John Sharp is an IT Manager for a major medical center in Northeast Ohio. Areas of expertise include: ehealth, personal health records, Web 2.0 technologies, social media and project management. He is active in the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society and the American Medical Informatics Association. The opinions expressed on this blog are those of the author.
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Archive for October 22nd, 2009
The Experience of being an embedded Twitterer at a conference
October 22, 2009
Two weeks ago I was at the Cleveland Clinic Innovation Summit as an embedded tweet. As an experiment to promote the conference and encourage twittering, I was asked to actively tweet at this important conference which included many CEOs from drug and device firms. Here are some of my experiences.
A hash tag was decided a few weeks in advance: #CCInnovation.
Initially, keeping up with presentations which included slides was manageable. Abbreviating key quotes from leaders in medical innovation is a challenge and including links to their companies required some quick searches. When the program shifted to an interview style with a panel, it became more difficult to keep up with what was being said and who said it, much less adding a link. Some followers asked for who was saying what. Including a hash tag, who is speaking, what they said and potentially a link is a trick in 140 characters.
Some of the important followers were from the press. It’s not clear how many conference registrants actually participated or followed the twitter stream.
Technical challenges: at times the wireless was not available. At one point I switched to Tiny Twitter on my Blackberry.
Overall, it helped to know the conference content being familiar with clinical trials and the pharma and device industries.
