We'll get started here. My name is Erin Ransford. Welcome to Social Media as a Tool to Educate the Public, Promote Your Practice, and Maximize Engagement. I'm the Director of Engagement at AECOM, and speakers with us today, we have Charlie Peckman, who is our Social Media Strategist at AECOM, and then we also have Dr. Manny Brangy, Dr. Parvati Somasundaram, and then joining us via Zoom is Dr. Zeke McKinney. So I'm going to start with a quick overview of Social Media 101. Some of this might be new information, some of it might be a review, and then we'll get a little bit of a deeper dive into some topics. So I'm going to go over what is social media, why is it used, who uses it, some basic terms differentiating between an at sign and a hashtag, and then a brief introduction into four of the most common social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. So what is social media? Social media, basically free online communications platforms, where people share information and news, ideas, they share content like photos and videos, or they can use it to promote a business or a product or even an idea. Social media can also be seen as a virtual community where people create connections and network, and they can send personal messages. Social media is actually pretty big. There's over 3.5 billion social media users worldwide, which is almost, I think it's a little higher than this now, almost half of the world population is on social media in some form or another. The average daily use of social media and messaging on social media is two to three hours, and unsurprisingly, use of social media increased during the pandemic. And now, I mean, this is 2022, so almost all businesses use social media for some sort of marketing and promotion. Social media is primarily, in terms of generations, used by over 90% of millennials, almost 80% of Gen Xers, and almost 50% of baby boomers. So quick overview of the basics, what's an at sign, what's a hashtag? So when you see an at sign, it's a mention of a user or an account. In the example here, the username, this is Acom's, is this our Twitter? I think it's our Twitter. It's Acom's Twitter account, and our Twitter handle or Twitter username is at Acom. A hashtag in this is essentially a keyword. It can indicate a topic. So you can have a specific hashtag for an event, like you've probably seen the hashtag for this event is hashtag AOHC2022, and that means, and this is sort of universal across social media platforms, how the at sign and the hashtag are used. So within Twitter, for example, if you search for hashtag AOHC2022, you would see every post that was posted using this hashtag. So it's a way to filter information. There's no rules for hashtags. People use them at their own discretion, but when we have a unique hashtag, it's a really great way to see what everybody's talking about, what's going on in the conversation. So how do we engage with posts? Well, you can like or react to a post. You can comment on it. You can share it. You can share it to somebody else or send in a message. The different platforms have different reactions. They're all fairly similar, like, love, applaud, laughing, different reactions. So the one, the example on the top is LinkedIn, and the one on the bottom is Facebook. So we're going to quickly go over, because I know we have a lot of content to get through this hour, are the four primary social media platforms. So Facebook is the most widely used. Almost 70% of adults use Facebook, over 2.3 billion monthly users. Quick differentiation of some of the terms, your Facebook profile is basically your personal page. It's for individual use. You connect with friends. A Facebook page is typically a business profile page. So if you're looking for your practice to promote something there, you would want to create a Facebook page and not an individual profile. And then you can have individual followers to that page. So what you post would show up in their feeds on Facebook. Facebook groups are really huge and really wide right now. You can either make them public or private. And it's a place where users can log in to discuss and share anything that they would like about a particular topic or event. And then Messenger within Facebook is a one-on-one private way to communicate and connect with somebody. This is, well, our Facebook business page, but there are ways to see a lot of engagement and measure the performance for your post. You can see how many people it reached, how many reactions it got, how many clicks the post got. If you have a click-through to register for an event or perform some sort of action, or you can view that information in your Facebook post details. You could also create ads, and this is for a Facebook business page. Twitter is essentially a micro-blogging site. All posts are limited to 280 characters. When Twitter started, it was 140, but they upped it. So it has over 330 million active users. If you want to post more than 280 characters, people usually post them in a thread. A tweet is basically a post that you share with your followers or content. You can reshare something, and that's also a tweet. Your handle is your username, so that's your at on Twitter. A hashtag, again, is the same as we went through before. A follower are people or accounts that follow your handle. A following are people that you follow that would show up in your feed, and a feed is basically the stream of all the posts that you see. A DM or direct message on Twitter is similar to Messenger on Facebook, where it's a way to