and back to Minneapolis, I’m in Chicago’s O’Hare airport waiting for a flight to Green Bay, Wisconsin. Tomorrow I will be in Green Bay and Madison for breakfast and lunch presentations on social media.

I look forward to sharing some stories from the journey during the coming week. It’s an exciting time to be involved in social media, particularly in health care.

Boosting Morale of the Morale Boosters

That’s my job today as I make a presentation to the annual meeting of the Employee Services Management Association. The meeting theme is The Employee Morale Conference: Program Ideas to Perk Up Every Employee’s Personality. My presentation is entitled, “Social Networking Applications and Today’s Workforce.”

I hope to encourage, or maybe even inspire, these employee morale boosters to actively adopt social networking tools within their organizations to further engage and inspire their employees. The ESM site lists the top 10 types of employee services programs; social media tools go to the heart of why companies have employee services programs in the first place, and also can be use to enhance (or even completely manage) the basic programs these HR professionals offer.

This presentation has some of the same stories I customarily tell, but it’s tailored for the employee services community, with additional focus on employee engagement options and some of our Mayo Clinic programs that involve employee communications.

Social Networking Applications and Today’s Workforce

View more presentations from Lee Aase.

I welcome your feedback and questions, or if you have ideas to share with these HR professionals on how they can use social media tools to do their work more effectively, I’m sure they would appreciate hearing those, too.