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Social Media Trumps Big Healthcare

Our insurance battle appears to be over! For those who haven’t been following on Facebook, I started a huge stink on Twitter on the 28 using my primary Twitter account, which has over 1600 very connected followers who have even more of a reach than I do. Several of my followers have over 100K followers, so I knew this could go viral with the right tweets.

It’s sort of funny that it was just Sunday’s newspaper in Tampa that had a story about company-run social media departments and how effective (almost too effective) social media is. Below is how things went down. ^JP denotes my tweets while ^CR denotes Aetna’s tweets. Read and learn.

^JP – @AetnaGlobal Your “customer service” staff are among the lowest form of life. If you’re interested in providing support, touch base w/ me.

^JP – @AetnaGlobal Your “customer service” people have done nothing but block my access to my meds in 2012 – I will wear you down. Calling again!

^JP – @AetnaGlobal Hi, it’s me again. Ready to practice “reform” or are you too busy killing people w/ cystic fibrosis? #cysticfibrosis

^JP – @AetnaGlobal Contact me before I contact them. Our appeal process is almost exhausted. You can stop this nonsense.yfrog.com/h0xhlvp (That’s a link to our local news investigative team who really gets results in the area.)

19 minutes later…

^CR – Hi, I’m Chris w/Aetna. Can I help you with any specific questions you may have? ^CR

[Read more…]

Join Us on Social Networks Like Google Plus

Google PlusMany of us have found each other through social networks, usually our blogs’ blogrolls in the sidebars. But many of us are also carrying on daily conversations on the major social networks.

I wanted to put together a place where we can post our social network IDs or URLs. Mine are and have been in the sidebar and header, but here they are in easy format.

http://twitter.com/cffatboy


https://www.facebook.com/cffatboy (yes, always use https!)
https://plus.google.com/114766171607995059456 (Google +)

Please leave your information in the comments so others can follow you and we can all have big parties.

Google +

The newest social network is Google +. It just opened up its doors by invitation last Tuesday, and I got in on Friday. Rather than creating lists and groups that you try to keep track of what permissions they all have (like on Facebook) or broadcasting to everyone without any group control at all (like Twitter), Google + has the best of both worlds: circles.

You create circles of people, such as family, friends, acquaintances, people you think sat behind you in class, etc. Then, each time you post something, you have the option of which circles to broadcast to, or “public” or “extended circles” of your circles’ circles. Pretty neat feature.

You can also edit both posts and comments later AND easily mute a conversation that you comment on and it just never ends. I’ve got a Chrome plugin so I even turned off all e-mail notifications.

My one gripe is that the stream shows all of your circles, but I have some very noisy friends. The work-around is to create a circle of those you want to see their posts (call it “stream” if you want to be really wild and crazy) and put most of your people in that circle, but leave out the noisy ones. You’re still following them and can see them by going to their circle, but your daily stream isn’t taken over by their “junk.”

If you need an invite to Google +, DM me your Gmail address in Twitter after I follow you back.

3 Things I’ve Learned About Life Because of CF

Colored GlassesHaving cystic fibrosis makes you a different breed one way or another. There are stronger CFers and  there are weak, defeated CFers, but none of us are “normal,” no matter how hard we try. We are automatically changed, forged by CF into something different than who we would be without it.

A favorite topic among CFers is whether or not you got a genetic a re-do on life if you’d take it because of the different person you’d be without CF. I’d give up CF in a heartbeat and take my chances with my body working correctly and see what kind of person I’d be. A few things would be different, but not too many, I don’t think. One of the things is perspective. Here are some things I’ve learned about life because I have CF.

  1. Life is short: Yeah, yeah. That’s cliché, but “normal” people say that. We have CF and have been given a different life expectancy number from the time we can remember. What we do with that expectation and how we let it affect us is what makes us different. [Read more…]