Social Media University, Global (SMUG)
Suus Non Ut Difficile • Home of the SMUGgles
As you can see in the post about Sharing Mayo Clinic being featured on FIR, it’s possible in the self-hosted version of WordPress to provide a Flash player for your mp3 files, which enables your users to listen to the audio track without downloading it and opening in another program, such as iTunes.
What you may not know is that it’s really easy to provide this functionality.
Continue reading “Blogging 369: Adding an Audio Player in WordPress”
Today I’m participating in an audio conference sponsored by Strategic Health Care Communications, entitled Blogging: Communicating and Marketing to Key Audiences. I’m looking forward to it, and to hearing what the other speakers have to say.
I will be talking about our Mayo Clinic experience, including our podcast blog, news blog, the various MayoClinic.com blogs and Sharing Mayo Clinic, which launched last week.
We will have a Q&A period as part of the audioconference, but one of the great benefits of blogging is that the conversation can continue beyond the time bounds of a conference call. So I hope you’ll share your reactions and questions in the comments below.
If you would like to connect and stay around for the long-term conversation on using social media (particularly in health care), “friend” me on Facebook, “follow” me on Twitter, or otherwise Enroll in SMUG.
If you want to chat about this subject matter in Twitter, you also can use the hashtag #healthstratchat. Might be kind of a fun demonstration during the audio conference.
As part of the launch of Sharing Mayo Clinic last week, we published guidelines for Mayo Clinic employees involved in blogging, social networking sites and other social media.
We previously had published the guidelines internally; our publishing them externally was inspired by our colleagues at Intel, a fellow member of the Blog Council, publishing their company’s guidelines, which are really well done.
We hadn’t considered publishing our guidelines externally until we learned that Intel had done it, and after some discussion within the Blog Council about the merits of disclosing these policies. It seems like the right thing to do, in the spirit of transparency.
From our perspective, these guidelines for social media aren’t really new policies; they mainly are applications of existing policies to new communications platforms.
So, if you’re looking to create social media policies or guidelines for your company, these are two examples you could consider.
In my presentation at Blogwell, at which I introduced our new Mayo Clinic blog for patients and employees, Sharing Mayo Clinic, I closed with a Jerry Maguire appeal:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-oHuogx6_Y]
Many of the questions I got after the presentation, and that I get in other contexts from people wanting to implement social media programs at work, began something like: “What about the concerns that …” or “What about the fears that ….”
One of my points in response is that it’s extremely helpful to have external consultants who can help reassure leadership that the social media advocates in the organization aren’t crazy, and that lots of other companies and similar groups are using blogs and social media successfully, and without major problems. Shel Holtz and Andy Sernovitz helped us.
It’s also great to be able to point to examples of success, like Nuts about Southwest.
I hope Sharing Mayo Clinic can be the kind of example you can show your leaders, and say “See! If an established organization like Mayo Clinic is using blogs and Facebook and YouTube, we can too.” I’d love it if our example can help you fight the FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) barrier in your organization.
You can help me with that in two ways: Suggesting Improvements and Spreading the Word.
Suggesting Improvements. In response to the post I did announcing the blog Thursday, SMUGgle Scott Meis (who I got to finally meet for the first time at BlogWell), left a good suggestion in the comments that I have implemented. It tripled the number of RSS and email subscribers we got in the second full day of the blog’s operation, as compared to the first. So, I hope you’ll check out Sharing Mayo Clinic, and I’d really appreciate any further suggestions you could offer on how we can improve.
Spreading the Word. Obviously building traffic to Sharing Mayo Clinic is our responsibility, and we’re communicating with our Mayo Clinic patients and employees about it. But if you would help spread the word by blogging or tweeting about it, or posting it on your Facebook profile or sending it to your friends, that would be fantastic, too.
And hopefully by helping me, I can help you fight the FUD.
Today we take a significant step for Mayo Clinic, launching our “culture” blog for patients and staff, called Sharing Mayo Clinic. I’ll be showing it as part of my presentation at BlogWell.
Sharing Mayo Clinic (at sharing.mayoclinic.org) is in many ways the culmination of a process we’ve had in the works for the last few years, starting with our first podcasts in Sept. 2005. As you can see in the post announcing Sharing Mayo Clinic my colleague Elizabeth Rice published this morning on our Mayo Clinic News Blog, we’ve had some other significant milestones that have helped bring us to this point, such as establishing a Facebook page and a YouTube channel. (You’ll also see some video of me talking about the project.)
But in another sense, Sharing Mayo Clinic is less recent and more timeless; it’s a logical extension of what Mayo Clinic patients have been doing for more than a century. Word of mouth from patients is the number one reason people give as their source of information about Mayo Clinic. Like our Facebook page, this blog is just a new way for patients to share their stories.
Sharing Mayo Clinic also will be a way to feature the work and stories of Mayo employees in various roles throughout the organization, who all contribute to creating the Mayo Clinic experience for patients and their families.
The blog is a work in progress, and we look forward to seeing it grow into a hub for Mayo Clinic’s various social media platforms. We have some ideas for new features and functionality once we’re past the launch stage, but I’d really like to know what you think of it so far, and how you think it could be improved.