Today I had the pleasure of spending the afternoon at the Ontario Hospital Association Social Media Conference at the Sutton Place Hotel in Toronto.
What a great group of communications leaders. There were a couple of speakers before me. Lee Aase from the Mayo Clinic Centre for Social Media, gave a great workshop on a sequence of case studies of physician engagement and media relations that his team has used social media for: very impressive. After that, Manuel Gitterman from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health gave a fascinating talk – using a well-conceived prezi – on the ways in which CAMH is engaging with social media. I was particularly impressed with their experiments in serious gaming and their use of Google Maps. Very progressive.
Needless to say, these were hard acts to follow.
I presented on how social media measurement is a part of institutional “social media hygiene,” that is to say that measurement should be a part of every social media communication strategy. I also talked about how many of the assumptions that corporate and institutional communicators have made are changing with social media: we are moving quickly to an oral culture. This move to an oral culture means that we need to develop metrics, KPIs and benchmarks that make sense for professional communicators and showcase the value of the practice to executives and institutional decision-makers.
You can check out the tweets during and about my presentation here. To follow the conference tweets in general, do a twitter search for #ohasm10 which is the conference hashtag. I kept my tweet deck live tweets going during the presentation, so the talk had an interactive component – lots of fun!
It was super to see two of our McMaster Master of Communications Management Program (MCM) students present: Cheryl Evans from Grand River Hospital in Kitchener-Waterloo and Anne Marie Males from the Scarborough Hospital.
It was great to go out for drinks afterward and continue the discussion. What a great event – hats off to the Ontario Hospital Association!
