This is “”https://socialmediaweek.org/“>Social Media Week,” a moniker adopted by organizers of “a network of internationally hosted biannual conferences and online through social and mobile media”

So, this week, we bring you a series of posts on social media and research, and visa-versa.

First meet, meet Dan Zarrella "social, search, and viral marketing scientist at HubSpot… “He has a background in web development and combines his programming capabilities with a passion for social marketing to study social media behavior from a data-backed position and teach marketers scientifically grounded best practices.” He works with HubSpot in Cambridge, Mass.

And, on the social media of science, check out this video from PatientsLikeMe R&D Director Paul Wicks, who “walks through the medical decision process faced by patients and clinicians trying to manage their illness in a world lacking in data.”

Also note that Patients Like Me researchers recently co-authored a study in the Journal of Medical Internet Research on the use of their data on patient outcomes as evidence for off-label prescribing.

Jeana Frost, Sally Okun, Timothy Vaughan, James Heywood, Paul Wicks. Journal of Medical Internet Research (https://www.jmir.org), 21.01.2011.

Conclusions: Patient-reported outcomes, like those entered within PatientsLikeMe, offer a unique real-time approach to understand utilization and performance of treatments across many conditions. These patient-reported data can provide a new source of evidence about secondary uses and potentially identify targets for treatments to be studied systematically in traditional efficacy trials.