Audience participation at any meeting is key. As an all-digital meeting, ME Live 2014 not only asked attendees to interact with the speakers and one another, it tasked them to do so on Twitter. With a live Twitter feed built into the ME Live meeting app and an official hashtag, #MELiveAustin, the audience maintained a constant discussion about ME Live happenings, which was also displayed on large screens in the meeting room. What resulted was a continual exchange of information and ideas, both with individuals seated in the same room and people at home, all over the world.

As our tech-savvy readers know, hashtags allow Twitter users to amplify the reach of their tweets and maintain an archive of all relevant tweets that contain them. A quick search for #MELiveAustin will draw up days’ worth of tweets from the meeting. Hashtags can also be registered with various sites to track their use. MillennialEYE registered #MELiveAustin at Symplur, a company who launched a Healthcare Hashtag Project with the goal of making Twitter more accessible for providers and the health care community as a whole. Symplur lists registered hashtags for ongoing medical conferences to help users find topics of interest and access a live feed of the conversations related to each hashtag.

Below are some of the stats on the use of #MELiveAustin, generated by Symplur.