Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Health Care Social Media Buddy Mentoring Chat 2 Tomorrow 12 CT




"The role of mainstream media will primarily become one of an aggregator, custodian and verifier, a credibility filter that sifts through all of this data and highlights what is and is not worth reading, understanding and trusting…” ( p.62, The New Digital Age,)


This makes me think that  in the same way these few lines are discussing the way traditional journalism must become the “aggregators” and “validators” so do not social media leaders?  Twitter links to many traditional news outlets, and other extremely solid sources of information. Therefore social media leaders must chart a course for populations that need to be lead to rich and useful information.

Health care social media leaders can help patient’s access useful discussions, forums, lists, blogs, Doctors, important organisations and much more, and therefore we need to keep finding top notch educators, navigators and curators to help build those bridges for people too access quality information amidst the noise.
If traditional media is being asked to find new ways, so does new media need to find leaders who operate just like traditional media; they utilize the ultimate modern landscape but put traditional methods to use within it?




Please join @Shumilne @JBBC @randy_chalfant @naveen101 and others for Health Care Social Media Buddy Mentoring Chat 2 tomorrow at 12 CT, 11 MT, 10 PT, 1pm ET, 6pm GMT 
Check out the hashtag #hcsmbm and see what is going on  :)

Friday, April 26, 2013

Health Care Social Media Buddy Mentoring



We are kicking off with Tweet chat number 2 on " Health Care Social Media Buddy Mentoring" (#hcsmbm)  at 12 CT, Wednesday May 1 st - (11 am MT, 10 am PT, 1pm ET, 6pm GMT, 7pm, CET)
Thank you so much to everyone who hung out with us last week during our brainstorm session. Looking back over the transcript  what jumps out, and to quote @JBBC ," is that this whole idea of developing a buddy mentoring system to help those who are in need of assistance to navigate social media sites for health care information", has really resonated with people and has started a really cool and interesting conversation. 

 @Mdigitalife  tweeted  @Naveen101 and myself a few days ago and said “how do we make this real?” , I think this is where we need to head next. There was a lot of chat last week about the start point for #some mentoring, and we agreed that it does have to be wound all the way back to off line in some cases, as some patients really are pretty much off line. We talked about mentoring up the platforms, for those already on social media but not getting all the benefits. There was a lot of interest in what Facebook – Twitter mentoring might look like. We also asked what about Health care providers? Where is their involvement in all this? There was a lot of agreement that it was a key factor in on boarding more patients to social media.

 There are so many strands to this conversation and so many ways to discuss further how we make it “ real” and help bring more patients in to the social media conversation and all it has to offer them.  Next week we want to take a piece of all of this and keep our objectives for the chat to how can doctors on board more patients? How do we support peer to peer mentoring?

This week’s chat questions come from the awesome @randy_chalfant, he put these together for us and if we share them now we hope some of you can start chewing on them before Wednesday.
Q1.  Everyone’s needs are different. What are the keys to identifying each patient’s needs?
Q2. What guidelines need to be developed to deliver meaningful and individualized support?
Q3. How can we categorize what a doctor and a mentor offer, to match patient’s individual needs?
Q4. How do we track progress and make adjustments when necessary

Hopefully we will start moving up a notch from brainstorming next week, and if you missed last week go check out #hcsmbm so ya can get up to speed before Wednesday. If you get any ideas before Wednesday throw them out and use the hash tag!

Thank you and big thanks to @topsurf @shumilne @JBBC @Naveen101 @randy_chalfant @audreybirt @pedal_india @HenrikeFH @jimcook1 @annemiekeh @lockeym @freshchapter @sfsurvivors @helnoble @allieemore @4breastcancer @cancer2gether @myelomateacher @cmaer @chimoose @mdigitalife

Continued Inspiration from all our awesome #communitys #LSCHAT #BCSM #BCCEU #HCSM - circle of  awesome hashtag community education.


Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Just sayin...





We are advocates because we feel passionately about something, and we use our voices to try and help get stuff done. There is so little being done that every single one of our voices is as valuable as the next persons, and believe me there is more than enough room for every single voice, in fact we have so much room we could rent out places in the cancer community for advocates voices. 

What gets me and that is why I am sharing this today is that an advocates voice is a sacred voice and it should never be made to feel by anyone or any other organisation like it is doing the wrong thing, not saying the right thing or just  not as valuable as what they have to offer.
We are not in the school yard anymore.  I have worked in environments that looking back on it now my hair stands on end. There was a job I had not so long ago and I still can’t think about what happened without wincing. But they were jobs…jobs I didn’t feel that passionately about either, and hey who doesn’t run up against quite a bit of sh## in their working life at some point or another.

This is different though. The work we do as advocates is so important. It is so valuable and it is also important that we feel comfortable and free in the space so we can do our best work. I am still reading Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In at the moment and she talks about women ditching the Queen Bee mentality, she asks us as women to stop thinking there has to just be one woman on top to get anything done in this world, we need to start thinking about a hive, a busy hive full of productive equals empowering one another.

Taking gender out of it, this actually counts for all of us male and female, and there is a no more important time to make sure we  shape our thinking like this, when we look at our work in the cancer community. We need to have a hive mentality. There is so much to do and every thought, contribution, word, action and voice counts -  equally.

I am just sayin…