Tag: Mayo Clinic

6 Reasons Your Organization Should Get a Twitter Account

Nancy asks:

I’m trying to convince my boss we need to start a twitter account and she’s not convinced. My main argument has been that it would increase our exposure on the web through our links on twitter. Can you help me make a better case?

I saw your slide presentation on slide share on Making the Case for Social Media but it didn’t get to exactly what I need (or I missed it).

And on the slight chance that we do get to start twitter, what can I do to build a following?

Here are my top six reasons why organizations should have a branded Twitter account:

Brand Protection. If you claim your organization’s name on Twitter, others can’t. One headache you don’t want is having someone impersonating your organization on Twitter. Claiming your Twitter handle is a good step, even from a purely defensive perspective.

Scalability. You can have a Twitter account without putting a lot of human resources into it. It’s reasonable at first to use a service that converts the RSS feed of your news releases into tweets, without any additional human involvement. You do have RSS feeds, right? If not, see the Social Media 102 course, and also my third reason.

Serving stakeholders. A non-human Twitter account connected to an RSS feed isn’t ideal, but like RSS it does at least provide a way for people interested in your news to get it in a way that’s convenient for them. And as you become more familiar with Twitter, it can lead to a much better use, Listening and Engagement, which I list as my last reason.

Increased News Coverage. Journalists are increasingly involved in Twitter, and looking to it as a quick way to identify sources and story ideas. Here’s a portion of an email one of my colleagues got in late October from @KimPainter, a columnist with USA Today (click to enlarge):

KimonTwittersource

Kim had seen one of our @MayoClinic tweets connected to our #mayoradio program called Mayo Clinic Medical Edge Weekend. We got her in touch with Dr. Richard Hurt, who was the guest on that program, and here is Kim’s column in USA Today in which he was featured.

It’s Free. Nothing I have mentioned above involves any cash. Your Twitter account is free. Twitterfeed to convert your RSS feed to tweets also is free. But even if you have to manually send tweets about your news, and including a link to your news releases, the time investment can be minimal. It doesn’t involve incremental cash outlays. If you’re like most organizations, you probably pay EurekAlert or PR Newswire or BusinessWire to distribute your news releases. If you are paying for those services, why wouldn’t you take advantage of a free tool like Twitter?

Listening and Engagement. The preceding reasons provide more than enough justification for getting a corporate Twitter account, but engaging stakeholders and listening to them is the best use for Twitter. For that reason, whether your boss approves a corporately branded Twitter account or not, I strongly suggest that you get your own personal Twitter account. Just dive in and start making connections. As you are using Twitter personally, you will see applications that are relevant to your work.

If you have questions about how to get started with Twitter, we have a whole Twitter curriculum here on SMUG to take you through the process. To answer your last question about building a following, see Twitter 103: Following and Being Followed, and Twitter 104: Four Steps to Building Your Personal Twitter Network.

Hospital Twitter Chat List

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Kelley O’Brien (@kelleyob) from North Carolina posed the following question via a tweet this afternoon:

Picture 12

A. I’m not aware of anything like a comprehensive list of hospital Twitter chats. Ed Bennett’s Hospital Social Networking List is a great resource to tell us which hospitals have social media presence, and he even has some great hospital Twitter lists by state, but the list doesn’t include specific projects (such as surgical cases being “tweeted” that have been undertaken by hospitals or healthcare organizations.

But the great thing about social media is that you can build a list pretty quickly by crowdsourcing…via Twitter.

Or at least I think we can. Let’s see!

I’m listing below some of the Twitter chats/events I’ve been involved with through Mayo Clinic, along with some others I’m aware of that others have done.

It’s not even close to exhaustive. But that’s where you come in. If you know of hospitals that have done Twitter events, whether it was related to a surgical procedure, or a communications crisis, or promoting research findings, or whatever other ways you’ve used Twitter (or seen it used) in a hospital setting, please tell about it in the comments below.

Please include the name of the hospital, its Twitter handle, a relevant link to a post, news release or news story describing the effort, and any description you would like to add. Also please indicate which category (listed in bold below) is appropriate. And if you think I’m missing a category that should be added, please tell me that, too.

You also can share your examples via Twitter, using the #HospitalTweets tag. But by adding them in the comments below, they’ll be more permanent (since Twitter doesn’t archive tweets)…and of course, you’re not limited to 140 characters.

I will update this post based on your contributions to create a more comprehensive list.

Let’s see how quickly we can come up with a really good list!

Surgical Case Tweeting

Research Communications

Crisis Communications

Presentations and Training:

  • At @MayoClinic, we have held three Tweetcamps to provide training for staff. Here’s a post that describes Tweetcamp III.
  • When I do presentations, I regularly include a Twitter back-channel, such as this training seminar on social media I did yesterday with local advocacy chapters of American Heart Association. This is a good way for participants to get hands-on experience with Twitter.

