Understanding Social Media for Healthcare

Mark Senak, of the Washington office of Fleishman Hillard has put together a very illuminating post in his blog, Eye on FDA on how to use social media to get the word out about new discoveries. Although it is targeted towards healthcare, it is one of the clearest explanations of how to use social media for those who are new to the area.

The Press Release Then, Now and Tomorrow
A press release used to be sent out by fax and later email. They got picked up and printed and then people who wanted to read the article in the publication might. They might clip it out and send it to a relative. Later, with the Internet, they
might send the URL to a friend. Then print media online began offering
little "share this" icons so that you could email the article to a friend.
That was all nice progress.

Then came RSS feed. One can aggregate a large number of feeds at once, getting news from a lot of sources and then spread them on quickly.
The nature of a press release is evolving as does our forms of communications. Now, there is no one sized fits all press release.

Read more at Senak's blog.