Category: Twitter

Happy 5th Twitter Birthday @MayoClinic

It was five years ago today that I created our @MayoClinic Twitter account, and launched it with this message:

If I had known Twitter was going to get this big, I would have been a little more creative and thoughtful in composing that first tweet. Not exactly a memorable “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” formulation.

But it got us started. That’s probably the main thing. A little over 10,500 tweets (and 530,000 followers) later, we have seen revolutionary impact and some amazing stories. We’ve made connections that likely never would have happened otherwise. Patients have been saved from decades of chronic pain. And it’s helped us extend the reach of our weekly Mayo Clinic Medical Edge radio call-in program around the world, with tweeted questions coming from as far away as Australia and Indonesia.

Thanks, Twitter, for five great years of connections!

Rooting for the Nats

I’m settled in for a fun night watching the fifth and deciding game of the National League Division Series, and I have a definite rooting interest since Jayson Werth hit the game-winning home run in the bottom of the 9th last night.

Jayson thought his career was over in 2005, but Mayo Clinic Orthopedic Surgeon Richard Berger, M.D. helped make his return to baseball possible.

Dr. Berger had discovered the kind of ligament tear Jayson had suffered in spring training in 2005. it is called a UT split tear and involves lengthwise split of the ligament, like a celery stick, as opposed to a complete rupture. Before Dr. Berger’s discovery of this type of injury, patients would never recover mostly because the injury doesn’t show up well on an MRI. It looks “normal” unless you really know what to look for.

Here is that story, as told on our Sharing Mayo Clinic blog, from when he was with the Phillies in 2009.

I met Jayson in 2009 when I got to interview him in Philadelphia:

That post led to a big story in USA Today when the Phillies went to the World Series again in 2009. It resulted in our first Twitter chat in collaboration with USA Today, in which Dr. Berger answered questions from readers, which led to one of those participants coming to Mayo Clinic for surgery by Dr. Berger for the same surgery, because she had a split-tear too. And that led to another USA Today story.

Two years ago in December, Jayson signed with the Washington Nationals, perennial cellar dwellers. Here’s a story about it in the New York Times, which gets into a lot of his Mayo Clinic story.

It’s neat that in just two years, Jayson is again playing post-season baseball. If my Twins can’t make the playoffs, I’m rooting for the Nationals.

And just in the time since I started writing this post, the Nats are off to a 3-0 lead in the first inning, as Jayson led off with a double and scored the game’s first run.

Go Nats!

Update 10/13/12: The Nats built a 6-0 lead early, but collapsed in the 9th inning, giving up four runs for a 9-7 loss. Bummer.

Delta Does Twitter Right

If you’re looking for an example of how customer service can be enhanced through Twitter, here’s a personal case study involving Delta Airlines and its @DeltaAssist account.

On Tuesday, due to some storms, the departure for my flight from Orlando was bumped back from 4:41 p.m. to 5:26, putting the ETA in Salt Lake City for my connection to San Francisco at 8:04.

Which was unfortunate since the flight to SFO was to depart at 8.

So I received an automated call from Delta while in Orlando telling me that my flight had been delayed and I would be rebooked. When I called to inquire about options, it turned out that the best they could do was to get me on an 8:30 flight Wednesday morning, arriving at 9:42 … only about two hours before my scheduled keynote in the Health Care and Life Sciences track at the Dreamforce conference.

Not an ideal situation, especially since I had a non-cancellable reservation in San Francisco and would need to also book a room in Salt Lake City. My Salesforce.com hosts would have been nervous, too.

But then a funny thing happened. Because of the delay, several people had switched bookings to go through Atlanta instead of SLC. That meant the plane boarded more quickly, and we were able to get off the ground by 5:28 EDT. And the pilot said he was going to try to make up time.

Then, as I tracked the flight’s progress using the onboard wifi, I saw that we were now estimated to land at 7:40. So, from 38,000 feet over Arkansas, I opened a Twitter conversation with @DeltaAssist and Irene O. Here are our private tweets:

As it turned out, we landed at 7:38 and got to the gate by 7:42. I was quickly off the plane and made it to the gate for SFO by 7:48, or about 2 minutes before the scheduled close of the boarding door.

I think it’s highly unlikely I would have been able to explain and organize everything if I had needed to wait until I landed. So this service probably saved me $150 or more since I didn’t have to get an extra hotel room.

At the very least it gave me peace of mind.

Thanks to Delta and Irene O. for showing how customer service should be done.

What examples do you have of companies using Twitter to improve customer service?

 

 

New Connections Tweetcamp

I will be in Princeton, New Jersey tomorrow for a presentation at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as part of its New Connections program for junior researchers. We will start with a social media overview, but then will conclude with a 45-minute focused session on Twitter. The goal is to give these researchers a taste of how they can practically use Twitter and other social media tools to be more effective in their work.

Here are the slides for second half of my Friday morning presentation:

Tweetcamp for New Connections

View more presentations from Lee Aase.

I hope you will join me in showing the speed, reach and power of Twitter as we conduct a mini-Twitter chat. Hopefully many of the researchers will have created Twitter accounts in advance of the session, and will be able to participate directly.

Our #TweetcampRWJF chat will start at 9:45 a.m. ET on Friday. I have created a couple of questions that are included in the last slide of my presentation above, and I’m asking the participants to tweet their own questions, too.

So if you have some time to share your experience with some younger and mid-career researchers, I hope you’ll join us. Or if you can tweet some pearls of wisdom between now and then, we would appreciate that, too.

Please tweet your introduction and answers to the following, using the #TweetcampRWJF hashtag:

  • Introduce yourself and give your location (or where you work) – City, State (Province), Country
  • Q1: What is the most important benefit you have experienced in Twitter?
  • Q2: What questions do you have about using Twitter in health care or research?

During and after the scheduled chat, I hope you will also engage in dialog with the students as they tweet their questions.

Teachers Tweeting for Support and Inspiration

Today’s Washington Post has a nice story about how teachers are using Twitter to connect with each other and get just-in-time training. Here’s an excerpt:

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:

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.