The Stanford School of Medicine managed to promote science stories broadly without issuing any press releases. At the national CTSA Communications Meeting, John Stafford, New Media Strategist at Stanford, shared some insights how this worked.

Depending on the science story, they posted what’s newsworthy on their blog Scope , Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and – very important – they successfully leveraged the informal relationships with their “blogger friends”. As a result, some of their stories made it into leading science magazines and newspapers.

But the story doesn’t end here: John also demoed a few online monitoring tools to measure media reach and brand leadership. These tools provide dashboards for monitoring how many and what types of media outlets pick up science stories, and even what attitudes readers have towards those stories. Here is a list of tools that might become useful to some of our organizational initiatives:

• Radian6: Provides a platform to listen, measure and engage with customers across the entire social web.
• ScoutLabs: A self-serve, web-based tool that includes natural language processing techniques for sentiment and tone scoring. Read article
• Sysomos Heartbeat: Provides constantly updated snapshots of online conversations.
• General Sentiment: Media Measurement Dashboard, Reporting Service, and Data API.
• Jive: Social media monitoring, engagement, and measurement.
• Klout: Helps you identify people you might want to start a conversation with.
• Cotweet
• Tweetreach

For those who still seek more, Stanford will be hosting a social media conference “Medicine 2.0” in September this year.