Kelley O’Brien (@kelleyob) from North Carolina posed the following question via a tweet this afternoon:

A. I’m not aware of anything like a comprehensive list of hospital Twitter chats. Ed Bennett’s Hospital Social Networking List is a great resource to tell us which hospitals have social media presence, and he even has some great hospital Twitter lists by state, but the list doesn’t include specific projects (such as surgical cases being “tweeted” that have been undertaken by hospitals or healthcare organizations.

But the great thing about social media is that you can build a list pretty quickly by crowdsourcing…via Twitter.

Or at least I think we can. Let’s see!

I’m listing below some of the Twitter chats/events I’ve been involved with through Mayo Clinic, along with some others I’m aware of that others have done.

It’s not even close to exhaustive. But that’s where you come in. If you know of hospitals that have done Twitter events, whether it was related to a surgical procedure, or a communications crisis, or promoting research findings, or whatever other ways you’ve used Twitter (or seen it used) in a hospital setting, please tell about it in the comments below.

Please include the name of the hospital, its Twitter handle, a relevant link to a post, news release or news story describing the effort, and any description you would like to add. Also please indicate which category (listed in bold below) is appropriate. And if you think I’m missing a category that should be added, please tell me that, too.

You also can share your examples via Twitter, using the #HospitalTweets tag. But by adding them in the comments below, they’ll be more permanent (since Twitter doesn’t archive tweets)…and of course, you’re not limited to 140 characters.

I will update this post based on your contributions to create a more comprehensive list.

Let’s see how quickly we can come up with a really good list!

Surgical Case Tweeting

• Henry Ford Health System (@HenryFordNews) and Bill Ferris (@Billfer) were, I believe, the first to do a live-tweeting exercise from the operating room.
• Aurora Health Care (@Aurora_Health) in Wisconsin got significant media attention for tweeting a knee operation.
• HealthOne Presbyterian/St. Luke’s in Denver collaborated with a local TV station on a Twitter procedure, as @angieanania describes.
• Sherman Hospital (@ShermanHealth) did the first live tweeting in Illinois.

Research Communications

• We did a @mayoclinic Twitter chat with @vmontori about a scientific journal article on diabetes and blood-sugar control.

Crisis Communications

• Innovis Health (@InnovisHealth) used Twitter to provide real-time updates during Fargo’s floods in March.
• Scott & White Healthcare (@SWHealthCare) used social media to manage the crisis surrounding the Fort Hood shootings and the victims who had been transported there for care.

Presentations and Training:

• At @MayoClinic, we have held three Tweetcamps to provide training for staff. Here’s a post that describes Tweetcamp III.
• When I do presentations, I regularly include a Twitter back-channel, such as this training seminar on social media I did yesterday with local advocacy chapters of American Heart Association. This is a good way for participants to get hands-on experience with Twitter.

Mainstream Media Collaboration

• @MayoClinic has done Twitter chats with @USAToday and @BrophyMarcUSAT related to this article about an under-diagnosed type of wrist pain that afflicted Philadelphia Phillies Outfielder Jayson Werth, and also about H1N1 flu and kids with asthma, as well as another relating to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and phobias.
• See the Denver example above in the Surgical Case Tweeting category.

What other examples can you add?

I saw yesterday that the University of Minnesota had developed a text-messaging system for quick notification of students, faculty and staff in the event of a campus emergency. Then today in my list of Facebook groups recently joined by my friends, I saw that they have a Facebook group for the same purpose.

I think this is an excellent use of technology for crisis communications. I’ve written some ideas about how Facebook could be used, and also Twitter. As Dennis McDonald recommends, you need to have multiple means of spreading the word in a crisis, because no one method reaches everyone. It’s great to see that the University of Minnesota has a comprehensive plan like this.

I think the dedicated text-message service is a really good idea, and may be preferable to Twitter for this application, because it will only be used for emergencies. I’m working with a crisis-planning group, and we’re experimenting with Twitter as a first step for a text-messaging system to alert the core crisis team. It’s a great solution for people who are just being introduced to Twitter and who don’t feel a need follow others’ tweets, because they can link their account with their cell phone, follow only the crisis communications Twitter account and have the notifications set to “on.” They will only get a text message in the event of an emergency.

For me, as someone who is already Twittering and following a few dozen people, having my notifications set to “on” would keep my cell phone buzzing all day. So I typically just check in with Twitter once in a while on the web. I want text messages I receive to be higher-priority and worthy of interruptions (especially since I’m paying for them.) But I haven’t found a way to choose which Tweets I get by text, and which just go to the web feed.

