That’s My Boy!

Actually, that’s not my boy. He’s Inkswamp‘s. But my youngest son, John (pictured below) did something this week that made me look for a photo in Flickr representing a boy looking up to and emulating his dad.

My Little Blogger
My Little Blogger

John Aase, as long-time SMUG students know, has a blog. He’s 9. On Monday, he told me, “Daddy, I’m going to write a page on my blog.” “A page?” I asked him. “Don’t you mean a post?” “No Daddy, I’m going to write a page.”

John had previously written this page about the bird’s nest on our porch. His posts and pages tend to be much more concise than mine.

I have to say his latest page just completely melts my heart. Not the subject matter, but the thought that he wants to follow in Dad’s didactic footsteps.

I know most SMUGgles won’t be familiar with Pokemon, but John is quite an expert. So if you wouldn’t mind going to his P.G.A. page and leaving a question to prime his pump, you would be providing great encouragement to a blogger who’s just getting started.

Maybe some of the younger SMUGgles who have gone through a childhood Pokemon stage would know better questions to ask. For others, you could ask simple questions like:

  • How many different kinds of Pokemon are there?
  • Which ones are the most powerful?
  • What’s your favorite one?
  • How do you play Pokemon?

You get the picture.

Beside setting John off on a writing spree, which would be good for his learning about computers and blogging, he would really get a kick out of seeing his daily page views spike.

So if you wouldn’t mind taking a minute to encourage John, I would greatly appreciate it.

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Social Media 107: Introduction to Flickr

Jeff Jarvis advises media companies wanting to survive to “focus on what you do best, and link to the rest,” which is why he thinks 15,000 journalists covering the major-party national conventions is a waste.

I’m taking his advice in the SMUG curriculum, and taking advantage of some recent posts from Scott Meis, a SMUGgle from Chicago. Read these posts and you’ll have a solid introduction to Flickr.

Flickr is essentially YouTube for photos, although as Scott points out, you can upload video to Flickr if you have a Pro account.

If you mainly want to share photos only with your friends, Facebook is your best choice. That’s why, according to comScore, it’s the #1 photo-sharing site on the Web.

But if you want your photos to be available to anyone, Flickr is a great site for you.

And as usual for these Core Courses in SMUG, Lee LeFever has a helpful introductory video, Online Photo Sharing in Plain English.

Assignments:

  1. Create a personal Flickr account.
  2. Paste the URL of your Flickr photostream in the comments below. (Scott’s photostream is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/bottspot/.


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Mayo Clinic Social Media Update

As I Tweeted earlier today, I had an opportunity this morning to provide an overview of Mayo Clinic’s social media activities to another division within our department. One of the things I enjoy about doing presentations like this is that as I update previous versions I can see where we’ve made progress in the intervening time.

Coincidentally, a Mayo Clinic colleague — Nancy Jensen — who leads our Public Affairs division in Florida and also is extensively involved in cancer communications nationally, asked me to provide an overview of what Mayo is doing in social media for a discussion board on which she is a member. It’s a group of cancer communications contacts for academic medical centers. She also thought it would be good for them to get a taste of SMUG and some hands-on social media education, so I decided it’s time for another update here.

Since my last Mayo Clinic social media progress report in May (which I would encourage you to check out for background), we have three significant developments:

  1. Our Mayo Clinic YouTube channel has been significantly upgraded. We’ve been able to get the look and feel customized to closely match mayoclinic.org, our main Web site for patients, and we’ve added playlists to group some of the similar videos and highlight them. Currently we have featured our Mayo Clinic Medical Edge videos and the video testimonials and personal stories we shot at the Transplant Games with the Flip.
  2. We’ve started a Mayo Clinic News Blog. We still have some refinement to do, but it serves at least two good purposes. First, it enables us to provide video and audio resources to journalists on a password-protected, pre-embargo basis, which should help us get more news coverage. Second, when the news embargoes lift, we take off the password protection and make those same resources available to interested members of the general public. And the videos we put there can discuss the research stories in much greater detail than would get into any mainstream media news story, which is a great service to potential patients.
  3. Finally, in just the last two weeks (coinciding with the Transplant Games), we established a Mayo Clinic Flickr account. The first application was to make photos available to the participants who visited our booth, but we’ve also created sets for photos of our campuses, and it seems the next move might be to put photos there that accompany our news releases.

Nancy also mentioned that it would be good for me to discuss some things a smaller communications unit, perhaps with three or fewer members, could do. It’s easy for people to look at the resources Mayo Clinic has, and think that these tools are just for the bigger players.

That would be a mistake; the truth is just the opposite. Here’s why.

Social media tools are a great democratizing force. They enable anyone to create content and distribute it worldwide (and also get feedback from users.) Kids can do this in their basements or dorm rooms; as communications professionals we certainly are capable of learning social media.

On a related note, the cost of participating in social media is extremely low. Through wordpress.com, you can get a blog with customized look and feel, mapped to a domain or subdomain of your choosing, and with the ability to deliver your podcasts, for $45 to $55 a year. A Flickr account with unlimited bandwidth and storage costs $25 a year. A Facebook page is free, and if you work for a non-profit, so is a YouTube channel. You may need to pay someone to do the blog and YouTube customization if you don’t have that in-house capability, but if you have a corporate Web site those design elements would be fairly easy to match. And you can get a Flip video camera, with tripod, for less than $200. A digital still camera also can be had for that price or less, and you already have computers capable of using these tools.

