The holidays are upon us, which means reflecting back and looking ahead. I'm presenting our board some of our web victories from this past year, along with a quick demonstration of our social media capabilities.

Then, I'd like to offer a glimpse of my wishes for the upcoming year.

These include:

• Enhancing the look of other areas in the hospital to offer our patients and families a better experience. (Excellent NY Times article about the importance of patient experiences.)


• Upgrading one of our blogs to include videos from our employees about their experiences with our hospital.


• Using our Flip video camera more. We're still in the mode of thinking that it's a "special occasion" tool, rather than an everyday moment capturer.


• Getting all of our employees to use the same e-mail signature, which includes all of our organization's social media links. (This may require gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh to our IT department. If anyone knows where I can score some myrrh, please let me know.)


• I would like a system in place in which all of our new employees are oriented to all of our social media/web marketing tools so that they can take part. I just don't want to be the one that does that.


• Finally, I would like every tweet our hospital sends out to generate $100,000 in revenue for our CFO, who would put it directly into our Marketing Department budget...fa-la-la-la la-la-la-la.

A while back, I wrote a post about how I don't use Twitter. Well, no more. Sometimes, there's no greater motivation to do something than your boss going to a social media conference and tweeting a declaration that I'm now required to learn and use Twitter. So it goes.

I've found a nice medium between casual use and from having it becoming a life-changing obsession. There are so many questions healthcare organizations (and people in general) have about Twitter:

"Does anyone really care?"
"How does this work?"
"Hello? Is there anybody in there?"

I found a cosmic balance with Twitter in a friend's blog--the genius of which is in its organizing principle: Things posted should either be interesting or helpful.

So when you whittle everything down, you have two considerations when tweeting information as a healthcare organization: Is it helpful to others? Is it interesting to others?

Here are some of the Twitter feeds that I've found to be interesting and helpful. Since you've been doing this longer than I have, please feel free to connect with me on Twitter and share yours! @joshmccolough

Interesting:
@AmerMedicalAssn
@NPRHealth
@ConanObrien
@TheOnion

Helpful:
@EdBennett
@ComcastCares
@raganreporter ... ;)