That’s the headline from this story in today’s Austin Daily Herald about basketball in my hometown, and about our family’s history (and hopefully future) of participating in Minnesota’s state high school basketball tournament. Here’s an excerpt:

Austin center Joe Aase knows all about his dad Lee’s history on the basketball court.

He knows he went to the state basketball tournament in 1981 with the Packers and he knows he played in the title game.

Joe also knows about his sister Rebekah. He knows she played in the state basketball tournament in 2008 because he was there.

Now Joe’s hoping he finally gets his chance to play in the state tournament as the Packers (12-4 overall, 9-2 Big Nine) are currently sitting atop the Section 1A standings and are just a half game behind Owatonna in the Big Nine.

Read the whole story here.

As a dad, it was a great blessing to be able to watch Rebekah and her team get to the state tournament in 2008 (I wrote about it here), and now Joe and my nephew Tom (who also is a junior starter on the boys’ team) are part of a team that is poised to make a tournament run. It’s particularly neat for my dad and mom, who also still live in Austin, to be able to watch both grandsons play, and also to get to go to Rebekah’s games as she is now playing at the local community college.

As a volunteer with the team’s booster club, I’m applying the SMUG philosophy, using social media tools to track (and promote) the team’s progress through a blog (the Packer Fast Break Club site), a YouTube channel and a Twitter account. I’m using a Flip camera (on a tripod) to capture game highlights to post to YouTube.

Since I already had the Flip, the total cost for all of it is about $20 a year for the PackerFastBreakClub.com domain and mapping it from WordPress.com.

How are you using your SMUG lessons to provide low-cost, high impact support for community or volunteer programs?

After her first year teaching history in a public high school in the District, Jamie Josephson was exhausted and plagued by self-doubt. Teaching had been more grueling than she ever expected. Law school began to sound appealing.

Then she stumbled onto Twitter. In the vast social network on the Web, she discovered a community of mentors offering inspiration, commiseration and classroom-tested lesson plans.

“Twitter essentially prepared me to go into my second year and not give up,” said Josephson, now in her third year at Woodrow Wilson High in Northwest Washington. “I never would have imagined that it would have been the place to find support.”

Josephson (known to fellow tweeters by her handle, @dontworryteach) is one of a small but growing number of teachers who are delving into the world of hashtags and retweets, using Twitter to improve their craft by reaching beyond the boundaries of their schools to connect with colleagues across the country and around the world.

The story goes on to tell about a now twice-weekly Twitter chat for teachers, #edchat, and the proliferation of chats around various subjects or specialties, including:

• #sschat for social atudies
• #musedchat for music teachers
• #psychat for psychology teachers
• #spedchat for special education teachers
• #gtchat for gifted education
• #langchat for foreign language teachers
• #jedchat for Jewish studies
• #mathchat – math teachers
• #engchat for teachers of English

Tell teachers you know about these opportunities to get practical help and support through Twitter. And if they need encouragement or training, we’ve got a whole Twitter curriculum here on SMUG, including Twitter 115: 5 Benefits of Twitter Chats.

Here is the late Friday Sports Extra from the local TV station, KTTC, where one of my high school contemporaries, Pat Lund, is the sports anchor.

Pat was a member of the Rochester Mayo high school team. He graduated in 1982, a year after I graduated from Austin. The segment starts with a recap of the Austin-Century game (including a bunch of plays by my son Joe and nephew Tom), and if you keep watching until the first wave of highlights is done (maybe 3-4 minutes into the segment), you’ll hear Pat reminisce about the Chancellor.

Last night the Austin Packers basketball team, on which my son Joe and nephew Tom are starters, had the largest margin of victory for an Austin basketball team in at least the last decade, as they cruised to a 74-19 win against winless Faribault. The starters played less than half of the game, but here’s the highlight taken from the four-minute compilation, as Joe took a beautiful Alley Oop pass from point guard Zach Wessels for a dunk:

If one of the rules for getting more video views is to have the video start fast and grab attention, jumping in at the middle lets you do that while keeping the rest of the video for context. And if you watch the whole thing starting from the beginning you’ll see that Tom almost had a similar dunk at the 1:19 mark.

We’re proud of how well the boys play, but more importantly how they play…as a team. And it’s pretty neat for my parents to be able to watch their grandsons on the same court, in the community where our family has lived for more than 40 years.

