I am, in this blog post, asking for leads on two tools that could be useful to me, or organizations engaged in social media. Do you know of any tools, free or other, available to do these things? Feel free to post ideas in the comments.

1. Tool #1: Registry of Twitter/Blog/RSS Feeds : Let’s say that you are a professional group, or maybe a large medical group, and you would like to aggregate all of the RSS feeds generated by your members/employees/people affiliated with your organization on the Internet. This could be their Twitter feed, blog feed, delicious links, even flickr feed. The purpose would be to know who in your organization is out there, to follow along what they are doing, and maybe tap their expertise when needed. Friendfeed used to have an “invisible friend” feature, where you could add an RSS feed that was out there without having the person actually get an account, but that feature appears to be gone from the new version. This particular tool request may be hard to explain the first time, so feel free to ask questions in the comments.
2. Tool #2: Preferred URL registry for individuals: This need comes up on this blog a lot – I decide that I’d like to reference a person who I’ve been working with or had a conversation with. Do I link to their Twitter URL? Blog URL? LinkedIn URL? Company biography URL? Or do they even have one? It would be nice if people had a place to indicate which place they would like people to point to when they are referenced. Maybe the default will be Twitter, but until then, I’d like to be respectful of each person’s preferences.

Thanks for any ideas!

Hawn C. Take Two Aspirin And Tweet Me In The Morning: How Twitter, Facebook, And Other Social Media Are Reshaping Health Care [Internet]. Health Aff. 2009 Mar 1;28(2):361-368.

Note: the article no longer requires a subscription for access (3/14/09)

The much anticipated health information technology issue of Health Affairs, and in it is an article written by Carleen Hawn about Social Media in Health Care. The links above to to the Health Affairs site, but it appears a subscription will be required to view it, so hopefully readers have access to an institutional or other subscription to read it.

The genesis of this article was a discussion that was started in July, 2008, at the American Board of Internal Medicine’s forum on Patient Centered Care, where i presented about some of these concepts. This was followed up with discussions with myself and other leaders in the field, such as Jay Parkinson, MD, from HelloHealth, Bob Coffield, a well known legal expert in the area of social media, as well as real patients.

I actually attended the briefing announcing the release of this issue in Washington, DC, and was pleasantly surprised to see that the article is billed on the front cover of a very full catalog of scholarly works. Who would have thought 4 years ago that an article about social networking/media would be front cover material for the Health Affairs issue on Health Information Technology. This says a lot about the impact that social media, or perceived impact, in this area of health care! At the same time, I think Matthew Holt correctly points out that there’s a part two (and three and four) to be written covering what’s below the tip of the iceberg.

In addition to the information mentioned in the article, Carleen Hawn also consulted with some of my favorite innovators in health care, including Scott Shreeve, MD, and the team at the Kaiser Permanente Sidney Garfield Center for Health Care Innovation.

In addition to these contributions, I would also mention the contribution of the California Healthcare Foundation, whose leaders, including Veenu Aulakh, MPH, Sophia Chang, MD, MPH and Sam Karp, stimulated the development of the crowdsourced definition of Health2.0 mentioned the article with a simple question to me: “Ted, what is Health2.0?” (my answer was, “I don’t know, let’s ask the crowd.”)

And, I would also like to mention that innovation like this comes from health care organizations and systems that are able to say,”Not everything has been tried before,” and in my case this is/was Group Health Cooperative, who have learned from our early blogging experience and now bring their physicians and staff online for the world to learn about what they are doing to reinvent primary care. I’ve been engaged in maybe a few conversations over the past few years about why health care organizations should be transparent and it’s helpful for everyone to have an example of why this works well for everyone.

Thanks again to Carleen Hawn, The Health Affairs Team, and The American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation for taking the time to explore this topic for America’s patients (that’s all of us).

• So, Who Do Consumers Trust? – They trust each other.

• Health Check: How Trusted Is Your Corporate Blog? – Nice discussion of what makes an organizational blog great. Being genuine and transparent is very helpful.

• Snapshot of Presidential Candidate Social Networking Stats: Nov 3, 2008 – Interesting profile of the different leadership approaches of the presidential candidates and what can be derived from their Web2.0 stats.

The following presentation is an update to one I gave at the California Healthcare Foundation in 2007, and includes updated data and experience since then. I gave the presentation to staff at The Advisory Board, who produce the very useful iHealthBeat publication. iHealthBeat has just begun accepting user generated content to spur discussion. Please head over and write a few comments on the perspective pieces if you can.

Key changes since 2007:

• Biog writing is slowing
• Blog reading is increasing and plateauing across all age groups
• General participation is increasing
• Note the slight dip in news reading for Generation Y relative to blog reading

I like the Forrester Social Technographics approach, which place blog writing at the highest tier of participation. It seems that the Web2.0 ecosystem will come to resemble the human one – a small percentage of people will lead, a larger percentage will participate and follow, and a small percentage will not participate.

Thanks a ton, again, to The Pew Internet and American Life Project for making their data so freely available. I was able to find the magic Excel file with data meticulously categorized and trended on this page on the Pew Internet site. It’s a huge help. Here’s the full presentation. Click on any slide to see fuller size:

• Blog growth slows; more bloggers are bringing home the bacon – Latest on the growth of the blogosphere, it's slowing. That’s just blogs though, social media penetration is picking up.

• Technorati: State of the Blogosphere 2008 – Annual State of the Blogosphere Report From Technorati. It looks like they are changing the measurement of blog growth (or stopping to measure it), but there are less daily postings now than there were in 2007.

• Web Strategy: How To Evolve Your Irrelevant Corporate Website – Ideas on how to make a corporate web site more usable to users. You could apply the same lessons to an Intranet

• New 2008 Social Technographics data reveals rapid growth in adoption – It will soon be no more remarkable that your grandmother reads a blog than that she reads email. Social content is going mainstream. Social content ranks high on search engines because it changes so frequently and gets linked to more often, so more and more online adults are becoming exposed to it, accepting it, and embracing it. If you’re a marketer, no matter what group of consumers you’re targeting, this means you must pay attention to the social world online.

  But the future of social applications online will not include contributions from everyone, because not everyone has the temperament to create content. Don’t count on all your customers to contribute, and don’t believe that what you see online is representative of your whole audience. The shy among your customers are reading this stuff, but most of them aren’t ready to contribute, and won’t be for a while.