Please join the #LCSM Chat on Thursday, July 27, at 8 pm Eastern Time (5 pm Pacific) to celebrate our fourth birthday.

First, a little history….the #LCSM hashtag was originally used by @subatomicdoc (Matt Katz, MD) to represent Lung Cancer Social Media on June 22, 2013. The first-ever #LCSM Chat occurred on July 25, 2013.  Seventy-two patients, advocates, caregivers, family members, educators, healthcare providers, and researchers participated. The first #LCSM Chat topic question was “It’s our community. What do you hope to get out of #lcsm chat?”  The answers were diverse and wide-ranging, reflecting the interests of a broad-based lung cancer community. Most importantly, this platform was a revelation—no other forum allowed all stakeholders in the lung cancer community to communicate directly with each other.

Since that time #LCSM has come a long way. During the past year, the #LCSM hashtag was used in almost 99,000 tweets from 13,227 participants and generated over 416 million impressions! We’ve chatted about wide ranging  subjects as direct to consumer advertising in lung cancer, the best tools for online cancer education, why multidisciplinary tumor boards are important, and dealing with grief over cumulative losses in the lung cancer community. We conducted a Facebook Live Q&A on immunotherapy and clinical trials jointly with the National Cancer Institute, a second Facebook Live event What I Like About the IASLC World Conference on Lung Cancer, and “open mic” nights to hear about what is important to all of you. Throughout all of this, our mission has remained the same: to use social media in an innovative manner to educate, develop public support, end the stigma, and facilitate successful treatments for the leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide.

To celebrate our fourth birthday, moderator @JFreemanDaily will lead the #LCSM Chat in discussion of the following topics.  We’re hoping to compare the answers from this year’s birthday chat to those of last year to see how #LCSM is evolving in the eyes of community members.

• T1: How has #LCSM affected your understanding of #LungCancer?
• T2: How well did #LCSM help to disseminate the most important #lungcancer news and events in the past year?
• T3: How could #LCSM better increase #LungCancer awareness, advocacy, and research funding?
• T4: How might #LCSM partner with other groups or social media stakeholders for future events?
• T5: Should #LCSM Chat expand to use other platforms besides Twitter? If so, which one(s)?

Please remember to include #LCSM in ALL your tweets so the other chat participants can see them. You can read a primer on participating in the chat here.  Hope you’ll join us to celebrate the fourth birthday of Lung Cancer Social Media!