You can learn more about how to use these tools for free. That’s what Social Media University, Global is all about. You can enroll here and then go through step-by-step, hands-on courses in general social media, blogging, podcasting, Facebook and other topics. All it takes is your time.

In the end, that’s the real potential cost for social media: it takes some people and a commitment to be involved. But I would submit that these tools provide leverage for you to accomplish your other work, and that by using them you will get better results in less time. And they also provide an opportunity for you to leverage the involvement of others in your organization, outside of your public affairs or communications group.

Tell your story! How are you using social media?

In the comments below, please share your stories and examples of how you’re using social media in your organization. I’d like to see them, and I know Nancy’s fellow cancer communicators would enjoy them as well.

Transplant Games 2008 Highlights

The games haven’t even started yet; today was just the first half-day of registration and setting up our Mayo Clinic booth.

I heard some great stories, both from organ recipients and from donor families (as well as some from families in which one member had donated to another) and we uploaded them to the Mayo Clinic YouTube channel.

Here’s one that was especially touching for me, because it involved a Dad (about my age, or maybe a bit younger) with five kids (I have six), none of whom had been born when he received his donated kidney.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97nMz3MdaHo]

Here’s a photo taken on the medal stand in the Mayo Clinic booth, of Katie Schnell and her father, who was her kidney donor.

Picture 051

You also can listen to Kati tell her story on YouTube.

There were lots of other moving and inspirational stories, and you can see them by clicking here (more will be uploaded soon) or by searching for transplantgames08 on YouTube. More videos will be shot and uploaded tomorrow, and I hope others who are staying for the entire games will shoot videos, and upload photos, and write blog posts giving them the transplantgames08 tag, so we can see and hear more about the difference transplant can make.

Mayo Clinic Social Media Progress Report

After presenting at a Web 2.0 Summit last week in Oakland, CA, I got to thinking it would be good to do an update on where we are with Mayo Clinic‘s engagement in social media. We’ve made a lot of progress in the last three years from a completely “old media” focus to a more balanced approach, continually increasing our attention to what Charlene Li calls “the Groundswell.” And hopefully when I do another update in a few months, I’ll be able to look back on many more exciting developments.

Here’s a list of where we are as of today in our social media exploration and adoption. For those areas in which I can pinpoint a starting date, I’ll do so.

Care Pages – Mayo Clinic provides this service for hospitalized patients, enabling them to provide updates to family and friends on a secure Web page. This helps keep loved ones informed without the undue burden of repeating information by cell phone for each individual, and it enables concerned friends and family to send greetings to the patient. We’ve had this service for a few years, and I know many patients appreciate how it makes staying in touch while hospitalized easier.

Podcasts – Mayo Clinic’s first podcast was based on our Medical Edge radio program, and launched in Sept. 2005 through what was then the iTunes Music Store. This gave us our first taste of the potential interest in and power of “new media.” In January 2007 we began offering video podcasts of Mayo Clinic Medical Edge television segments, and in July 2007 followed with extended podcasts in several categories: Men’s Health, Women’s Health, Children’s Health, Heart, Cancer and Bones & Muscles. In April 2008, we moved these podcasts to podcasts.mayoclinic.org, so users could find and listen to individual segments of interest, instead of subscribing to a particular feed.

RSS/Web Feeds – Also in Sept. 2005, we began offering really simple syndication (RSS), a.k.a. Web Feeds. You can sign up for Mayo Clinic News from all three campuses (or can choose to receive only Arizona, Florida or Minnesota news), health information news, science news or business-related news.

Syndicated Video – Mayo Clinic began using Voxant in 2007 to make its Medical Edge video segments available for syndication to other Web sites. Instead of making people go to our mayoclinic.org site to view the videos, we wanted to put them where people are going, such as in on-line news sites. The Mayo Clinic YouTube channel was started just last week; expect to see the look improve significantly yet this month. Here’s our latest addition, a video tour of the new Mayo Clinic Hospital in Jacksonville, Fla.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UT6vmldLRw]

Facebook – with Mayo Medical School and several other health-related science schools (and with our mayo.edu e-mail addresses), Mayo has had people in Facebook for a long time. In the last six months we’ve seen the number of Mayo participants in Facebook more than double, to over 2,100. When “fan” pages became available to organizations and brands in November 2007, we established one immediately (partly because of what you see when you go to myspace.com/mayoclinic.) We revised and re-categorized the official Mayo Clinic Facebook page in January 2008, and have 1,053 fans as of this writing. In another effort to prevent domain name “squatting,” we also have established accounts in Twitter (twitter.com/mayoclinic) and Flickr.

Finally, we’ve begun sponsoring some official blogs. The first was in conjunction with an event, a symposium on innovation in health care in November 2007. It was hosted on wordpress.com and customized somewhat, but we didn’t map to a mayoclinic.org subdomain. We followed that in March 2008 with our Health Policy blog, our podcast blog and a blog about diversity in education at Mayo. These have all started in the last two months, and we hope and expect to continue developing new blogs.

Meanwhile, our colleagues at our sister site, MayoClinic.com, which is Mayo Clinic’s consumer health information site, have been starting blogs and a podcast, too. The blogs cover topics like Alzheimers’ Disease, Nutrition, Stress, Pregnancy and Depression.

Mayo Clinic is one of the United States’ best places to work (Fortune magazine has had us in its top 100 for the last five years.) I feel exceptionally blessed to be able to work for an organization like Mayo, working with such interesting subject matter during this exciting time of innovation and change in the media world.