Every day, more and more COPDers are finding a home among the thousands that seek support and companionship on the Internet. In February of this year, we launched a social media strategy in effort to create a place online where the fragmented groups of COPDers could come to meet other COPDers, access a growing database of resources, and have a voice in the community.
We launched our Facebook and Twitter pages in February, and by April we created our first blog post with the help of social media guru Geoff Livingston. Our plan was to create a page where we could speak with not to the community. Geoff says that what people want from organizations is real dialogue because companies are made of people, and people want to talk to people.
That’s precisely what we set out to do. When we launched our blog, we simultaneously announced the start of a new project: the Faces of COPD. We asked our readers to post their picture in our Flickr photo album. Over 100 members posted their pictures in the album for the contest and folks continue to add to it. This helped us show the true faces of COPD, those that make up the community of COPDers in the U.S. In July, we held our Summer Music Challenge where our community submitted songs and a description of what it meant to them. Several other similar activities are taking place in our online community, where everyone can express themselves through common interests.
Conversations are ongoing on Facebook and Twitter. We’re proud to say that we have over 5,000 members on our Causes page, almost 1,300 followers on our fan page and over 1,000 followers on Twitter. This is a great accomplishment for the community because each of these individuals has received a message educating them on the important issues about COPD. Steadily, more and more individuals are benefitting from the access to the largest source of information and support in the world.
Many individuals affected by COPD (that includes patients, caregivers, family members, friends, and health care professionals) have opened up to others on our Facebook page and blog. We’ve encouraged everyone to share his or her story to those reading on the other end. The response has been incredible. Story after story has been posted on Facebook and fellow community members responded with information and encouragement. The online community is warm and welcoming to everyone no matter what concerns they’ve shared, troubles they’re going through, or successes they’ve achieved.
This is more than we’ve ever expected. So, we thank all of our readers for supporting us in these past several months and hope that those of you who haven’t joined the bandwagon to subscribe to our blog (blog.copdfoundation.org) to keep up to date with the latest news between each issue of the COPD Digest.
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