My last weekend was spent with about 20 other diabetes bloggers from entire Europe. Abbott Diabetes Care had invited us to Berlin to an event called „Diabetes Exchange“ (in brief: DXBerlin). Now we decided among the German bloggers to report on this event with a blog parade.

The idea for this blog parade came to us when we listened to the British fashion blogger Gemma Tomlinson who writes on fashion, beauty, lifestyle, cooking and all kinds of personal stuff on her blog „Hello Gemma“. Gemma has turned her hobby into a profession by now and earns her living by blogging. That’s why she keeps an eye on how to extend the range of her blog – and which strategies seem to be less efficient to reach her target audience.

Active and connected patients have more power!

Gemma’s main hint to us was to cooperate with other bloggers, to share blogposts and to place links to connect to one another. It was probably no coincidence that this hint perfectly fit to Abbott’s aim to connect European bloggers with each other. As I could find out during Friday night’s smalltalk, Abbott would like to see active and connected patients who stand up for better diabetes care on an European level (which includes better access to medical devices as e. g. glucose meters and respective supplies – this, of course, is of great interest to Abbott and other companies in the diabetes field). „There are about 500 millions of people in Europe who could be a very powerful force. But since they speak so many different languages and live in so many different cultures, they don’t speak in one voice in Brussels“, I was told, „but people with diabetes habe the same set of problems everywhere and basically wish for the same things in their diabetes care.“

Diabetes is the language and culture we have in common!

Yes, this is something I can absolutely confirm. Our mother tongues and original cultures may vary, but when it comes to diabetes, we all speak the same language – and I bet that a diabetic from Italy will understand me better than a non-diabetic from Germany! Anyway, Abbott seems to regard us bloggers as important multipliers for this process of networking and unification. And since we believe that networking with like-minded people has always been a good idea, the German participants of the DXBerlin event have resolved to start a little experiment. During the next days, we will take turns to report on different aspects of the event and will pass the baton on to the next blogger each time. So you may look forward to blogposts on „diabetes & fashion“, „vegan cooking“, „quantified self“, „diabetic nightlife in Berlin“ and of course „first-hand infos on the freestyle libre“, since in Berlin we all had the opportunity to meet the head of production and the head of research & development at Abbott Diabetes Care. In ordert o give the other European bloggers a chance to follow us, we will try to post an English translation of every blogpost in this blog parade.

Finn and Ilka (mein-diabetes-blog) will start by telling you about a workshop on the use of Instagram which was held at DXBerlin. Marcel (Ishinne-Diabetes), Manuela (Second Hand Diabetes), Sarah (Dia-beat-this) and Sascha (Sugartweaks) will follow them. For today, I pass the baton to Finn and Ilka. It’ll be fun to find out where our little blog parade will lead us to. Stay tuned and follow our journey!