social media « eagledawg.net

Posts Tagged ‘social media’

Embedded Librarianship Via Twitter

Thursday, June 16th, 2011

A long time ago (May 2008) in a .blogspot far away when I was a brand new librarian, I opined about the Medical Library Association (MLA)

We promote anytime/anywhere access to information and resources in the most efficient way possible for our users, and I want to be part of whatever it takes to do the same for our own organization plus encourage this vital sense of community. I have other online community friends of 8+ years I have never met yet we’re closer than family. My dear mentor has given me everything with a fellowship for my education and has asked for nothing. The time for me to give back and have the most effective and lasting impact is now. Highly ambitious words for a 3-week-old, I know, but it’s a vision I have and can’t let die.

The medical library field has made a lot of progress with involvement on Twitter and other social media channels since then. The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has had a social media directory since April 2010. Yeah!

Consider a sampling of my blog history directly related to librarians’ involvement in social media, particularly Twitter:

A tweet for change: #PubMed (January 2009 – a call for sharing medical librarian-related input using that hashtag before spammers took over, wondering in April 2010 if it should again be a feedback tool, but now everyone uses it.)
ACRL 2009 – Social Networking Literacy Competencies for Librarians (March 2009 – including Librarians who are social networking-literate must be able to apply their current skills and curiosity to emerging and evolving resources)
Crashing the #hcsm party (November 2009, another shoutout to engaged medical librarians involved in non-medlib hashtag chat)
Health Literacy and Twitter Synergy: #healthlit (October 2010, cover of the first organized health literacy chat and firehose experience that the CDC Health Out Loud blog noted. This is a great example of how helpful embedded librarianship can be for audiences on Twitter.)

Michelle Kraft elaborated well with What is the Purpose of an Association? upon the original MLA Connections post MLA’s Future.

One possibility may be encouraging involvement in hashtag chats. They are a valuable health information service and advocacy/outreach tool that medical librarians who are already active social media users should be participating in now. Anecdotally I think I see this happening more. Why limit participation to the already active? Because 38% of the MLA 2011 attendees who used the #mlanet11 hashtag on Twitter only did so once for the free drink coupon. You can’t fully engage as a one tweet wonder – it takes time, perseverance, and showing what you know and have to offer to build relationships, trust and connections in both online and other communities.

I was rather surprised by yesterday’s guest #hcsmca (Canadian twist on #hcsm above) post of Get out from behind the stacks: sharing health information with online communities. I see very engaged Canadian medical librarians doing quite well for themselves and their organizations on Twitter while encouraging their colleagues’ participation, particularly with @giustini‘s HLWiki Canada Social media for information professionals resources and I plan to attend @danhooker‘s Practicing Social Media in Health and Healthcare webcast Thursday June 15th at 1pm Pacific time.

How does the online medical library community connect with one another to learn? Ages ago I took over management of the Group Tweet account @medlibs when hashtags were much more cumbersome to find and follow than they are now. When there is a reciprocal following relationship (if you do not clearly indicate in your profile or by your tweets that you are a student or library-related type, I don’t follow back) a direct message sent to the account is then sent as a tweet to all followers. @medlibs is still a good way to share one message with over 1,300 interested parties and avoids spam but hashtags are a way for everyone to participate whether or not they are medical librarians. Is it time for the widespread promotion of #medlibs as an international community? Something else?

Tags: hashtags, librarians, mla, nlm, social media, twitter
Posted in Social Media | No Comments »

Health Literacy and Twitter Synergy: #healthlit

Friday, October 8th, 2010

On October 4th, the Twitter accounts for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention social media (@CDC_eHealth) and healthfinder.gov (@healthfinder) proposed a chat on October 7th with a hashtag of #healthlit to discuss the National Action Plan to Improve Health Literacy developed by the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS).

What happened on Twitter during that hour still blows my mind away 20 hours later as I’m writing this.

I and quite a few librarians, library-related folks & library Twitter accounts (medical and others) were there along with federal, state & local/county-level agencies with health information interests, hospitals, regular media, healthcare social media strategists, health information vendors, health educators, public health educators, and countless others.

We were probably supposed to follow a semi-structured question/discussion format centering on the health literacy action plan that is gently cattle prodded moderated as most scheduled Twitter chats are.

That’s not quite what happened.

The energetic passion that resulted from everyone seeking to connect, share and learn about each other’s strategies and approaches for health literacy were contagious to the point of being an instant online pandemic. It was chaotic. It was overwhelming. It was the first time I saw the MedlinePlus Twitter account (@medlineplus4you) be quite engaged in a hashtag chat including direct replies to others… putting the social in a National Library of Medicine social media channel.

