Interview with Lee Aase, Director, Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media

Topic: Social Media and Healthcare

Lee Aase

CAROLYN SMAKA: Lee, thanks for your time. Can you give an overview of the Mayo Clinic for Social Media and tell me how it got started?

LEE AASE: Sure. The Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media had its origins in an e-mail that our CEO, Dr. John Noseworthy, sent out maybe about a little over a year and a half ago. He had seen a video on YouTube about how social media is changing the world and the way people communicate, and he had heard one of my presentations about the things that we were doing already in social media at Mayo Clinic.

He sent an e-mail to our department chair and a few others and asked if we had considered expanding our social media efforts even further. That gave us license to dream a little, to think about what we could do beyond the public relations and marketing applications of social media that we had been doing.

When we first started using social media tools, it was mainly for media relations and marketing kinds of applications. My background is in these areas, and that's what I was hired to do. And one of the things I now emphasize for audiologists or other healthcare providers interested in using social media is to not look at this as some flashy new set of tools. Look at social media as tools to help you do your existing work better.

Social media is not an end in and of itself. Rather, it's a set of tools to help you accomplish something that you are already doing, or something that is maybe already in your pipeline of things that you want to do. Or, maybe it can help you accomplish things that previously were impossible to do but now, because of these technologies, you can. So Dr. Noseworthy's email led to us getting the chance to dream.

And as we started thinking about how would we apply these tools for collaboration internally as well as for other applications within Mayo, we came up with a proposal that our leadership approved. And as of July 2010 we had the Center for Social Media.

SMAKA: When you say - moving beyond public relations and media relations - can you give a few examples of how social media can be used?

AASE: Sure. A big part of what we do internally in a large organization like Mayo Clinic - is collaborate. We need to be able to work closely together. For independent practitioners it's just as important to be able to network and connect with others. And in the case of an organization like Mayo we may have the proverbial left hand and right hand and we need to be aware of what each other is doing.

These tools can be really helpful for that internal collaboration and to get similar projects on each other's radar screens so that we're improving our communication. They're great for knowledge sharing and working collaboratively. An example is when you look at creating a policy, or any type of shared document that has multiple people working on it. One way to create such a document is to use Microsoft Word with track changes.

If you have maybe a half dozen or more people involved, it's nearly impossible to compare documents and figure out which changes you should be accepting. A Wiki is tool that enables collaboration on a document. Wikipedia is the most well known of the Wikis but a Wiki is just a way of quickly collaborating on creating a document. So one example of our use of social media is in the use of Wikis to much more quickly and efficiently produce documents together instead of having all the manual labor and mental confusion of creating a document when you've got six or ten or twelve people or more providing input.

SMAKA: Are patients of the Mayo Clinic involved in any of your social media efforts?

AASE: Patients are involved in a lot of different ways ranging from just sharing their story because part of the healing process is getting some closure on it. We've found that many of our patients are grateful for the opportunity to share what their experience has been like and to tell their story. When you're encountering an illness and getting to the point where you're ready to talk about it in the past tense - "How I overcame this" - it's very helpful.

We've done some early experimentation with online support groups, where people dealing with a condition can connect with others like them. We're also able to share expertise from our Mayo Clinic specialists. For instance, we'll do a brief video - or sometimes not even all that brief - to share information with people who may be interested.

So if we've got a video on a really unusual condition where one of our subject experts is talking about his or her research or how we treat the condition at Mayo Clinic, many times patients and their families will find that really useful.

Patients are able to ask clarifying questions and then we can respond - not giving specific medical advice about a particular case - but talking about the condition in general. And it really helps some patients, whether they ever come to Mayo Clinic or not, to be able to have better conversations with their physicians.

SMAKA: That's really interesting when you talk about the length of a video because I think a lot of what's out there on videos focuses on the marketing aspect. With a video 'commercial' you don't really want to exceed more than a few minutes, but if it's informative and educational why do you have to stop at two minutes?

AASE: Right. I think if you did a map or a chart of number of views per video by length of video you definitely would see that the ones that are two minutes or shorter are getting more views. And that's absolutely fine. But we did a video on myelofibrosis, a kind of blood cancer, for example, and it's a ten and a half minute video and it has more than 7,000 views, I think, so far. That's not your 20 million views like "Charlie bit my finger again" but we're not trying to appeal to a mass audience.

