Mayo Clinic | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Twitter 116: 3 Steps to Joining or Leading a Twitter Chat

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Note: This post is specifically intended to help USA Today readers who are new to Twitter so they can participate in our #MayoUSAToday Twitter chats. For more introductory information on Twitter, see the Twitter curriculum.

Update: This week’s #MayoUSAToday Twitter chat is on concerns about memory loss. Join us from 1-2 p.m. ET on Thursday, Sept. 16.

In Twitter 115: 5 Benefits of Twitter Chats, I discussed why you would want to create (or join) a Twitter chat. Twitter 116 takes you through the how.

Prerequisite: It seems obvious, but to join a Twitter chat, you need to have a Twitter account. If you don’t have one yet, go to Twitter 102 for step-by-step guidance.

3 Steps to Twitter Chats

1. Go to Twitter.com and search for your desired hashtag. This applies whether you are joining an existing chat (like #MayoUSAToday) or creating one of your own. If you’re starting your own chat, your goal for this step is to find a tag that hasn’t previously been used.

2. Save your search for easy reference. When you see your search results for a chat you’re joining (like our Mayo Clinic/USA Today chat) you will see a “Save this search” link:

…right next to the “Real-time results for #(name of hashtag)”

When you click the “Save this search” link, you will add that search query to your list of saved searches, like this:

3. Use the hashtag in a Tweet to start or join the conversation. Here is an example of a tweet I did as part of the #MayoUSAToday chat (click to enlarge):

…and then after refreshing the page, you’ll see that the tweet shows up in the thread:

That’s really all there is to it. When the chat starts, just click on your saved search link and wait to see what tweets show up. You should occasionally see a yellow bar at the top of your search results that looks something like this:

Just click that yellow bar and the new tweets will show up. To reply to any of them, just hit the reply arrow next to the tweet…

…and be sure to add the #MayoUSAToday hashtag to your tweet so it will be included in the conversational stream.

There are other ways to participate in a Twitter chat, such as through desktop clients like Tweetdeck or smartphone clients like Tweetie or Twitterberry, but for Twitter beginners this is the simplest way, just using the main Twitter Web site.

Is this clear? Do you have other questions about how Twitter chats work?

Assignment:

Add the #MayoUSAToday chat to your saved searches, using the first two steps listed above.
For extra credit, join the conversation if you find this week’s topic interesting.

Twitter 115: 5 Benefits of Twitter Chats

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Twitter chats are an amazing way to bring together people for a focused conversation on a particular topic or surrounding an event, such as a conference or Webinar.

There’s no need for the people involved to know each other before the chat, and in many cases the chats can be great ways to connect with people who have common interests. For example, I frequently join the #hcsm chat for people interested in using social media in healthcare, and occasionally join the #hcmktg chat related to healthcare marketing.

For Mayo Clinic, we use a #mayoradio Twitter chat to gather questions from outside our local area for our Medical Edge Weekend radio program, and have done several joint chats with Mary Brophy Marcus (@BrophyMarcUSAT) from USA Today, inviting readers to discuss the topics of her stories with a Mayo Clinic specialist. We’re now using #MayoUSAToday as the hashtag for these discussions.

In 3 Steps to Joining or Leading a Twitter Chat, I take you step by step through the process of joining a Twitter chat. But first, here are some of the reasons you might want to participate. I’ll use the #MayoUSAToday chat as an example:

Public discussion that spreads as it continues. When a new person joins the discussion by including #MayoUSAToday in a tweet, it spreads the word about the chat to her Twitter followers. Any of her followers who retweet or reply to her tweet extend the reach still further.
Broad geographic reach. Speaking of extending the reach, the beauty of a Twitter chat is it can be worldwide. Some diseases or conditions just aren’t common enough to build a critical mass for discussion locally, no matter how metropolitan the location. Getting people together physically is tough, but with Twitter you can gather people with common interests virtually without them having to leave the comfort of wherever they use their computer. And of course with iPhones, Blackberries or Androids people can join the chat from wherever they are: I did a recent chat from O”Hare airport in Chicago.
No need to raise your hand. Unlike an in-person meeting, you don’t need to be recognized by the moderator to ask you question or make your comment. Just include the #MayoUSAToday tag in your tweet, and you’re part of the conversation. If you use the tag to interject your marketing messages into a discussion, you won’t last long in the chat (or in Twitter). Users will report you as a “hashtag spammer” (a term that is part of a Twitter lexicon I plan to publish) and your account will be suspended. But if you’re a real person who just wants to join the conversation without hijacking it for pecuniary reasons, you’ll find people in Twitter quite friendly and open.
Wallflowers welcome. It’s fine to just lurk and listen. You can just click the #MayoUSAToday link, for instance, and watch what others are saying. But more importantly, a Twitter chat can be a great tool to get discussion from the whole audience at a conference, instead of just those who are most verbose and comfortable speaking in public. So when I do a presentation, I generally create a hashtag that enables everyone to comment or ask questions. This can help make sure we hear from the introverts, whose ideas may not otherwise get as much consideration as they deserve, which leads to the final point…
No time limits. Many if not most Twitter chats have a set time during which people have agreed to gather. The #MayoUSAToday chats are scheduled to run for one hour, during which time our Mayo Clinic subject experts are online to answer questions tweeted by USA Today readers and others drawn into the conversation (see Benefit #1 above.) But the time expiring doesn’t mean you can’t continue to tweet using the hashtag, and the conversation can continue on at a slower pace. So if someone tweets with a #MayoUSAToday tag three hours after the scheduled chat ends, it just means the question probably won’t be answered right away, as it would during the one-hour window. This also obviously applies to conferences and other in-person meetings; just because people have gone home doesn’t mean the conversation has to end.