It was one of the most unexpected and amazing community flashmob experiences I’ve been a part of on Twitter. I was just one small voice contributing the Medical Library Association’s and the National Network of Libraries of Medicines’ health literacy resources and supporting the discussion about MedlinePlus, NIHSeniorhealth and the Information RX program.

Other health literacy resources I managed to gulp from the firehose (besides the National Action Plan to Improve Health Literacy) were

Health Literacy Online (fantastic ODPHP resource covering how to write & design easy-to-read websites)
The Plain Language Medical Dictionary Widget (University of Michigan)
Clear Communication: An NIH Health Literacy Initiative (National Institutes of Health)
Talk To Your Doctor (part of NIH Clear Communication)
Talking With Your Doctor (National Institute on Aging)
Improving Health Literacy for Older Adults (PDF, CDC)
Improving Communication with Older Patients (AAFP)
Health Literacy for Public Health Professionals (online health tutorial, CDC)
Health Information for All by 2015 (HIFA2015)
Health Literacy Studies (Harvard)
MEDLINE/PubMed Search and Health Literacy Information Resources (NLM)

For me, the most exciting thing was having people from so many perspectives coming together with so much enthusiasm to discuss health literacy. Not a single one of us (or the agencies we work for) has The Only Right Answer: if we did, everyone would already understand medical information and there wouldn’t be a national action plan to improve it.

With everyone continuing to come together and all perspectives being heard, that is very likely to change. I can’t even begin to cover the multiple threads addressing accessibility, jargon, acronyms, disparities, specialized health needs (rural, seniors, etc) that were part of the conversation beyond resource sharing. There is a WTHashtag archive but it’s very hard to follow these threads there. I am excited about additional discussions and future collaboration opportunities though and will keep writing as I learn more about how to get involved.

Tags: communication, hashtags, linkedin, nlm, social media, twitter
Posted in consumer health, Health literacy, NIH, PubMed | 5 Comments »

Social Media in Health & Medicine (and Reference? Emergencies?)

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

It was a pleasure to participate in Highlight Health‘s hosting of Social Media in Health and Medicine, Medlibs Round 2.7. Thank you for an excellent compilation and presentation, Walter!

I’ve been talking about social media a lot here recently, I have just a few more updates related to social media then I’ll move on to other subjects.

Twitter as Government Agency Reference Source

I am encouraged by the step the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has taken by announcing they will monitor a hashtag, #findsamhsa, to assist people who are seeking information from their numerous helpful pamphlets and online resources. So far I haven’t seen where people have used the hashtag except in retweets, but the agency’s willingness to try this way to engage in assisting health information seekers is commendable. I’d suggest they include a blurb about it on their social media page though so others will know about this service after this scrolls off the immediate horizon from their Twitter posts. We already know how I feel about #pubmed so I won’t rehash that hashtag.

Increased Social Media Use in Emergencies – 74% of Those Posting Expect Help in 1 Hour

Everyone needs to review the report of a Red Cross survey released this week about the usage of social media in emergencies. Of course, the first step should always be to call your emergency services number (911 in the United States) but what if the phone lines are down? 1 in 5 of the 1,058 adult participants would try to get help via email, websites or social media.

What was particularly notable are the expectations people have when they use social media in this way, bold emphasis mine

Web users also have clear expectations about how first responders should be answering their requests. The survey showed that 69 percent said that emergency responders should be monitoring social media sites in order to quickly send help—and nearly half believe a response agency is probably already responding to any urgent request they might see.

And the survey respondents expected quick response to an online appeal for help—74 percent expected help to come less than an hour after their tweet or Facebook post.

and

More web users say they get their emergency information from social media than from a NOAA weather radio, government website or emergency text message system. One in five social media users also report posting eyewitness accounts of emergency events to their accounts.

The National Weather Service has taken a step in this direction by encouraging the use of the #wxreport hashtag for severe weather events… but the reality is you can’t preassign a hashtag to be used in an emergency. People will inherently create their own individual ones, the local social media community will reach a hive mind consensus on what it is, and onward it goes. From my perspective this is why agency social media channels need to build relationships so they are aware of who their audience is and what they are discussing, so in an emergency the agency will know what specific hashtag will be most useful to convey information to those who need it.

Tags: communication, emergency preparedness, hashtags, linkedin, social media, twitter
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Libraries and Social Media: Who gives a tweet?

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

by Brian Lane Winfield Moore

I’ve been working on a followup assessment to a baseline I did last year about our work blog. Recently we’ve been branching into social media for communication and I’m honestly not all that sure what strategies we will use to include them in assessment for the future.

