OPEN Forum by American Express OPEN | | How to Use Social Media: An Interview with Lee Aase of Mayo Clinic: “How to Use Social Media: An Interview with Lee Aase of Mayo Clinic.Lee Aase is the manager for syndication and social media for Mayo Clinic. He is also the chancellor of Social Media University, Global (SMUG), an institution that provides training in social media. In this interview he explains how the Mayo Clinic uses social media as a marketing and communications tool.”

Not many of us would be willing to believe that a Hospital has been able to use social media so successfully. In an interview with Guy Kawasaki, Lee Aasase who heads the Social Media Initiative at Mayo Clinic elaborates on how May clinic managed to use social media so successfully. This is a must read for all brands and product managers who has anything to do with social media. The basic premise as Lee explains beautifully, is that social media should be managed by existing available tools in any organization, if they need to talk anything talkworthy. For any hospital ,its the clinical pedigree that forms the core of branding initiatives,and social media provides that platform for brands and products to engage and connect to their community.Lee points it out very well when he says you cant plan a viral marketing strategy.

You can’t and shouldn’t start a blog or a YouTube channel with the expectation that you’ll have a viral video. Viral isn’t a strategy. But yet there is a sense in which having the vehicles in place makes it possible for a video to go viral.Lee Aase is the manager for syndication and social media for Mayo Clinic. This means he’s in charge of making in-depth health and medical news content available directly to patients and interested consumers in order to encourage feedback, dialog, and sharing of information. He is also the chancellor of Social Media University, Global (SMUG), an institution that provides training in social media. In this interview he explains how the Mayo Clinic uses social media as a marketing and communications tool.”

You can read the entire interview with Guy Kawasaki here