It’s been really amazing watching the evolution of social media at HIMSS. It wasn’t too long ago that Shahid Shah was trying to convince HIMSS that bloggers should be invited to the event. Shortly after that, HIMSS held a set of Meet the Blogger panels and then put together a full blown HIMSS Social Media center with a number of great social media meetups at the conference. This year HIMSS even launched its social media ambassador program with our very own Mandi Bishop taking part.
This year I think we’re seeing the evolution of social media into essentially a standard part of the HIMSS conference. Just like you expect conference sessions, keynotes and an exhibit hall at the conference, you now expect social media to be there as well. Social media is finally a permanent tenant at HIMSS.
A you can imagine, much of my HIMSS participation will include and be influenced by social media. Shahid Shah, Cari McLean and myself will be hosting a #SocialMedia and Influence Meetup on Monday Feb 24, at 3:30 PM at the HIMSS Spot. Our plan is to dig deeply into social media and how it can be used most effectively. I’m sure the conversation will leak over into Tuesday night’s 5th Annual New Media Meetup. The event is nearly at capacity and should be the highlight of my HIMSS experience. A big thanks to Stericycle Communication Solutions for sponsoring the event.
Plus, I believe these two HIMSS events will be an amazing prelude to what we’re doing with the Health IT Marketing and PR Conference. At HIMSS we only have a couple hours, but at this conference we’ll have two days with some of the best health IT marketing and PR minds.
Of course, the #HITsm tweetup is also a great time to see so many #HIMSS14 social media influencers as well. Plus, I hear they’re looking to have a little different format this year than last. My hope is that this year we have more chance to meet and interact with those in the community who we’ve mostly known virtually.
What’s also been amazing to me is how much action the #HIMSS14 hashtag has had already. It’s certainly dominated by the companies that will be at HIMSS, but it’s been extremely active. If that’s a preview of what’s to come, then it will be interesting to see how much value will come from the #HIMSS14 stream during the event. Will there be so much noise in it that it’s not as valuable to follow?
Less than two weeks until HIMSS. Can’t wait to indulge in the 1200+ vendors and 35,000 attendees. I guess I am an #HITNerd.
There sure are a lot of vendors who just repeat the same stuff over and over. I’m pretty much burnt out on Kronos already. At some point I think there’s a negative return to having your employees and sales reps tweeting out the same thing over and over. You’d think that if a vendor has so many tweeps ready to tweet that they’d at least mix up and vary the info they are sharing?
And what’s up with the EXACT SAME “NextGen” tweet from 30+ different accounts last week? There may have been even more accounts but I gave up after counting 30 unique Twitter accounts tweeting out the same thing.
</rant.
There is definitely a point where you do too much and you have the opposite effect on the audience. Although, people aren’t usually reading the tweet stream as much as you and I, so it’s probably not as much of a negative impact as you would think.
I love when a company sends the exact same tweet from multiple accounts at the same time. That never makes sense to me. I have 30 accounts as well, but I use all those accounts to spread those tweets over time for maximum impact. I’m sure you’ve seen that though.
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