Tag: Lee Aase

FIR Interview on Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media

I had an opportunity on Wednesday to record a conversation with Shel Holtz, co-host of For Immediate Release, for one of the podcast series he produces with Neville Hobson. This one, Lee Aase on Mayo Clinic’s Center for Social Media, is part of the FIR Interview series.

I believe I met Shel seven or eight years ago, and in the last four years we’ve gotten to know each other well through social media and in speaking together at conferences. In fact, he’s going to be one of the speakers at our Mayo Clinic/Ragan Communications Social Media Summit in Jacksonville in September.

In our FIR conversation we go into a lot of the detail about our new Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, so for those interested in more background on what we’re envisioning for its role, and how it came to be, I think it will be helpful.

Listen here.

Let me know what you think!

What a difference in four years!

It was four years ago today that I started a blog called “Lines from Lee” with this post.

So much has happened in that time, and I have documented the progress with highlights posts on the first, second and third birthdays of my blog.

So this is my fourth in an annual series related to how blogging and involvement in social media has changed my life. I do more of a personal year-in-review sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas, which is the time when I thank God for his many blessings to me and our family (such as our two grandchildren, and my son getting married next month.) More reflections on those in December.

The last year has been so crazy, it’s hard to know where to begin in recounting it.

Trips to the Netherlands (with a brief stop in London) and Paris, my first ventures outside North America, are a good place to start. But visits for presentations on social media to Miami, Indianapolis (twice), Omaha, Washington DC (twice), Idaho, Arizona, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Green Bay, Madison, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, New York (thrice), Pittsburgh, Boca Raton, San Francisco, Orlando, Boston, Cooperstown, San Diego, North Carolina, Des Moines and Lake Ozark, Missouri as well as several trips to Chicago and various points within Minnesota have been memorable too. So were the videoconferences to Zurich and Toronto.

I can’t even begin to mention all the great people I’ve gotten to meet, because it would take all day. And since I’m writing this on the bus on the way to work, I have to move it along. Especially with the announcement we made this week of our new Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media. We’ve got lots of work to do as we get this ramped up. As you might imagine, I’m seriously jazzed about it.

When I got back from New York on Wednesday after the announcement of the center, my team at work had a celebration ready, complete with balloons, gluten-free treats and a new sign on my office door (click to enlarge):

(I’m pretty sure our brand standards group isn’t going to let us use that poster officially.)

What a team! I do want to mention them: Joyce Groenke, Dana Sparks, Joel Streed and Laurel Kelly. They’ve been the core group for our syndication and social media team, and they also help tweet on our @MayoClinic account.

And our broader media relations team, led by Karl Oestreich and including Traci Klein, Amy Tieder, Bob Nellis, Rebecca Finseth, Elizabeth Rice, Bryan Anderson, Kevin Punsky, Paul Scotti, and Lynn Closway have all contributed to our social media efforts (particularly YouTube videos related to research news.) It’s hard to know where to stop with this, but Hoyt Finnamore, Cory Pedersen, Linda Donlin, Kathy Barbour, Evelyn Tovar and Julie Janovsky-Mason have done great work with social media on our internal communications team, too, as have our education, research and marketing groups.

The idea has been not to have a huge social media “silo” but to instead get everyone in Public Affairs using these powerful tools to do their regular work. To infuse social media thinking and strategies into everything we do. And with our new Center for Social Media, we aim to provide training and resources to all 56,000 employees at Mayo Clinic while also offering some of those same tools and guidance to other health-related organizations.

Tonight I’m going to have another new experience, as I will be doing a live TV interview on Almanac, the weekly public affairs program produced by Twin Cities Public Television.

In my previous career I frequently accompanied my employers (government officials or political candidates) to the tpt (not sure why they don’t capitalize) studios for their guest appearances. It’s going to be really weird to be the guy sitting between Erik and Cathy for one of the early segments of the program, which airs at 7 p.m on channel 2 in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.

If you live in Minnesota and can get channel 2, I hope you’ll tune in tonight at 7. I hope I don’t look too much like this:

Launching Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media

The posts on SMUG have been sparse for a few weeks, and here’s why: In my “day job” we’ve been on the verge of announcing what I think is an exciting new development, the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media.

