A GP who is also an education professional and an expert user of social media, Anne Marie is a natural and presents a superb discussion posing some difficult questions of her readers:

How are people using social marketing in health? Now you have surgeries tweeting, blogging, opening YouTube accounts but what has social media got to do with me as a health professional?  What does ‘engagement with consumers’ using social media, ‘establishing a brand’ got to do with health and health care organisations?

Anne Marie has a real life example of a Government organisation encouraging people to use twitter to contact a sexual health nurse, Zena.  Zena is using twitter, a website and a facebook page to contact patients. But:

• What about private issues being discussed between health professional and patient on a public site?
• How to guide patients online? To use it in a safe way?

This is what this presentation is about – well worth a listen to and if you are really struck with how good this is, the comments on Anne Marie’s blog from health professionals including Zena and patients are enlightening too.

Health professionals and social media

And my two pennies worth: – I admire what this sexual health nurse is doing – not only getting her head around the technology, but putting herself out there as a professional in social media opens her up to all sorts of discussions, comments and criticisms, in a very public way.

I agree with Anne Marie’s concerns that what happens online stays online.  Forever. And from the comments from patients here it’s worth remembering how vulnerable people are especially when they have health problems, their concerns may overtake their care for privacy.

I see what professionals like this nurse are doing as advertising good information to people on a variety of networks, giving them the channels to communicate/find someone, and then taking the conversation off line.

Even if you have the best expertise in health – if you don’t use social media how are patients going to find you?

In response Anne-Marie wrote

“I agree that social media may be a useful way to disseminate contact details. But I do have grave concerns about encouraging its use a contact medium. And it may be heresy but the people who probably most need Zena’s help probably have the least access to social media in any form. This is where enabling patients to make contact by SMS is really useful. Those are 140 private characters.”

Google wave is to be no more, the Google team in Sydney, having put a lot of effort into an innovative new product will see the technology developed in a different way.  What happened?  Wave had some internal competition from Google Buzz, and users were having to get used to two very different ways of communicating.  And in both cases you need someone to communicate with. A very active Sydney Wave user group dived into the technology, visited Google HQ and began to experiment.  Here are some of their discussions on hearing the news but first, from the Google blog:

… Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

Posted by Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow

I didn’t know you could be a Google Fellow! But that aside, here are comments from the wave user group in Sydney on their experience with using wave and interacting with the Google Wave team. The discussion took place on facebook, but some of the points raised are so pertinent I wanted to post them here. I agree with Tony’s comment:

Tony Cosentino

It’s funny, I was at a gathering the night before the announcement and when wave came up in conversation someone said ‘does anyone even use it?’ Most agreed not.

I made a statement that I believed they had rolled out BUZZ and WAVE the wrong way around. I think WAVE should have been offered to all gmail users from the beginning to allow a critical mass to use and understand it. It was so hard to try putting groups together in the beginning with limited invites it all became like a secret cult with little documentation.

I feel for Gina Trapani who wrote the ‘Complete Google Wave Guide’ as an ongoing project. And also the programmers we have met at google wave meeting putting a lot of time and money to develop wave tools. No One in google lost their jobs over it.

I am also glad I hadn’t put anything really critical on wave that I was relying on as a long term repository.

Frances Jones

What I appreciated about Wave was that Lars, Jens & co created it in Sydney and I will always admire them as entrepreneurs. Heck, Lars even came to see us speak at the User Group. Many of the nscm crowd got together at Google HQ because of it. It created positives for us.

Google spent I don’t know how many $millions on Wave which Sydney benefitted from. Positives all round for us I’d say.

Tony Hollingsworth

Spot on Frances – the community building and support that occurred remains.

For example, some memories include:
http://gwsug.eventbrite.com/ – the informal user groups where you can see the range of people interested.

http://friendfeed.com/search?q=%23gwsug – we coined the hastag #gwsug for Google Wave Sydney User Group and can enjoy the history via FriendFeed, including the photos of the community.

Finally your teriffic blog posts Frances capturing the initial excitement and promise of Wave:

First impressions of Google Wave, An Australian Perspective
Innovation according to Goovle Wave co-creator Lars Rasmussen

These guys (and many others) really were experienced on wave and their comments, to me at least, say a lot.