interact privately. Twitter also has analytics to see the number of impressions, engagements that you get on a particular post. Instagram, it's essentially a visual storytelling platform. You have to post a picture with Instagram. You don't. You're not required to post any media with Twitter or Facebook necessarily, but Instagram is all about the visual story, all about pictures. You can post up to 10 pictures in one post. It's a very, very media-focused site, and kind of going with the a picture is worth a thousand words. There are businesses, more and more businesses now are also using Instagram as a way to reach younger and more engaged audiences that are more media-focused. Same with at and hashtag here. LinkedIn is the most common business-oriented platform. Most of you probably have a LinkedIn page. There's over 675 million LinkedIn users. Your profile is essentially like your online resume or your CV. There are company pages on LinkedIn, where people share information about their company or their industry. A connection is like a friend on LinkedIn, indicating that you're connected to that person, and it also shows you how close you're connected to somebody, like you're a third-degree connection to somebody or a secondary connection if one of your connections is connected with them. You can also provide a recommendation, and it's sort of like a letter of recommendation in the real world, but it's available publicly for people to see, that if you've worked with somebody or used their product or whatever, that you can recommend them on their profile page. Before I turn this over to Charlie, a few quick tips for getting started. If you haven't established a social media presence yet, you want to select a username or a handle that'll be meaningful to your followers, and if it's possible, you want to use the same handle across all platforms. For AECOM, we did that the best we could, so we have at AECOM on Twitter. We have at AECOM1916 on some of the other platforms, but if you're using your own name, you have to see what's available, because a lot of the handles are taken, but if your practice or whatever you're looking to do has a specific name, you want to see if you can create a name that's meaningful, that's short and easy to remember, that you can communicate with followers so you can have them get involved with you and connect on social media. Of course, you also want to make sure that you pick a secure password and really understand how to manage your privacy settings. What you might want to post on your personal page or share with just your friends is different from what you might choose to post on your business page, and you also don't want to have any potential security risks for someone to log in and pose as you or pose as your company to do posts like that. You also want to make sure that your bio on any of the social media platforms really accurately and concisely reflects what you do, what your practice is, and contains any vital information like websites, contact information, hours of operation if you're using it for your practice. You also want to make sure that you select a good profile picture, not a cropped selfie of you at a party. You want to make sure that you have a nice sort of professional-looking picture that is on more of a plain background and a higher resolution, or if it's for your business and you have a logo, use your logo as your profile picture. Make sure you introduce yourself and use hashtags. One thing that we're doing to try to get people more involved, particularly here at the conference as I mentioned, is we have a conference-specific hashtag, AOHC2022. Hopefully you saw our social media wall over there by registration. That is a thing called a social media aggregator. That's pulling in social media posts from Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and we have hashtag sharing for Instagram and for Twitter. If anybody at the conference posts to Twitter or posts to Instagram using hashtag AOHC2022, it'll pull that post and populate everything that was posted with hashtag AOHC2022, which you'll see on our social media wall and the social aggregator. Also if you are looking on Twitter, for example, and you're looking to grow your own following, it's also very, very helpful to follow other relevant accounts. For ACOM, for example, we would want to follow the CDC account and the NIOSH account and the WOMA account and other relevant accounts so you can see what other people are talking about, be a part of the conversation, and just be actively involved. You can share posts, retweet posts, and it's just a great way to connect with other people. So now I'm going to turn it over to Charlie, who is going to continue our social media overview. Charlie? Thank you to everyone for attending this session today. So keeping in mind some of the things that Erin was talking about previously, social media is critical. It's not just a marketing tool, which is a common misconception about different platforms. And social media may seem like something that's used primarily by brands to sell you something, a product, but, you know, there's a new series of people that are coming on there called influencers. I'm sure we've all heard of them. And they're selling a different sort of product themselves. And both avenues exist, but social media can also be used by you to build a personal brand and raise awareness for important and relevant issues. This is especially salient with something like Occupational Environmental Medicine, and more specifically, the