Tag: Lee Aase

28 Minutes with the Chancellor

One of the points I regularly make in discussing social media tools is the opportunity they provide for providing in-depth information to people who have a particular interest. The example I most frequently cite is this 10-minute video on myelofibrosis, which has been viewed more than 5,200 times on our Mayo Clinic YouTube channel.

It doesn’t matter that Dr. Mesa’s video lacks mass appeal; it provides important information for patients with myelofibrosis and for their families, giving them just what they need, and what they are interested in seeing because they have strong personal motivation to learn about this type of blood cancer.

What you see embedded below is another example of a video with limited mass appeal. Shawn Riley (@rilescat), who blogs at HealthTechnica, hosts a regular TV talk show called Health Connections on our local Austin, MN PBS affiliate, KSMQ. When we announced our new Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, the producer of Health Connections asked if I would come on the program to talk with Shawn about social media in heath care, and about our new center. This interview was broadcast locally last Tuesday, and now the 27:47 program is available (thanks to viewers like you) on YouTube.

I don’t expect this video to get anything near the traffic of Dr. Mesa’s discussion of myelofibrosis. But if you’re among the global niche those interested in applying social media in health care, you may find it helpful.

On World Peace, Labor Day and Blocking Facebook

I’m as big an advocate of social media as you’re likely to meet. Still, I think Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker went a bit overboard in yesterday’s offering, Facebook and social media offer the potential of peace:

Not to be a Pollyanna, but it is striking to realize that peace becomes plausible when barriers to communication are eliminated. More than 500 million people use Facebook alone. Of those, 70 percent are outside the United States. MySpace has 122 million monthly active users, and Twitter reports 145 million registered users.

I actually think Ms. Parker does have a bit of the Pollyanna principle running through her argument. And it’s kind of nice for me to have people like her occupying the “extreme optimism” end of the social media spectrum. It makes me seem more moderate. I agree that building more friendship connections is helpful, but I’m not anticipating a Nobel Peace Prize for Mark Zuckerberg.

While I don’t see social media ending the Middle East conflict, I do see these tools playing a huge role in connecting and strengthening relationships within organizations and among those with common interests.

That leads me to one of Parker’s paragraphs that I thought was particularly illuminating, as it relates to the practice of many companies in blocking access to social media sites from their corporate networks:

Obviously, some countries don’t like these media for the very reasons we do. People talk. Facebook is blocked in Syria and China and until recently was also blocked in Iran, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Where freedom flourishes, so do open channels of communication.

As we celebrate Labor Day in the United States, maybe opening access to social media sites at work wouldn’t rank among the all-time achievements for employee-friendly workplaces. It probably won’t usher in a Millennium of peace, either.

But at least it would make your company more open than China, Syria and Iran.

Does your company block access to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube at work?

Joyous Occasions

This is a big week for the Aase clan, as my son Jacob is getting married today. I will follow up with a post with some more wedding-related photos, but here are some highlights from the events leading up to the big day.

The wedding provided a reason for my daughter Rachel, her husband Kyle and our two grandchildren, Evelyn and Juday, to make the trip to southern Minnesota from western Michigan. It also happened to be right at the time of Evelyn’s second birthday, so we had a family party for her on Wednesday night at our home. Here are some highlight photos (click to enlarge):

Evelyn
Judah
The Borg Family

Here’s the big finish, in which her father, Kyle, helped ensure that as of this moment she has NO boyfriends:

Last night we had the rehearsal for Jacob’s wedding to Alexi Iler at the church in La Crosse, WI. Jacob’s favorite food is steak, so that was our main course, and I got to grill 13 boxes of No-Name steaks:

Grilling 52 Steaks

More highlights coming soon.

More Good Reasons to Not Protect Your Tweets

For the background on the slide deck below, check out Twitter 135: 10 Reasons to NOT Protect Your Tweets.

After our interaction described above, which brought Lisa Fields (@PracticalWisdom) to the point of open tweeting, she was inspired to use her presentation design skills to turn my blog post into a set of slides, which I have embedded here:

Slideshare lee aase 10 reasons not to protect your tweets

View more presentations from Lisa Fields.

Lisa has a great gift for finding the right photo or illustration to make a point. For fuller amplification of the slides, click this link to open Twitter 135 in a new window and read along as you advance through the slide show.

This leads me to my eleventh reason why you shouldn’t protect your tweets. If Lisa still was using tweet protection, you wouldn’t be able to see this tweet of hers from earlier today:

Now wouldn’t it be a tragedy if sentiment like that had been kept under wraps?