A social media presentation to Delaware dietitians by Rebecca Scritchfield

September 28, 2009 by Colby
Filed under: Local, Presentations

Rebecca Scritchfield is a Washington, D.C. based registered dietitian specializing in performance nutrition and weight management. D.C. An athlete herself, she regularly completes marathons and triathlons. Together with Bernie Salazar, at-home winner of The Biggest Loser, she co-created “The Nurture Principles” – Five mantras to help people change their lives and find wellness within.

As I become aware of presentations given to nutrition professionals about social media in professional settings, I will post them here to highlight the people who give them and encourage others to use them as examples.

The following is reposted with permission from Rebecca Scritchfield’s blog about a presentation she gave to dietitians in Delaware this year on social media. Visit her blog post here to read the comments: http://rebeccascritchfield.wordpress.com/2009/05/14/social-media-insights-for-dietitians/. Rebecca has informed me that she will be speaking again in April on the topic, and because she is a great example of how to use social media effectively I will be posting an email interview with her in the near future.

Hi, I’m Rebecca Scritchfield and I’m a dietitian. I’m also a reformed IT professional. Couple that with a master’s degree in communications from Johns Hopkins University and it starts to make sense why I’m writing this post on opportunities for dietitians in social medial.

I recently presented at the Delaware Dietetic Association meeting on social media in Wilmington, Delaware. My task? Educate dietitians on the opportunities with social media and inspire them to take action – in one hour!

It was a crash course in simplification! Lucky for me, I recently read Nancy Duarte’s book Slideology, which offered great tips on getting your point across with few words and pictures.

So I went with it and used mostly images to describe social networking and the logos from the popular social media tools to help guide my presentation. I decided that the best way I can “explain” the benefits of social media is by providing live demos of the tools in action – a very important piece because everyone had a chance to learn by “doing” and could discover themselves that there’s nothing too scary about social media.

After laying the groundwork on social media characteristics, I made my case that the ultimate benefit of social media is “POWER”. I took them on a journey starting with conversations and relationships and how this ultimately leads to influence and power. (Props to my Hopkins Prof. Nicco Mele and all the wonderful texts he made me read.)

After looking at it from a 30,000 foot view, I thought it would be fun to include an interactive game. I couldn’t think of a catchy name so I just called it “WIIFD” – what’s in it for dietitians. I randomly asked audience members to describe a job task and I would try to brainstorm an example of how they can use social media to their advantage. It’s always a risk to do something like this… could they stump me?

Some of the ideas I gave them for using social media include:

Network – make new (virtual) connections

Grow a business (consulting, counseling…)

Sell more products

Land interviews

Save time

Collaborate

Discover… and be discovered!

I then went through the following social media tools by discussing the “lingo”, the benefits, live demo, and tips for getting started. For example, “blogging may be for you if…” Here’s what we covered:

Blogs
- WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad
Microblogs
- Twitter (the almighty, these days)
Social Networks
- Facebook
- Linked In
- MeetUp
Social Media Tools
- Podcasts
- Vlogs/video
- RSS
- Flickr
- You Tube

I could not talk about social networking without talking about socialNOTworking… so I discussed how dietitians can make it work for them… bottom line… integration!

I reviewed how they can use WordPress and Woo to make their own website with a blog. They can link their tweets to their facebook status or use Tweet Deck as a way to keep up with their social circles.

I spent some time discussing some “hot” opportunities that they missed out on such as the RD Blogfest and recent online newspaper coverage.