The goal isn't to build huge audiences, it's to help people and to give them the information they need. In general, we don't care about a disease until we actually have it. And then once you have it you want all the information you can find on it. And so we're not trying to appeal to the mass audience with these videos;we're trying to provide useful information that then finds the right community of interest.

SMAKA: I've heard audiologists say that seniors are not online like the other age demographics, and for many audiologists in private practice, seniors are their primary patient demographic. Who are your patients that are using social media?

AASE: It's age 45 and up, mainly because younger people aren't as sick. As I mentioned, you don't care about a disease until you actually have it or until you know somebody that does. With older seniors often their baby boomer age children will be seeking information online.

The other reality is that four out of five North American adults have Facebook.

SMAKA: Oh, wow, I hadn't heard that statistic.

AASE: I'd heard before that women over 55 is the fastest growing demographic on Facebook, but this was something new that I heard from Marcia Conner with the Altimeter Group.

Increasingly, people are on these platforms - even seniors, to see grandchildren and great grandchildren videos or to connect in other ways. So although Facebook skews a little bit younger than the senior demographic, four out of five adults is a pretty strong concentration.

SMAKA: I've never seen statistics for the "over the shoulder" Facebook users but I have friends who supposedly aren't on Facebook, but maybe their spouse is, and they're constantly referring to things they saw on Facebook. So maybe that 4 out of 5 statistic is even a little higher.

That brings up another question. You've referred to podcasts, video, Wikis, Facebook - how does the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media define social media?

AASE: We would define social media as media that enable interaction and conversation. Another way of talking about it is conversational media. We used to call it new media because it was different from newspaper and radio and T.V. But social media is probably a nice blended term because it emphasizes the media aspect, that it has the potential reach of the mass media, while at the same time, it has the power of the personal interaction.

SMAKA: When I first visited the Mayo Clinic Facebook page, I was really impressed by how much was going on there. And then I thought about the risks. You're not providing individual medical advice, obviously, but as healthcare professionals, how concerned should we be about the risks of social media?

AASE: When you consider the risks, you also have to consider the ROI - risk of ignoring. That's a term I heard the U.S. Navy use. So on the one hand you can say there's some risk of participating. But there's also the risk of, "What if I'm not there and everybody else is?" If you just Google your name or your practice's name what you'll find very often is that blogs or other social sites come up among the top search results.

That means other people are defining you or your practice or your organization. What these social platforms do is give you a chance to show who you are, what you're motivated by, what you're about and to just be real and genuine and human with your interactions. And that really pays off.

SMAKA: Would another risk of ignoring or not participating be that your employees likely are participating? That could certainly affect your business so you may as well get in there and get some policies in place before it owns you.

AASE: Right. Some organizations think, "Well we'll just block it from our Internet or our computers", but that doesn't stop employees from using their smartphones.

If four out of five adults are on Facebook, essentially what that means is that Facebook is the mother of all yellow pages ads. It's a place where people go and search and look for things and for people. If you're spending any money on yellow pages then you just have to ask yourself why not have a free application that lets you have video and photos and is actually the place where more people are going?

Participating in social media is not about being slick or having all the technological gee-whiz things. It's really pretty straightforward communication for which old-fashioned common sense helps a lot. But on the other hand, some hand holding is helpful - and that's part of what we're trying to do through the Social Media Health Network.

SMAKA: The Network can provide guidance?

AASE: Yes, exactly. The Social Media Health Network is something we've created as a means of more formally sharing what we've learned at Mayo Clinic about social media. It's for folks who understand that they need to learn about this but want to accelerate the pace. Part of learning to use social media tools is the hands-on experience, and we can help to provide guidance.

SMAKA: Sure, no need to reinvent the wheel.

