Treating patients, keeping up with the latest research and running a business means squeezing the most out of minutes. Adding social media into the mix seems a contradiction – it might seem like chitter chatter and time-wasting.

There is also the question of mixing private use of social media with work – maybe you’re on Facebook – No Way do you want patients to find you, or know anything about your private stuff, but Yes Way, you’d like an easy way to stay up-to-date, and let people know what you do professionally. Maybe.

Photo by Mark Smiciklas, IntersectionConsulting.com

You might be thinking ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’, or perhaps you keep meaning to ‘do something about that Facebook stuff’, (does anyone get Twitter anyway?), but you reflect that your world is not going to stop turning if you do not use it – it’s not like you are going to run out of patients. If you relate to any of these common reflections, then it might be worth learning more. Here is one of two posts on some of the ways that social media is being used:

Social media to facilitate your clinical practice

Let’s say you are working in clinical practice, you might sell things, and you might be wanting to attract a particular kind of client? You want what you do to stand out as something a bit different and you want potential and current patients to see your treatment is evidence-based.

First, they have to find you. More and more, people are turning to Google (or Bing, or Yahoo! perhaps) instead of picking up the phone book. Adding yourself and your practice to social media accounts means Google finds you more easily, which means clients finds you more easily.

What is a social media account? There are several common accounts. Facebook is probably the most popular.  One can have a professional Facebook page, which is not your personal page, does not include personal information (unless you want it to) and does not put you at risk of cybermisadventures with which such sites are sometimes associated.  What would you put on your Facebook page? You might want to list some of the treatments you are doing, up-to-date research, events and relevant articles you’ve read. Facebook currently has 400 million active users, 50% of whom log onto Facebook every day[1] so it is certainly worth a second glance if you are considering it.

If your desire is to link up with like-minded clinicians or researchers, or to link in to their networks, then perhaps an aptly named site called LinkedIn would help[2].  LinkedIn is another free site and is your CV online – but much more: it connects you to your peers, clients find you as they search for practices in their area and it advertises very nicely what you do, in other words your LinkedIn profile comes up in Google searches. If you don’t have a website it can be your individual site online which you can add to your email address.  LinkedIn currently has over 70 million members in over 200 countries[3].

If you do have a website then add a blog/current news section – Google will find you a lot more quickly if you do this. What do you write about? This depends on your audience – for patients you might want to write about basic exercises, good practice, take a 2 min video of an exercise and stick it on youtube as well as on your site (not hard to do, honestly).  It is pretty cool to be able to say to your patient when you hand them their exercise sheet – ‘if you forget how to do it, have a look at my site – I’ve got a section there on how to do this exercise if you forget’. How often do you need to write? The content can be anything from a couple of paragraphs a week to a book a day.

This is an example of a virtual network translating into a physical one.  Your patient has a look at your site, tells their friends, they then have a look and your reputation grows on and off-line.  The bonus is that you get to put out some quality patient information (the quality of what you post comes down to you of course, and with the huge amount of information available it is worthwhile to provide evidence that what you are writing about is credible).

Next post: Social media and keeping up with research

References

[1] http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
[2] http://www.linkedin.com/
[3] http://press.linkedin.com/

This study of social networks is from Harvard Professor Nicholas Christakis, who during this TEDtalk came out with this superbness:

Our experience of the world depends on the architecture of the ties around us, it depends on the actual structure of the networks in which we are residing and on all the kinds of things that ripple and flow through the network.

Human beings assemble themselves and form a kind of super organism. A super organism is a collection of individuals which show behaviours or phenomena that are not reducible to the study of individuals and must be understood by reference to and by studying the collective

Compare this ‘super organism’ to a hive of bees looking for new nesting site or flock of birds and then apply it to market crashes, adoption of innovation etc. We form social networks because the benefits of a connective life outweigh the costs such as the spread of good and valuable things

What is spread is not a behaviour, but a new ‘norm’, an idea.

