Country Stars Tweet Prayers

OFFSTAGE: Country Stars Tweet Prayers
August 15, 2011; Written by Alison Bonaguro

When it comes to the power of prayer, I think social media works wonders. When the country artists we know and love tweet that they are praying for the people of Indiana after the tragic stage collapse prior to a Sugarland concert on Saturday night (Aug. 13), their followers may join them in that prayer. It’s a ripple effect, in the best way. Here are some of the recent tweets I read that made me pray a little harder:

Dierks Bentley: “man… my heart goes out to all the country fans at the Indiana state fair. praying for you all…. #fb”

Little Big Town: “Our hearts are heavy this morning for the people of Indiana and for our dear friends in Sugarland. Our thoughts & prayers are with you. J”

David Nail: “Huge knot in stomach, feeling completely sick watching/reading about Indy! All of us in Idaho are praying for ya!”

Blake Shelton: “My prayers to the people at the Sugarland concert in Indianapolis…. Absolutely shocking and hard to comprehend… Beyond belief…”

Martina McBride: “So sad to hear about the State Fair in Indianapolis. Our prayers are with Sugarland, their fans, and all the personnel working there. And most importantly, our prayers are with the families of the injured and the families of the four people who were killed.”

Rascal Flatts’ Jay DeMarcus: “All thoughts and prayers go to the folks in Indy and Sugarlands camp tonight… What an awful tragedy…”

Jake Owen: “Every guy in our crew has thoughts and prayers going out to folks at Indiana State Fair and our friends @Sugarlandmusic”

Brad Paisley: “Really sad about the sugarland stage collapse. What a tragedy.”

Keith Urban: “I just saw the footage from Indiana State Fair tonight on youtube and am absolutely in shock. We send our prayers and thoughts to each and every one of you who were there and your families and loved ones as well. God bless you all.”

Reba: “What happened in Indianapolis tonight is what promoters, artists, crews and fans pray never happens. From my band, crew and the entire Starstruck organization, we send our thoughts and prayers to the 4 people who lost their lives tonight and to everyone who was at the concert. Jennifer and Kristian, I love you both.”

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Mayo Clinic’s New Center for Social Media

By Katherine Hobson

Mayo Clinic has been taking advantage of social media — including Facebook, Twitter and patient and employee blogs — for several years.

Today Mayo announced the launch of a Center for Social Media, which it says will expand social media tools beyond the traditional P.R. and marketing functions to use by staff, physicians and patients. We chatted by phone with Lee Aase, currently manager of syndications and social media at Mayo, who will be one of the center’s leaders.

Here are edited excerpts from our conversation:

What does this involve?

The real focus is looking for ways to increase the use of social media throughout the practice at Mayo — to provide in-depth information for patients in a much more comprehensive way, and to create connections between researchers, physicians and staff. Up until now we’ve had the equivalent of a person and a half working through the P.R. department, and we want to take that same model to the whole enterprise at Mayo. We’ll have the equivalent of about eight full-time employees, including a medical director.

Why would a busy doctor want to spend the time to learn how to use YouTube?

This is building on the interest that we’ve already had. There is immense interest from clinical departments — they want to be able to harness these tools to do their business. We want to create a curriculum that’s scalable and enables us to provide them with training when they want it.

Can you give me an example?

We’ve done an introduction video for the head of our dental specialties department, Dr. Sreenivas Koka, with some background information — where he’s from, his history. And it talks about the things patients are looking to fix, and asks what’s most important for them. The idea is that it will make the consultations more efficient by getting the preliminaries out of the way. What Dr. Koka has found is that the patients feel they know him a little bit before they come. We want to study the impact of that — so far we’ve sent it out to a few dozen patients but we want to study it [more formally].

And you’d also offer this to other institutions, advocacy groups and other organizations?

We’ve informally been consulting and providing advice to other medical providers and organizations; now there’s a formal relationship we can have with other hospitals. We’ll charge nominal fees to cover the cost of the center. We’re planning to create a blogging platform, for example, that we may offer to other hospitals or to patient foundations.

What’s the goal?

To help patients. Sometimes that means providing information directly to them, and sometimes it means disseminating information more rapidly to the medical community.

http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2010/07/27/health-blog-qa-mayo-clinics-new-center-for-social-media/

Mobile Food Vendors Using Social Media

Using social media to distribute information. Incorporating Twitter into their game plan, but also use traditional media including the phone. 10-15% of sales through social.

Social media to communicate information in an entertaining way

Timmons&Company, a creative marketing firm focusing on business to business marketing and advertising, has recently established itself as a serious player in the world of social media.

Rich Timmons, Founder of Timmons&Company, said “by engaging in social media, the company will now be able to connect with their current and prospective clients online. Our social media will serve as a resource of entertaining and educational information through sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and our blog.”

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/07/prweb4292944.htm

Old Spice Videos leverage Twitter, Facebook, Reddit etc, and it worked!

This is a great example of using technology, social media and micro-blogging to create the content, the distribution, and the marketing. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_old_spice_won_the_internet.php

My sister, Liz Dubelman, posted this link on her Facebook site. Thanks Liz!

Wyclef Jean Video #140conf

I edited a series from #140conf for Macala Wright.  These segments feature Wyclef Jean:

1)  This clip will make you love Wyclef.  “There’s a happy side to these kids,” he says in reference to poor children.  He knows that you have to build on something positive.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P8TwCt8lTw

2)  “You make it (Twitter) your own world,” says Wyclef Jean, explaining that the value is in the quality of the relationships.  There are ways to find all kinds of resources within your own community.  Wyclef became known as “The Twitter Police,” because the community is self-policing.

http://www.youtube.com/user/MarketingFashion#play/uploads/8/MOFGSHVqP58

3)  Here Wyclef Jean explains that the record label doesn’t have enough time to promote all the singles, but the fans do.  “A record compay ain’t gonna have no time…so that the fans are doing this…so through Twitter we have built our own street team online called the Warriors.”

http://www.youtube.com/user/MarketingFashion#play/uploads/5/P_FzhEXfaEs

Tweets and Warhol

It’s funny that in place of our Warhol promised 15 minutes, twitter offers us 140 characters to make our statements.