Category: Twitter

Twitter + Facebook = Kidney Donation

Here’s an interesting story from the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which illustrates an interesting and unusual application of social media tools in health care and medicine:

Chris Strouth needed a kidney transplant. He’d been on dialysis for months after Berger’s disease (which he called “Harold”) wreaked havoc on his renal system. So he tweeted about it, casting a wide electronic net with a plea to anyone he was even remotely connected to online. He got an impressive 19 offers, and one match — casual acquaintance and Facebook friend Scott Pakudaitis of St. Paul, whose left kidney, “William the Conqueror,” was transplanted into Strouth in December. Both are doing well, and the rest is Facebook history.

Check out the rest of the story.

Why don’t teens tweet?

The Pew Internet & American Life Project came out with an updated survey today, which found that only 8 percent of Americans aged 12-17 use Twitter, and that blogging is much less popular than it was in 2006, when the survey was last conducted. Now only 14 percent said they maintained their own blogs, which is half of the 2006 figure.

I had an opportunity to discuss some of the reasons for this Wednesday, in advance of the public release, with Mary Brophy Marcus (@BrophyMarcUSAT) of USA Today, for her story related to the study.

“To quote my 15 year-old-son, ‘Twitter is lame,'” says Lee Aase, manager of social media at Mayo Clinic. He says Facebook and texting may be satisfying teen chat needs.

“They’re so into text-messaging that that niche is already sort of filled for them,” he says.

Aase also says some teenagers may grow back into blogging as they hit adulthood: “Blogging has become a way to communicate with the world, about more meaningful issues, not just about communicating to friends.”

Read the full story, and get more details on the Pew site.

As I see it, the big thing that has changed since 2006, causing blogging to decline, is the immense popularity of Facebook, which was still pretty new back then. And with Facebook’s chat feature, combined with text messaging, most young people already have ways to do the short message communication with people who matter to them…their friends. There really isn’t much incentive for them to go to Twitter, because most of their friends aren’t there anyway; they’re all on Facebook. Or they can be reached via SMS.

It’s different for adults; many of us actually use our cell phones primarily for voice calls instead of text. And we see Twitter as a way to make connections with people who have common interests.

What do you think? Are there other reasons why teens don’t tweet?

Examples of Social Media in CME?

I met with a group today interested in seeing how we could use social media tools for Continuing Medical Education (CME), which is now called Continuous Professional Development. Someone asked what is being done at other centers, so as a demo of the power of social media, I said I would use social tools to ask the crowd for some answers and examples.

Please post your examples in the comments below.

Fail Whale related to Brown-Coakley Race Aftermath?

I was following the Massachusetts Senate special election last night on Twitter (while attending a high school basketball game), and one thing I noted was that the intense national interest was crashing several Web sites that were supposed to be providing updated vote totals. And from what I read this morning, the turnout for the election was much higher than had been expected – higher than most general elections in Massachusetts (which, as we all know, haven’t been very competitive lately.)

So I was interested this morning when I checked into Twitter and got this “blast from the past”:

I hadn’t seen this very often lately, and when I did see it the problem usually resolved with the next browser refresh. But this persisted for a while. I’m wondering whether the Massachusetts race had anything to do with it, with all the Wednesday-morning campaign managing (or celebrating).

It’s also interesting that #whentwitterwasdown is currently a trending topic.

On a related note, the New York Times had an interesting Op-Ed this week, “Internet Politics From Both Sides Now.” It’s worth a read.