Network with peers and colleagues on social media sites to get the help you need.

Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter allow users to contact other like minded nurses and medical professionals, but it also allows them to learn and become better at their jobs. Check out the article at NursingLink that shares “5 Ways Social Media Can Help Nurses.” As a Travel Nurse, using a social media site can have many advantages.

If you’re moving to an unfamiliar city for an assignment  you can ask your network for a possible introduction to someone who can show them around. Or maybe you have a need for help with a certain situation at work and want feedback on the best way to handle it… This can be done by setting up discussion groups on Facebook, starting your own blog or posting questions and so forth on Twitter. The greatest thing about using tools like social media is that responses will come quickly.

There are so many ways a Traveling Nurse can use the internet to their benefit. Shopping for scrubs or asking for professional advice. Whatever the need, it can all be done through the power of social media. What are some other ways you can think of that will help nurses like yourself? Please leave your comments below.

Here are a couple other articles written on the subject of Social Media and the internet:

To Post or Not to Post?

You Are What You Post.

50 Social Media and Networking Sites for the Medically Minded.

It may be hard to associate any of the activities you’re use to doing with others as something to do by your lonesome, but if you give it a go you may find it to be quite liberating. Try going to a concert or go see a flick by yourself. What’s different is that you don’t have to coordinate with anyone else about which theatre to go to, what time works best and how much butter you want on your popcorn. Plus you won’t have the possibility of  interruptions about the plot or actors during the movie which can be real irritating.

Shopping is another activity that can be done by yourself. If you’re like me, you have a plan. You know what you want and where to get it. In and out. You don’t have to worry about any unwanted comments about your choices or that you’re taking too long or you’re too fast. Nope, you can go at your own pace and not have to worry about the approval of others. Take the time to read a few pages of a book you’re thinking about buying or listen to a few tracks of the new album you’ve been wanting to purchase. Whatever you want to do, it’s your choice.

If shopping is not your bag, you can always try some form of self-improvement. As you know, a travel nursing assignment comes with a lot of downtime. You work 3-4 days straight and then you’re rewarded with an ample amount of time to spend to yourself and what better way to spend that time the betterment of you? If you ever wanted to learn a new language you can try taking a class or DIY at home with Rosetta Stone.

Maybe your goal for the new year was to get into better shape and going to the gym is one that is best enjoyed by yourself. You can focus on you and the workouts that will benefit you best. Hop on the treadmill, strap on the headphones and lose yourself while burning the calories. If going to the gym and dealing with the crowds and equipment is not your idea of fun, try going for a dip. Swimming is one of the best forms of exercise you can do and  if you’re lucky enough to be on a traveling nurse assignment near the coast with temperate waters, what better way to get in shape than with a swim in one of mother nature’s swimming pools? Then after your swim, why not bask in the glow of the sun for a bit, especially if you’re from any land locked places that experiences wintry weather. I’d sacrifice being alone for beach in a heartbeat!

Getting to any of the activities mentioned above is an experience in itself. Driving can be very therapeutic, so roll your windows down, open up the sunroof, crank up the tunes and sing along to your hearts content. You can’t usually do this in a group setting without hearing some comments about your “talent” and who wants to hear that?

But you don’t have to go anywhere to enjoy your time. Stay at home and hone in on your cooking skills or take a class online. There’s so much available to you on the world wide web that you can do to pass the time in a constructive manner. Since you’re alone, why not take some time to update family and friends on your well-being. Create a profile on one of the many different social networking sites and get in touch with those you are closest to and possibly find those with whom you use to be close to.

You can use your time alone however you see fit. Think of anything and everything you usually did with another. Now just picture yourself doing it without them. It’s not that bad is it? Doing anything alone can give you a greater appreciation for a few things, the friends and family you do have and perhaps you’ll see whatever activity you do alone in a new light. Just because you’re by yourself doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the time just the same as if you had others to share it with… Who knows, you may find it more enjoyable!

If you have other ideas and activities one can do alone while out on assignment, please share them below in our comment section.

That’s why I wanted to share a site that could offer you some help to make some of your travel challenges a little easier. WorkShifting.com is a site geared more toward remote office workers who travel and work out of places like coffee shops, hotels, airports and their homes, but it is full of great resources and articles that I think travel nurses (especially if you are a blogger or into social media yourself) could really use too.

