Our office has spent the last 18-24 months working hard on developing our social media voice.  We have focused on Facebook, Twitter and our blog.  While it was a slow start, it’s been exciting to watch the proverbial “ball” roll.

Facebook seemed to be the logical start to get our feet wet, so we started with a group.  We asked ourselves, What does a group do? How do we get “likes” and what do we do with them once we have them? We now have over 200 “Likes” and you can find all kinds of great information posted on our Global Health Office Facebook Page. We have students, faculty, other universities and other NGO’s posting and sharing our stories.

Twitter was definitely uncharted territory…the constant barrage of “25 new tweets” was mind boggling. We would post our news bites and retweet other stories of interest….but it still felt like we were operating in a vacuum and only talking to ourselves for months….then suddenly we were connected with some big Canadian “Global Health” Fish!

• Grand Challenges Canada
• CUGH
• CSIH
• CIRH
• University of Alberta
• University of Toronto International Health Program
• Canadian Coalition for Global Health Research

to name a few….quickly followed by even bigger fish! With names like

• Duke Global Health npr Global Health
• Global Medical Knowledge Inc
• IMU

and medical professionals from around the globe! We currently have over 350 Followers. How did that happen? We tweet and retweet each other, we “mention” each other, we promote each other…and yet we have never met.  If you would like to be part of the discussion please “Follow” us here: https://twitter.com/DalGlobalHealth.

Most recently a twitter post lead us to a fabulous blog by Laurie Garrett. http://lauriegarrett.com/blog/.  Laurie is a Senior Fellow for Global Health Council on Foreign Relations and a very eloquent writer.  We encourage you to read her thoughts.

While this new virtual world can be confusing, overwhelming and intimidating we don’t want to think where we would be without these connections. We like to think this as one of those opportunities to “Lead by Example”. Join us, won’t you?