conference that we're all at now. There we go. It was lagging. So keeping in mind the ABCs of social media engagement, this is kind of an important little moniker to help you remember this. We're thinking about awareness, getting people interested in what you're selling or your personal brand that you're trying to build. Brand loyalty, getting people convinced of this. And this can come through different avenues, such as posting regularly and posting engaging content on different platforms. And what Aaron was speaking about earlier, different platforms have kind of different mediums that work well for them. So Instagram is very photo heavy. And then others, such as Twitter, you know, can be more in the moment, sharing reactions to, say, breaking news or news in medicine, specifically, if you're talking about your social media platforms for, you know, your practice or your healthcare facility as well. And then community, getting people engaged. You know, building community is one of the core tenets of social media, because ultimately, the media is social. It's self-evident in the name. So this is kind of an interesting matrix here, if you will, kind of talking about some of the different considerations. So reach, we kind of already went over this a little bit. How am I interacting with my intended audience? And am I truly reaching out to who I wish to communicate with? And these kind of questions that you're asking yourself, you know, you don't want to focus too heavily on these questions when you're making posts, because it can at times seem stilted if it's evident that you're taking too much time to think about this, but taking the correct amount of time to kind of ask yourself these questions. And then user-friendliness as well. Is the content, both the visual content and the written content, appropriate for the intended audience? This is especially important with things like medical lingo, because if you're trying to reach the general audience, non-medical professionals about something like vaccine hesitancy or the inoculations against COVID-19, you wouldn't want to load those posts up with all kinds of different jargon, because a general audience may not know those terminologies. And if you do use those terminologies, keeping in mind to kind of define them and make sure that any questions that the audience may have get answered. And then these bottom two here kind of get more into the minutia of different platforms, but the data collection and analytics components, we won't go into those just for the sake of time in too much detail, but analytics can kind of give you a snapshot of who is following you on these platforms, and that kind of ties back into something like the reach, reaching your intended audience. So physicians and social media. To understand the rise of physicians utilizing social media, we have to understand the shift in how the public consumes news. You know, the 24-hour news cycle is really a byproduct of the past 20 or 30 years with cable news networks and then now social media, and the public consumes news in real time. You know, it's not the fact anymore that the only way you can receive news is by turning on the radio or picking up a newspaper every morning. And a top-down or bottom-up to news distribution, that kind of ties into what I was just saying about the physical newspapers versus now e-newspapers and social media platforms as well. Social media used by physicians has actually increased dramatically over the past 10 years, and it's only grown faster during the COVID-19 pandemic. You know, in the early days of the pandemic, people were really searching for those answers to questions that they all had about things like how does this spread, you know, the community transmission and then now into more issues relating to vaccinations. But people are turning towards their social media platforms and the audience that they've kind of interacted with in order to get the answers to these questions. You know, news is not only relegated now to journalists at journalistic outlets. It's also coming from influencers in the public sphere in everything imaginable. You know, the communications director for the White House has a Twitter account, and all the secretaries in the cabinet have Twitter accounts as well, and they're all talking about things that are happening in real time. And while most physicians use social media for personal, 90% around, a growing cohort is using social media for professional purposes, 65%, and this kind of ties into the corporate communications aspect of things. So this is an important slide, just talking about the pros and cons of social media. So some of the pros, obviously, reaching a large audience, sharing up-to-date information that kind of ties into the things that we were talking about, about kind of the in-the-moment news that's becoming more popular now, streamlining communication with other healthcare workers and the public at large, obviously networking, which Erin talked about LinkedIn and how that's very active in the professional sphere, tracking metrics and garnering awareness. And then some of the cons, you have privacy of patients and other healthcare providers. It's very important, especially when posting photos in any kind of healthcare setting, to make sure that you have all the correct waivers and that you receive the patient's permission. And an interesting example of this, actually, I was working at my college's newspaper at the time, and I was doing a story about a free clinic for underrepresented communities who