Social Media | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Mayo Clinic Social Media Progress Report

After presenting at a Web 2.0 Summit last week in Oakland, CA, I got to thinking it would be good to do an update on where we are with Mayo Clinic‘s engagement in social media. We’ve made a lot of progress in the last three years from a completely “old media” focus to a more balanced approach, continually increasing our attention to what Charlene Li calls “the Groundswell.” And hopefully when I do another update in a few months, I’ll be able to look back on many more exciting developments.

Here’s a list of where we are as of today in our social media exploration and adoption. For those areas in which I can pinpoint a starting date, I’ll do so.

Care Pages – Mayo Clinic provides this service for hospitalized patients, enabling them to provide updates to family and friends on a secure Web page. This helps keep loved ones informed without the undue burden of repeating information by cell phone for each individual, and it enables concerned friends and family to send greetings to the patient. We’ve had this service for a few years, and I know many patients appreciate how it makes staying in touch while hospitalized easier.

Podcasts – Mayo Clinic’s first podcast was based on our Medical Edge radio program, and launched in Sept. 2005 through what was then the iTunes Music Store. This gave us our first taste of the potential interest in and power of “new media.” In January 2007 we began offering video podcasts of Mayo Clinic Medical Edge television segments, and in July 2007 followed with extended podcasts in several categories: Men’s Health, Women’s Health, Children’s Health, Heart, Cancer and Bones & Muscles. In April 2008, we moved these podcasts to podcasts.mayoclinic.org, so users could find and listen to individual segments of interest, instead of subscribing to a particular feed.

RSS/Web Feeds – Also in Sept. 2005, we began offering really simple syndication (RSS), a.k.a. Web Feeds. You can sign up for Mayo Clinic News from all three campuses (or can choose to receive only Arizona, Florida or Minnesota news), health information news, science news or business-related news.

Syndicated Video – Mayo Clinic began using Voxant in 2007 to make its Medical Edge video segments available for syndication to other Web sites. Instead of making people go to our mayoclinic.org site to view the videos, we wanted to put them where people are going, such as in on-line news sites. The Mayo Clinic YouTube channel was started just last week; expect to see the look improve significantly yet this month. Here’s our latest addition, a video tour of the new Mayo Clinic Hospital in Jacksonville, Fla.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UT6vmldLRw]

Facebook – with Mayo Medical School and several other health-related science schools (and with our mayo.edu e-mail addresses), Mayo has had people in Facebook for a long time. In the last six months we’ve seen the number of Mayo participants in Facebook more than double, to over 2,100. When “fan” pages became available to organizations and brands in November 2007, we established one immediately (partly because of what you see when you go to myspace.com/mayoclinic.) We revised and re-categorized the official Mayo Clinic Facebook page in January 2008, and have 1,053 fans as of this writing. In another effort to prevent domain name “squatting,” we also have established accounts in Twitter (twitter.com/mayoclinic) and Flickr.

Finally, we’ve begun sponsoring some official blogs. The first was in conjunction with an event, a symposium on innovation in health care in November 2007. It was hosted on wordpress.com and customized somewhat, but we didn’t map to a mayoclinic.org subdomain. We followed that in March 2008 with our Health Policy blog, our podcast blog and a blog about diversity in education at Mayo. These have all started in the last two months, and we hope and expect to continue developing new blogs.

Meanwhile, our colleagues at our sister site, MayoClinic.com, which is Mayo Clinic’s consumer health information site, have been starting blogs and a podcast, too. The blogs cover topics like Alzheimers’ Disease, Nutrition, Stress, Pregnancy and Depression.

Mayo Clinic is one of the United States’ best places to work (Fortune magazine has had us in its top 100 for the last five years.) I feel exceptionally blessed to be able to work for an organization like Mayo, working with such interesting subject matter during this exciting time of innovation and change in the media world.

Why Facebook Won’t Be Friendster

This weekend I got another firsthand view of why, despite suggestions that today’s kids will chase after whatever is the next new shiny toy, Facebook will have long-term staying power.

I witnessed scores of young ladies (the young men were much less active in this) taking pictures of each other and their dates at the Austin, Minn. High School Prom. Then two of them who are really close to me came home the next evening and started uploading dozens photos to Facebook, and tagging all of their friends.

So, for example, here is a pre-prom picture that showed up in my news feed, after Bekah tagged me:

And here’s a partial group picture from one of the early Saturday evening events:

Some observers warn that Facebook will become uncool because people like me (or at least in my age group) can be members. Others say the concern is that with Facebook being a “walled garden” in which your data goes in but doesn’t come out, users will rebel because they want data portability.

