Twitter Meets Health 2.0 Boston and redefines the press corps
Submitted by Dr. Gwenn Is In
Last week I spent 1 ½ days attending the Health 2.0 Conference in Boston. Having heard the buzz for a while but not having attended before, I was very much looking forward to experiencing this for myself. What made the experience exquisitely interesting and fun for me was that I was attending as a member of the press so had the privilege to interview some of the leading minds in Health 2.0. Stay tuned for those posts in the coming days. These folks have their fingers on the pulse of health care in all sorts of interesting ways.
You only had to walk into the main room to feel the power of web 2.0, with 2 Twitter screens up on each side of the room, lap tops buzzing at almost every table, and cell phones ready to text polls. “Press” took on a new web 2.0 meaning at this conference because people were not just writing about the event but blogging and tweeting. In fact, it appeared that blogs and tweets were the primary reporting tools of the venue. Gone seem to be the days of the pen and paper.
I’m a relative newbie to Twitter, having only joined in January. It didn’t take me long on Twitter to recognize it’s PR and networking value but I didn’t fully understand it’s power until last week. With so many of us “live tweeting” the conference sessions using the #Health2con hashtag, we not only became a trending topic on twitter as a whole but crashed the Health2Con sound system on day 1 of the conference. By the conference’s end, there were 3464 tweets with the #Health2con hashtag, with me contributing 104 to the mix, the 5th highest of the tweeters.
Twitter put an entirely new spin on what it means to be a health journalist and reporter – to be a member of the press.
Pre-Twitter, we would rely on traditional reporting tools with interviewing, writing and posting being the staples of the trade. Articles would end up on websites, blogs or newspapers with a definite time delay from the live event and without immediate feedback from the current audience in the room. In order to appreciate the perceptions of others at the event, we’d have to call or email people we knew were there to get some feedback. For readers to respond to our posts, they’d have to submit a comment that may be further delayed online due to moderation or even more delayed by the letter to the editor submission process of most print publications.
Not so with twitter! Twitter dishes it out all in one spot: posting, responding and conversing in a live, unedited and unfiltered fashion. It’s like instant note log, article draft, letters to the editor and editorials all interacting in a complicated online dance. Preparing my posts from the sessions and interviews I conducted, my tweets have been invaluable resources to me, more so than any notes I have jotted down additionally.
Beyond the log, however, the experience of the live tweets brings the conferences to life without disruption to others and in a powerful way. Pre-Twitter, if you wanted to comment to a friend, you could text but not keep that up for long or involve too many others. You could whisper but then folks around you would get upset. Or, you could pass notes like we used to do in middle school - very inefficient. Twitters allows you to “pass notes” to many people at once without disruption to the event, but in a way that creates a huge amount of noise to those listening. How cool is that!
Cicero once wrote: “Brevity is the best recommendation of speech, whether in a senator or an orator.” If Cicero were living now, he’d be talking about Twitter.
