One way Twittering at RSNA 2009
Overcoming the legal and regulatory hurdles associated with social technologies in MedTech is just the beginning of the battle. Companies must still segment their audience by their social-graphic tendencies in order to develop a Web 2.0 strategy that fits with their patients’ and physicians’ social technology engagement habits. I recently attended the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, where social technology crossed paths with physicians and the medical imaging industry in a high-profile way.
Conference organizers generated hype around Twitter and pre-announced that Twitterers should include the #RSNA09 hash tag to label their RSNA related tweets. A live feed of #RSNA09 tweets was posted prominently on the main RSNA conference web page. Yellow-shirted Twitter teams walked around the conference to promote the medium by drawing attention to themselves (yellow t-shirts in a sea of suits) and sponsoring Twitter-mediated giveaways.
As a result, 163 Twitterers sent a combined 857 tweets in the nine days around the official four and a half days of the conference (see Figure 1). The top 15 Twitterers, who generated over 55% of the total tweets, were overwhelmingly represented by commercial vendors and the RSNA staff (see Figure 2).
Figure 1: Analysis of tweets containing the #RSNA09 hash tag, decomposed into tweets, re?tweets, and replies.
Figure 2: Top 15 tweeters, re?tweeters and repliers. Analysis of all tweets containing the #RSNA09 hash tag.
A lexical analysis showed that 141/857 (16%) of the #RSNA09 tweets were re-tweets, indicating that one person thought it worthy to repeat what another person had said. An additional 80/857 (11%) of the #RSNA09 tweets were directed at, or explicitly mentioned, another Twitterer. Using the re-tweets and referential/conversational tweets as a measure of social interaction among conference attendees and vendors, this analysis shows that there was only a moderate amount of Twitter-mediated social interaction at RSNA 2009 (27% of all tweets).
Was Twitter an effective outbound marketing channel at RSNA09? Perhaps; the silent customers, including physicians and hospital administrators, who may have been following the #RSNA09 twitter feed, may have read vendors’ tweets and subsequently followed a hyperlink or visited their exhibit at the trade show. The entry cost for vendors to use this communication channel is negligible and their actions are immediately observable, which facilitates a rapid competitive response (see Figure 3). Yet, the modest level of social interaction suggests that the Twitter audience was not fully engaged by this social technology.
Figure 3: Three large medical imaging vendors: cumulative tweeting by day at RSNA 2009. Philips and Siemens demonstrated a relatively consistent level of twittering, while General Electric had a surge of activity on the second day of the conference.