needed dental work done. And I was allowed access to this facility, and of course, all of the healthcare providers who were there, they were fine posing for pictures, but there was one patient who actually agreed to be interviewed and have his photograph taken, getting a free of charge dental cleaning. So that's one of those situations where, because it was for a newspaper, it was allowed, but you know, if you're kind of doing an off-the-cuff thing, like great day at the clinic, you want to make sure that you're just keeping in mind what is in those photographs. And then data breaches, obviously, can lead to other compromised information. Change your passwords. I was very guilty for a while of having the same password for everything, but then that password appeared in a data leak, and that's not what we want. Ethical concerns, and then the spread of misinformation. And this is an entire can of worms, but you know, obviously, social media platforms, just as much as they can spread information, they can spread disinformation as well. We've seen that with COVID-19, and we've seen that with elections and other political concerns, so I'll leave that at that. And then this is kind of just an example of some of the things that we've been talking about so far in action. This is the ACOM Social Media Presence Year-over-Year Review, and as you can see, we've seen steady growth on all of these different platforms, and that's mainly due to posting regularly and posting engaging content to get members and non-members alike engaged. Thank you all for attending once again, and I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Berenjino. Great, thank you, Charlie and Aaron. You guys did a great job kind of giving us an overview. So I'm going to be talking more about advocacy, so I have no financial disclosures related to this material. I'm not representing my employers. So we're going to talk about a couple of things today. We're going to talk about current best practices around advocacy, my own experiences around advocacy, and the future of advocacy. So I was doing a literature review a couple weeks ago just to kind of see what's out there in terms of evidence base for advocacy in healthcare, and the family physicians have actually done a pretty robust job of really taking that deep dive into advocacy and really formalizing some best practices. So really the basic gist of this slide is to advocate for a cause. Depending on what type of practice you have, what you're passionate about, as long as you're able to use this platform to educate your patients, your fellow colleagues, you know, the general public, I think this is the most important takeaway for advocacy, and I know a lot of us have some reservations about what we post and how it's going to be interpreted, but as long as you're being forthright, you're presenting evidence, you're presenting facts, that's really what we do. We're an evidence-based specialty, and I think we can really use this for education. So how can physicians advocate for healthcare policies? I'm sure you guys know this better than anyone. A lot of things happen at the state level, at the national level, and being able to use this platform to educate our policymakers is really critical. I've actually been able to use this platform like Twitter to be able to reach out to my congressman, and we actually had a nice chat a couple weeks ago. So it's amazing how you can leverage this technology to your advantage. So I'm a woman and clearly women in medicine and using these social media platforms to advocate for women and being able to advance women in leadership positions is something I'm very passionate about. So the AMA actually has a really great social media toolkit if you guys want to take a look at that. So I was kind of taking some more in-depth analysis just to see what's out there and if there's actual any evidence to suggest that these types of advocacy activities really have an impact. So I found this article in PLOS and they were actually looking at This Is Our Lane and I'm sure many of you know this particular movement was really focused on the 2018 shooting in Florida at that high school. And these researchers actually wanted to take a deeper dive into how these hashtags were being generated and how many people were actually responding to these hashtags and you know actually getting involved in the conversation around gun violence. And I actually have a number here there were over 500,000 tweets related to this particular topic. So clearly these hashtags really do make a difference and being able to generate that traction. So my own experiences I think I've already mentioned a couple. I'm very passionate about women and women leadership opportunities. I also use it for climate advocacy and environmental health advocacy. So I just want anyone today to really take that opportunity to take that leap of faith and use your platform to share your you know information what you know about occupational and environmental health. So the future. You guys are the future. So hopefully we can take this time to really understand advocacy and understand that it's not so scary as we think. Thank you. Thank you everyone. My name is Parvati Somasundaram and thank you for AOHC for inviting us to attend and talk about this important topic. In this section I'll be reviewing information and guidance on how to use social media to promote health education and combat misinformation. I have no financial disclosures. I am disclosing though that I do post general health education anonymously