In this episode of Reputation Revolution, I speak with digital health influencer, Jason Berek-Lewis.
Jason is an evangelist for digital innovation in healthcare; he is a prominent blogger at HealthyStartups.com and an emerging thought leader in the social healthcare arena.
During the chat, Jason outlines his strategy to grow his visibility and influence within digital healthcare circles and explains his thought leadership journey so far including the important role blogging has played to date.
Becoming the brand
“Your journey is going to change,” says Jason. When he started Healthy Startups, his vision was to be the Mashable or TechCrunch for healthcare, but quickly realised this was not going to be feasible.
This change in strategy led to Jason putting himself out on the web via his blog and social channels and personally becoming ‘the brand’, with the goal of establishing himself as a consultant and speaker specialising in digital healthcare.
Apart from his professional credentials in the healthcare arena, specifically PR and communications, Jason also has a personal motivation around driving change in the sector – he has a heart condition that necessitated him undergoing three operations as a child, and this has given him additional credibility from the patient side of the healthcare equation.
Jason’s thought leadership journey has included:
being invited to speak at a global health tech conference in Dublin (he was nominated by someone whom he did not know at the time);- meeting and interviewing key influential people within the healthcare sector;
- hosting a dinner with IBM Australia and a high profile doctor and ‘medical futurist’ from Hungary named Dr Percy Mesco.
The upshot is blogging has given Jason the credibility to gain access to hard-to-reach people in the medical and healthcare fraternity.
Aside from blogging, Jason is also an active participant on Twitter and other social channels such as LinkedIn. But he’s careful not to use social media just to push himself.
“That’s a critical part of your personal brand is to be seen as an enabler and a sharer of content as much as a creator of your own content”, he says.
“The coolest thing I think you can do with social media is share your knowledge or share what you learn to benefit people at scale,” says Jason.
Links to thought leaders mentioned in this episode:
- Chris Brogan
- Gary Vaynerchuk
- The Gary Vaynerchuk keynote address to Web 2.0 conference that started Jason on his journey
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