Mayo Clinic | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Mayo Clinic Social Media Update

I’m making a several presentations over the next week, and delivering variations of what you see embedded below. I prefer to not distribute the slides in advance as handouts, so that people aren’t distracted and reading ahead, and so we can all literally be on the same page as we have a conversation.

I also don’t want to have people thinking they need to feverishly take notes, so it’s helpful to be able to tell people just to sit back, relax and discuss, knowing that they can go back and refer to the slides online later.

My presentations vary somewhat by audience, depending on whether I need to introduce the social media tools (and how much time I have been allotted), so what you see below is the “full meal deal.”

Mayo Clinic Social Media Update

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Here are links to some of the Mayo Clinic social media sites I will be mentioning. I invite you to check them out:

I welcome any questions or comments from any of the presentations here, or feel free to tweet them to me (@LeeAase). The great thing about having that conversation in public is that it’s not just one-on-one; on a blog (or on the really small blog called Twitter) others can learn from the discussion, too. But even more importantly, they can contribute their thoughts…so we’re all richer for having brought in diverse experiences and perspectives.

This also is helpful so I can take a snapshot of where we are in our implementation of social media at Mayo Clinic as of September, 2009.

The Value of Twitter, Part I: Recommendation Engine

In honor of Shel Israel’s new book, Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods, which is coming out Thursday and in which I understand I am mentioned, I’m planning to do a few posts over the next several days on the practical value of Twitter for businesses.

I’m really looking forward to seeing the book. At the time I did my email interview with Shel we had not yet become officially active with our @mayoclinic Twitter account, and one of the points I made was that even without lots of interaction it’s smart for organizations to at least claim their “brand” name and automatically tweet with an RSS feed. From a purely defensive posture, it’s wise to have claimed your brand’s name on an increasingly popular social networking site like Twitter, to prevent someone else unrelated to your organization from “brandjacking” you. Our @mayoclinic Twitter activity has changed a lot in the last six months or so, and I hope at least some of that was captured in Twitterville. If not, that’s another reason for me to do a series outlining my thinking about Twitter today, and what I see as its main values for business in general and health care in particular.

On a related note, @PhilBaumann challenged @EdBennett and me yesterday to “sell” the value of Twitter for health care in 140 characters or less. Here was my response:

That’s as good a summary as I can do within a Tweet, and in this series of posts I plan to expand on those themes. But for the fuller exploration, I’m confident Shel’s book will be excellent.

So here’s my first contribution:

Lots of people don’t “get” Twitter, and the question posed by its interface: “What are you doing?” is responsible for much of the mainstream misunderstanding. Just as Second Life skeptics routinely quip, “But I don’t even have time for my first life!” there is a similarly common (and unimaginative) phrase used dismissively of Twitter: “Who CARES what I’m having for breakfast?!”

I sure don’t. Care about your breakfast choices, that is. But if you’re reading an interesting article online as you slurp your coffee, it may be really helpful to me if you “tweet” the link so I can read the article as I savor my gluten-free Corn Chex.

That’s one of the significant values of Twitter: it enables you to find others with similar interests, and when they see (and tweet about) an online news story that interests them, there’s a good chance you’ll think it’s worthwhile, too.

So while Google’s search engine is great when you’re looking for particular information that you know must be out there somewhere, one of Twitter’s values is that it helps you get notified about things for which you wouldn’t think to search.

So tonight, for example, I saw this tweet from @BradMays:

I clicked the link and it took me to this story that shows the viewership of the online video site Hulu as compared with the number of viewers for various cable TV companies.

I would never have thought to search for this information, but it’s interesting to me as someone who follows media trends, particularly comparing more traditional delivery channels like cable vs. Web sites.

And because @BradMays is among those I’m following on Twitter, I came across this information and have marked it for future reference. It might well show up in a presentation in the coming months. In essence, he served as an unpaid scout/adviser, helping me find interesting material on the Web.

But I still have no idea what he had for breakfast.

Creativity and the MacGyver Mindset

Here’s an interesting story from our Mayo Clinic Medical Edge TV news feature about the nature of creativity, and how it doesn’t just apply to art and music:

It’s nice to have a Mayo Clinic neurologist validating and outlining more rigorously something I’ve felt intuitively, and that is consistent with what I call “The MacGyver Mindset.” MacGyver was extremely creative, finding ways to use what he had on hand to accomplish what he needed to do. (Yes, I realize he was a fictional character, but we can learn lessons from his approach.)

Dr. Caselli breaks down creativity into these core elements, which surprisingly have little to do with what would traditionally considered “creative” professions:

Motivation
Perception
Execution
Temperament, and
Social Context

What I’m trying to do in SMUG is help create a social context in which mid-career professionals can perceive the value of using social media tools professionally, can be motivated to try and get training to help them execute. Not sure whether we can do anything about temperament, but hopefully we can influence the rest.

Creativity is extremely important. Every business that starts involves creativity: seeing a situation that is not what you want it to be, and figuring out how to get to the desired end. Likewise, a politician who (in the words of Bobby Kennedy) says “I dream of things that never where and ask ‘Why not?'” is being creative in imagining a desired future state.

How is SMUG helping you think — and act — more creatively?

LifeScience Alley Presentation

This morning I have the opportunity to present at a LifeScience Alley educational forum. The title of the presentation is Leveraging Social Media to Reach Customers and Improve Organizational Effectiveness: The Mayo Clinic Perspective.

Here are my slides:

LifeScience Alley Mayo Clinic Presentation

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I’m looking forward to this presentation and the ensuing discussion, and hope the conversation will continue here.