As I dug through the site I saw a lot of potential for taking their advice about staying in contact with their companies and staff and applying it to staying in touch with your family and friends. One of the disadvantages of being a travel nurse is the disconnect from home, but by following some of their advice you could stay almost as connected as if you were home.

Take a look at let me know what you think.

Each of these social networking sites has a niche. For instance LinkedIn is geared more towards the professional looking to network with other like minded professionals in their field while sites like MySpace and Facebook are aimed towards those who celebrate the weekends! Whatever site you use, remember, this is your advertisement to the world. You are what you post. These sites all serve a purpose and can work to your benefit professionally if used correctly, it’s the incorrect ways you need to worry about. So, are you branding yourself the right way or the wrong way?

One of the simplest forms of using these social media sites is the “status update. Here you can post whatever is on your mind, whether you want to tell everyone good news, share an insight into an important topic like healthcare or just vent. I find myself posting lyrics to a song that gets lodged in my head the second I wake up to torture all my friends and on occasion I’ll share a juicy nugget. It just depends on how I’m feeling that day. You want to keep it fresh and stay away from any sort of pattern. Your “readers” will begin to get bored with you if all you do is complain about how much time you have left in your day at work, or how bad your work day is and blah, blah, blah!

These sites are all about sharing. Sharing your tastes in music, film, or whatever suits your fancy. It’s also a great place to share all the things that are important to you in this world. Being a nurse you may belong to organizations related to nursing or charities that you may volunteer your skills to. All these are great to share as your future employers may be doing background checks to see what kind of person they may be dealing with. Sharing this information is great for them to get a feel of what you are about without having talked to you personally. It’s hard to separate your professional and personal being, so just be smart as to what you want to put out there about yourself and your opinions. There are many options built into these sites that allow you to “censor” what can be seen from outside viewers. So use them accordingly if you think anything you have available to see may be questionable. You’re building your brand and you need to try and control what info comes up when your name is searched online by potential employers. Here’s a fine example of how NOT to use facebook… Doctor and Nurse Suspensions.

For traveling nurses these social networking sites are a wonderful way to keep in touch with family and friends while away from home and I recommend starting your online presence now if you haven’t already. All the cool kids are doing it! Staying connected is very important and helps keep the lonliness factor to a minimum. These sites are also a great way for nurses to share with future employers the person that you really are, from all the causes and charities you may be involved with to the great insights and opinions you share on others pages. Remember, you have total control of what you want seen. If you post meaningless dribble and constantly play games and whatnot, I don’t think that’s what you want as a first impression. I guess it depends on what you’re trying to attract… A potential new employer or a level 5 warlock to help you get to the next level? The choice is yours, for you are what you post.

With all these advancements in technology it is so much easier for you, the traveling nurse and traveling allied health professional to keep in contact with those those you know and love. There are so many social networking sites out there, with MySpace, Facebook and Twitter leading the way. Each has a unique interface and function, but moreover they all do the same thing. I’m sure most of you have at least been on these sites at least once or have completed a profile of your own. It can be a useful tool to connect with people you may have lost contact with, or just something fun you and your friends can do when there’s not enough time in the week to see one another. These are perfect means for the traveling healthcare professional!

While on the road on assignment you can keep your friends and family updated with your life on the road. The standard use to be logging on via computer, but today you can do so by way of your cell phone. You can update your “status” or get sent updates on those you have chosen and those are all relayed by SMS or text messaging. That’s basically what the site Twitter is all about. It’s a fun, easy way to update your followers in 140 characters or less! Facebook also offers a mobile version as well as MySpace. With all these different sites available to you on a mobile basis, there’s no reason you can’t be in the know, even if you are a thousand miles away. There is usually no extra charge connected to these mobile sites, it’s just a standard text message. Check your carrier plan to gain a greater understanding if you think it might be extra.

So even though you’re no where near home, you can still feel like you’re in the know while on assignment as a travel nurse. Log on to your favorite social networking site and check out there mobile offerings and soon you can get updates 24/7 straight to your pocket!