Ideally I would like to just have some tweets come by text (such as those from the crisis management account.) Does anyone have a way around this? I have a couple of ideas:

1. Can I sign up for another account in Twitter and also link to my same cell phone?
2. Or can I be selective about which tweets on my main account come by txt?

I would appreciate any guidance on this that anyone can offer, because I would like to have Twitter be the text-notification service for our crisis plan (since it’s free.) But if it becomes more widely used among my non-geek colleagues and they start “following” multiple accounts and not just the crisis account, they may end up turning off the text notifications, which would defeat our purpose.

Technorati: Facebook, crisis management, crisis communications, crisis alerts, crisis, Twitter, SMS, Minnesota, Dennis McDonald

The main idea is to build in multiple levels of redundancy for your communications, because no one method gets to everyone, and you can never trust in just one delivery mechanism because you need to account for the possibility that your primary means may be knocked out.

In a college environment, though, Facebook and texting via cell phone come close to being universal delivery methods, as St. John’s University and UW-Madison showed last month.

When a masked freshman came to campus at St. John’s University with what police said was a loaded rifle sticking out of a bag, the school alerted students via cell-phone text messages within 18 minutes.

I think that with the growth of social media sites like Facebook, and with high-profile examples of success like this, these methods are going to go from being back-ups and nice add-ons (like a belt and suspenders), to becoming the main way people communicate quickly in a crisis.

Technorati: Crisis Communications, Facebook, Twitter, St. John’s, social media, social networking

Or they see the “poke” lingo in Facebook and can’t imagine serious business uses.

They miss the point. It’s not about the initial application as envisioned by the developer; it’s about what you can envision as an implication of the application.

To paraphrase Ted Kennedy eulogizing his brother Bobby: “Some men see Twitter as it is and say ‘Why?’ I dream new uses for social media and say, ‘Why not?’”

These aren’t like pharmaceuticals that should be used only as directed. Off-label use is fine.

For example, Twitter could be one way to rapidly alert an emergency response team that they have been activated. You could create a Twitter account called “Your company alerts” and have all of your key staff subscribe to cell phone alerts from that account. You wouldn’t use the account except in an emergency.

But then, when a disaster strikes, you would have Twitter as one way of getting the word out. As Dennis McDonald recommends, you wouldn’t rely on it as your only means of communication, but it could potentially shave several precious minutes off the time it takes to reach everyone. You could use Twitter to send a message like this to get your team to participate in a crisis activation call:

Explosion at plant. Conference call at 800-555-1212 at 8:45 for details of emergency activation.

At the same time, you could start working through your old-fashioned phone tree until you know that the message was successfully delivered.

Likewise, you could create a secret Facebook group called “Your Company Crisis Management” and have all of your key staff join. Then, when a disaster hits, you could use the Message All Members function to blast an alert to everyone (which may include sending text messages to some), and you could use the Wall and Discussion Board to post information your team needs and to clarify issues.

This kind of group could remain invisible to the general public; you could create a companion site (or a blog) very quickly for public interactions.
I’m quite certain that neither Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg nor Twitter founder Biz Stone envisioned this kind of use for their applications when they began developing them.

What kind of “off-label” uses for social media have you found?

Technorati: Facebook, Twitter, Social Media, Crisis Communications, Crisis management, crisis, disaster, Mark Zuckerberg, Biz Stone

• Facebook in USA Today
• A personal note on “Labor” Day
• Blogs as a tool for PR Clip reporting (and an example of how that works)
• Sen. Ted Stevens, Miss South Carolina Teen USA Caitlin Upton and misunderstandings of Facebook
• A nice compliment from Ben Martin
• Facebook’s extremely low coefficient of friction for friendships
• The option of using Facebook strictly for business
• Why social media must be part of your crisis communication planning (because even if YOU don’t use them, others will!)
• My Alla to Zada experience with MySpace porn spam (updated since then with invitations from “Clarice” and “Mertie”) and how on-line creepiness isn’t limited to old, married guys.
• TIME magazine’s coverage of Facebook
• And finally, how Brad Paisley’s “Online” is an injustice to tall people.

Technorati: Facebook, Ted Stevens, Caitlin Upton, Brad Paisley, Miss South Carolina, PR, Clippings, Media Measurment, MySpace, Spam, Porn Spam, crisis communication, social media, business, TIME magazine

Here’s a synopsis of the highlights (so far), with links to the posts with fuller discussion. I started to do a top 10, but then realized I’ve done a dozen. No extra charge for the last two.