AASE: Right. Through the Social Media Health Network we have an opportunity to share the curriculum that we're developing for our Mayo employees, but also to have interaction and discussion among peers. So that if you've got a question about, "What would you do in a situation like this", you can get perspectives from others. And that's been really well received as of today. We have about 60 organizations in the network ranging from literally 'mom and pop' patient-oriented disease foundations to individuals to some of the largest hospitals in the country. We also have some international representation from Israel, the Netherlands and Canada and there's been interest from Australia as well. It's been really exciting to see the global interest in getting engaged with it.

SMAKA: You mentioned patient-oriented disease foundations. I could see the value in social media for these organizations.

AASE: Yes. Social media tools are very useful for orphan or rare diseases. An in-person support group for a rare condition may not be possible, but on the Web people can get together.

SMAKA: In addition to the benefits of membership in the network that you've described, can you talk about the upcoming Social Media Summit?

AASE: Our Social Media Summit is happening in Rochester, Minnesota from October 17th to the 19th. It's something that we're doing in conjunction with Ragan Communications - we're hosting it and they're helping us to put together the program and marketing it to their clientele. For members of our network, one of the benefits is that they get significantly discounted admission, making it more affordable.

There will be three tracks, one on mobile communications, one for medical professionals and one on marketing and communications. Some sessions overlap the three tracks. We're working on getting CME accreditation for some of the sessions, too. It's going to be a very exciting event.

SMAKA: It sounds great. Is it open to people who are not members of the network?

AASE: Yes, it is.

SMAKA: Lee, how did you end up in your role and how did you inform yourself regarding social media?

AASE: My experience really goes back to 2005 when we first heard about podcasting and decided to just try it. We already had some audio files on our website and we figured out how to create an RSS feed, which is just a way of subscribing to have updates sent to you. We attached that RSS feed to our existing mp3 files and we listed it in the podcast directory on iTunes, and we had an amazing uptake from it. Coincidentally, I guess, it was featured on the front page of the iTunes podcast directory which was one of those quirky things that we couldn't have planned.

After seeing that response I started exploring with it personally. I started my own blog as a way of learning hands on, which I really recommend as a good method to get started. A lot of people think of this as something that's super complicated, or something that only their kids can do. But the reality is, if it was really complicated you wouldn't have half a billion people on Facebook. Half a billion people can't do anything that's complicated. It just takes a little bit of time and thought and experience.

Over time we just kind of naturally moved from one thing to the other as it seemed like it made sense. I can't say we had a grand well thought-out strategy. We just said, "Let's use these tools and see how these tools can help us do our work better". By continually asking ourselves that question we came up with some good answers. That led to our leadership seeing that this is something we should be expanding upon.

SMAKA: Do you find it hard to keep up as new technology or tools emerge?

AASE: I would say that it's not important to keep up with every last new shiny toy that's out there. The main thing is to understand what I call the four basic food groups of social media - there's Twitter at the bottom, then Facebook, then YouTube and blogs at the peak. Those are the four core technologies, and then think about how you can combine them together.

If you're reading TechCrunch or other blogs like that, you'll find there are new things coming every day. But you don't have to be the first one to use those things. You can kind of watch them and see if you start to see some interesting ideas. If you see something interesting, give it a try. I would recommend experimenting on your own personally, first, not connected with your practice or company. That way you can have the freedom to experiment and not feel like you're under some performance pressure.
If you find a really interesting application, then go for it, but until some of these new sites start getting a lot more traffic you don't need to be that concerned about them. Once the traffic gets to a few million people then it's something you may want to pay more attention to.

SMAKA: You mentioned your personal blog, SMUG, and I have to say, I'm a big fan. There is a ton of great information there for people wanting more information about social media.

AASE: Thanks. When I started my blog about five years ago it was called "Lines from Lee". Later, I decided to rebrand my blog and turn it into a tongue and cheek university to teach about social media. I have a propensity toward teaching, and we're having fun with it. It isn't specifically oriented toward healthcare, but some of the curriculum that you'll see within our network is going to be adapted from that and updated and expanded upon.

SMAKA: I appreciate all your time today, Lee, it was a great discussion.

AASE: Thanks, Carolyn.

For more information, please visit:
socialmedia.mayoclinic.org/
www.facebook.com/MayoClinic
www.youtube.com/MayoClinic
twitter.com/MayoClinic