Here’s a story about it from KTTC TV in Rochester, which includes an interview with our interim medical director, Victor Montori, M.D.:

As you might imagine, I’m seriously excited that we have gotten to this point. I’ll be writing more about this later, but just wanted to resurface after several days of what may have seemed like summer vacation here at SMUG.

Update 7/30/2010: The KAAL TV story on the launch of the center also was picked up by ABCNews.com. You can see it here:

Feedburner: Dress Up Your Feeds

Chancellor’s Note: This is part of the SMUG beautification project, cleaning out some of the underbrush of content originally published at the “page” level but that needs to be demoted.

This content was first published on October 22, 2006. Since then, Google bought Feedburner. But Feedburner is still a great way to add functionality to the RSS feeds from your blog.

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Thanks to Shel Holtz for his advice on how to incorporate “Digg This” and “Add to Del.icio.us” links/badges into blog posts, using FeedFlare, a free service that is available through Feedburner, another free service.
Feedburner
That’s also where I got the badges for My Yahoo, Google Reader, and others that you see at right. Shel explained that Feedburner adapts and enhances your site’s existing RSS feed and provides great reporting on subscriptions and click-throughs.

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Feedburner is definitely still a service worth exploring.

It’s All Free (Or At Least It Was)

Chancellor’s Note: This is a reposting of the first WordPress Page I created, which was originally published on October 19, 2006. The original title was “It’s All Free (And Mostly Easy)” and it was my first attempt to keep some basic themes foremost on my blog, which was at that time called “Lines from Lee.” As you’ll see below, I had resolved that I wasn’t going to do anything on my blog that required me to spend any money. This page (now demoted to a post) highlights all the things you can do in social media for free.

Over time, that “It’s all free and mostly easy” theme morphed into the school motto for SMUG: Suus Non Ut Difficile, or “It’s Not That Hard.”

I’m going to be cleaning up some of the navigation on SMUG, and demoting some of the other Pages to “Post” status as well. This also will give me a chance to reflect upon things I wrote three to four years ago, and see how my thinking has evolved since then.

And how many things I saw in social media then really haven’t changed. It’s still mainly free. And it’s not that hard.

So…here’s a blast from October 2009:

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With 100 million blogs listed in Technorati, obviously there isn’t too much inertia preventing people from starting blogs, but among public relations professionals I have seen less familiarity with blogs, podcasts, and social media.

This ought not to be.

One reason for the reticence to jump in might be a lack of understanding and a misperception that it’s expensive, difficult or requires extensive IT support. That’s why I’ve decided that on this blog I will only use services that are FREE, such as:

Flickr, for photos:

Lee Aase

YouTube, for video (and audio):

(For the story behind that clip, click here.)

And, of course, WordPress.com is a free blog hosting site.

For social networking, I use Facebook (and you can friend me here.) MySpace is also free.
Many of these services offer paid upgrade packages that let you do more, and maybe you (and I) will want to do that in the future (e.g. to be able to upload more than 20 megs of photos per month). But the point is, you can start right now with a blog and have it up and running in about 90 seconds (and that’s if you take a minute or so to decide what you want for your username or domain name.)

So, I may blog about some services that have a cost, but what I incorporate in my site will all be free.

This is my first time creating a standalone page (outside of the reverse chronology of the blog.) I hope to add some related pages that would highlight other free stuff, and maybe a step-by-step tutorial on how to get started.

If you want to use another free hosting service other than WordPress, that’s fine. Blogger and others probably have some features that differ slightly. But for whatever tutorial I develop, it will be in WordPress, so my examples will be easiest for you to use on that platform. Besides, how much better can you get than free? And if you decide to wait and research which is the best free hosting service, that’s a recipe for procrastination. Just do it.

Also, to prevent inappropriate mixing of business and personal worlds from an email perspective, go get a free email account from Google or Yahoo!

Here’s another post where I have boiled this all down into a 12-step social media program for PR professionals. Follow this plan and you’ll be conversant with key social media tools and trends within a couple of weeks. Not expert, but at least conversant.

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By the way, I’m now up to spending about $80 a year for blog hosting. And the above post was published just six months after Twitter was created, well before it had gotten any kind of critical mass. Just another free (and easy) service that has become much more prominent in the last four years.