I don’t buy either of those arguments. Facebook’s variable privacy settings (as described in Facebook 210) mean people of all ages can coexist in the same social networking space, just as we all formerly used the same land-line phone network and now use interoperable digital cell phones with text messaging.

Just because we have the technical ability to interact through cell phones doesn’t mean I’m regularly “texting” people of my daughters’ generation. But it doesn’t stop us from peacefully coexisting in the same digital spectrum. And if I needed to reach one of them in an emergency, being able to send a message through Facebook may be just the ticket.

Likewise, I only know one of their peers who’s using Twitter. This tool of the geeky set has a lot of potential, but hasn’t broken through to mass appeal in anything like the numbers that Facebook has, partly because a lot of people look at it and can’t immediately see what good it will do them. But if they ever discover Twitter, they won’t let the fact that Robert Scoble and I are using it keep them from taking advantage of its wonderfulness.

They don’t have a problem figuring Facebook’s functionality, though, which is why it’s the top photo-sharing site on the Internet. It’s just simple to use, and over their high school and college years they will load lots of memories to these servers.

Unlike the data portability purists, who want the ability to integrate data from all sorts of yet-to-be-invented services into whatever container site they desire, my daughters and their friends just want to be able to connect with each other easily. And they LOVE Facebook Chat. Data portability means nothing to them. Functionality does. They want to be where their friends are, and they don’t particularly care about the identity of Facebook’s other 70 million active users.

As long as Facebook keeps developing and improving its service and doesn’t violate their trust in a way that creeps them out, the likelihood that many of its younger users will bail for another network is remote. And as they see how friend lists can make it reasonably easy to separate personal and professional networks in one site, they’ll be less inclined to join a network like LinkedIn.

I still think LinkedIn is likely to do well in the long term, because it has a critical mass in business networking. But with 14 million photos uploaded to Facebook daily, I see its critical mass continuing to grow as well. People aren’t going to lightly leave a few hundred friends and their photos behind.

What do you think? The growth in Facebook’s reported number of active users seems to be slowing somewhat, but do you see anything on the horizon that would cause it to decline? Any possibility of a recession (two quarters of negative growth) for Facebook?

Blogging 113: Comments Policies for Blogs

In Charlene Li’s presentation yesterday, she showed the JNJ BTW blog, and its comments policy, which reads in part:

All comments will be reviewed before posting. Since this blog is about Johnson & Johnson, comments that don’t directly relate to the Company or to topics covered on this blog won’t be posted. That said, some comments may be forwarded to other people within the Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies for follow-up as appropriate.

We generally won’t post comments about products that are sold by the Johnson & Johnson operating companies. Product questions should directed to the companies that sell them. A list of the products sold by our operating companies is available on the Johnson & Johnson website.

If you’re starting a corporate blog, I think this is a good example of a “plain english” explanation for comment moderation, and also highlighting that some of the issues that may be raised that would be more appropriately handled 1-1 with the customer will be done that way, instead of on the public blog.

The Marriott on the Move Blog also has some good language in its Terms of Use:

The primary rule when commenting is to be relevant and respectful in your postings. Just as we would not allow someone to stand in one of our hotel lobbies shouting profanities or engaging in other disruptive behavior that upsets guests, we will not allow that same type of action here. While Marriott assumes no duty to pre-screen or regularly review posted content, the blog will be moderated by an Editor and an Editorial Board who will have the right to refuse to post or remove any posting that they believe violates these Terms of Use.

These are good examples of ways you can set expectations for your blog, so that if you want to moderate comments and be able to deal with an individual issues off-line, it doesn’t interfere with the overall conversation.

What do you think of the JNJ and Marriott comment policy examples? If you have other examples to share, please add them in the comments below.