on Twitter. I just provide general public education to my community to help and talk about local issues in my community. So as an overview we will look at the role of social media in health promotion to better inform our patients, our clients, and community. I'm also going to be discussing some helpful tips and practical guidance and also briefly touch upon finally how to combat misinformation and disinformation on social media. So some background. This is a slide that shows a chart of the population in the U.S. that uses social media and as you can see in 2008 you had a 10% using social media. In 2018 it was 77% which is really an exponential increase. Currently last data point at 2021 it was 82%. It's been a rise but not a steady rise in the last couple of years. So how do we access health information? The most common devices used are smartphone at 86%, television at 68%, and a radio media at 50%. In terms of the platforms used, news websites and apps are used at 68%, general search engines at 65%, and the point to note here is social media is used an average 53% of the time to access health information. And of course age has an impact on the devices used. Under the age of 50 as you'll see you're most likely to use smartphones, computers, and tablets. Over the age of 65 television is quite prominent, of course smartphones and tablets, but of note print media is more prominent in an older population. So this is some information from the Health Information National Trend Survey that looked at data from 2013 to 2017 and what's interesting is that there's a significant decrease in just sharing personal health information on social media. However in that same period exchanging health information and having a two-way conversation with your health care provider did increase. The age group most likely to you know participate in this exchange was age less than 40 49 and significantly there was no ethnic or racial disparity in the use of social media, which I think is significant as it shows it's a good platform to really reach those vulnerable populations. And this is a survey from the French Health Survey which had very similar findings and what it showed was that women and groups with higher socio-cultural positions were more likely to use the internet. And of interest 80% of young online users 15 to 30 reported that they consider information found online reliable. Okay so these are some practical tips. These are two documents from the CDC that really provide provide excellent resource to you. There's a very good social media strategy worksheet that you could work through. It goes through to help you define your strategy and some specific goals and and kind of operationalizing your platform. Okay so what are the top lessons that the CDC learned from their strategy? What the main point was they really mentioned about making a strategic effort to understand the level of commitment needed for the goals that you want to achieve. Often resources needed to start a project and maintain a project are different and it is really important to understand the level of commitment and planning. Spreading key messages using low-risk tools such as videos, podcasts, health information messages, posting general information is a good way to start. However to really you know influence someone's health decision to help you know making decisions for making choices in their health it really requires a high level of engagement and interaction and that and also trust takes time to build. One of the points they did mention was information needs to be consistent with the overall strategy that you have. So the other thing is of course you want to encourage participation, you know leverage other networks, personalizing and targeting information using niche networks such as here in occupational medicine helps build engagement in the group and it also helps share information within that group. Acknowledging concerns and promoting action is really important. It's really important to listen to what is being shared, foster a sense of communication which really facilitates a meaningful relationship that helps build trust, further interaction and sharing. So the tips for an effective health education are it's really again understanding your audience you're trying to reach, apply basic health literacy principles, personalize the health message to give knowledge and to empower the audience to make safer and healthier decisions. The goals really are again to encourage your audience to interact in different ways with the content and you can make it fun, simple quizzes, questions. So tips when writing this content. It's really important to quickly engage the reader, limit use of jargon, technical scientific language, use an active voice and keep it simple. And again some of the principles are again plain language or use familiar terms more often, avoid scientific jargon and put relevant information first and of course use acronyms cautiously. Things like BP for blood pressure, DM for diabetes, use numbers when they help make a point. However, avoid terms such as risk, normal, range. It is really important to keep it simple. Okay so in summary it's really important to make it easy to understand and share, friendly, conversational, engaging and action orientated. So some examples are stress is normal, it's a mental or physical reaction to problems people have in their lives and the weak answer would be stress is prevalent. Again it's a term that not everyone will be familiar with and it's really better to have a statement at