Solutions: CardioExchange
MMS launches semantic social networking experiment at CardioExchange.org
Silverchair was proud to announce the November 2009 launch of Massachusetts Medical Society’s CardioExchange, an experimental online community for cardiologists, on the Silverchair Content Manager platform. The site features cardiology content from The New England Journal of Medicine and Journal Watch contextualized by clinical insights and analysis from cardiology thought leaders and practicing cardiologists from around the world. Content management for CardioExchange, including management of blogging and content curation, is hosted on Silverchair’s Orbital. Semantic tagging of content and users is controlled by Silverchair’s Cortex taxonomy.
Last month, we conducted the following interview with Kent Anderson, who led the MMS initiative to develop CardioExchange. At the time, Kent was Executive Director for Product Development for NEJM and Journal Watch. On January 4, Kent became CEO and Publisher of The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery.
What is the mission of CardioExchange?
At its heart, CardioExchange is an experiment to see if there is a new, better way to present community-specific information using new curation, community, and conversation tools. We went into it knowing that it was a major chance to learn and adapt as we learned. Ultimately, the mission is to find the best way to communicate and integrate new findings and information within a community of practice, and to allow that community to learn from its own members.
At its heart, CardioExchange is an experiment to see if there is a new, better way to present community-specific information using new curation, community, and conversation tools.
Why did MMS want to experiment with professional networking and community building, and how does it relate to NEJM and Journal Watch?
Both NEJM and Journal Watch have a history of balancing the duality of simultaneously being general medicine publications and multi-specialty publications. Journal Watch accomplishes this by having a "general medicine" publication and a family of specialty-specific publications, along with disease-specific offerings. NEJM accomplishes this through its editorial boards, collections, and a constant awareness of focusing on clinical practice. But over the past few years, both brands have been experimenting with social media implementations and seeing good results. So, when we ratcheted up our goals of meeting customer expectations, we knew we had to use both brands and all our editorial acumen together. It’s been a great experience for the teams to work across brands and focus on the customer through the CardioExchange experiment.
Why was it important to build CardioExchange on a semantic content delivery platform?
There were many reasons. The content from NEJM and Journal Watch was vital to the intersection of content, community, and curation, and semantics gave us a great way to automate some of the recommendations, elaborate on content items in a meaningful way, and match content and community members. We also ask members to identify areas of clinical or research interest, so we can suggest content to them and also suggest people they may be interested in knowing. Semantics make the whole thing much richer and more scalable.
The content from NEJM and Journal Watch was vital to the intersection of content, community, and curation, and semantics gave us a great way to automate some of the recommendations, elaborate on content items in a meaningful way, and match content and community members.
Why focus on one specialty rather than professional networking for a wider medical audience?
We asked ourselves that question, too. Ultimately, it came down to a few factors—first, cardiology is both a highly specialized area of medicine while also a major emphasis in general practice. All physicians deal with cardiac care to some extent, whether it’s hypertension, chest pain, heart attacks, or rhythm disturbances. So, we saw a chance to strike that familiar balance between general medicine and specialty care, while giving it a real focus. Also, we have great strengths in cardiology. Finally, we wanted to start with a focused offering, learn, adapt, and refine. Going "big" from the start seemed unwise, given the fact that we have a lot to learn.
We talked a lot about "curation" in developing the site. What does that mean for CardioExchange?
Curation hits on a lot of aspects. Basically, it means selecting and arranging. So, from a traditional editorial point of view, we select and arrange content in issues. On CardioExchange, the pace of curation is accelerated, and we can choose from more sources. But we also have to be sensitive to the conversational aspect, so we want to curate in a manner that gives people a chance to reflect and engage. We also reward good comments by curating them onto the home page and into other locations, so that the conversations are curated (in addition to being moderated). We use tools like "Most Commented" and "Most Recommended" to let user activity effectively curate elements up, and we let group moderators curate items independently so that they’re specific to important subgroups in the cardiology community.
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CardioExchange home page.
Why is membership in the site by invitation only?
We looked at this carefully and determined that a great way to fail would be to have a high level of casual activity. Many social sites fail this way. People come because they’re intrigued, but the site owners can’t respond fast enough, haven’t refined their approach well enough, or simply don’t have anything that interesting, so a large population comes, sniffs, and leaves, never to return. We sought input from experienced people in this space, and learned that a slow build, while it may test your patience, is the best way to have an active, engaged community that grows at a rate you can respond to productively.
What will define success for CardioExchange?
As an experiment, if we learn a lot, we’ll have achieved a level of success as an organization. But the ultimate success will be found when the community members are learning from each other as much as from us, are checking the site each morning and night because it’s a great way to gauge the pulse of the specialty, are eagerly inviting peers to join, and are making CardioExchange a topic of conversation in the hallways of medicine.
To learn more about enabling social interactions around your content, please contact Silverchair.
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