Australian YouTube Statistics

2010

Did you know that YouTube has an official Australian blog?
• YouTube was launched officially in Australia on October 22, 2007 [1]
• YouTube is ranked the second highest social networking site in Australia [2]




• Facebook is the most popular social networking site accessed via a mobile (92%), followed by YouTube and Twitter (18%) and MySpace (9%) [2]

It is remarkably difficult to find statistics on Australian YouTube usage, not even the official YouTube blog lists any details.  Globally:

• A day’s worth of content updated every minute globally.[3]
• 70% of YouTube’s traffic comes from outside the US [4]
• Over 50% of 18-34 year-olds share videos often with friends and colleagues [3]

More Web Metrics

References

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube
[2] http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/global/australia-getting-more-social-online-as-facebook-leads-and-twitter-grows
[3] http://www.youtube.com/t/fact_sheet
[4] http://www.viralblog.com/research/youtube-statistics

Australian Twitter Statistics

2010

Overall the state of the twittersphere is:

• Globally twitter’s audience levels grew by more than 400% in 2009 [1]
• Demographics globally show the majority of users (39%) are aged between 18-34 years and are Caucasian [2]

Although Twitter accounts in Australia lag far behind Facebook, there has been a big rise in Twitter usage:

• There are approximately 2.5M twitter accounts in Australia although only 16% of twitter users are aged under 24 years old [2]
• Within Australia nearly a quarter of online Australians (23%) read ‘tweets’ in the past year [1]
• 14 percent ‘followed’ companies or organizations via Twitter (up from 5% in 2008) and 13 percent posted ‘tweets’ (up from 4% in 2008) [1]
• The majority of accounts are in NSW (over 35%), seconded by Victoria (27%) [3]

More Web Metrics

References

[1] http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/global/australia-getting-more-social-online-as-facebook-leads-and-twitter-grows
[2] http://www.webkrunk.com/2010/04/13/twitter-demographics-infographic/
[3] http://blog.tribalytic.com/2010/05/13/how-many-australian-twitter-users-are-there-and-where-are-they-from/

Australian Facebook Statistics

2010

• Launched in February 2004, Worldwide Facebook has more than 400 million active users and an average user has 130 friends [1]. [UPDATE, this is now 500 million users as of July 2010].
• Within Australia, facebook is currently the most used social media site and a key driver in Australians’ trial and uptake of social media [2]
• 83 percent of social networkers name Facebook as their main social networking platform, up from 72 percent in 2008 and 34 percent in 2007 [2]

  

• There are nearly 8 million monthly active users in Australia, although only 1 million of these are under 18 years old [3]
• Three quarters of Australian Internet users (75%) reporting to have visited Facebook, 59 percent have a Facebook profile [2]
• The average time spent on Facebook in a given month is 8:19 hours – seven and a half hours more than its closest rival site, YouTube [2]

• UPDATE: July 2010: number of Australian users on facebook 9,009,660 [4]

More Web Metrics

References

[1] http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
[2] http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/global/australia-getting-more-social-online-as-facebook-leads-and-twitter-grows
[3] http://laurelpapworth.com/australia-number-of-australians-on-facebook-2010
[4] http://www.nickburcher.com/2010/07/facebook-usage-statistics-by-country.html

Specific social media statistics for different networks are difficult to find.  Gathering Web 2.0 metrics into one place for reference, to be updated as new statistics are published is the next task in hand. Here is an overview of where Australia is in terms of social media based on information gathered and analysed at the end of 2009.

Nielsen[1] reported that social networking on sites such as Facebook was a key driver in Australians uptake of social media and that close to three quarters of online Australians (73%) have looked at others’ profiles on social networks.  That’s three quarters of Australians online using social media!

With well over one third (37%) of these reporting to be interacting with others via social networking sites on a daily basis it changes the way we are communicating and getting information – it changes a whole heap of things in a fundamental way. Australia topped even the U.S. when it came to time spent per person on social networks – but the country that spends the most time on social networks… Italy! [2]

The biggest increases in social media usage in Australia were reading and posting on Twitter, reading wikis and engaging with brands and organizations via social media.

References

[1] http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/global/australia-getting-more-social-online-as-facebook-leads-and-twitter-grows
[2] http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/global/global-audience-spends-two-hours-more-a-month-on-social-networks-than-last-year