These past few days, as many of you who read this blog know, I have been fortunate enough to be in Indianapolis attending the Roche Diabetes Care Social Media Summit. I will have to say that this was one of the most enjoyable trips I have had in a very long time and the reason for this is because I was fortunate enough to meet, in person, for the very frist time with so many people that I have considered my friends. Now, this entire trip was made possible because of Roche. It started with an email inviting myself and about 25 other bloggers and influencial people in the Diabetes social media venue to their headquarters. I will have to say that I was rather shocked when I was invited due to the fact that I have only been blogging for about 2 years now but I guess that I have made enough of an impression on the Diabetes online community that I was placed into this group.

Now, I will have to say that I was a little skeptical when I received the invitation because it was an all expenses paid trip to come and talk with a major Pharma / Diabetes supply company. My first thought was “This is so cool. I am finally going to get the chance to meet so many of the people that I converse with on a daily basis and consider my friends.” This thought was closely followed by the thought “OK, why does such a large company want to get a select group of Diabetes bloggers / social media people together? What is their motiviation behind this?” You have to admit, when hear about Big Pharma throwing down all expense paid trips for 25-30 people to come talk to them, you have to think that there is some type of alterior motive in this. Well, regardless of what their intentions were, I knew that I was not about to miss an opportunity to meet up with my second family for the first time and I will have to say that I took full advantage of the opportunity.

The 24 hour media summit consisted of an meet and greet dinner which consisted of smoeintroductions, speaches and what to expect from the individuals at Roche for the next 24 hours. The dinner was a lot of fun. Even though, the item of most interest to me was meeting my fellow online friends, I got the chance to meet some of the people at Roche and had a good time doing so. Many of the individuals did their research on my blog and I was happy to hear the comments from them. It made me a little more reassured that there was some genuine interest in this meeting (even if they were assigned to make sure they knew about us.) After getting to mingle with everyone at dinner, we then headed back to the hotel and proceeded to take over the lobby bar for the next hour and enjoy the company. It was such a great experience and I wouldn’t have traded it for the world. After about an hour of 25+ Diabetic media junkies making noise and having fun, we were asked to leave the bar. I guess we were just a little too much for them to handle. So , a majority of us decided to head up to our rooms to continue the after party. The party continued and fun and emotions were had by all. A lot of high hearted joking, some deep discussions and possibly a little love connection (Who knows what happened after hours with Chris AKA Diabetes Rockstar and Tim the hotel barfly… lol). Everyone closed up the night about 12:30 because we all new that 7:30 would come much too quickly the next morning.

I won’t get into the details of the days events because I am sure that there are many other who will be doing that and we will be getting a transcript of the entire day soon from Roche, so I will likely post that when I get it.

For those interested in seeing the event in pictures, I have setup a flickr photo pool for the Roche Diabetes Social Media Summit. Everyone involved has been made aware of this and I am looking forward to seeing all the pictures that come from the event. You can check the group on flickr:

Roche Diabetes Social MEdia Summit Flickr Pool

Here is a picture of the entire group of friends that made it to Roche

I will have to say that after all was said and done and we all said our goodbyes, I was still very unsure of why Roche had invited us to come and talk with them. I understand that social media is a large part of the world on both a personal and business level, but I guess I am just a little skeptical that Big Pharma is only in this to financially benefit from the knowledge that  those of us who have embraced the social media world and use and thrive off of it. It is sometimes hard to be optomistic when, being a diabetic, you are constantly fighting these big companies to try and improve your life using the products and service provided to you by these companies, only to have to deal with the political red tape, the denial letters, the increased restrictions and costs put onto these devices and services. It just sometimes feels like we (as diabetics) are the mice and these companies that we rely on to improve our life are the scientists placing us in a maze of smoke and mirrors that we have to try and find our way through in order to get our “cheese”.

I know that, in the end, Roche were very kind hosts and I appreciate them giving us the opportunity to voice our opions and concerns to the questions, comments, and business practices that they have. I still come away from this not really sure of the true intentions of this meeting. I truely hope that they are truely interested in embracing social media in a fashion that will take a more personal level and personal ownership of themsleves and not follow the path that we as Diabetic have seen many other corporate entities do and try to weasel their way into our life for a pure financial gain. Only time will tell.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 24th, 2009 at 2:57 pm and is filed under Diabetes, Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.