1. Crisis management – creating “dark” sites in Facebook (or on a WordPress.com blog) that can go live quickly to communicate effectively with affected constituencies. Communicate meaning two-way conversations.
2. Limited profiles – how to set a division between what you reveal to close friends and family vs. business and professional networks.
3. How Facebook makes everyone a “connector” and why Facebook has reached a Tipping Point
4. Facebook vs. “White Label” social networking software, and why and when organizations should consider each.
5. A case study of a group spontaneously formed in Facebook surrounding the I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis.
6. How Facebook can put the “relations” back into Media Relations
7. Examples of organizations with Facebook groups, official and otherwise
8. Why organizations should get in on the Facebook groups land rush
9. A vision for how Facebook could become a “Cheers” for industry-specific journalist and newsmaker interactions (which is related to the “putting relations into media relations” post.)
10. And another related post, Toward a Medical News community
11. The Facebook/social networking session at the Frost & Sullivan MindXChange
12. The WordPress.com application for the Facebook platform, which ties what I put on this blog into my Facebook profile (and you can “friend me” here)
13. To make it a Baker’s Dozen, here’s one more, my initial thoughts as I started this Facebook trek.

Technorati: Facebook, business, PR, news media, crisis communications, social networking, 35W, bridge, collapse, WordPress.com, Facebook platform

One really easy way to do this is through Facebook. As I’ve detailed here, Facebook has three main types of free groups: open, closed, and secret.

You can prepare for events you expect to happen eventually by establishing a secret group in Facebook for crisis communications. For example, a local government agency in southern Florida could create a secret group “Fort Lauderdale Hurricane Information,” and pre-populate it with information from its pre-written evacuation plan.

When Amos, or Bob, or Carla, or Doug or whomever starts heading toward the community, they could simply update the information to reflect current reality and change the status to “Public” and it’s instantly available to anyone. Then place a link to the Facebook group from the organization’s main page to send people there for news updates and discussion. And you can establish a few administrators in advance, too.

For example, you can join my Facebook group called Social Network Options for Organizations by clicking this link. And you can “friend” me by clicking this one.
Groups like this will form in the aftermath of tragedies and crises, as we have seen with this group spontaneously created about the 35W bridge collapse. (In less than six days it’s gotten more than 10,000 members.) And in reality, it’s incredibly easy to create new groups in Facebook, so you may not want to pre-create a group for everything. That way you can name the group more definitively, e.g. with the hurricane’s name.

But what you should definitely do is practice setting up Facebook groups, so that as you develop your crisis communications plan you know exactly what settings you want. For example:

• Do you want a discussion board?
• Do you want to enable the Wall?
• Will you have photos and videos on the site? If so, will you let users upload theirs, or only Administrators.

Then your crisis communications plan could include step-by-step instructions so you can create the new group within minutes when the crisis happens.

Possible arguments against this approach are that Facebook is a “walled garden” and that the information isn’t broadly available on the web. Someone has said it’s a walled garden with a really big gate, but I prefer the analogy of a garden that is ever expanding (by a million-plus members a week), with a six-inch wall. Anyone with an email address can join Facebook in just a few minutes, and once they’ve done that, it takes just seconds to join a particular group.

When you form a new group, for instance, you could send an email to your constituent groups that includes the link to the group. If they are in Facebook already, joining will take seconds. If they’re not, they can sign up with basic information in minutes.
The other reality is that for major public events, groups will form in Facebook. Wouldn’t you rather have the discussion about your company or government unit starting in a group that you form and promote, instead of possibly one formed by an antagonist? You can’t stop those groups from forming, but if you create a group yourself and promote it well, it will be the most relevant by number of users, and likely will have the critical mass to be “the” place people go for news, updates and discussion.

You won’t control the discussion, but at least you will have earned the right to participate. And as the administrator of the group, if you need to get a message to everyone who has joined, you can hit the “Message All Members” link and send an email to everyone who has joined. If someone else has formed the group, you don’t have that option.

Update: In the comments below and on their blogs, Kip Havel and Richard Stacy suggest blogs as an alternative to Facebook groups.

I agree blogs are another good choice for crisis communications. You could do the same thing with wordpress.com, for instance, starting it as an “only people I invite” blog, and then changing it to “public” status when the crisis hits. The advantage is it’s Google-able; one disadvantage is you don’t have the ability to  proactively send a message to an interested group of members…at least not as easily as you can with Facebook.

And of course you could do both: a Facebook group (because some people will look there), but with the associated URL being to your WordPress.com blog. Maybe Blogger also has this kind of “secret” blog feature that can be later opened up; I’m just more familiar with WordPress.

Technorati: Facebook, Crisis Communications, Hurricane, disaster, dark sites, 35W bridge, bridge collapse