Here are the links to my 3 favorite mobile social networking sites:

Twitter: Twitter Devices
Facebook: Facebook Mobile
MySpace: MySpaceMobile

This is the final article from Beth’s series of guest posts. Beth maintains a fantastic blog at PixelRN.com where she writes about her experiences in nursing as well as social networking and website design/development.

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I recently was fortunate enough to attend Blog World Expo 2008, the world’s largest blogging and new media conference. Part of my agenda was to meet with other health care bloggers like Kim from Emergiblog, and Dr. Val Jones from GetBetterHealth, to discuss the possibility of putting together a track dedicated to health care bloggers at next year’s conference. We also met with Rob Halper, who oversees the Johnson & Johnson Youtube channel, and Shane Pike, of Health Care Today. Together we brainstormed ways that we could make this happen. The result? A health care blogger track is a sure thing for next year (September 2009), and it’s going to be the first event of its kind that will bring all types of health care bloggers together. Potential topics include: HIPAA issues, using blogging to affect change in health care policy, and using your blog to leverage your expertise in your field. If you’re interested, Emergiblog has a poll up where you can see the list of topics and vote on the best ones.

One of our goals for the health care blogger’s track is to include all types of bloggers in the health care arena. That includes nurses, doctors, students, EMTs, technicians, medical librarians, social workers, pharmacists, researchers, and patients. One of the great things about health care blogging is that it brings together people from all specialties, and the result is one of the largest (and liveliest) ongoing multidisciplinary discussions on the state of health care. If you are still new to this idea of people blogging about health care, I would urge you to check out Grand Rounds. It’s a weekly roundup of some of the best blog posts with a medical theme.

Blog World Expo is a worthwhile and energizing experience for any type of blogger. If you have a blog, whether it be about nursing, or any thing else, I would urge you to go. Presentations included topics such as how to make money from your blog, building readership on your blog, and how to analyze your blog statistics. One of the best things about Blog World Expo was getting to meet other bloggers face to face. I had known of Kim and Dr. Val through their blogs for a couple of years now, but this was the first time I had a chance to sit down and have a conversation with them. It was a very energizing experience.

If you’d like to learn more about Blog World Expo and the health care blogger’s track, stop by Emergiblog and leave a comment with your email. Kim, the author of Emergiblog, is putting together an email list and will be updating us through out the year on this event. Hope to see you there!

Here is Part 3 of Beth’s series on Social Networking for travel nurses. Beth maintains a fantastic blog at PixelRN.com where she writes about her experiences in nursing as well as social networking and website design/development.

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 Use Twitter to connect with other nurses.

Twitter is another social networking technology and it has often been referred to as “microblogging.” You make friends with people by following them, and if they are interested they will follow you back. When you update your Twitter page, it goes into a public timeline, and you can see what everyone else is “tweeting” about. People think of twitter as microblogging because you update your twitter page just as you would update a blog, but you are limited to 140 characters. Many people use it to share details about their day. Others use it to share links to promote their blogs or websites.

Lately Twitter has been jumping into the political arena. During the last presidential and vice-presidential debates, many participated on Twitter while watching the debate, which resulted in some very lively political discussion. Twitter also keeps track of trending topics so you can see what others are saying about each of the candidates.

There is an emerging community of nurses who use Twitter and you can find a list of them here. I can say first hand that the nurses who use Twitter are a welcoming and friendly community so I urge you to join in.

What is the benefit from using Twitter? For me it’s one more way of connecting to interesting people online. Nurses sometimes keep strange hours so it’s nice to be able to come home from night shift or evening shift and have people to chat with.

Use LinkedIn to maintain your resume and professional contacts.

LinkedIn is great site for maintaining your professional contacts. It also gives you a space to post your resume online, and it’s easy to keep it updated. One of my favorite things about LinkedIn is that you can automatically attach your resume as a PDF file when applying for jobs. You can also use LinkedIn to maintain professional relationships with people at other hospitals that you’ve worked for.

LinkedIn also provides a way to connect with former classmates. You can do a search of the school you attended, and then invite people to become your connections. (It’s funny how each social networking site has a different name for your contacts. Facebook has “friends,” Twitter has “followers,” and LinkedIn has “connections.”) They also feature professional groups you can join. Overall, it’s a great way to network with people in your chosen field.