Speaking of comments, I may publish a Terms of Use or a Comments Policy for SMUG as a separate page, too, but for starters here is the policy I follow:

I LOVE comments. If what you have to say relates to the topic of the post, I’m delighted to have you join the conversation. That’s why I don’t use a Captcha, because I don’t want to make it harder for real people to comment.
I use the Akismet anti-spam service, which is part of WordPress.com and has spared me 42,792 comments so far. It’s really good, and I don’t even check the Akismet queue any more. In medical lingo, it’s both highly sensitive and highly specific. It catches most spam, and it rarely falsely labels a legitimate comment. So if your comment gets caught by Akismet, it’s not going to be posted. I won’t even see it. But if you’re a real person instead of a spambot, that’s not going to be a problem.
Negative comments are fine. I don’t even really mind personal attacks. In fact, I published a highly negative comment from a reader here, and it caused me to do this follow-up post. If you use profanity, however, I will delete the expletives and do the cartoon representation (such as &#@!) to maintain a family-friendly atmosphere.
I don’t moderate comments in advance, but I might take them down or mark them as spam if they fall into Category 5 or Category 6 below.
If you’re just selling something and not adding value to the conversation, I may not mark your comment as spam, but I will take it down. So, for example, if I’m reviewing the Flip video camera and you are the manufacturer of a competitor, I would welcome you to comment, talk about your camera’s capabilities and feature differences, and include a link for more information. But if you’re running an on-line store for various video cameras and just post a link to your site, with no other value added, I will remove the comment.
If you’re selling Viagra or its alleged herbal equivalents, and if somehow your comment and link makes it past Akismet, I will mark it as spam to ensure that you will be caught the next time you comment on an Akismet-protected blog.

Since SMUG is an on-line university dedicated to the exchange of ideas, our comments policy is more open than is appropriate for a big brand or a corporate blog. If you have thoughts on this draft policy and its appropriateness for a personal blog, or ideas on something I might be missing, I’d be glad to hear those in the comments, too.

Charlene Li Forrester Web 2.0 Presentation

I had the pleasure yesterday of presenting at a Web 2.0 Summit sponsored by Kaiser Permanente. Our panel was moderated by Ted Eytan, M.D., who also presented on his blogging experience from the last four years as part of Kaiser’s sister (or cousin, or some other relation I don’t completely understand) organization, Group Health. He’s an interesting guy who also has a passion for LEAN in Health Care, which is the topic of the other blog on which he is a collaborator. I also got to meet and hear Tim Collins from Wells Fargo, whose company has official blogs that include Guided by History, The Student LoanDown and one that supports Stagecoach Island, its virtual world. TIm says Wells Fargo was the first big brand in Second Life, but that they got out just as many others were starting to get in. Now they have a world of their own.

Charlene Li from Forrester Research opened the Summit with an overview of Web 2.0. She’s also the co-author of Groundswell, a book I just bought at Audible.com (It’s also here on Amazon, and I’ll be reviewing it after I listen to it over the next few days). Before her presentation, we got to talk about our experience with audio books, and I recommended some from Patrick Lencioni that I think most people in business would find extremely helpful (and which I have reviewed on this blog): The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and Silos, Politics and Turf Wars. (I thought I had reviewed Death by Meeting, too…but I guess that’s on my to-do list.)

I’ll have my full review of Groundswell, but meanwhile here are some of the high points and recommendations from Charlene’s presentation:

Focus on the relationships, not the technologies. At Forrester, they have developed a four-step process using the acronym POST. You should consider:

People – for those you want to reach and with whom you want to interact, consider their characteristics and what kinds of social media involvement they have already. Getting seniors into a 3D virtual world may be a mismatch, unless the group you’re targeting is retired Microsoft or IBM engineers.
Objectives – Decide what you want to accomplish
Strategy – Plan for how relationships with customers will change
Technology – Decide which social technologies to use

Charlene’s blog has a fuller discussion of POST, and I’m sure Groundswell will be even more detailed.

Part of analyzing People is determining where they are on the Ladder of Participation.

Charlene had a lot of other great material in her presentation, but she closed with some Keys to Success:

Start with Your Customers.
Choose Objectives You Can Measure
LIne Up Executive Backing
Romance the Naysayers
Start Small, but Think Big

I particularly like that last point, because it fits with the SMUG (It’s all Free) philosophy. It’s possible to start small because the barriers to entry are practically non-existent, but you should plan for success to that you can scale up as necessary.

For example, you can start a blog hosted on WordPress.com and map to a domain or subdomain of your choosing for $10-$20 (and can extensively customize your look and feel for another $15). Later, if your blog is successful and you decide you want to host it elsewhere to allow more use of Flash and embedded widgets, you can just download and install WordPress from WordPress.org and re-map the domain, and you won’t lose any of your links. I’ll have more on that as I build out the Blogging curriculum.

What do you think of the JNJ and Marriott comment policy examples? If you have other examples to share, please add them in the comments below.

With a diverse set of authors and no common theme, it’s the Seinfeld blog: about everything, and about nothing.