the beginning and then at the end you can add or here are the ways in which you can do something about it. Fetal alcohol syndrome is a condition that occurs when a baby is exposed to alcohol during pregnancy and you can kind of change it around as to how you feel. Learn ways to have a healthy pregnancy and how to prevent possible complications. That can really be interchanged with many many topics. Wear helmet every time you ride your bike. It's important to be positive and not have a negative at the beginning and again have an action orientated statement. You can also then link some to another link where you could have more information that you want to follow up on. You could get sick if you're near the chemical. Okay so posting on social media there is a format that different websites have and and I have it here for you to review but really the main difference for Facebook is that the call to action usually invites followers to follow, watch a video, attend an event whereas for Twitter you really want to start with a verb or action such as watch, read, learn and here are some examples. So for example, celebrate this 4th of July by declaring freedom from nicotine addiction. Learn how today's cigarettes are even more addictive and how you and your loved one can quit and a Twitter one would be schools out for the summer. Read tips on how to keep kids healthy and safe and a more relevant topic right now would be to maybe talk about allergies, the different classes over-the-counter allergy medications available and of course implications to safety sensitive duties. Another topic I recently posted on was recent adenovirus infections. Just information about it. What's commonly you know commonly causes conjunctivitis, preventing its spread with hand-washing and of course adequate chlorination of pools. Okay and finally I would like to touch upon is this is a big topic but really like touch upon how to begin to combat misinformation. So misinformation is the false information that is spread regardless of intent and disinformation is really a kind of misinformation. The difference being the intent is malicious. So how do you know if information is suspicious? It seems too good to be true. It plays to your own implicit biases. It elicits a strong extreme positive or negative emotion and if not and it's really not properly sourced, stats appear out of date and these are some tactics used to spread misinformation. It usually and it can all happen at the same time or in a sequence, it usually begins with a bold specific medical claim which is supported by some cherry-picked data to support that claim. And that may continue for some time and then someone may say something to counteract it but then you really have an argument or reaction directed against that person rather than the position they're maintaining. And then another technique that can be used is a straw man argument and I'm just gonna read an example here. So a one post could say person one could say I think pollution from humans contributes to climate change and person two will reply so you think humans are directly responsible for extreme weather like hurricanes and have caused the droughts in the southwest. If that's the case maybe we just need to go to the southwest and perform a rain dance. And this if you really listen carefully it is used and it really uses distraction, sarcasm and has a personal component to it. So how do you combat misinformation? The first is always have a strong community. Connect with your trusted audience, keep information factual, maintain a social, you know, mention social norms and a decorum, avoid of course using any patient-specific information and avoid you know any personal information. And the other important part is to provide information explaining the science and I think that's really important from an expert point of view is to really simplify the explanation. And also use clear communication, plain language, colorful shareable content, provide better than independent sources and acknowledge that a personal experience may not apply to everyone. Discuss contraindications, highlight the data that's cherry-picked and the distractions used, call it out. Keep the information factual and call out bad behavior. One comment I recently read on a UK website was that there was someone really started out talking about of course COVID and it just got very negative and then somebody maybe the moderator I wasn't sure posted and said no need to be nasty just share your thoughts. And it was a very powerful statement that he just changed the the tone of the rest of the conversation. So in summary, exercise politeness or test authenticity and empathy. Use anecdotes, they're very powerful narratives to make the information relatable. Focus on the facts, not the misinformation. And what I would say is that not everyone can be reached but a large group in the middle really wants credible information. Thank you. Hi everybody, I'm Zeke McKinney. Hopefully you can hear me. I am the program director for Health Partners Occupational Environmental Medicine Residency here in Minnesota. First of all, thank you to ACOM for having me. Thank you to my colleagues presenting in advance of me. They do a wonderful job and hopefully this will be fun and interesting for you all. You know before I get started I just want to let you know I started using social media professionally in about 2018 when I became the chief medical editor for our state's medical journal Minnesota Medicine. And so I felt like I needed to have more of a