Well the first day of the CDC Health Communication, Marketing and Media conference has come to fantastic close with a great reception at the Georgia Aquarium. What a great venue to relax in and catch up with folks that you only saw in passing throughout the day.
The theme of this year for the conference is “Convergence: Purpose, Programs and Partners”. I really saw how that was true with the various tracks that were available, including:
- To Advance Science
- To Bridge Divides
- To Explore Innovations
- To Improve Practice
The opening session consisted of industry leaders such as Dr. Jay Bernhardt, former Director of Health Marketing at the CDC and Donna Garland of the CDC. The plenary speaker was Dr. Vic Strecher of HealthMedia, Inc and University of Michigan School of Public Health. His speech covered some fantastic aspects of health innovation and looking to the future for where we need to spend our time to make lasting change and impact in the industry. It was great to see some changemakers in the field like BJ Fogg of Texting 4 Health/Mobile Health 2010 conference, my favorite folks over at HopeLab and Josh Nesbit of FrontlineSMS:Medic get some attention for what they have been doing. Here is Josh talking at the recent PopTech conference:
PopTech 2009 Social Innovation Fellow Josh Nesbit from PopTech on Vimeo.
The first session I attended had a panel with Nedra Weinreich of Weinreich Communications, Stacy Shelp of the NC Division of Public Health and Amelia Burke of AED. These panelists gave great examples of using social media for both external and internal campaigns (Teen2Xtreme, Eat Smart/Move More, Iowa Teen Pregnancy Prevention campaign, respectively).
These sessions for me set the tone for what I saw throughout the day with great examples of how organizations did innovative things using social media and other technologies to implement awareness and behavior change. I absolutely love highlighting and seeing success stories in this field – it gives people an idea of where things are going as well as encouragement to continue innovating.
As the day went on however, I wondered to myself how spread out over the spectrum of knowledge and experience were the attendees? Were people who were just starting out in need of a more step by step approach to creating innovation in their organizations? Of course there were workshops designed by Nedra Weinreich that are always sold out and successful – but would the conference benefit from having more of that? Maybe it would be beneficial to also have a designated time to talk to presenters for an extended Q&A session?
Later this year, Fard Johnmar of Enspektos will be hosting another conference focused on the doing part of innovation in the health communications world with the UnNiched 2010 learning lab event. That may be a great follow up for this conference. Stay tuned for more information on that gathering. I’m definitely looking forward to Day Two of the event and learning about more successes and meeting more pioneers for public health!
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@Nedra: Always a pleasure Nedra – hopefully it will make it to next year’s schedule! I’m really excited to see what we can do for the rest of the year to keep this momentum going!
@Dr. Gold: Thanks so much for stopping by! Means alot
@Fard: My pleasure Fard – thanks so much for your diligent efforts to move innovation and more importantly, an understanding, along.
Andre, Nedra:
Wow, this sounds like a fantastic event. Thanks also for mentioning unNiched 2010. I’m proud to have you both involved and speaking so highly of what we’re trying to achieve.
Thanks for sharing this. I’ll follow your blog as we seem to have similar interests in Public Health 2.0 but are on differnt continents.
Andre, great summary, thanks. Loved the Healthy Turtle interview also.
Thanks for the shout-out, Andre! I’m sure that you would be great for a workshop on innovation for public health. I think there had been talk early on about bringing together people for more informal Q&A on specific topics in a roundtable kind of setting, but it doesn’t look like it made it to the final schedule. UnNiched really would be an excellent follow-up to this more research-focused conference for those who want to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty.
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