In 3 Steps to Joining or Leading a Twitter chat, I will take you step-by-step into joining the #MayoUSAToday chat, and you can use the same pattern to join other chats (or set up one of your own.)

Healthcare Internet Conference Presentation

Today I’m honored to be keynoting the 13th Annual Health Internet Conference at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. So, as Mark Ragan said a couple of weeks ago, now I can tell people, “I’ve played Caesars.” 😉

Here’s how I planned to start my presentation, though I’m not sure it will come out quite like this.

I frequently have people ask me about the frequency of my travel and how I can do it, as they follow my tweets or blog posts. This is the 55th external presentation or Webcast I’ve delivered so far this year, and in October I was in Sun Valley, Scottsdale, Milwaukee, Nijmegen and Amsterdam in the Netherlands, St. Louis, Green Bay, Madison, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia.

This month looks almost as busy. So how and why do I do it?

First, the Web and related tools like the iPhone help me stay connected with the office when I’m traveling. So I can help keep things moving along at home, even when I’m not physically present.

But in another sense, I’m keeping faith with the founders of Mayo Clinic, to whom I will be introducing you shortly. They believed it was essential for them to reach out and learn from others, but that it also was their obligation to share what they had discovered in their practice so that others may benefit.

Social media will be used in health care; the only question is whether it will be led by responsible organizations or by the purveyors of herbal, all-natural Viagra substitutes.

Despite the diffuse nature of the Web in general and social media in particular, I believe it is not only possible for us (and by that I mean all of us in healthcare, not just Mayo Clinic) to lead: I believe it’s a moral imperative. We can do well for our organizations by doing good things in social media. More importantly, patients will do better by becoming more empowered and engaged in their own health and health care. They can learn from credible experts and from each other, and apply those learnings to improve their lives.

I’ve previously said it’s not my goal to convince begrudging skeptics that they should using social media. They won’t do it well, mainly because they will see social media as an extension of the mass media era, and as a former boss used to say, “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.”

My goal is to encourage you, maybe even excite you. You’re most likely here because you sense the amazing potential of the Web and social media.

If you’ve been wanting to implement social media in your organization, I hope to provide you with some concrete examples of success and powerful arguments you can use to help launch your own programs. If our Mayo Clinic example helps you remove internal barriers or work up the nerve to just hurdle them, I will count this a success.

If you are using social media already, I hope to hear your story and what’s worked for you, so we can together help continue the momentum in growth of hospital social media that Ed Bennett has done so well in documenting.

I’ve also embedded the slides from the presentation, which are substantially different from anything you’ve seen from me before. It’s the first time I’ve discussed the 35 Social Media Theses in public. So I hope you will review them and share your thoughts, criticisms, suggested edits and additions.

35 Theses on Why Social Media are Essential to Healthcare’s Future

View more presentations from Lee Aase.

Looking Back a Year

It was just about a year ago that I got a chance to do an interview with Mark Ragan after having done a presentation at a corporate communicators conference Ragan Communications cosponsored with SAS in North Carolina. Today Mark tweeted a link to his post about it on Ragan.com, but when I viewed it I saw it had an embed code that would enable me to post it here, I thought it would be good to cross-post.

Give it a view, and then I’ll be back below with a few observations (or of course you can just skip to the observations if you’d like.)

Observations:

I’ve had a few opportunities to do return engagements, addressing groups to which I had previously made a presentation. Those are fun because they give me a chance to take stock, to see how we have progressed in the time between presentations.

This video is similar for me in that regard, because it predates the launch of our Sharing Mayo Clinic blog and our active engagement in Twitter. So it’s great to see how much has developed further in our Mayo Clinic social media efforts.

It’s also fun to see that the screen shots of SMUG that Ragan showed in the video are from the days when this blog was operating on WordPress.com instead of a self-hosted version of WordPress. One of the advantages of the self-hosted WordPress is that I’m able to embed the video you see above; on WordPress.com you have much more limited options for embedding video, so if I were doing this post a year ago I would have only been able to link to the Ragan post instead of embedding.

So it’s neat to see how far we’ve come, but also to see that the basic strategy outlined in the video above hasn’t changed.

And just last month, almost a year to the date after I talked with Mark at the SAS conference, we hosted a summit on social media in healthcare with Ragan at our Mayo Clinic campus in Scottsdale, Arizona.

I’ve done some year-in-review posts previously (in 2006. 2007 and 2008) and will plan to do so again, but Mark’s tweet provided a nice opportunity for a quick look back.

Tomorrow I’m excited to provide a look forward when I do the keynote at the Healthcare Internet Conference in Las Vegas. If you’re attending the conference, I hope to get to talk to you in person. Please to stop me and say hi. If you’re not going to be there in person, I think the tweet stream to follow will be #hcic.

e-Patient Connections

Tomorrow I’m giving a presentation at the e-Patient Connections conference (#ePatCon) in Philadelphia, at the Park Hyatt Bellevue. It’s a really neat hotel, but the broadband “tubes” have a serious case of atherosclerosis.

Here are my slides.

e-Patient Connections from Lee Aase

I’m really looking forward to meeting a lot of people with whom I’ve only Tweeted previously. Just met @epatientdave in the lobby on the way up to my room. Will hopefully see @PhilBaumann, @MeredithGould and @DanaMLewis tonight too…and lots more tomorrow, including @SusannahFox.