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The presenters (Peter Murray, Chris Paton, Margaret Hansen and Luis Luque) provided an overview of social media and Web 2.0, the background to and purpose of the WG, and some examples of the use of social media, including via mobile platforms such as iPad, from their own experiences and current activities and research.

The purpose of the workshop was mainly to raise discussion and questions; among the issues raised were
- how do we study/evaluate social media?
- why does social media matter to healthcare? what examples are thee of use at present?
- what types of tools might be needed – eg should there be a ‘wikipedia for health’? – or should we ‘ride the wave’ of current successful platforms and not try to reinvent the wheel?
- can we use social media to cut down time from research to publication? – eg move from ‘peer review’ to a crowd-sourced model?
- how do we define ‘success’ in terms of social media? – what if ‘low quality’ contributions get more views/hits than the high quality ones; is this ‘success’?
- information overload – how to deal with this whether we are patients or professionals? – how do we identify ‘quality’ especially when, for example, rating care and interaction with health professionals?

A follow-on panel will be presented at the Medicine 2.0’11 conference in Stanford, CA, USA in mid September. It will build on this discussion and explore these and other issues to develop the first stage of the research agenda or roadmap.

After the break a “speed dating” session for the WS participants was set up to stimulation networking and collaboration among the attending delegates.

The second product launch was made by iMedia Tracking presenting their products and sevices. specialise in the design and production of LBS (Location-Based Search) applications for mobile devices and mobile-to-web solutions. By combining mobile and web platforms with a simple and effective white label API solution iMT can easily integrate their mobile services into any existing web-based solutions.

Chris and Luis outlined the history of the SMWG and some past activities, as well as future plans. Much of the meeting was taken up by discussion among participants of possible future activities for the WG, and some possible areas that might be needed for future research.

Information o future plans will be distributed via the above blog pages.

On Tuesday 30 August, the SMWG will host a workshop at MIE2011, titled “Towards a Research Agenda for Social Media in Healthcare and Academia”. We will try to tweet and blog ‘live’ from the event.