About Nicholas Christakis

At Harvard, Christakis is a Professor of Medicine, Health Care Policy, and Sociology, and he directs a diverse research group investigating social networks.

His work examines the biological, psychological, sociological, and mathematical rules that govern how we form these social networks, and the rules that govern how they shape our lives. His work shows how phenomena as diverse as obesity, smoking, emotions, ideas, germs, and altruism can spread through our social ties, and how genes can partially underlie our creation of social ties to begin with. His work also sheds light on how we might take advantage of an understanding of social networks to make the world a better place.

Thanks for the hat-tip Chris and Raz.

As a Professional looking at the plethora of Social media sites available with only limited amount of time during the day where do you start?  I have tried to simplify this process with Healthcare Professionals in mind, but the principles apply in other areas. These are the steps, with examples, the main thing is – start simple.

getting started in social media

Look at some potential networks you are thinking of joining or trying out (for suggestions see Social Media Resources in Health and Medicine). Divide them into

• Professional
• Clinical
• Consumer Networks
• and information sites

Then, pick one from each.  For example:

This post is in preparation of a presentation to be given at the Noi2010 Conference on applications of Digital Strategy in Health.

There are many sites to chose from if you want to get started in Social Media.  For Health Professionals here is an updated list of available sites divided into categories. It’s impressive and updated regularly. Here’s a summary of what is included from HLWiki Canada:

• Academic science 2.0 (social networking) (20 services)
• Bookmarking and infomanagement (12 services)
• Consumer health 2.0 (social networking) (24 services)
• Medicine 2.0 (social networking) (15 services)
• Micro-blogging, -searching & -aggregation (7 services)
• Open knowledge-sharing sites (9 services)
• Personal life 2.0 & genetics tracking (13 services)
• Search 2.0 tools (11 services)
• Slide & video sharing sites (10 services)

• Medical Video sharing sites
• Podcasts and videocasts
• Applie iphones 3GS for Physicians
• Medical sites for mobiles
• Full contents list here

If you doubted the value of wiki’s have a look at the amazing amount of information contained in these links. The wiki was created in 2006 to support a health library course at the University of British Columbia.

The wiki is one part of using interactive, collaborative social software in our classes to encourage discussion with and between our students… This wiki, however, is not the exclusive domain of students taking our course. In fact, we encourage all professional health librarians to participate.

So, if you are interested in contributing your expertise to writing some of the wiki entries contact: dean.giustini@ubc.ca

This post is in preparation of a presentation to be given at the Noi2010 Conference mid-April on applications of Digital Strategy in Health.

I have been approached by Allen & Unwin, Book Publishers, to use some less traditional ways to connect with readers – and using a newly published book seems a good place to start.  This is an experiment, an ongoing project over the next 3 months open to change and trialling things depending on your feedback. Will using Social Media make any difference at all?  I like the Publisher, Elizabeth Weiss, I like the book and am happy to be involved.

The Clean Industrial Revolution: growing Australian prosperity in a greenhouse age published 3 weeks ago, written by Ben McNeil known for his work on climate change and energy policy in Australia (Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Australian Financial Review, The Australian and The Canberra Times, radio and television appearances).

Ben also recently joined Twitter, started a blog and is doing a book signing at UNSW bookshop on Wednesday where I hope to interview him.

To see how news of The Clean Industrial Revolution spreads on social media channels like Twitter, Facebook or Friendfeed, we’ve opted to give a 27% discount on the book – we want the discount to be big and different.

I have signed copies of the book to give away, 9 copies every month for the next 3 months. Signed books will be given for new ideas, comments, suggestions, feedback.

First thing, while I’m waiting to meet Ben, is to think of a hashtag for twitter that can also be used as a code to get the discount on the Publisher’s website.  Suggestions welcome (preferably something to do with the subject matter), and whichever suggestion we use will get the first of this months free signed copies.

We would like to start this officially by Friday, so I’ll need suggestions for #hashtags before then.

