HIMMS interested in bloggers, blogging, and social networking

Today I spent some time being interviewed by a HIMMS marketing and communications group member and I was pleased by what I heard. The fellow on the phone seem genuinely interested in how we, as bloggers, see HIMMS as an organization and especially how they could better cater the 2007 conference to our small (but in his words “influential”) blogging community.

He said HIMMS had been following blogs like mine and are very interested learning if the HIMMS 2007 Conference should have a blog and what it should look like. I was impressed by their questions because it really seemed that they were genuinely interested in blogging to bring real value to potential attendees.

I told them that if they’re serious about hearing from the “people at work” including CIOs, software architects, system architects, clinical professionals, and others involved in the healthcare IT community we would be happy to guide them. I made it clear that we’re looking or real value and not glorified press releases or canned presentations. He agreed and it was clear that they understand the value and influence we bring to the healthcare IT industry. I also cautioned against a HIMMS blog being a echo chamber for its other, normal, marketing and communications materials and he said that they were not looking in that direction either.

All in all, I couldn’t complain because they were very receptive to everything I said. It will be interesting to see how many of the ideas I presented will be implemented but even if a couple of them are, I’d be happy.

I got the sense that our little get together at last year’s HIMMS got someone’s attention and I’m going to help them come up with some ideas to really get the bloggers involved even more next year. Perhaps in New Orleans next year we will be first class citizens :-).

If you have some specific ideas that you’d like me to pass along to the folks at HIMMS, let me know and I’ll be happy to get it there. E-mail me if you have something private to share or better yet drop a comment here in case you don’t mind others seeing your ideas.