Day One of Mayo Ragan Health Care Social Media Summit

I had this amazing moment yesterday. During the lunch break of the Health Care Social Media Summit I decided to run up to my room to catch up on some work. An elderly woman who is receiving care at Mayo Clinic joined me in the elevator. Once the doors closed she turned to me with a great big smile and said: “Isn’t it nice here?” That’s exactly what Mayo has created. And yes, it is nice here.

The pre-conference workshops yesterday were terrific. In the morning I sat in on Shel Holtz’ session on “Hospital Social Media Best Practices.” Shel is one of the people who influenced my adoption of social media years ago. In the afternoon I attended the physician panel. How often do any of us get an opportunity to hear four physicians discuss their social media experience? It was a rare opportunity to hear from these four early adopters of social media. The panel included Matt Katz, MD (@subatomicdoc), Mark Ryan, MD (@RichmondDoc), Christian Sinclair, MD (@ctsinclair), and Jennifer Dyer, MD, MPH (@endogoddess). These are people I have followed on Twitter for some time, so it was terrific to have this opportunity to hear them present.

One of the unique aspects of this conference is that it is attended by so many social media users and thought leaders. During the workshops yesterday there were tons of people tweeting. That is not typical of healthcare marketing conferences. Typically you’ll only find a small cadre of people tweeting. At one point I went to tweetreach to get a feel for the volume of tweets and the overall reach. At that moment, the most recent 50 #mayoragan tweets (from 34 different people) had reached 277,729 people and achieved 329,589 Impressions. Here’s a screen shot of part of the TweetReach report:

The highlight of the day was my tour of Mayo Clinic Campus. The place is spectacular. Special thanks to our tour guide, John Murphy of Mayo Clinic Public Affairs. Below are some photos that I took during the tour: