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Many of us in the #hcsmca community hold events and integrate social media in the planning and execution. Are we doing a good job? What can we learn from each other? This week guest moderator Craig Thompson, digital specialist at Women’s College Hospital, offers their event as a case study on #hcsmca (with a twist). Craig explains.

By Craig Thompson (@CraigTyyz)

On Monday, October 22, 2012 my colleagues and I at Women’s College Hospital (@WCHospital) presented “The Power Study Forum – a discussion about cutting-edge issues in women’s health”. This forum featured Women’s College Research Institute scientists who contributed to the POWER Study. This was our first event where social media played a role in both raising awareness and execution.

The following is brief description of the strategy behind our digital communications and social media planning.

Goals – What we hoped to achieve.
Put bums in…

Social media when combined with traditional media can put your healthcare brand on the winners’ podium.

Social media is ubiquitous.  Look at the Olympics to see how much social media has become so pervasive.  The Olympics just completed in London has been dubbed the first “Social Media Games.”  The heavy use of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube by fans, athletes and the news media, the 2012 Olympics was unlike any other in the way we watch and interact with the games.

For the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney few people had high speed internet.  By 2004 with the games in Athens, smartphones were on the scene.  For the Beijing Games in 2008 there were 100 million Facebook users.  But for the games in London there were about 900 million Facebook users and about 500 million Twitter users sending about 400 million tweets per day.

The fans were part of the action…

On Wednesday, the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media introduced Bringing the Social Media Revolution to Health Care, a new book to help people, specifically health care professionals, join the conversations taking place on social media – conversations that promote health, support people living with chronic diseases, build bridges, deconstruct silos and improve health care.

The book includes a foreword by John Noseworthy, M.D., President and CEO of Mayo Clinic; Preface by Farris Timimi, M.D., Medical Director of MCCSM; a special section about legal concerns by Mayo Clinic Legal Counsel Dan Goldman, J.D., and a checklist for strategic planning.

But what I particularly like about Bringing the Social Media Revolution to Health Care is that the Mayo Clinic invited 30 social media thought leaders to write personal and personable essays on specific common questions and topics about using social media for health and health care. You’ll be familiar with many of…