Marlow and Fran Cowan, the elderly couple from Ankeny, Iowa whose piano duet at Mayo Clinic has gone “viral” in the last year (to the tune of more than 6.6 million views to date on YouTube), were the subjects last night of an extended feature on KARE TV in Minneapolis-St. Paul:
The Minneapolis Star Tribune also has a nice article about the Cowans in this morning’s edition.
I had the wonderful opportunity yesterday to help arrange a return visit concert for Marlow and Fran Cowan to the Landow Atrium in the Gonda building on our Mayo Clinic campus in Rochester. You likely remember them as the couple whose piano duet became a YouTube sensation last year, and led to their appearance on ABC’s Good Morning America.
Below is a playlist from our Mayo Clinic YouTube channel, which concludes with their reprise of the number that led to world-wide attention for this couple. He just turned 91 last week, and she’ll be 85 in July. We should all be so spunky, at whatever age we are.
Last week, I got a direct-message tweet from Amber Smith (@AmberSmith), a reporter from Syracuse, NY. I had met Amber previously (because of Twitter) and we have interacted via Twitter, and she was tweeting because she had seen some chatter about one of our Mayo Clinic videos being among the most-tweeted videos on Twitter. It’s about continuous chest compressions, a kind of CPR that doesn’t involve mouth-to-mouth.
This story is another example of both Thesis 9 and Thesis 33. The original video was produced as part of our Mayo Clinic Medical Edge news program for television stations, and the story ran in 2008. Now, because of the power of social media, it has gone viral, which has led to more mainstream news coverage, which will undoubtedly increase the YouTube traffic. And as a result, more people who are untrained in mouth-to-mouth CPR will be aware of the continuous chest compressions alternative.
I hope you will take a couple of minutes to watch the video above, and also to read Amber’s story. Then I hope you will share this post (or the video) with your friends via email, or Facebook, or Twitter, or however you like to spread the word.
I met with a group today interested in seeing how we could use social media tools for Continuing Medical Education (CME), which is now called Continuous Professional Development. Someone asked what is being done at other centers, so as a demo of the power of social media, I said I would use social tools to ask the crowd for some answers and examples.
An interview featuring one of my Mayo Clinic colleagues was posted recently on Ragan.com. Linda Donlin was interviewed as part of the health care social media summit we hosted with Ragan in Arizona. Here’s the video:
I thought you’d enjoy hearing from one of my colleagues at Mayo whose job is different from mine, but who is actively embracing social media tools for communication with our employees.
Here’s a post I did at the time about the “In the Loop” publication, including an example.
This emphasizes that social media tools are powerful, and can be adapted to your communication needs. They also help you go beyond “audiences” to “communities” by enabling those you’re reaching to provide feedback to you and share with others.