Mainstream Media Collaboration

What other examples can you add?

Thesis 2: Social Media Tools Overcome Inertia

Note: This post is part of a series providing fuller discussion for my 35 Social Media Theses. I welcome your feedback and comments to challenge and improve them.

In Thesis 1, I discussed how social media really aren’t completely new, since air was the original social medium. This leads us, however, to what is new:

Thesis 2: Electronic tools merely facilitate broader and more efficient transmission by overcoming inertia and friction.

What these electronic tools like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter do is not different in kind from what has happened with word of mouth since the dawn of civilization.

They just make it a whole lot easier.

People have always talked with friends and family about their experiences, including those with merchants and service providers. From which blacksmith did the best job with horseshoes a century ago to which dentist is best able to prevent pain, a huge portion of our “purchase” decisions have been and remain significantly affected by word-of-mouth.

As I mentioned in Thesis 1, word of mouth from patients and their families has been the top source of information for people who prefer Mayo Clinic, and it’s been that way for more than a century.

Now that word just spreads a lot faster.

So when someone writes on our Mayo Clinic Facebook wall, it’s available for the world to see…

Shannon Swing

…but more importantly, it may show up in her friends’ news feeds.

Social tools just mean that people are sharing with a lot more people, with a lot less effort.

Offline word of mouth is still more prevalent and more powerful than online, even with the new tools. Hearing a friend talk in person about an experience makes a deeper impression. And if a person, let’s call him Bob, is telling his friend Carl about his mysterious illness and his frustration that it hasn’t been diagnosed, if Carl tells him right then, at the point of need, about his good experience and recommends that Bob try Mayo, that’s obviously going to have deeper impact than a wall posting on Facebook.

But social media can have a broader impact. In the example above, Shannon’s wall posting was potentially visible to 300 million Facebook users, and the sharing she did with her Facebook friends was effortless. The act of writing was the act of sharing.

Likewise, when Rhonda King told the story of bringing her son Trevor to Mayo Clinic for a second opinion on the Mayo Clinic YouTube channel:

…It was seen by many more people than she could have spoken with personally. As of this writing, in fact, it’s been viewed more than 4,400 times. And while nothing is as powerful as face-to-face dialogue, I would argue that the impression Brenda made via video is both broad and deep, for those who have taken time to listen to what she had to say.

So while social media really are as old as human speech, as Thesis 1 says, there is something new and exciting about the ease with which messages can spread with social tools.

I say “merely” in Thesis 2 to emphasize the continuity of social tools with offline word-of-mouth. But don’t think that “merely” minimizes their impact. As we will discuss in the next two theses, social media tools are revolutionary in what they are doing to the anomalous mass media era of the 20th century.

Thesis 1: Air was the original social medium

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Note: This post is part of the 35 Social Media Theses series, providing amplification and an opportunity for discussion of one of the theses originally posted on Reformation Day 2009.

SocialMediaEquation

In one sense, as I will argue in Thesis 4, the social media revolution is historic. But the fundamental issue to understand about social media is that, in their essence, they have been around from the beginning of human civilization. Or, as I put it in the first of my 35 Social Media Theses posted 492 years after Luther’s 95:

Social media are as old as human speech, with air being the medium through which sound waves propagated.

I have boiled that down further into the title of this post and in my presentation slides, in keeping with Seth Godin’s advice. I don’t completely agree with his arbitrary limit (never more than six words on a slide), but it’s good general guidance, so I try to comply when I can. And it’s nice to see that he relaxed the hard-and-fast limit with these helpful presentation tips.

For several millennia, “spreading the word” happened mainly by the propagation of sound waves through the mix of Nitrogen, Oxygen, Argon, water vapor, Carbon Dioxide (which is not a pollutant, by the way) and other chemicals that make up our atmosphere.

So whether it was news about a miraculous healer in the countryside of Judea or which merchant in the marketplace had the freshest produce, the way it was disseminated was almost entirely verbal, from one person to another (or a small group at a time), via the medium of air.

In other words, through a social medium.

I work at Mayo Clinic as manager of syndication and social media, but social media have been at work at Mayo long before I was even born. For more than a century, and even after the advent of mass media like TV and radio, word of mouth has been the most important source of information influencing preference for Mayo Clinic. It’s been all about people sharing their experiences as patients (or accompanying family members visiting Mayo) in a social context. In the equation above, S! stands for satisfaction, and as it is multiplied via sound waves through air, it leads to word-of-mouth. Putting it in a formula like that creates the illusion of scientific rigor, but it’s really pretty simple.

In considering the tools (as we will see in Thesis 2) social media are new, but in another sense they are just the way we as humans have always communicated.

YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and blogs are new.

Social media aren’t.