Mastodon Twitter, Blogs and the 2010 AAHPM HPNA Annual Assembly ~ Pallimed

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Twitter, Blogs and the 2010 AAHPM HPNA Annual Assembly

I had a wonderful time at the 2010 AAHPM / HPNA Annual Assembly in Boston this past week.  Meeting new people, seeing good friends, and learning a few new tricks along the way.


One of the prevalent themes in many of my conversations was social media, particularly blogs (the new AAHPM blog, GeriPal and Pallimed) and Twitter.  The Social Media in Palliative Care Communities talk was an apparent success given we got 24 survey responses, expected only 10 people to come at the 7am session that had a compressed promotion timeline, but we had over 140 people, standing room only.  There ARE people who like social media, they really really like it.  Or at least are curious about it.  Eric Widera, Alex and I will be posting a review of that conference along with all the slides from the talk in the next week.

Some quick stats on the impact of Twitter over the week of the 2010 Assembly (via What The Hashtag):
(2009 stats are in parentheses)

834 tweets (224)
92 contributors (30)
119.1 tweets per day (41)
75.2% come from "The Top 10 Contributors" (NA)
24.3% are retweets (NA)
46.6% are mentions (NA)
29.7% have multiple hashtags (NA)

Top 10 Contributors

  1. @ctsinclair - 304
  2. @suzanakm - 124
  3. @brimcmike - 52
  4. @doclake - 30
  5. @equijada - 27
  6. @HynesBeacon - 22
  7. @marachne - 22
  8. @erinrbreedlove - 17
  9. @mchwistek - 16
  10. @gcooneymd - 13

More in depth analysis will follow later this week, once I get caught up on my clinical and administrative work from being gone for a week.

Some quick highlights of social media from the conference:
  • The volume of posts on the new AAHPM blog (fixed link 3/8).  It is great to see such activity. Now we have to go and comment and keep the passion going because it is a place where you can really contribute to information that would not necessairly fit in any other AAHPM publication
  • Teaching Diane Meier (@DianeEMeier), David McGrew (@dmmcgrew) and Dennis Pacl (@dspacl) about Twitter.  Last year I was lucky enough to have Diane Meier interested enough in social media to have her inquire about a quick beginner Twitter lesson.  And incoming AAHPM president Gail Cooney saw what we were doing and joined us.  This year, Diane and I planned to have an intermediate Twitter lesson, and Dennis Pacl and David McGrew happened to see what we were doing and stopped by as well.  None of them left befuddled and it seemed each had 'a-ha' moments and a sense of enthusiasm about the potential to make an impact for our field.  You can too.
  • The attendance at the Pallimed/GeriPal gathering at Lir.  It was wonderful to meet so many of the (long-time and new) readers.  This party keeps growing every year because of this informal network.  Now if we can put that same network to task for selected projects that could be really amazing!
  • The Social Media in Palliative Care Communities talk.  I already mentioned the attendance, but a lot of people came up to the panel and talked as if they were moving from the pre-contemplative to contemplative stage.
I have a lot of great stories of the power of social networking and social media that I will share over the next few weeks so I can demonstrate some principles and help change the abstract into a real-world example.  After the next few weeks I plan on changing back to regular scheduled programming.  But if you are interested in possibly getting involved with Twitter these next few weeks should be fairly active as many other hospice and palliative care professionals start using it.

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