What I Do

Special access for my blog readers

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As some of you may know, I created and maintain a u.osu site for our One Health initiative. Since we launched in February, we’ve had 7,607 pageviews and 3,359 visits from 94 countries. The top 5 countries are the U.S., Ethiopia, India, the UK, and Canada. Our contributors include deans, professors, students, and external partners.

I’m in the process of creating a new u.osu site, this time as an overview of the health sciences community at Ohio State. The home page will be set up as a blog using content from Ohio State’s seven health sciences colleges. I just updated the blog content yesterday.hsci-uosu-screen

The site is currently in review with stakeholders, and we expect it to be public Oct. 20. But readers of this blog can get special advance access.

Go to http://u.osu.edu/healthsciences/ and use the password onmytodolist2014 to log in.

I welcome your comments, questions and feedback.

 

Honey! I shrunk the competition!

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mousetrap-with-caption

I just posted some thoughts on LinkedIn about marketing your small upstart in a field with more established competitors. I start out talking about mousetraps.

We Americans sure like building better mousetraps. The U.S. Patent Office has issued more patents for mousetraps than any other device, reports Ruth Kassinger, author of “Build a Better Mousetrap.” Yet, the spring-loaded trap is still the most popular, Kassinger says.

Do you have a new mousetrap? How do you get that story out about your new, upstart invention against a well-known, respected market leader?

Marketers of small, young, new organizations may have a good story to tell, but we must figure out how to tell the world.

Like many communicators, I believe that you can’t tell your story without great, compelling content. Let’s suppose you have collected dynamic, shareable content about your organization.

When you’re a small fish in a big pond, how do you get attention for that great content?

Read more …

What I Do: Building a personal brand in social media

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I was flipping through work notes from my recent Fulbright project in Ethiopia, and the topic of personal branding using social media caught my attention.

Earlier this year, I presented my course “Branding, Content and Social Media” to faculty and staff in two Ethiopian universities.

Daily, I wrote an outline of the topics I expected to cover for each session so I wouldn’t forget anything.

For the personal brand topic, I actually wrote out more of a script. I don’t include this subject in my iTunes U course, but I wanted to emphasize the use of social media in personal branding for my Ethiopian students.

I thought I’d share my notes here:

Branding is not just for your organization. It also applies to you.

Your personal brand is similar to reputation – how others view you and how you show up in your daily life.

Are you a genius? Trustworthy? Responsive?

Do you do what you say you will?

One way to communicate your personal brand is to write a blog about a special project or a cool hobby. Since I work in higher education, I am always looking for faculty who can be thought leaders on an issue of importance.

If that person writes a blog, then we can tweet about it, promote it on our websites, or include it in e-newsletters. Expert blog posts can also be promoted to external media as a possible information source or future interview.

However, having a blog can be a big time commitment. Perhaps your experts can’t invest the time in regularly posting to a blog. One option is to pitch that expert as a guest writer on someone else’s blog. The key is to be a relevant voice and add value to the site’s followers.

What to write about? Perhaps there is a photograph that speaks to your expertise. Writing about the backstory for that image could be a great blog post.

Here’s an example: We have a great photograph of our American students and Ethiopian partners conducting surveys on perceptions related to rabies. Here it is:

interview (1)

The Ethiopian expert in the photo could write a post about what is happening and why, what she was thinking when this was happening, and the challenges of getting to and from the rural location.

Throughout my course, I focus on an organization’s use of brand, content and social media. My point here is that it can also apply to your personal brand.

What I Do: Skype Q&A with an Ethiopian colleague

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Sintayehu is a friend who is part of the collaboration between Ohio State and the University of Gondar (UOG), Ethiopia. This summer, Ohio State sent a team of students and faculty to partner with UOG on a spay/neuter program and dog inventory as part of a rabies elimination pilot project. Below is a transcript of a Skype conversation between Sintayehu and myself. Sintayehu, a veterinary medicine faculty member, describes the field training UOG provides its vet students.

Christine: Now that the Diamond Jubilee is over, what’s going on at the University of Gondar? Is it summer break?

Sintayehu: Well, I am out of office for field work with students on their clinical field experience. Most of the schools are on summer vacation now, but students in Medicine and Health College, Vet Faculty and freshmen in various departments are still in campus.

Christine: What kind of field work do the vet students do?

Sintayehu: To support clinical medicine course and help them develop confidence and get acquainted with the real picture at clinics out there in working place, students take a course called off-campus training. The students will have about two weeks’ time exposure to different districts’ government vet clinics where they work as clinical vet students with close supervision by one faculty staff from UoG, and the district’s vet.

