2011 AHLA Annual Meeting: How to Use Social Media with @BobCoffield

Welcome How to Use Social Media session students and others.

I hope you enjoyed my presentation during the afternoon health care social media sessions at the 2011 American Health Lawyers Association Annual Meeting in Boston. The health care social media sessions this afternoon were a great introduction to a variety of practical and legal issues surrounding the world of social media and its impact on the health care industry.

Now it is time for you to do your "out of the classroom" social media assignment using the SOCIAL MEDIA bucket list. Click on the linked Google Doc and get started. Good luck!

Below is a copy of the written materials from today's session which were posted here using Scribd. If you want to review my Prezi slides from my presentation watch it below and then go explore Prezi. 

If you have any questions send me a Tweet at @BobCoffield. Follow along with the tweets from the AHLA Annual Meeting at #AHLABoston. David Harlow (@HealthBlawg) also set up a Cover It Live Twitter feed for the Annual Meeting tweets. Thanks for attending the session.

How to Use Social by @BobCoffield (AHLA Annual Mtg 2011) on Prezi

How to Use Social Media (AHLA Annual Mtg - Coffield)

The Twitter Trap: Are we outsourcing our brains to the cloud?

The Twitter Trap by Bill Keller (@NYTKeller), Executive Editor of The New York Times captures many of the thoughts I have been having lately about the impact social media and technology is having on our society. Where does it end? What will be the future? How will it change us as humans? As a society? Like Mr. Keller, I have had similar feelings as I watch the impact on my 7 and 10 year old children.

Recently I have been preparing a presentation for the AHLA Annual Meeting at the end of June on the practical ways health lawyers can and should use social media. As a result I have tried to step back from the social media explosion to examine some of these issues, including the parallels between Mark Zuckerberg and Johannes Gutenberg referenced in Mr. Keller's piece.

I love this quote from Mr. Keller's article that helps visualize the innovation/disruption/impact cycle:

"My father, who was trained in engineering at M.I.T. in the slide-rule era, often lamented the way the pocket calculator, for all its convenience, diminished my generation’s math skills. Many of us have discovered that navigating by G.P.S. has undermined our mastery of city streets and perhaps even impaired our innate sense of direction. Typing pretty much killed penmanship. Twitter and YouTube are nibbling away at our attention spans. And what little memory we had not already surrendered to Gutenberg we have relinquished to Google. Why remember what you can look up in seconds?"

I also like his explanation of Twitter as a tool, "So let me be clear that Twitter is a brilliant device — a megaphone for promotion, a seine for information, a helpful organizing tool for everything from dog-lover meet-ups to revolutions."

His question around whether these new social media instruments are genuinely social is a good one. It is hard to see the answer to this when you are sitting in the midst of the social media cloud. One question that he doesn't address is how the collection of all this "collective social media data" about you and me will be used in the future. Is Facebook just one big social experiment. It now knows more about my family and friends than I can probably remember.

Take time away from your Twitter and Facebook posts, go read the article, and then sit back and take some quiet time to reflect on his message. I will leave you with this quote from Mr. Keller's article:

"The things we may be unlearning, tweet by tweet — complexity, acuity, patience, wisdom, intimacy — are things that matter."

Thanks to Jason Keeling (@JasonKeeling) for pointing out this insightful piece that was published back in print on May 22, 2011.