Now if I could just get Joe to update his Twitter avatar.

Here’s an example of a brief video I did to document my newly cleaned office as I prepared to start fresh in 2012:

With a quick Google search, I found this site, which makes it really easy to customize your player.

Among the changes you can make are:

• Autoplay (have the video start automatically when the page is loaded)
• Hide the video title
• Hide the related videos list
• Adjust size of the player
• Enable or disable full-screen mode
• Start the video somewhere in the middle.

Here is what it looks like after the customization:

Here’s another version with looping of the video (and showing the related videos):

The other neat thing about this online tool is that it lets you understand the syntax involved in the embed codes, so that you can adjust the settings manually.

Finally, here’s one more embed, in which I have our Mayo Clinic “Know Your Numbers” video start at the beginning of one of my two cameos.

Do you have other tricks for customizing display of your YouTube videos? How do you do it?

It’s about this video we did through our Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, in cooperation with our colleagues in the Office of Women’s Health and our cardiology group.

I wrote the lyrics to this parody of Tommy TuTone’s 867-5309/Jenny and was the Executive Producer, and Makala Johnson from our team shot, edited and coordinated production. We had a great team for the project, including a band and back-up singers drawn almost entirely from our Mayo Clinic employee population, and over 100 enthusiastic concertgoers.

So here’s the trivia question for the day:

Where are my two cameos in the video?

Put your guesses in the comments below. And with February Heart Month coming up, I hope you’ll also help spread the word.

Since then, I’ve delivered well over 100 presentations in 7 countries, and in almost every one I’ve used my 35 Theses (get a PDF) as the organizing principle, beginning with the story of how a technological innovation, the Gutenberg movable type printing press, helped make Luther’s theses the first massively viral communication, spreading throughout Germany in two weeks and reaching the rest of Europe in two months.

It all ties to my first two theses:

1. Social media are as old as human speech, with air being the medium through which sound waves propagated.
2. Electronic tools merely facilitate broader and more efficient transmission by overcoming inertia and friction.

So it was interesting when Dr. Victor Montori, our former medical director for the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, sent me a link to an article in the current issue of The Economist, “How Luther went viral.” I’m sure it was unintentional imitation, but I’m sincerely flattered anyway. Here’s an excerpt:

Although they were written in Latin, the “95 Theses” caused an immediate stir, first within academic circles in Wittenberg and then farther afield. In December 1517 printed editions of the theses, in the form of pamphlets and broadsheets, appeared simultaneously in Leipzig, Nuremberg and Basel, paid for by Luther’s friends to whom he had sent copies. German translations, which could be read by a wider public than Latin-speaking academics and clergy, soon followed and quickly spread throughout the German-speaking lands. Luther’s friend Friedrich Myconius later wrote that “hardly 14 days had passed when these propositions were known throughout Germany and within four weeks almost all of Christendom was familiar with them.”

The unintentional but rapid spread of the “95 Theses” alerted Luther to the way in which media passed from one person to another could quickly reach a wide audience. “They are printed and circulated far beyond my expectation,” he wrote in March 1518 to a publisher in Nuremberg who had published a German translation of the theses.

This is required reading for SMUGgles. The article does a great job of analyzing at length what I can only briefly introduce in 90 seconds or so in my presentations. It applies network theory to describe how technology enabled such rapid spread, and does a great job of explaining how and why it happened.

I read lots because I enjoy learning, but one of the extra pleasures it provides is validation. I certainly have gotten new and helpful ideas from Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin, Gary Vaynerchuk and others, but it’s especially encouraging when they affirm what I’m already doing.

For example, if you’ve heard one of my presentations you know that I typically introduce my family, including my grandchildren. After I had been doing that for a while, I ran across presentation advice from Guy Kawasaki in which he suggested including pictures of your kids to build empathy and rapport with audiences. I didn’t start introducing Evie, Judah and Aletta because Guy suggested it, but his guidance validated what had seemed like a good approach, and was just naturally who I am. (For my latest family news, see my Holiday Greetings.)

In some ways, this Economist article serves that same validation function. In my presentations I usually cite Wikipedia as the source for my assertion on the rapid dissemination of the 95 Theses. Because of this article, I now know that Friedrich Myconius is the original source of the quote. And if a writer for The Economist sees the same historical analogy that I have, we can’t both be crazy.

