Voce Communications has partnered with The Community Roundtable to produce a new podcast series,Conversations with Community Managers. In this series, Voce’s Doug Haslam and The Community Roundtable’s Jim Storer speak with people from a variety of industries about their efforts with online community; what they are doing, the challenges and opportunities unique to their industry, and the differences and similarities between “community” and “social media.” Episode 5 is an interview Shwen Gwee, who works in the health care and pharma industries, and heads up a network called SocialPharmer* and the blog Med 2.0 Some of the podcast highlights include:

• Taking a community cultivated at a conference and continuing to grow it online with social media tools
• Conversely, how online groups (like Twitter chats) can be used to lead to more substantial offline events
• The reluctance in highly-regulated industries like pharmaceuticals to using social media, and how to counter those
• How growth in industry participation has actually taken off in some areas, particularly Twitter, and Facebook, which has seen many popular Fan Pages grow up around support for people with certain diseases
• Lessons learned from live events, including: the ability for people to talk across different verticals, the opportunity to speak with patients in an informal setting, and in-depth discussions of the mutual trust needed to keep social media use growing in pharma

Listen here:

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Download the show here. Subscribe to the podcast here: MUSIC CREDIT: “Bleuacide” by graphiqsgroove * Note: SocialPharmer is currently a Ning group, but with the announcement that Ning will stop support for free groups, Shwen has told us that he is working on moving the network to a new platform, to be determined soon.