Today I am heading out to Bellevue to give a talk called "Twitter While You Work" to the Jay Ray Think Lab conference attended by health care marketers. I spoke at a Think Lab last year and kept everyone awake enough to be asked back again this year. Given I will be talking after lunch on a gorgeous 80 degree day, keeping them awake again will be a tall order.I will have to use short declarations of 140 characters or less. At least if I were microblogging. But that is only the topic and not the format.
I was slow to pick up on the value of microblogging. I thought it was interesting and followed along for certain, but wasn't going to be sold on the technology until I started seeing unique, valuable results from its use.
One of the sites that I took a look at and used was QuillPill, which was a creative writing site for those who wanted to write from their handheld devices. I wrote about it here.
Where it became apparent that Twitter was going to grow and become a successful and valuable tool was in Journalism. Reporters and newspapers alike have picked it up as a useful tool for breaking news and aggregate reporting. It is the speed and brevity of the delivery that makes it so valuable.
Yesterday, Paul Farhi provided a pretty thorough review of its use in the American Journalism Review. He does did in to it a bit but I would have liked to hear more about his personal experiences using the tool.
I have also looked into Twitters use in Education, and will continue to do so. My hopes for some good data came from an August 2008 Blog By Carol posting which touts 50 ideas on using twitter for education. I was a little disappointed when the next four sites I visited to expand on the topic referred back to hers. I have used blogging over the last several quarters as a teaching aid, in particular for short writing assignments and commenting, but have yet to include microblogging. Perhaps in the Fall.
As for Healthcare. Well, surprisingly it is being done, which speaks to the universal value of the tool. It has cross industry value.
It is not as mature as the use in newspapers and by journalists, but it is being testing on several fronts for its usefulness.
My favorite for making you think. Twittering from the operating room. I would like to know why this is a good idea, but I am not a surgeon and have not had the opportunity to twitter in the OR yet.
As for the number of uses, in a non deliberate show of one upmanship, Phil Baumann Online lists not 20, not 50, but 140 Health Care Uses for Twitter.
3 comments:
I just wanted to start a discussion about Twitter in health care.
Health care has a lot of catching up to do with regard to social software and communities, but it's getting there slowly. As I wrote in my list of 140 uses, health care has considerations that other industries don't.
If you want to see how others are using these media in health care, follow the hashtag #HCSM on Search.Twitter. The conversations take place every Sunday at 9pm EDT. Check it out: you'll find a friendly, diverse and knowledgeable group there.
@PhilBaumann
Thanks for writing Phil. You will probably see a few healthcare folks over following #HCSM as you note. Had a good discussion at a conference today on the very topic.
Hey Andrew - We posted about an event that took place today where the Coast Guard sent out tweets, king 5 picked it up, etc. It was a neat use of social networking tools.
http://www.sitecrafting.com/blog/coast-guard-new-media-mission-1/
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