Wednesday 30 April to Friday 2 May I was in DC for a Choosing Wisely meetup. Part of it was hosted by ABIM Foundation and part was hosted by Consumer Reports. When I was there I met other people who work in health communications and we talked about how we get messages to people. One worry that I had was that I perceived that many people felt pressured to “do more social media”, whatever that meant, and that some people felt like they ought to invest indefinite amounts of time and money in “doing social media” without having enough information about what outcome they were likely to have. Just personally, I worry a lot about advertising in the health profession, and I am more comfortable managing small communications projects with a certain outcome and good metrics reporting than I am with larger campaigns for which results might now be as easy to understand or measure.
I talked with some of you at the Choosing Wisely and ABIM Foundation conferences about small engagements with social media. Here I share some ideas about very inexpensive, short term, and low commitment ideas to reaching more of people more thoughtfully through social media.
Facebook likes
Some people at the conference were discussing how to make a purchase decision for Facebook advertising. The people making these decisions were community educators who wished to share health messages and not sell any products, and they had professional experience in communicating for mid-size nonprofit organizations. I take the position that Facebook advertising is useful but not something which someone should purchase without anticipating outcomes that have already been discussed as outreach goals.
As an anecdote to help people think about their goals, I shared the story of the “Facebook Fraud” video. In February 2014 a blogger presented a provocative video called “Facebook Fraud“. It is about 10 minutes long and entertaining, and I recommend that anyone who has ever thought of buying consulting or advertising for social media to watch it. The creator of this video is not a communication industry professional (but is a professional communicator in science), and he makes some sensational claims which have been challenged by others. However, he is easy to understand and he makes the claim that it is not good for any organization to try to reach a large audience that is not engaging with the content being shared. I am sharing this video with the recommendation that if those who cannot recognize what is correct and incorrect in this video should not feel pressured or bothered to engage more deeply and increase their social media traffic numbers. The premise of the video is that Facebook advertising is ineffective or harmful among those who try to throw money to Facebook to address their outreach needs without being thoughtful about their goals for outreach. In some cases it is better to find just a few people who appreciate what you an organization does and who will comment on it than to try to reach large audiences, and that in some cases, social media expansion has not helped some people get their messages out.
Quality versus quantity
I take my philosophy about quality versus quantity in communication from an essay called “1,000 True Fans” by a technology writer Kevin Kelly. In this essay, Kelly suggests that for an enterprise to be successful it just needs 1,000 really engaged people behind it. For some projects, it is better to have tens or hundreds of thousands of people reading messages and engaging lightly. For other projects, 1000 people or even fewer to the point of dozens is sufficient, just so long as those people are engaged enough. Anyone who is fortunate enough to meet the fans of their work should respect their attempts to engage and not think that quantity always matters over quality.
“Ask me anything” on Reddit.com
I want to share some examples of very limited social media engagement in medicine by introducing everyone to casual conversations on Reddit.com. Reddit hosts forums for various kinds of users, and in one forum, the theme is “IamA XYZ, AMA”. This is a way of expressing “I am a (doctor, gardener, president), ask me anything”. In this forum, people either are scheduled or just spontaneously appear to be on hand for not more than a work day to answer whatever questions a person has on a topic. The platform has a system wherein the community can sort their favorite questions so that the guest can prioritize their answers. At the end of the session the talk is permanently archived and no one expects any followup. Reddit has hosted as many interviews with as many celebrities as any interviewer in any medium ever has, and despite being a casual forum with often just a small audience it is a demographic which cares.
It is hard to explain reddit but many people get it when they see it. Here are some recent popular AMA posts relating to health –
- IamA 58 year old woman who contracted polio because my mother didn’t vaccinate me as a child. AMA!
- IamA man with Spinal Muscular Atrophy Type 2 AMA!
- I cut open peoples eyeballs and get paid! AMA!
- I am an Emergency Medicine Doctor that does Helicopter and Rapid Response Car besides hospital duty. AMA!
The people on the site are not expecting health information. They are just typically people who participate in these conversations as entertainment media. If any of you would like to organize one of these, the typical cycle is to post that you are around, then cycle through periodically during the day either answering questions or waiting for more questions. The above posts all got hundreds of comments, which is more than any single person could read. I could say more, but in short, no preparation is required for this and at the end of the day (or after as soon as 2-4 hours if the guest desires) the experience is over. The general forum for all kinds of these interviews is at http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/.
Youth culture?
If you want a relaxing evening in front of a documentary, PBS Frontline recently had Doug Rushkoff, a technology journalist whom I enjoy, produce an hour documentary called Generation Like. I feel that anyone interested in online communication who watches this documentary will learn to better communicate what they do and be entertained in the process of learning. Although the documentary nominally is about youth, I think that the issues it explores apply to organizations’ attempts to get attention for themselves. Check it out if you “Like”!
Collaborating with Lane
I personally login to Facebook and Twitter less than monthly, and do almost everything I do within Wikipedia and email. If any of you would like to meet me online in a virtual space to talk about any aspect of Wikipedia or to tour its health content then contact me about taking a tour. When I present Wikipedia to people it is from the perspective of information literacy and media literacy, and not because I expect people to edit or contribute to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the encyclopedia which anyone can edit, but honestly most people do not enjoy editing encyclopedias. Even so, more people do enjoy talking about how Wikipedia is made and how the community works, because it gives context to how information is produced and how online communities work.