Yesterday was a unique experience for me. As usual, I was hanging out on twitter and monitoring things. What I was monitoring was spreading the word on an issue that is very important to Family Medicine. Read my post yesterday for more details. But, in brief, proposed federal cuts in Medicare may have significant effects on the number of Family Physicians in future years.
I called it a kind of social media experiment when I sent out an e-mail to some key advocates and FamMed/SoMe evangelists. For those with blogs, they were asked to write a blog post about it. For those only with twitter and facebook, they were asked to help spread the word on this issue using updates on their account. I believe I started posting at around 9am, Following this, I saw the other team members posting on twitter. They were even able to pull in other friends of Family Medicine.
It was really nice seeing more of the #SaveGME hashtag throughout the day. As you can see in the graphic above, the tweetreach free app was used to track the most recent 50 tweets for a reach of about 40,000 impressions. Now, did this experiment reach its objectives? Well, the ultimate goal was for Family Physicians to contact their Congress representative about these proposed federal cuts. I guess we'll never know if that action step was taken.
Overall, I'm happy how this quick project was pulled together. I only sent out the e-mail about 3-4 days ago. I'd like to thank everyone involved in yesterday's activites on twitter, facebook, blogs, and other platforms. I'm looking forward to trying this experiment on a higher scale with more people and more friends of Family Medicine. With the 2011 and 2012 election cycles, I hope that the Family Medicine establishment learns from this experiment and sees the potential power of social media when it comes to communication and advocacy.