First posts on a new blog are always the hardest to write, but introductions are usually a good start: I’m Reed Smidebush, the Associate Product Manager for Online Communities at OptumHealth in Minneapolis, MN. The MyCancerHub blog tracks the progress of development, release, and ongoing happenings with MyCancerHub.com, the first of many online communities that we’re building here at Optum. More importantly, we would like to share the lessons we learn and mistakes we make along the way, as well as share any interesting links or events that relate to social networking and media.
MyCancerHub runs on Jive Software’s Clearspace Community software, which is very comprehensive and includes full features for discussions, blogs, documents, tags, and a lot more.
Progress Updates tend to be a bit dry, but hopefully this first one will put everything in context:
We just got back from a relaxing weekend and it’s been a busy day with brainstorming meetings and resolving a lot of issues that came out of left field this afternoon. Technical and security-related delays have pushed back the launch of our first online community here at OptumHealth, so as of now, our public launch is planned for May 20, 2008. We will have an initial test group using the site for the first three weeks, but registration will be open to all who stumble upon MyCancerHub.com. We should begin online marketing in early June, but we’re doing a push of some viral and social network marketing in the meantime.
We’ll have a lot more interesting things to share just about every day, and you can also keep up with Reed and Shannon on Twitter.
Tags: Clearspace Community, first post, Jive Software, Online Marketing, progress update, technical issues
