Talk of social media and how it impacts business is everywhere at the moment. Or so it seems. I recently flew Qantas on a recent business trip and must confess to being a bit of a fan of the Talking Business interviews on Q radio. I couldn’t help but notice virtually every interviewee, successful business types from a variety of industries, all mentioning the importance of social media in the successful marketing of their brand and business. Their experiences with the effective use of the New Media seemed as diverse as the industries they were from, ranging from using it with great effectiveness to recognising the need but having no real clue where to start.

It made me think whether the Health/Medical industry had the same level of awareness of the impact of social media and whether they saw any value in it. I recently saw a nice visual “infographic” posted by John Joyce on Mindmeister.com demonstrating the myriad of social networking and media sites out there. It’s mind boggling, so little wonder people and businesses struggle to grasp it all.

The following infographic posted on the Vincos Blog shows the uptake and impact of one of the relatively more well-known social networking sites called LinkedIn (a professional version of Facebook ). If LinkedIn was a country it would have a population about the size of the UK or more than 3 times the population of Australia and growing.

What was curious was that out of 17 industry sectors listed the medical sector ranks a pretty respectable fourth for the number of Linkedin users. Unfortunately this number doesn’t reflect my own experience, since many of the doctors I know have never even heard of LinkedIn much less bothered to register on it.

So we’re looking for the medical/health LinkedIn users not just in Australia but all over the world, make yourself known we’d love to hear how else you are using social media in your professional life and business. We’d love to feature some of the more innovative ways the use of social media might improve healthcare.