Case Study: Mayo Clinic Supports Patients Via Social Media

To enhance its growing social media presence, nonprofit medical practice and research group Mayo Clinic established a Center for Social Media in July 2010. Since launching the division, Mayo Clinic has bolstered its activity on social networks and blogs. With carefully crafted social media guidelines and an expanded team, the organization has both empowered employees to get involved in the social space and provided patients and healthcare researchers with a robust destination for information and support.

Challenges
When setting out to launch the new social media initiative, Mayo Clinic sought to accomplish the following:

Strategy
In July 2010, Mayo Clinic hired a team of nine full-time employees, who were tasked with monitoring the social network sites at all times. The social media team has strengthened Mayo Clinic’s ability to repost content such as patient stories and video testimonials across various channels. Mayo Clinic is also using social media to answer questions in less traditional ways. On Facebook, for instance, it can supply a patient with a video from a Mayo Clinic subject-matter expert. Providing these videos in a social media setting not only enables patients to find the information they need, but also lets them ask clarifying questions.

This new level of support gave the organization the capability to take its social media activities, such as photos, videos, contests and discussions about healthcare issues on its Facebook page, to new levels. For example, the organization is promoting a Facebook contest in which children can submit a video about how they stay healthy to win a chance to get on the JumboTron at a Minnesota Twins baseball game. Mayo Clinic has begun using Twitter to encourage users to tweet questions that to be answered during its regular Mayo Clinic radio broadcasts in Rochester.

Results
Through its social media outreach, Mayo Clinic wanted to be a true ally with consumers in their journey toward health and wellness, a position that is central to the organization’s communication strategy. “This isn’t marketing and this isn’t advertising,” Aase insisted. “This is about being helpful. If you pursue it with an attitude that’s too sales-like, it’s going to be less effective, less genuine and less authentic.”

Thanks to social media efforts, Mayo Clinic has 180,000 followers on Twitter and 54,000 “likes” on Facebook. It also has the largest YouTube channel of any medical provider, attracting approximately 6,000 to 8,000 video views a day.

The level of sharing among Mayo Clinic stakeholders has exceeded expectations, Aase said. Not only do fans and followers interact with one another on Mayo Clinic’s channels, they are frequently sharing items of use with each other. “We’ve seen cases where someone finds a video helpful and shares that video with a patient support group,” Aase noted. “That draws another group of people to our community—that’s why our growth has been so organic. Community members are naturally sharing this with their friends, which then draws more folks in.”

Key Takeaways
For Mayo Clinic, social media has proven to be an important opportunity to listen and respond to patients’ concerns in a new way. “People are overwhelmingly positive,” said Aase, “but the negative comments are important because they provide us an opportunity to listen and respond if somebody hasn’t had a good experience.”

Being able to tweak its social media guidelines to address new and evolving situations has also contributed to the program’s success. To avoid getting entrenched in nonmedical debates, Mayo Clinic has amended its guidelines slightly so as to move the conversations to a “discussion” tab on the Facebook page. “We said, ‘We’re not silencing you, but we want to move this discussion off the wall so that others who want to talk about medical-related issues have that opportunity,’ ” Aase said.

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