#ACR14 Follow Up: Social Media Bootcamp, Tweetup, Podcasts, and #RheumJC Beginnings

Paul SufkaConferences, Rheumatology Podcast, Social Media

acr14-tweetup-group

Group picture from #ACR14 Tweetup.

“A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. For millions of years, human beings have been part of one tribe or another. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.” ― Seth Godin

A few weeks ago I was able to attend my seventh consecutive American College of Rheumatology Annual Meeting (ACR) in Boston.

Despite the fact I was only able to attend the meeting for a relatively short time (Saturday evening until late Monday morning), I was able to be involved in a number of activities. I’ll have to come back for sightseeing in Boston another time.

The biggest thing I was involved in while in Boston was the ACR Social Media Bootcamp, with excellent sessions on Twitter and blogging for rheumatologists.

Sunday sessions:

Monday sessions:

Also check out these Storify timelines regarding social media at #ACR14:

The next big thing was the #ACR14 Tweetup. This event is designed with the goal of helping myself and others meet more people face-to-face at a major medical conference, and was again a big success. As always, it was great to catch up with a number of friends from all over the globe.

During the conference, I had Tweeted out a link to one of my favorite articles:

In this article, titled “You don’t have to be local”, Derek Sivers writes:

You can focus your time locally or globally.

But if you over-commit yourself locally, you under-commit yourself globally, and vice-versa.

If you’re local, then you’re probably social, doing a lot of things in-person, and being a part of your community. But this means you’ll have less time to focus on creating things for the world.

If you’re global, then you want to focus on creating things that can reach out through distribution to the whole world. But this means you’ll have less time to be part of your local community.

One of the great things about having a tweetup is that by meeting some of the people that we communicate with in person, I think it brings some balance to the local vs global feeling.

Somehow during all of this, Dr. Suleman Bhana (@DrBhana) and I were able to record two live episodes of The Rheumatology Podcast.

Episode 35 – Live at #ACR14 with Dr. Philip Robinson

Episode 36 – Live at #ACR14 with Dr. Rebecca Grainger and Dr. Jonathan Hausmann

I’m also including a link to “Episode 34 – Interview with Irish rheumatologist Ronan Kavanagh”, since it was such a fun episode to record and we had discussed a bit about the social media bootcamp (among many other things).

Last, a good meeting wouldn’t come to a close without plans for the future. Toward the end of the meeting, talk about a Twitter based online journal club started to pop up, which has been deemed #RheumJC, and in the process of planning and organizing, and should launch soon.

For anyone interested in this, be sure to check out: