Public Affairs Council Webinar

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.

“What are we missing?”

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.

Reshape09

Here is the presentation I am offering at the Reshape09 summit in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Note to self: Next time you travel internationally and take a brief afternoon nap and therefore set you iPhone alarm to wake you in time for dinner, be sure when you reset the alarm for the next day that you change the designation from “p.m.” to “a.m.”

I overslept by about two hours this morning, but thankfully I had planned to get up four hours before my presentation, and thanks to Cisco (the guy, not the company) for the timely wake-up call.

Reshape09

View more documents from Lee Aase.

Putting the “Global” in SMUG

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.