Should your library have a social media policy? Libraries need a social media strategy! *WARNING: the next page has the f-bomb as URL* What the *censored* is my social media strategy? I jest, but it is wise to develop some sort of structure to avoid embarrassing yourself and your library.

‘How can you show the value of social media?’ or ‘What’s the ROI?’ if you’re in sales and marketing are common questions. I don’t have the answers, but a new study by the University of Southampton, MIT and Georgia Institute of Technology has launched Who Gives A Tweet? to receive feedback about messages on Twitter. They started off offering somewhat immediate feedback on your own tweets by friends & strangers, but have scaled back to rating “a few strangers’ tweets before you rate your friends’ tweets.”

From Science Daily,

“Social networking sites currently take an optimistically positive view of status updates,” says Paul André, graduate student at the University of Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science. “Facebook enables users to ‘like’ their friends’ updates, and Twitter has ‘favourites’. But this ignores the value that could be gained from understanding which updates are disliked and why.”

Michael Bernstein, PhD student at MIT, comments: “Analysing the negatively rated tweets, and the consensus that forms around them, will help us understand the emerging approved or accepted norms in these new forms of online communication.”

I’m not sure about this & haven’t signed up my own account. For me, much of what I write and tweet is with an understanding (I hope) of my target audience of librarian colleagues and others interested in health and library information. Strangers wouldn’t necessarily pick up on those nuances. My own friends have told me they have no idea what I’m tweeting about most of the time. That’s ok since they love me anyway (or at least they haven’t unfollowed me yet), but it wouldn’t be ok if a library’s Twitter account followers didn’t get the message.

For all the talk about what libraries should be doing with policies and strategies for social media, what about making sure their patrons perceive the library’s use of social media as positive? What is the equivalent of website usability study that can be done by a social media audience of patrons for the library social media channel? Since offering feedback via social media about companies and their websites is new, this may be too far of a stretch currently but it’s one I see on the horizon.

Tags: assessment, libraries, social media, twitter
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Widgety Mobile-y New? Thoughts on NLM & Social Media

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

Susannah Fox from Pew Internet (so glad I got to meet her in DC!) recently met with Senior Staff at the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to discuss some current issues and trends in mobile and social health information that she blogged at e-patients.net.

Yesterday a redesign of MedlinePlus went live, offering some new features such as widgets to access information from MedlinePlus on your own website or blog such as the search cloud.

I agree with Michelle Kraft that they may want to consider placing the mobile link at the top, since my Android using Opera 5 mini browser does not redirect to mobile site (and looks truly awful) if you access medlineplus.gov instead of m.medlineplus.gov . I freely admit that Dean Giustini’s ‘NLM’s MedlinePlus Goes All Widgety‘ inspired this entry title.

A few of the questions Susannah asks include

How can the NLM seed conversations happening online and offline, to spread good information and good behaviors?
Should the NLM maintain its own brand or should the National Institutes of Health emerge as the stronger, overall brand?
(my paraphrase) How can the NLM harness techniques such as Procter & Gamble’s ‘Listen more than ask’?

I’ve been advocating for dynamic NLM social media communication channels since January 2009 with A tweet for change: #pubmed. The feedback I received was that NLM was aware of Twitter as a communication feedback channel which was “too brief”, then #pubmed became too spammy by January this year. It’s hard to tell how it is used currently since Twitter significantly dropped search history query results from 14 to about 5 days, so I parked a WTHashtag for #pubmed to see how it goes.

There are now a wide variety of NLM social media channels. I see most of these as push-out news rather than pull-in or embedded social health information resources but this is a positive step in the right direction.

I personally believe that user feedback offered via social media channels is every bit as specific, measurable and valid as feedback sent through emails and website contact forms. Remember when I took a look outside the medical library field to see what other users were saying about the Pubmed redesign in October 2009?

Tweeting is often a spontaneous form of communication that captures our first reactions to something new. It is also much easier to tweet than clicking through and filling out a contact form on a website with mobile phone, especially when accessing some part of the website is the problem. I did it myself last month without really thinking about it:

I later received a kind email from NLM asking if I could provide more details about the issue, which I gladly did, and know that I should have sent this in via the contact form…. but I’m not always a medical librarian thinking in forms of structured feedback. I don’t think other patients sitting in a waiting room using their mobile phones to look up health information they just learned about are either.

I do not mean that Twitter feedback about websites should be more valid than website contact forms (see The Social Divide for a good narrative on regular vs. social media company customer service), but it does have value that shouldn’t be dismissed due to its brevity. I hope NLM, NIH and other government organizations who seek to have a meaningful presence in social media channels understand that.