public presence to you know really get information out there. They're gonna move the slides ahead for me so please next slide. I have no disclosures, keep it rolling. So I'm going to talk about Twitter for examples. You know Twitter is not the only relevant social media platform but and it's also limited by character limit. So you know what that's when I can talk a lot about. Alright next. So we're gonna talk about how do you cultivate a social media presence, how do you effectively engage folks, and then maybe what do you do to address negative comments that you get. And you'll get them. So the first thing is think about what your purpose is. Some people want to you know increase their patient population or increase their business. Some people are trying to develop a brand. Some people like to professionally network. Some people like to you know raise awareness of topics or stay in touch with people or stay in touch with issues. You know for me I'd say it's some of these latter ones. I really want to raise awareness of occupational medicine. You'll see me talk about that here. I like to network and honestly I've met a lot of people through social media in our field and other fields that have really raised areas for collaboration. And then honestly you know I think and I mentioned Twitter a lot because I think there's a lot about what's contemporarily going on in medicine that you can find there. Next slide please. So think about who your audience is and if you can't figure out what your purpose and what your audience is that I would say just stop before you do anything and figure that out. In my case I do want to really reach out to the general public, other occupational professionals, other health professionals, so they understand who we are and what we do and what kind of value we can bring and that's been more relevant in COVID-19. But on the flip side some people want to you know stay in touch with their friends and family. I mean that's what I think I use my personal Facebook account for a lot. But there's probably other reasons you might want to engage folks too. Next slide. So first of all ask yourself why would someone be interested in what you have to say? Well I'd say well my name is Zeke McKinney. I'm an OCMED doc which is unique. I'm black which is you know unique for physicians relatively. I'm in Minnesota you know the site of you know George Floyd's murder and Dante Wright's murder and the ground zero for systemic racism nowadays. You know how am I presenting information differently than other sources? Well I try to be funny, concise, interesting, presenting something novel. And what's your unique expertise and angle? In this audience I would say OCMED is unique. You know there's only 4,000 of us in the United States. We should be out there spreading good information because you know we're public health and preventive experts. Next. So you know here's my profile from Twitter. You know you have to have a photo yourself. I normally have a professional photo but somebody made this cool drawing of me so I decided to use it and I think it's cool. And then you have a header photo where you can show something else unique. So that that Black Lives Matter thing right there is actually a picture of a stained glass window I have here in my house. It's one-of-a-kind and I thought that's cool because it's something I support and I think it's unique and it's interesting. And then in my profile thing I talk about who I am. You know I'm the program director. I went to health equity and environmental toxicology. I was a past president of Central States. I'm the current president of Twin Cities Medical Society. I'm into children's environmental health for PSU. My wife is Kidaloo Clef. That's her name you know there. And so this is like talking about who I am and what I'm into. And you know I think some of it like indicates that I'm really a person. Next please. So first of all when people engage you, follow up on that and keep them engaged. That's critical. You know pictures worth a thousand words so use images. You know people love to see that. Make sure you use hashtags folks. Earlier I talked about the importance of that because then you can amplify things either through hashtags that have already been made or make up your own. I'll talk more about this. And then you know try to use some gifs and emojis if you can because people find that stuff funny too. So here's an example of engaging someone. I had posted about Tate Schoenfeld's article showing that occupational environmental medicine had the lowest rates of burnout and the highest rates of work-life balance satisfaction. And they said whoa can an internist do an Occ Med fellowship? Is this another residency? And so I just wrote a bunch of tweets like explaining hey here's how you can engage. Go ahead. Do it. It's easy. You know like I followed up on this to try to keep them interested because they were asking about our specialty and that's what I want to promote. Next please. So this is an interesting image, you know, I posted this picture when I was giving vaccines at the barbershop. This is a picture of a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. Honestly, I didn't think that much of it when I posted it, but it got like, you know, 8400 likes, which is probably the most popular thing I ever posted on Twitter. And I'm not some kind of social media maven. But this just shows you images go a long way. I mean, genuinely, I did not think much of this picture and like it blew up. And that actually led Charlie Peck to