We caught up with the man behind Mayo Clinic’s long-running medical podcasts to learn how it started and how it’s done
At one time, Mayo Clinic’s podcast reached No. 29 on the list of iTunes top 100 podcasts. That’s impressive for a corporate podcast. If you look at the top 20 podcasts on iTunes right now, it’s a mix of mainly news and comedy-themed podcasts. There’s nothing related to the medical field.
This high rank surprised even Mayo Clinic officials. “Suddenly we were getting huge traffic spikes,” recalled Lee Aase, the manager of media relations and new media at Mayo. “When we went to iTunes we noticed our podcast was featured on the front page.”
Aase admits that reaching this high watermark again might prove difficult. After all, it happened in September 2005—about one year after podcasting was invented and shortly after iTunes began hosting them. He called it the benefit of being ahead of the curve—before podcasts grew in popularity—and having the Mayo name recognition.
This head start on social media that Aase mentioned helped the hospital outpace its competition and provide patients and the media with information in new and exciting ways. It also helped Aase and his staff amass a wealth of knowledge about podcasting which exceeds what even some experts can claim.
So here’s the scoop on Mayo Clinic’s podcasting: How it started, where the content comes from and how the podcast is produced.
From TV to podcasting Mayo Clinic’s podcasts evolved from TV and radio segments the hospital media relations team had produced since 2000 called Medical Edge. It launched as a news package offered to TV stations. Mayo created weekly news pieces on specific health topics that it would offer exclusively to one station in a market. Stations could use the entire piece or pull out b-roll and sound bites.
“We originally saw it has something to offer as a resource mainly targeted to the smaller markets where they might not have a full-time health reporter,” Aase explained. TV stations trusted the pieces as newsworthy— as opposed to advertorial content—because Mayo Clinic’s reputation was on the line.
Mayo Clinic started a similar product for radio stations in 2004: the Medical Edge radio program. While the TV segments were 90 seconds long and weekly, Mayo packaged the radio product as daily 60-second pieces in MP3 format. One radio spot about epilepsy, for example, provided a description of the ailment, along with voiceover from a doctor and instructions for how listeners could receive even more information.
In August 2005 Mayo decided to give the MP3 files to consumers in the form of podcasts: the Medical Edge podcast.
“We did it in a real low-key way,” Aase recalled. “We had a programmer on our staff who figured out how to create an RSS feed, and we surreptitiously published it to iTunes.”
Now that radio spot about epilepsy is a 60-second podcast available on Mayo Clinic’s Web site, iTunes and podcast hosting sites. These brief, well-produced podcasts proved ideal for a mass audience, Aase said. Thousands of people subscribed to Medical Edge and the cost for Mayo was marginal.
Shortly after it was released in 2005, Medical Edge hit No. 29 on iTunes.
In July 2007, Mayo Clinic reached out to a niche audience with longer podcasts about specific topics. These podcasts are about 15 to 20 minutes long and feature doctors who are specialists in their fields, talking about a specific topic. It’s aimed at niche audiences: such as the person interested in heart disease or cancer, for example.
How it’s done “We’re beginning with the end in mind,” Aase said. This means communicators at Mayo Clinic know they need TV and radio segments from an interview with a physician, and now they want at least one podcast as well.
Every month Mayo Clinic communicators sit down with a physician—the segment’s medical adviser—and map out the next month’s editorial calendar. What will the TV and radio spots cover, and what topic will go in the syndicated newspaper column Mayo also creates?
Fact Box
Mayo Clinic is a nonprofit medical practice with clinics and hospitals in Rochester, Minn.; Jacksonville, Fla.; and Phoenix and Scottsdale, Az. More than 3,300 physicians, scientists and researchers work at Mayo Clinic’s three locations, along with 46,000 additional health staff. The three locations collectively treat more than half a million people each year.
From there communicators ask, how can we make this into a podcast?
Let’s say, for example, Mayo Clinic communicators decide to create a TV segment about epilepsy. They find a doctor to speak about the topic, and he or she will likely discuss epilepsy and related disorders in front of the camera for 20 minutes. Perhaps only eight seconds will make the 90-second TV package, while the audio recording from that interview might make two or three 60-second radio pieces.
Those radio pieces become short podcasts intended for a broad audience. Meanwhile, the entire 20-minute audio recording becomes a podcast for the niche audience.
Pardon the jargon, but that collaboration is a perfect example of synergy. It also makes the best use of a doctor’s time.
“It is trying to be smart about production,” he commented. “With a little extra effort how can we produce something that will really meet the need, be valuable to a niche of people who are really looking for information to make a decision?”
Behind the scenes Mayo Clinic worked with a freelance producer when it launched the Medical Edge radio segments. That freelancer is now part of the Mayo staff. What this producer does is turn audio from telephone interviews into high-quality radio segments and then makes them into podcasts.
He also strips audio tracks from TV interviews and spends a few hours converting a 20-minute interview into a podcast. Mayo Clinic then uses its “homegrown” RSS tool to upload the podcast (the tool its Web team built before RSS for podcasts was widely available online). That homegrown tool may not prove the ultimate solution, Aase said, because podcasts are now easily served by blogging software with built-it RSS feeds.
So what is the ROI of all this podcasting?
“We haven’t done a mercenary calculation of what all of this brings in [to Mayo Clinic],” Aase said.
Instead, Aase and the communicators at Mayo Clinic offer this example of ROI. Think of medicine, of diseases and the hospitals and specialists that treat them. Mayo Clinic likely comes to mind sooner rather than later. This is no accident.
“Part of making these podcasts is creating general awareness and providing worthwhile information for people,” Aase explained. “It makes people think better of you, makes you top-of-mind as they are having serious medical conditions where they might want to seek a referral some place.”
The radio and TV spots, meanwhile, contribute to Mayo’s media relations. It is building relationships with news organizations so Mayo gets press when its doctors are published in a major medical journal or someone famous seeks treatment there.
Mayo Clinic has never advertised on a national scale, and yet it’s a nationally known name. Whether it’s measurable or not, that’s definitely a strong ROI.
“It really comes down to our philosophy: Do the right thing for the patient, and they will tell their friends and their doctors, and their doctors will their patients,” Aase said.
From media relations to social media manager Shortly after we talked to Lee Aase, he upgraded his “media relations manager” title. Now he’s manager of syndications and social media. Mayo Clinic hired someone to exclusively handle media relations, leaving Aase to social media (and syndications—Mayo’s TV, radio and newspaper columns). Beyond podcasts, he will explore innovative uses for social media tools like Facebook and more.
The Mayo Clinic home page offers a link to the blogs and podcasts page, where there are a number of podcasts on various topics along with two blogs (on Alzheimer’s and stress). Look for the number of blogs to increase.
“We definitely believe new media will grow in importance,” he said. “For communication professionals, being unfamiliar with social media tools borders on malpractice.”
Mayo launches videocasts Just as the Medical Edge radio broadcasts became podcasts so too did the Medical Edge TV productions. In January 2007, Aase and his team turned the weekly patient-focused TV spots into videocasts available on Mayo Clinic’s Web site.
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