Healthcare Conference Hashtags

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You know the story. You’re attending a healthcare conference and have one of those moments where something of real value to you was said. Or perhaps you’re attending one of these special unconferences that spur incredible creativity and innovating thought. In both cases, two issues often pop up. “I need to make some good notes of this”, and “more people should have been here right now to hear this stuff”.

Just a short time ago, many of these in-the-moment ideas during these conferences were often strictly limited to the attending participants and closed to the public. It’s pretty safe to say that those ideas would have had a better chance of being profitable had the audience been greater and the conference more open.

Twitter enters Healthcare Conferences

That was the pre-Twitter era for healthcare conferences. After Twitter got so broadly adapted by healthcare professionals, many healthcare conferences have had their doors and ideas blown wide open to the public. The conference participants have, perhaps somewhat unconsciously, been functioning as trojan horses. In their pockets are hidden iPhones and Androids, loaded with Twitter clients, instantly both recording what they perceive are the greatest thoughts from the conference and sharing it to the public. Information wants to be free.

The beauty of it all is that there is no one single account from a healthcare conference, no one official writeup, but many! This is important because what one individual finds valuable can be complete trash to another individual. But with both of them tweeting, we are able to extract more from the conference and we can filter the good from the bad ourselves or via our trusted Twitter peers.

Global Healthcare Social Media

From the viewpoint of the Healthcare Hashtag Project, it’s been remarkable to see how healthcare social media is spreading so fast around the globe. First a general healthcare hashtag is created for a specific local market; then fairly quickly it automatically segments itself into more healthcare-topic focused hashtags. Friendships are created and thought-leaders are identified and followed. From a global perspective, what we have been witnessing is absolutely beautiful. Sharing and caring across boundaries.

The Healthcare Hashtag Project has been keeping track of these global healthcare hashtags, and every now and then we see sparks of massive increase in tweet volume from certain locations. These are not the regular massive volume increases from a healthcare tweet chat, but from a healthcare conference. So ever since we started noticing this, we have been thinking of ways to capture these tweets during those healthcare conferences and create a repository where the public can browse, discover, and learn the essence of each conference.

Health Conferences on Social Media

We are glad to tell you that we are now tracking healthcare conference hashtags with realtime stats and transcripts. All twitter users can now add a conference hashtag themselves, and it will go live immediately (with only limited post-curation from us). We have been testing it out for some time, and I must tell you it’s quite remarkable to see the real-time tweets, the activity of a conference over time, and to witness what conference sessions create the most tweets, most mentioned individuals, top tweeters and the live transcript itself.

We hope this feature will help to capture and share the essence of these healthcare conferences on a global perspective. If a conference is worth tweeting, add the hashtag and tweet it. Share the knowledge.

Audun Utengen - @audvin

Sharing research from the Healthcare Social Graph®. Co-founder, CEO of @symplur. Advisor to @MayoClinicSMN. ❤️ #Parkinsons, #Schizophrenia, #PancreaticCancer