Everyone Exhale. The Hospital Social Networking List is Alive and Well, Thank You.
Those of us who know (or know of) Ed Bennett have to applaud his pioneering work in creating and maintaining the Hospital Social Network List. His work during the past few years resulting in the highly informative list—a giant scoreboard really—of hospital social media resources around the nation.
For professionals in hospital marketing and communications, Ed’s sortable and clickable list of hospitals with websites, Facebook pages, blogs, etc. was a tremendously useful reference point. No doubt Ed and the list itself helped propel and expand the use of online and social media tools.
In a historical perspective, Ed’s list was one of the first, if not the first, to spotlight and quantify the adoption curve of social media by hospitals in the United States. The List enabled hospital executives, physicians, healthcare marketing professionals and others to not only tabulate a “how many” of something in pure numbers, we could see the creative handiwork that was underway in the industry with a click or two.
Perhaps your heard the industry-wide collective gasp when Ed announced a “final update” and “archive” for the Hospital Social Network List. At the time, he explained, via his Found In Cache blog, his original goals had been achieved over the years, and the amount of time required for manual updates was considerable.
Fortunately for all of us, the Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media will now embrace Ed’s original list, and make it available at a new home and a new name: Health Care Social Media List (HCSML).
In announcing these changes, Lee Aase, director of the Clinic’s Center for Social Media, indicated Ed’s foundation list would be expanded beyond US hospitals to include international and non-hospital members. In addition, there are a number of enhancements planned including adding key organizational contacts, as well as the future creation of sub-lists and the addition of other key data.
You can find the Mayo Clinic Health Care Social Media List and more information on this page.
In addition to the industry-wide exhale and sighs of relief, we offer our salute and grateful appreciation to Ed Bennett and to Lee Aase.