Some excerpts from the book:

In 2007, I was in Canberra as a young scientist pushing the scientific case for action and learning very quickly that the government was completely blind to the gravity of potential threats to Australia beyond just the environment.  At a high-level meeting in the Cabinet room, as I looked in awe around me, all I could see was a sea of grey hair and suits clustered around the biggest table I had ever seen.

Sitting to my right was the Prime Minister, John Howard, the Minister for Education and Science, Julie Bishop, the Environment Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, and the Minister for Industry, Ian Macfarlane.  Scattered among the rest of the Cabinet were the heads of every science, research technology and education body in Australia.

Before my presentation, three of Australia’s most influential climate scientists presented an exhaustive report of recommendations on how Australia could actively respond to the emerging climate of change.  As I stared down the Cabinet room I wondered why the two most senior government minsters responsible for the economy and foreign policy were not in the room.  Where were the Treasure and the Foreign Minster?  It seems for many years the Australian Government reflected a broad and dangerous public misconception about combating climate change:  that is it has nothing to do with Australia’s long-term economic prosperity or national security.

This book has one overarching theme: that climate change and our over-reliance on fossil fuels will put Australia’s economic prosperity, not just the environment, at great risk.  The only way to boost the prospects of stabilising our climate, and grow Australia’s economy in a world that will move away from carbon, coal and oil, is to slash carbon emissions and foster a new, clean low-carbon industrial revolution.  These new Australian products and technologies will be craved in a world short on oil and high on carbon and would position Australia as a leading clean-tech hub for a growing Asia.

Dont forget to leave your ideas for a codename/hashtag reference for people to use.  The best we’ve come up with is #GreenCollar…

Declaration: I will at no point be receiving any money from sales of this book.

“How do you trust what you’re reading is quality?”  “When does quality become quality?” These are recurring themes encountered with regard to some of the websites that offer free content. However, aggregator sites gather content of a certain standard or type which may offer an alternative to some of the more traditional ways of peer review or defining quality.

Academic Earth

This is an excellent new educational resource which gathers video lectures from leading Universities such as MIT, Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, and Berkeley.  Lectures are free to use and download and there is plan to include social features for users.  As an example:

Private Equity and the Financial Crisis — Yale University lecture by Stephen Schwarzman Co-Founder of Blackstone Group

For a more detailed description on Academic Earth see also Life in the Fast lane’s Academic Earth Open Source Lecture Series.

Science Blogs

This site features bloggers from a wide array of scientific disciplines and only includes those posts which have reached a high academic standard. Launched in January 2006, ScienceBlogs claims to have the largest online community dedicated to science.

Research Blogging

Research Blogging  automatically aggregates only blog posts about peer-reviewed research, many of which appear in Science Blogs and can be recognized by the green tick telling reader they are reading a blog on peer reviewed research.  If you don’t know this site I can highly recommend having a look – topics covered range from Computer Science to Psychology.

YouTube EDU

Newly launched, YouTubeEdu collects all the educational content being uploaded on YouTube by Colleges and Universities.  However, in this case there is no guarantee being made of educational quality and the standards will undoubtedly vary but it is another excellent resource.

Universities providing free content

Although not aggregator sites as such, it is probable that top Universities offering content on a variety of subjects will have reached a certain standard.  Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in addition to providing OpenCourseWare recently opted to publish their research articles free online (in addition to sending them to journals for publication) in order to give greater access to the university’s scholarship. Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences have also decided on a similar policy.  The Education Portal lists some of the best free online University courses available.
Overall, does content go through as rigorous a review process compared with more traditional routes – maybe, maybe not. There are new ideas like GPeerReview being developed, however, for sites such as Academic Earth, ScienceBlogs, or MIT to be able to continue to draw traffic by virtue of hosting only the best means they must ensure that content meets their standards – much in the same way as happens in the more traditional routes of peer review.

For more information on the role of blogs as institutional educational tools which also tackles the issue of quality control very well see an article published by PLoS Biol: Advancing Science through Conversations: Bridging the Gap between Blogs and the Academy.