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Sintayehu: They also engage in community services and help the clinics in every capacity they are capable of, like cleaning the clinic compound, providing recommendations on potential shortcomings, etc. After completion of off-campus training, they are supposed to present a field practice report about their stay and will be evaluated based on that.

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Christine: Do they provide direct care to animal patients?

Sintayehu: Yes, with supervision. That is why I am currently with them here in field.

Christine: I bet they learn a lot from that.

Sintayehu: Sure. That is the best way of learning from practical courses. And this is witnessed by them. However, because of small amount of budget they sometimes come back to campus earlier than planned. This is really a continuous challenge to the faculty and to them.

Christine: What are the most common illnesses or conditions that you see at the district clinics?

Sintayehu: Well, I can say we have all sorts of diseases. For instance, in the place we are now working are Infectious (Pasteurellosis, Black leg, Anthrax, Lumpy Skin Disease, Sheep pox, Rabies, Newcastle Disease), Parasitic (helminthes, arthropods: ticks, lice, mange mites; protozoans: Trypanosomes, Coccidia), Metabolic and nutritional, and reproductive disorders in cattle, sheep, goats, donkeys and chicken. I was surprised to see dogs as well in the clinic.

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Sintayehu: However, to be honest with you, there are no laboratory facilities for confirmation of cases, so the diagnosis is almost always relied on history and clinical findings. No single laboratory diagnostic aid and there are only few drugs available.

Sintayehu: I saw a new building for the clinic and I was told that it has been built from the World Bank fund. Mr Nigussie, the vet technician working here, told me that it is now completed and will be furnished with basic clinic facilities from the same fund. Then it can have better veterinary service.

Christine: Why were you surprised to see dogs?

Sintayehu: I mean not to see them, but the awareness of the community, most of which are poor farmers, to get medical care for their dogs.

Christine: That seems like a good thing.

Sintayehu: Definitely! I was told by Mr Nigussie that the community has good awareness about the importance of bringing their animals to clinics whenever there is ill-health to their animals. That shows there is a big demand for vet service.

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Christine: Also a good thing for the rabies project, perhaps? Showing awareness of needing to take care of their dogs?

Sintayehu: Yes. You know, I also asked about the status of rabies in the area. It is terrible to hear that there is high prevalence of rabies in the countryside. This is worsening by strongly rooted perception of the community that traditional healers can cure the disease. It is challenging human/animal health care.  There is no rabies vaccination at the clinics. The only thing the vets in such districts doing are advise farmers to be careful of suspected dogs.

Christine O’Malley: Yikes! What areas will you visit next?

Sintayehu: This is the last field work for this academic year.  Koladdiba, the place we are now working in, is not that much far from Gondar, about 35kms, but the road is rugged and may take you about an hour or so. I love having seen the countryside. I wish I could visit such places more often.

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Group of students with my friend, Dr. Sintayehu, in the middle wearing the blue jacket.

What I Do: Event communications

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You might know this about me: I value collaboration.

In many instances, I think we get better results when we collaborate.

My iTunes U course is a great example. For most of the chapters, I recruited experts to serve as guest speakers. They recorded themselves answering questions I had sent them in advance. Then I took the raw footage and created mini-lectures ranging in length from 2-10 minutes. Their participation makes the course even more effective by offering a variety of perspectives.

The course includes a chapter on event communications. That chapter is primarily a case study using the first Building Healthy Academic Communities conference held at Ohio State in 2013. The next conference will be at UC Irvine in 2015.

At the time of the conference, Kathryn Kelley was Chief Advancement Officer for the College of Nursing and led the strategic planning and implementation for the event communications. (She is now the program manager for the Ohio Manufacturing Institute.)

Here is the case study video on event communications. It’s about 10 minutes long, but well worth the time.

 

 

What I Do: One Health brochure is done!

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Today I’m Skype-texting and emailing with collaborator and friend, Tigist E., our logistics coordinator in Ethiopia.

Our One Health Summer Institute has launched, and we are putting the finishing touches on logistics. Much planning has gone into the institute this year. We have more than twice the number of Buckeyes traveling to Ethiopia this year!

Tigist-E

Tigist E.

Tigist is helping coordinate hotels and ground transportation. She’s amazing. She’s the mother of two girls, pursuing a master’s degree, and working full time. Yet nothing gets by her! If you want something to get done, ask a busy person! If she took a StrengthsFinder assessment, she would probably be an Achiever and Arranger.

Here’s the Summer Institute brochure that went to press last week. It will be circulated around the world! We’ll also use it as handouts when we meet with potential external partners and funders. This little baby will get quite the workout!