Lee Aase is the manager for syndication and social media for Mayo Clinic. This means he’s in charge of making in-depth health and medical news content available directly to patients and interested consumers in order to encourage feedback, dialog, and sharing of information. He is also the chancellor of Social Media University, Global (SMUG), an institution that provides training in social media. In this interview he explains how the Mayo Clinic uses social media as a marketing and communications tool.
1. Question: How did an old, established organization like Mayo Clinic get so involved in social media?
Even today word-of-mouth recommendations are the most important source of information that makes Mayo Clinic the top choice for diagnosis and treatment of serious diseases. Stories in the news media rank second in influence, and physician recommendation—another kind of word of mouth—is third. Social media combines the potential worldwide reach of news media stories with the personal touch of a friend’s recommendation. With over 90 percent of Mayo Clinic patients reporting that they say “good things” to their friends after a visit, using social media tools to amplify their impressions seemed reasonable.
That said, we didn’t just immediately jump into blogging, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. It was a natural, gradual progression that incorporated what I like to call, “The MacGyver Mindset.” creating new solutions out of resources we already had on hand. Mayo Clinic created its “Medical Edge” syndicated weekly TV news resource in 2000 and offered local stations trustworthy health and medical news content. In 2004, we established a similar daily program for radio stations.
Our first “new media” foray involved creating an RSS feed for the radio segments to publish a podcast and because of its early entry into the iTunes podcast directory and the Mayo Clinic brand, it was featured on the front page. This led to a significant increase in downloads, which provided impetus for further new media exploration.
Producing our Medical Edge TV segments typically involved interviewing physicians for 20 minutes or more, while only eight seconds or so actually made the air. Our next MacGyver step was to make the audio tracks from the complete interviews available as audio podcast segments and to categorize them as Heart, Cancer, Men’s Health, Women’s Health, Children’s Health and Bones & Muscles podcast feeds.
Within the next year or so we established a Mayo Clinic Facebook page, YouTube channel, and Twitter account. Part of the goal for each was to keep others from “squatting” on the name and posing as Mayo Clinic. For the Twitter account, we started with an RSS feed. For the YouTube channel, we uploaded our Medical Edge segments. With the rapid growth of Facebook, we saw a “fan” page as a way for people to share their stories on our wall, and for their friends to see them. Again, this was consistent with our word-of-mouth tradition.
2. Question: What were the costs for such efforts?
Answer: The total out-of-pocket cost for Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube was $0. I’ve had several people say that’s misleading because maintaining these sites takes time, which is money. Granted, but we had a passion for the projects, so no one was getting any extra pay, and we didn’t add staff. If the sites had not grown to provide significant benefit, we could have continued maintaining them without additional staff. But we found that as we got more interactive with these platforms they also grew in popularity.
Answer: Another key low-cost tool that greatly extended our social media presence is the Flip video camera which lets us shoot miniDV quality video, edit and upload to YouTube quickly and easily. We also can provide the raw video files to journalists for incorporation into their online stories. For subject experts who lack national TV experience, this video lets us show program producers how they perform in interviews, which has helped us secure national network placements.This video camera made blogging realistic for us because we want our blogs to be authentic, not ghost-written, but yet we don’t want to take time away from patient care. By shooting interviews with physicians we can take just fifteen minutes of their time and ask them to explain their studies as they would for a patient in the office. Then we lightly edit and upload that video, and this which provides patients all over the world exactly what they’re looking for: the perspective of a Mayo Clinic doctor on what the study practically means.
Answer: We have several blogs currently hosted on Wordpress.com—each of which has a specific place on our metaphorical “magazine rack:”
* Mayo Clinic News Blog (RSS Feed) provides pre-embargo resources for journalists and then makes that same information available directly to patients. It’s our “hard” news analog to Time, Newsweek or U.S. News & World Report.
* Advancing the Science (RSS Feed) is a medical version of Scientific American.
8. Question: But this is the Mayo Clinic, after all—what will “mere mortal” organizations experience?
9. Question: What’s your advice to organizations that want to achieve this kind of success with social media.
Answer: It’s not an overnight process, so start by listening and taking advantage of the free or low-cost tools. By keeping your costs low, you will be able to create the breathing room you need to have time to achieve results. If you go in and ask for two FTEs right at the beginning, you will be expected to show more immediate traction, and that may be hard to achieve. But if you use the social tools with your existing staff as a way to accomplish your current work more effectively, you will get some wins that will enable you to expand your scope.I would also stress that a video with 3.7 million views is a nice bonus, but it’s not the goal. The real power is being able to create niche videos that may reach only a few thousand views, but they’re seen by the people who are most interested. That’s another reason for keeping the costs low, so that this niche content can show positive results through what Chris Anderson called “The Long Tail."
10. Question: And what’s SMUG?