Today’s hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson. (Photo credit: Lee Odden (TopRankBlog; Flickr).

Joining us on the podcast is a brand new Minnov8 contributor and participant, Gary Koelling, who is Senior Manager, Social Technology at Best Buy Inc. After interactions with Graeme Thickins — who isn’t bashful about promoting Minnov8 — Gary decided he’d like to create for Minnov8 and completed the form (hint: you could too!).

Gary is the founder of BlueShirtNation.com, Giftag.com and leads several social technology projects within Best Buy. He describes himself as a tinkerer, gadfly (and an aspiring iconoclast), reader, tryer (someone who tries), teacher and listener (with a fairly tuned bullshit meter). Due to the success of the efforts he’s involved in, and the high profile of our hometown consumer electronics retailing giant, Gary has been able to talk to lots of people and companies around the country about social media and social technology.

Our favorite quote about his speaking around the country from his LinkedIn profile? “I don’t know if it’s helping, but I enjoy it.” We sure think so since he’s in-the-game, taking risks, experimenting and driving towards high value outcomes for his employer.

LINKS
Here are links to sites, products or other resources discussed during the podcast:

• Good economic news for MN tech firms in Q4 2008: MTS revs up 9%, EPS up 21% (view MTS “Test Suite“) and NVE up 24%, EPS up 44% (view NVE “Fun Facts” page)
• Mashable article on 40 Best Twitter Brands and the People Behind Them (Scroll down to the “Retail” section)
• Fortune Top 100 Best Places to Work: Mayo (24th) and General Mills (39th) as great places to work (via MNHeadhunter)
• Forbes listing America’s Top Most Wired Cities: Minneapolis is #7 on the list
• The (mostly mythological) “Osborne Effect” but is there some reality to it in an online world?
• Macintosh image editors increasingly used by Tim Elliott: Acorn and Pixelmator
• Gary headed to Etail in Phoenix and a Computerworld event (both he and his cohort and colleague, Steve Bendt)
• EVENTS: Social Media Breakfast 1/30/09; Minnedemo (RSVP if you want to get in!) 2/6/09; Unsummit 3/7/09.

Minnov8 Gang Podcast – Episode 22 is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

According to Mayo’s about page positioning this new blog, Each year over 500,000 unique patients from every U.S. state and nearly 150 countries come to Mayo Clinic for diagnosis and treatment. These patients and their families and friends, and 50,000 employees and students are part of a global Mayo Clinic community.

The goal for the Sharing Mayo Clinic blog is to provide a virtual place for this community to connect and share their experiences. It’s the online companion to the new newsletter for patients, also called Sharing Mayo Clinic, and is a hub that links to Mayo Clinic’s pages on other social networking sites, such as Facebook and YouTube.

Unless you’re a constant observer of Mayo Clinic, you may be as surprised as I was to learn how truly significant and holistic the Mayo online presence has become, and how its online initiatives actually spring forth from the innovation DNA of the Mayo Clinic. This premiere healthcare organization is leveraging social tools to extend their reach and to ensure they’re at the points online where people are increasingly focusing their attention: the internet and web with a primary focus on social media applications.

This morning I talked briefly with Lee Aase, Mayo Clinic’s manager of social media and syndication. When I expressed my surprise at how dramatically different their online presence is compared to what I’ve seen in the past, Aase pointed out that innovation is at the heart of Mayo itself and leveraging these social media technologies in an innovative way makes perfect sense and were easily accepted within the Mayo culture. As a way to illustrate that point, he talked about how Dr. Will and Charlie Mayo invented the group practice of medicine and, along with the Franciscan Sisters, they were able to figure out how to prevent surgical infections through completely new and asceptic surgery techniques, so instead of people going to the hospital to die, they lived to tell about their experience…and did. (For more Mayo history, see this page).

Today we expect to live (or at least to know specifics about our odds of survival before surgery) and the Sharing Mayo Clinic blog is really a systemic way for 21st century stories to be told using social media and therefore to be accessible to people worldwide.

Sharing Mayo Clinic builds on Mayo Clinic’s existing social media initiatives:

Mayo Clinic YouTube Channel
The Mayo Clinic Channel has more than 250 videos for consumers to watch and share. They include patient stories, information about Mayo services and programs, background on Mayo Clinic’s history and people, and details about Mayo’s latest research and treatment advances. Through the “Share Your Mayo Clinic Story” campaign, patients are encouraged to post videos about their personal experiences with Mayo Clinic on YouTube. Patients who do not have the technical expertise or equipment to do this may have their stories recorded during their visit to Mayo Clinic.

Mayo Clinic Facebook page (Type Mayo Clinic Facebook in any search engine.)
On this social networking site, patients can tell their Mayo Clinic story, watch videos about Mayo’s latest news and research, become a Facebook “fan” of Mayo, and share it all with their friends. They also can read and discuss what others say about their experiences at Mayo Clinic.

Mayo Clinic podcast blog
Dozens of Mayo podcasts are available on this site. Mayo’s podcasts include extended conversations and news stories on many diseases and conditions, emphasizing conditions that Mayo Clinic experts treat and research. Consumers can search by topic, post comments and subscribe to have new episodes of a particular podcast delivered automatically.

Mayo Clinic news blog
In this blog, journalists and consumers can see and hear video and audio excerpts featuring Mayo Clinic physicians and researchers providing context for stories about their research and other health and medical news. They also can join discussions with other readers through the blog comments.

MayoClinic.com consumer blogs and podcasts
MayoClinic.com offers consumer blogs on topics such as stress, smoking cessation, pregnancy, nutrition, depression, diabetes and more. MayoClinic.com podcasts are available in portable audio files that contain consumer-friendly information from a Mayo Clinic expert. Consumers can sign up for RSS feeds for new blog posts and podcast topics, as well as several other content features from MayoClinic.com.

I must admit that my attention on Mayo hasn’t been too high as of late. In the mid-1990′s, while at Apple in the prepress and publishing space, Mayo remained a strong supporter and key customer of the company and I spent a fair amount of time in Rochester. Pleased that Steve Jobs had returned and new energy was being infused in to the company (e.g., the new iMac), Mayo continued to deploy Mac’s where it made sense (i.e., printing and publishing) as well as within the biomedical computing and research areas.

While calling on this organization and interacting with folks like Dr. Bijoy Khanderia, head of cardiology and chair of the I.T. Steering Committee at the time, I was always struck by: the quality of their vision; hyperfocus on the patient; long history of quality healthcare and positive patient outcomes; solid and atypically nice people with big-city smarts and small-town values; good content; and a work ethic that was pervasive throughout the organization and — combined with all those other factors — are obviously the foundation of their success. That said, it was also clear that this was a conservative organization which moved somewhat slowly on pushing the envelope, and my reaction to most of their online publishing in the past was that everything was basically an online brochure with well scrubbed content.

No more. They’re in-the-game and on-the-net in a big way.

It’s delightful to see Mayo opening up in this way and I’ll be interested to see where their online engagement leads them and how it might mold, shape and influence the course of their patient and employee interactions in the future. I presume the goal of any effort they put forth is to enhance, extend and improve the health and well-being of people in the world. To that end, reading, hearing and seeing the stories of people whose lives have been saved, made better and changed will be a powerful way to move that agenda forward.

Mayo Accelerates Their Online Presence is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.