NIH Clinical Center "Tweets" to the Nation and World
EPISODE #19
Uploaded: June 22, 2009
Running Time: 3:20
SCHMALFELDT: From the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, this is CLINICAL CENTER RADIO. No doubt by now you’ve heard of the social media application known as Twitter. Chances are you use it yourself, sending messages – known as "tweets" – to your friends and family about your day-to-day goings-on. The NIH Clinical Center has caught on to this trend and is now sending out "tweets" to the public to keep them aware of news and events, lectures and clinical trials. If you’re one of the hundreds of folks who have been "following" the Clinical Center on Twitter, it’s time you got to meet Maggie McGuire at the Clinical Center’s Office of Communications, Patient Recruitment and Public Liaison. She’s the young lady with her fingers on the keyboard.
MCGUIRE: We have the "handle" NIHClinicalCntr and that’s basically a reposting of a lot of announcements, things going on at the hospital, lectures and such and other avenues of information like the podcasts and CC News. Our audience, I would say, is the general public – staff, too, because there are some campus announcements. That would be anyone interested in anything going on in the Clinical Center, including patient recruitment trials we "re-tweet," if you will, from the NIH Patient Recruitment handle, which we also run.
SCHMALFELDT: Twitter is an interactive social media service where folks can talk about anything they want, up to 140 characters at a time. Basically, you set up an account and you find people and topics of interest. Then, if you want updates from these folks or institutions, you "follow" them. That way, you’re only getting the information you want to see and not anything that doesn’t interest you. Think of it as an electronic bulletin board for the early 21st Century.
MCGUIRE: Yes, it is. It’s an interactive bulletin board. You can click through, you can hold conversations with other people who have posted things of interest, follow and be updated automatically of other "tweets" from other users who may be "tweeting" about medical research and diabetes trials, what have you.
SCHMALFELDT: Twitter has been getting a lot of publicity recently with the situation in Iran. Where the Iranian government has been able to shut down traditional media, the "tweets" are getting through to the rest of the world.
MCGUIRE: I think the glory of Twitter is it is really like a viral web community where if someone in Bethesda who is familiar with the Clinical Center reads something that we have "tweeted," "re-tweets" it, it reaches their followers. From there, it just goes on and on and on. It is really a global resource. I know we have followers from all over the world. Yeah, I mean, if you look at our follower list, it’s pretty global.
SCHMALFELDT: If you already have a Twitter account, you can follow Maggie’s updates by following the Twitter handle "NIHClinicalCntr". If you DON’T have a Twitter account, what are you waiting for? Log on and join up for free at http://twitter.com And and for more news from the NIH Clinical Center, including updates about the medical research going on here every day, log on to http://clinicalcenter.nih.gov. From America’s Clinical Research Hospital, this has been CLINICAL CENTER RADIO. In Bethesda, Maryland, I’m Bill Schmalfeldt at the National Institutes of Health, an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services.
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