A final word on social networking for nurses: Don’t be afraid to get your feet wet. Start out small if you wish. Leave a comment on a blog, or search Flickr for some subjects you might be interested. I’ve come to find that there are many interesting people online and the only way to find this out is to start participating.

Here is Part 2 of Beth’s series on Social Networking for travel nurses. Beth maintains a fantastic blog at PixelRN.com where she writes about her experiences in nursing as well as social networking and website design/development.

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In this post, we’ll take a look at Facebook, Blogger, and WordPress.

Facebook is kind of a grab-bag for all of your social networking activity. You can create a profile, upload photos, write notes, and post links, and find people that you may know from high school, college, or previous places of employment (among other things.) If you are a traveling nurse and still aren’t using facebook, I suggest you sign up. It’s a very convenient and fun way of staying in touch with people.

There are also social sites dedicated strictly to nurses and people who are interested in nursing. Nursinglink is one of them. It contains many of the same features that you see on Facebook but centers around nursing.

If you are really ambitious about social networking you can start your own blog. What is a blog, exactly? The original word comes from web + log, and the first blogs were kind of like personal journals. They date back to earlier in this decade. These days a blog can be about anything you want it to be. It can be a personal diary, a way to update your friends and family on where you are traveling, or it can even be a collection of articles that you have written on a chosen subject. Travel nursing and blogging go hand in hand, and there is a great community of nurses who blog out there. Setting up a blog is really very easy to do, and free as well. You can start a free blog at wordpress.com or blogger.com. Each of these sites have templates that you can choose from and fairly easy to use interfaces.

There’s a large community of nurses who blog. You can find a partial list of them at OrientedX3.com. There’s also a biweekly roundup of some of the best nursing blog posts called Change of Shift. You can see the latest edition of Change of Shift at crzegrl.net.

In part three we’ll take a look at Twitter, a micro-blogging tool, and LinkedIn, a social site for professionals.

We’re delighted to have Beth join us for Part 1 of her series on Social Networking for travel nurses. Beth maintains a fantastic blog at PixelRN.com where she writes about her experiences in nursing as well as social networking and website design/development.

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First of all, what is social networking, and why would a travel nurse be interested in it? A social networking service is basically any type of website that provides a way for people to connect and socialize online. More and more nurses these days are using social networking services to connect with friends, family, and other nurses. Travel nurses, especially, can benefit from these new technologies. They travel from job to job, making new friends along the way and trying to keep in touch with old friends, not to mention the people they leave behind at their home base.  Online communities, blogs, and photo-sharing sites can help them stay connected to everyone. But there are many different sites out there and figuring out which ones to use can sometimes be overwhelming. I’d like to share with you my top 5 favorite social networking sites, and explain how they can benefit the travel nurse.

Let’s start with one of my favorite social networking sites, Flickr

Flickr is a site that lets you store and share your photos. Two things make flickr especially useful, the ability to “tag” your photos and organize them according to subject, and the ability to search other people’s photos by subject matter. Also, you can create a profile and “friend” other flickr users. Flickr and traveling go hand in hand. Say you are about to accept a travel assignment in Baltimore, MD. You’ve never been there before and you are anxious to get a feel for the city. Perhaps you’d like to figure out what neighborhood to live in, or what sites you’d like to see. Flickr allows you to search all of the photos tagged, Baltimore. From here you might search other neighborhoods in Baltimore, like Canton or Charles Village. I recommend searching by “tags only” and by “most interesting” as opposed to “most recent.” That way, Flickr will pick out the most relevant photos for you. You can also search by clicking on “Explore” and choosing “Places.” Then, type in the place you would like to see and Flickr will show you photos that have been geo-tagged with that place, and also show you some photo groups that revolve around that location

Flickr is also a social site, and so you can create a list of contacts. Flickr, like many other social networking sites, allows you to find people you already know by searching your email contacts on gmail, hotmail, and yahoo mail. When you become friends with someone, it will be easier to view one another’s photos.

Finally, when you start uploading your own photos, you can also “tag” them. Tagging simply refers to designating a keyword to your photo, making it easier to search for at a later date. You can basically choose any tags you want, and organize your photos according to subject matter, location, or when you took them.

In part two I’ll take a look at Facebook, and also talk about starting your own blog.