Social Media University, Global (SMUG)
Suus Non Ut Difficile • Home of the SMUGgles
Here are the slides for a presentation I’m delivering via videoconference this morning to a large gathering in Zurich, Switzerland. It’s entitled, “Why Social Media are Essential to the Future of Healthcare,” and it led me to develop a 36th thesis that may work its way into future presentations.
If you follow the Tweetstream from Jacqueline Fackeldey (@FackeldeyFinds) you may not get a lot from it (unless you’re one of my new friends from the Netherlands) because she mostly tweets in Dutch. But when I attended ReShape09 in Nijmegen, I had a nice opportunity to chat (in English) with this advocate of what she calls “human to human marketing.” When she used the phrase that is the title for this post, I thought it would be great to have her talk about it on camera and share it with the SMUGgles:
Dr. Bas Bloem, the third speaker at REshape (#reshape09), shared a portion of this entertaining video in his presentation on Health 2.0: What it is and what it isn’t. You’ll get a kick out of this:
Dr. Bloem is doing some interesting work with ParkinsonNet, being piloted in Holland but planning to grow internationally. I see some strong parallels between this and the work Dr. Victor Montori is doing at Mayo Clinic with diabetes patients.
When I first named our august institution of social media higher education, calling it Social Media University, Global was a bit of overstatement. Yes, through the world-wide Web it did have the potential for global reach, and I did already have some visitors from other continents, but clearly our institutional naming (and my self-designation as “Chancellor”) was, as the English say, “cheeky.”
Over the ensuing months the “G” became more deserved, or at least less ridiculous, as we reached the point at which we had SMUGgles from every continent (except Antarctica). We have continued to grow, with now more than 700 people having joined the SMUG group in Facebook.
But it’s one thing to have a global reach via the Web; it’s another to personally visit other parts of the world. Starting tomorrow, SMUG will officially become a little more global in reality, as I am at the airport in Rochester right now traveling to the Netherlands for two presentations. I will be arriving in Amsterdam at 9 a.m. Sunday morning and taking a train to Nijmegen, where I will participate in a series of events led by Lucien Engelen, including Reshape09 and the Health 2.0 Challenge. On Thursday we will go back to Amsterdam, where I will be presenting at the first international E-Mental Health Summit, and then I’m spending the night in London, where I will be visiting British media on Friday morning before returning to Minneapolis.
I look forward to an interesting adventure, and will be regularly reporting on the events here and via Twitter if you follow me.
If any of you have tips for international travel, or about the places I’m visiting, I would appreciate any guidance.
I’m looking forward to my first trip to Europe in about 10 days, where I have been asked to speak at REshape 2009, the second Health 2.0 conference and the first international E-Mental Health summit.
The organizers of these conferences have set up an interesting contest, called the Dutch Open Health 2.0 Challenge, that will run during that week, from Oct. 12 to 15, with winners announced Oct. 16. They have a catchy video to introduce it:
This is one of those “need not be present to win” contests. I’m helping to organize a Mayo team, and looking forward to getting the full details on Oct. 12. Meanwhile, check out the challenge and consider entering a team of your own!