Since you’re here at SMUG, you likely are interested in social media. You “just see” that it makes sense to harness revolutionary tools for the reformation of your industry. But maybe that insight isn’t shared by all in your workplace.

I hope SMUG can provide validation and encouragement for you. My purpose with the 35 Theses is to give you arguments you can use to make the case for social applying social media in your work.

If you work in a health-related field, you also should check out our Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media and consider having your organization join our Social Media Health Network. The Network goes beyond validating your intuition; our aim is to learn together and share best practices so we can harness these revolutionary tools to improve health care, promote health and fight disease.

As The Economist concludes:

Modern digital networks may be able to do it more quickly, but even 500 years ago the sharing of media could play a supporting role in precipitating a revolution. Today’s social-media systems do not just connect us to each other: they also link us to the past.

My first two theses all over again.

For Contact #1, I knew we were connected on LinkedIn, so I decided to send him a message through that service on Friday, Dec. 30.

For the next three, I checked first to see whether they were following me on Twitter, and sent them direct tweets instead.

Finally, yesterday, after having not heard from #1, I sent a direct tweet.

Here is the table of my results:

I realize this isn’t a large enough sample to be statistically meaningful. I also realize that my LinkedIn message was sent on a Friday before a holiday weekend, so it probably wasn’t the fairest test. But I wasn’t exactly fair to Twitter, either. For participants 2-4, I sent the tweets in the mid-to-late evening, possibly after some had gone to bed (they were all an hour ahead of me in the Eastern time zone). Number 3 responded at 4 a.m. I sent a follow-up to Number 4 the next afternoon, and this time the response was less than 2 hours.

Still, these results do fit with what I perceive as my experience in the relative responsiveness of Twitter vs. LinkedIn.

I think it relates to the way most people interact with the platforms. I don’t have statistics to support this (if you have some, please put them in the comments), but it seems people tend to use LinkedIn through its Web site. When you send someone a message in LinkedIn, therefore, people see it when they visit the site, or possibly through an email notification.

On Twitter, people can get notifications of new messages in those ways, but also tend to use smart phone clients or get text message alerts. This makes it much more likely they will get the notice quickly, wherever they are.

I’m not hacking on LinkedIn; it obviously has capabilities Twitter doesn’t, and you need to use different tools depending on what you want to accomplish. For soliciting and organizing professional recommendations, for instance, LinkedIn is clearly superior.

I have the LinkedIn iPhone app (although I haven’t used it much) and it probably offers push notifications as the Twitter app does (again, I welcome confirmation in the comments). My point isn’t that people couldn’t respond as quickly on LinkedIn as they do on Twitter, it’s just that in my experience they don’t.

How about you?

When you need to reach someone quickly, and if you don’t have the old-school contact information such as email or cell phone (and yes, having grown up with a single land line and snail mail, I realize the irony of calling email and cell phone “old school”), what do you find is the best social platform to use?

It’s great to take time in this season to reflect on God’s blessings from the previous year (and I’ve also enjoyed reviewing again the amazing changes in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010.)

Lots of things are different this year. When I wrote last year’s letter we were in the midst of the snowiest December on record in southern Minnesota. Here was the view out our porch window on Christmas morning a week ago today:

Part of the reason for my delay in writing this year’s edition is that for the last week we’ve had a full house, as our son Jacob and his wife Alexi and our daughter Rachel and her family have been here for Christmas. It would have been odd to spend the time writing instead of taking in the fun. But now that we’re down to our usual complement of the four youngest kids who are still at home (and since we got some updated pictures during Christmas, which you can enlarge by clicking), it’s time to recap 2011.

Rachel and her husband Kyle are still in Grand Rapids, Michigan. When they visited us in June, they took a few minutes to stop by my office, where my grandchildren Evie and Judah created some whiteboard art work:

A couple of months later, we got a new granddaughter, Aletta Louise, born to Rachel in August. I didn’t get to see her until the end of September, though. Here’s a picture from that trip to Grand Rapids:

Here’s Rachel with the trio this week:

Rachel’s husband Kyle is still in seminary in Grand Rapids, and also is pastoring a small church. We don’t see them nearly as often as we would like, but we’re thankful for Skype.

