Experiments in Social Media

There’s no better way to learn about something than to jump right in. So we’ve decided to experiment with some social media tools for one of the Massachusetts Medical Society’s more popular and effective advocacy events.

Every other year, we invite our members to come to the State House for a day to listen to speakers and visit their local state legislators. Depending on the year, from 200 to 1,000 doctors participate. We have usually solicited them by letter, e-mail and newsletter. So I wondered, with the growing adoption of social media by our doctors, what would happen if we used some of those tools?

So we set up a Facebook group, Twitter feed, and a blog category for the event. We added these links to our letters, e-mails, newsletters, and web pages. We cross promote all the media with each other, and direct everything back to the web page, which has a basic registration form. Eventually we will add briefing papers and other resources for the issues we would like the doctors to discuss.

This is in service of our overall objective to engage more members, to grow the great core group of doctors we always see at these events.

If “life is a beta,” as Jeff Jarvis has written, then let’s see what happens.