As readers may know, I recently attended the annual meeting of the Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) in Philadelphia. I’m working my way through some posts from Health Journalism 2011 , and at the same taking the opportunity to experiment with new social media tools such as Storify.

So far I have written posts from AHCJ on Massachusetts health care reform and the drug development pipeline.  Tomorrow, I will be posting on nanotechnology and a presentation by Kacy Cullen, Ph.D from the Center for Brain Injury and Repair at the University of Pennsylvania – my highlight of the meeting!

On the last day of Health Journalism 2011 there was an engaging panel on social media and blogging moderated by Scott Hensley of National Public Radio (NPR).

I’m always looking for tips on what I could be doing better, so it was interesting to hear from experienced journalists on their approach to blogging and social media. I decided to use Storify to aggregate many of the live tweets, and in the process shares the tips from the session.

Storify is an interesting new tool in beta stage of development that allows you to capture social media and incorporate into a story and then embed it in a blog post.  Given that Twitter posts are not kept after several days, it’s a useful way to capture Tweets that may otherwise be lost. It also allows you to bring social media together from a number of sources e.g. Facebook, YouTube.

However, there’s room for improvement given the lack of a search feature on the Storify site and to me it seems hard to find stories that others have done, unless you have a link to them. Improved search will be key to success.

I’m also not sure to what extent any content posted on Storify makes it into search engines, or is crawled by bots.  Again, if your content cannot be found, then it’s social media utility is lowered.  However, it’s always good to try new tools and you can read what I put together on Storify from the Health Journalism 2011 session on blogging and social media below:


 

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