Our son Jacob is in his first year of Physical Therapy training, with about 16 months remaining until he begins three separate clinical rotations. He and Alexi still live in La Crosse, Wisconsin. She’s working full time to pay the bills while he finishes school. They spent most of the last week at our place, since Jacob is in a school break. Here’s a picture of Jacob, John, Joe and me from lunch yesterday, just before Jacob and Alexi left for La Crosse:

Rebekah and Ruth are both in the two-year RN program at Riverland Community College in Austin, and are back home living with us. Ruth is a year ahead in the program and is already an LPN. She went on a mission trip to Haiti last month, and will be a short-term missionary in Bulgaria this summer. Rebekah is playing basketball for the Riverland team in addition to nursing school. Both young ladies are working at a local nursing home, although Rebekah’s basketball limits her hours for the next couple of months.

Here are all six our our kids, along with their seven cousins on Lisa’s side of the family. Our four oldest are in the middle row. Again, note the lack of snow and the shirt-sleeves attire for a Dec. 28 photo:

Our son Joe is 17 and a junior in high school. He’s also 6’8″ and getting significant recruiting interest from college basketball programs. He played AAU ball this spring and summer with two of his Austin High School teammates, one of whom is my brother’s son, Tom. Lisa, Joe and I spent lots of weekends together, as their Minnesota Fury Gold team played 50 games altogether. Here we are after one of the tournaments:

Here’s a picture I took of the three at the season-ending tournament in Las Vegas (Tom is on the left):

The Austin Packers are off to a 4-2 start in the 2011-12 season. You can follow their progress on the Fast Break Club site. Between Joe’s games and Bekah’s games, we’ll be busy s few nights a week, hopefully well into March.

And speaking of March, one of the other highlights of the year was the 30th anniversary reunion of our 1981 Austin basketball team, which finished 24-1, losing in the state championship game.

John, our youngest, is 13. He’s in Bible Bowl and orchestra, and is in 7th grade. He’s our last home schooled student, and after next year will probably be going to the high school. In her 20th year of homeschooling, Lisa’s finding it a lot easier with just one student instead of up to five at once. While John’s a big boy – about 6’2″ – he doesn’t have much interest in sports, although he did play football for the first time this year.

Our family goes to Trinity Presbyterian Church in Rochester, where I am an elder. It’s been a great blessing to be part of that church family, and we’re hoping to begin construction on a new building in 2012.

Professionally, my last year has been amazing. We have a great team in our Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media staff:

The year was full of too many highlights to go into detail in this post that is already too long, but here’s one major  project that was especially fun. I actually wrote the words for this parody of 867-5309/Jenny in late 2010, but we weren’t able to produce the video until last summer.

I was the executive producer for the project, and Makala Johnson from our team produced and directed the video. If you haven’t seen it yet, I hope you’ll take a few minutes to watch, and also check out the related app on our Mayo Clinic Facebook page, and also the contest site where you can help spread the word.

I also have traveled a lot in the last year, and met lots of people with whom I had previously interacted in social media. I enjoyed all of the trips, but a couple of the highlights were my first visit to Italy, where I spent 48 hours on a mountain lake near Baveno:

As part of that same trip I got to visit Chocolate World in Hershey, Pennsylvania:

And in November I got to spend almost a week in Sydney, Australia, where I got to keynote the HARC Forum:

I spent my last work day of 2011 getting my office cleaned for a fresh start in 2012, which meant cleaning up Evelyn and Judah’s artwork after it had adorned my whiteboard for more than six months:

But I did capture their handiwork for posterity, and to share with the world:

Lisa and I wish you and yours a fresh start and great year in 2012!

Meredith also has been a great advisor as we established the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, and in advance of her visit to Rochester for our Social Media Summit she did a post on our site, which she called: “This Bride Wants to Register at the Mayo Clinic.”

That post has gotten lots of traction, including being reposted on several other blogs. And earlier this week our Austin, Minn. ABC affiliate, KAAL, picked up on a tweet and decided to do a TV story featuring Meredith via Skype (and me in my office.). Here’s the link to that story.

Sometimes other stations pick up TV stories that have run on a network affiliate, and that happened with Meredith’s as well. Here’s the version that ran today on the ABC affiliate in Los Angeles, KABC:

Another case study showing how social media can lead to traditional media coverage. It will be interesting to see whether this goes any further.