(creative commons image courtesy of Ninha Morandini)

Forget about the economic crisis we are facing.

Readers, I am in the midst of a full fledged blogger emergency. I’ve recently discovered that Google is blacklisting me for some reason. I have completely lost all of my search engine traffic from Google and I’m not sure why.

Luckily I have Shane working on the case, and he suggested changing my wordpress theme around. Instead of getting into that, though, I decided to just revert back to my old theme (which Shane, himself designed!) until I can figure things out.

I have some ideas about what happened, and I’ll be posting more on this later. Meanwhile, if there are any other SEO experts that might happen upon this blog, I would love to hear from you.

What could a travel nurse possibly want to know about social networking? How about everything? In my view, every travel nurse should acquaint themselves with at least one or two of the social networking tools that are available. I can’t think of a better way to stay in touch with friends and family while you’re on the road.

With that in mind I wrote a series of articles for my friends over at travelnursingblogs.com. You can find part one here. I’d also like to thank Medical Solutions for sponsoring my trip to Blog World Expo. It was well worth it!

Also, I just finished writing my about page. I’ve had this blog for a long time and it recently occurred to me that I’d really like to tell the story of how I got here to people who arrive by *accident* Enjoy!

(creative commons image courtesy of slack 12)

One of the great benefits of attending Blog World Expo 2008 was all of the great advice and inspiration I got that will help me to keep on blogging.

Hands down, my favorite blogging advice was dispensed by Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Work Week:

Talk to your readers the way you would talk to your friends after 2 drinks.

This makes perfect sense to me, and here’s why:

What happens when you sit down with some friends and have a couple drinks?

You start to get that relaxed, warm fuzzy feeling.

You start to loosen your inhibitions.

Your enthusiasm starts to bubble up to the top and affects what you say.

As people who blog, we all have something to say. The question is, What’s the best way to say it? And how do we write a really good post without letting all of our little insecurities and doubts get in the way? And the answer is, blog like you’re buzzed!

I think the 2-drink rule is brilliant, and I’ve already started to implement it. And what’s more, Tim Ferriss actually wrote his entire book with that rule in mind. Did I mention that it’s a New York Times bestseller?

If 2 drinks are good, wouldn’t 3 or 4 or 5 drinks be even better?

Easy now, I don’t want to encourage any lush-like behavior. At three drinks you start to take that turn where warm and fuzzy becomes silly and sloppy, and bubbly enthusiasm can turn into incoherence and long-windedness. Which is fine if you’re at the bar, or a party, or even sitting at home watching House and tweeting - Goodness, who would do that? ; ) - It’s probably just not good for your blog.

And obviously the 2 drink rule would need to be adjusted to fit your weight and tolerance. If you weigh 98 pounds, a scant glass of sherry might do it for you, but if you’re > 200 pounds, you might be halfway into a six-pack before you start getting the warm fuzzies.

And remeber, we juSt pretending we had two drinks, right? Not like we drink so much we forgette how to type an spell. And maibee even fall off out of the chair wile we are blogging.

*hiccup*

I see you later. guys,. Got t0 go take nAp.

o_O

You are a nurse. You are out in public, going about your business and you see a person in distress, or a situation where someone has been harmed or injured in some way.

What would you do?

I had a conversation with some fellow nurses yesterday that I found kind of surprising. Someone was cursing their husband for telling her son’s little league team that she was an ER nurse. Now the coach wanted her to volunteer to run the first aid station at some of the games.

“I never tell anyone I’m a nurse,” she says.

The other nurse agreed and said that she never wears her scrubs home when taking the subway, because she would be expected to help if something went wrong.

Now, I understand where this mentality comes form. Everyone’s afraid of liability. Everyone’s afraid of losing their license if something goes wrong.

Call me naive and idealistic, but if I saw someone in distress, or someone who had been harmed, it would take wild hungry pit bulls to keep me from helping them. You see, it’s kind of why I became a nurse in the first place. Not only is there something so infinitely rewarding about being able to help someone in a crisis situation, I also consider it to be my duty. And I may not have the type of first-line emergency skills that many ER nurses and EMTs have but I’ll tell you what I can do. I can hold pressure to stop someone from bleeding. I know BLS and if there’s an AED around I can set it up, calmly and quickly. I can hold someone’s hand, talk them through the situation and try to keep the scene calm until the EMTs get there.

And if you’re still afraid, well, there is something to protect you. It’s called The Good Samaritan Law.

I’m proud to be a nurse. Sure I may do my share of complaining about all the menial stuff, but in the end, I have pride in who I am. This is going to sound incredibly corny but when I wear my scrubs out in public, stopping to get coffee before work, or stopping at the grocery store after my shift, I hold my head up a little higher. The funny thing is that people seem to treat me with slightly more reverence when I’m in my scrubs. And I don’t mind that at all.

Blog World Expo has been an excellent conference. It is so energizing to meet other bloggers. This makes up for every person in my life that says “Huh, what? blogging?” and then their eyes glaze over. I’ve met so many other bloggers and feel completely rejuvenated and inspired to keep on blogging.

I can’t say enough about how cool it was to meet Kim (emergiblog) and Dr. Val (Revolution Health) in person. I really felt like Kim was an old friend, especially when she said she remembered when I graduated from nursing school!

The exciting thing is that we spent some time planning for next year’s conference. We are planning our own Medblogger/HealthCare track. What this means is that we can plan our own sessions and have an great venue to meet one another in person.

I can’t stress enough what a worthwhile experience this will be. In the future I will be blogging about how you guys can make this happen (budgeting for it, perhaps finding sponsorships to help you with expenses), but for now I will just urge you all to put it on your calendars: October 15th-17th in Las Vegas.

You know how much fun we have in the Dr. Anonymous chat room every Thursday night? - it’s going to be like that only 1000x better.

Sent from my iPhone

Posted by email from pixelrn’s posterous

Sent from my iPhone

Posted by email from pixelrn’s posterous

Just finished listening to this guy talk at Blog World Expo. He has some great things to say about staying true to what you are passionate about. One of the most interesting things I learned from him is that Linkin Park actually chose the name of their band because the domain name, lincolnpark.com was already taken!

Sent from my iPhone

Posted by email from pixelrn’s posterous

Okay, so who’s who in this picture?

Rob Halper, who runs the JNJ Health Channel, yours truly, Shane Pike of Health Care Today fame, the illustrious Kim of emergiblog, and the vivacious Dr. Val.

Recently I wrote about how companies might use social media to reach out to nurses, and discussed how Johnson & Johnson might use Twitter to start a conversation about their products. After writing that post, I learned that J&J now has a health channel on Youtube and I think this is an exciting step in the right direction.

Now let’s take a look at the other medical company that uses an ampersand in its name: Smith & Nephew. One of my favorite products that they make is the Allevyn wound dressing. It’s a highly absorbent, non-adhesive dressing that is very effective for pressure ulcers. So how does S&N get the message out to nurses about this product? Two ways come to mind:

1. Product Demos. This could occur on the unit, perhaps on an education day, or maybe at a conference. Usually done by sales reps who bring a big bag of candy to keep everyone interested.

2. Company Website. Overall, The S&N website has a nice look to it - good use of color and graphics. There’s some navigation issues but beyond that, here is a place I see room for improvement. When I navigate to one of the products I use and click on “contact us,” I am lead to a screen that looks like this:

Okay, so it looks pretty but who is going to take the time to fill out this form? S&N should be finding ways to make it easy for us to contact them. To me this seems like a lot of hassle just have a informal discussion about a product. On the other hand, if S&N had some interesting learning materials on say, Youtube, Flickr, or perhaps even a corporate blog I would then have a venue to leave a comment and perhaps start a conversation about the product.

This is where large companies like Smith & Nephew are missing the boat.

On the other hand, I have a pretty good reason why they aren’t interested in opening the lines of conversation to their customers. First of all, there is a feeling in the marketing department of most of these companies that you have to control your brand, control your message, under all circumstances. I would suspect that the other reason is that they aren’t yet convinced of the ROI in joining in the social media parade.

As a nurse, (and a social media evangelist) I would love to see some more of these companies start joining in the Groundswell. When these companies send their sales reps to give us a little demo at change of shift, you know what I’m thinking? “Let’s wrap this up as quickly as possible. I have a boatload of stuff to do and I need to hit the ground running.” If they come in the middle of the afternoon I am thinking, “Okay, what form of carbs did they bring so I can snarf that up and then get back to finishing things up?” My mind is not really in the right place to be learning about a new product.

Why not figure out a way to reach out to nurses when they are relaxed, and not thinking about the 389 things they have to get done before change of shift? Or better yet, why not create some really compelling learning content that nurses would seek out rather than bothering them while they are working?

So who’s going to be first?

I knew it was a full moon.

Posted by email from pixelrn’s posterous