reach out to me so they could feature me in this photo in ACOM quarterly this summer. So that was kind of crazy. But here we were. Next, please. So here's me starting a new hashtag back in 2018. And I said, hashtag environmental medicine. I mean, that's, there wasn't one for us. And so I thought this was the best to, you know, explain who we are, you know, OEM probably wouldn't have been good. Achmed, I don't think was good enough, even though it's shorter. They're clever ones for other specialties, but this was the best I could do. And so, you know, I was seeing Donald Trump using Twitter so much that I was like, well, hey, at least maybe I can use it to get Achmed out in the world. Next, please. So but, you know, don't go crazy with hashtags. And this is, again, back in 2018 when I was kind of a newbie here. And I was like, oh, hashtag, hashtag, hashtag, hashtag, hashtag. And that's fine. I mean, it's good. Some of these probably have other stuff behind them. Some are probably one of a kind. But I think you'll lose your audience if you go too crazy. So try to, you know, be brief and maybe just use one or a couple. In this case, I recommend you use AOHC 2022 or Ock Environmental Medicine, whatever. And by the way, hey, somebody take a picture of this and post it on Twitter for me, because then I'd be happy to know that people were following me and seeing what was going on. Next, please. All right. So now, here's how you actually think about hashtags. So somebody, I've seen this a lot. People have used OEM or Ock EnvMed or I've seen even other variations. I'm trying to unify us behind OCC ENVMed, just because I think it's as brief and simple while still, you know, saying who we are. But you know, again, this was engaging someone about hashtags, because they were asking, they used both, sorry, rather OEM and the other one. And I said, well, which one do you think is better? Anyway, next, please. So again, I'm trying to promote Ock Med. That is what I want. We are not known. And I think this is really critical. So I have a post here for 2018, like, what do we do? Well, we're kind of a generalist. We're kind of a specialist. We kind of do prevention. We deal with function. We're really on public health. Similarly, here's what we aren't. We aren't an occupational therapist. We aren't the company doc. We aren't someone who isn't seeing patients. That is to say, we do see patients. We're not only working for insurers and lawyers. We are trying to get you back to work when you're ready or back to doing whatever you want. But I tried to be brief and just say, like, here's what our field is about. Here's what it's not about. Again, I don't know if anybody saw these posts, but they're out there. And maybe I'll repost them again in perpetuity. Next, please. Try to be funny, you know. So again, I refer to this Tate shine. I refer to this Tate shine. I refer to this Tate shine. I refer to this Tate shine. I refer to this Tate shine. I refer to this Tate shine. I refer to this Tate shine. I refer to this Tate shine. I refer to this Tate shine. I refer to this Tate shine. I refer to this Tate shine. I refer to this Tate shine. I refer to this Tate shine. I refer to this Tate shine. I refer to this Tate shine. I refer to this Tate shine. I refer to this Tate shine. I refer to this Tate shine. I refer to this Tate shine. I refer to this Tate shine. I refer to this Tate shine. I refer to this Tate shine. I refer to this Tate shine. I refer to this Tate shine. I refer to this Tate shine. I refer to this Tate shine. I refer to this Tate shine. I refer to this Tate shine. I refer to this Tate shine. 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I'm really happy to participate. Thank you. Come on over. We are all happy to take any questions that you have. Okay. This is going to be more for Charlie, but thinking of whether someone's working for their own practice or for one of the components, can you talk a little bit about the analytics or the analytics of usage? Is that something that is offered, free by the different platforms? Any tidbits to help us with the analytics? Is the value there and are we effective in what we're trying to achieve? No, absolutely. And, I mean, that's an excellent question. Thank you for asking that. So on the different platforms, there is a varying degree of analytics insight that you can get. You know, Instagram is fairly straightforward. And unless your page is marked or designated as a business or an influencer or another type of account, the only real metric you have access to in that moment is number of likes. But if we kind of go back here, I don't think we had included any slides about the analytics because we kind of wanted to keep it to the basics for this presentation. But Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn all have very robust ecosystems for the analytics, and you can see things such as impressions, and you can even get into more detailed avenues such as the demographics and psychographics of who accessed those posts and, you know, who is interacting with that. I mean, that's something that we're kind of keeping an eye on at ACOM in terms of the people who are interacting with our LinkedIn page specifically, you know, in terms of the age groups of people who are interacting to see if there's a particular type of content. We've noticed something that didn't really catch us by surprise but was nice to kind of have that reiterated was that visual components tend to do very well with younger audiences, and the more kind of detailed information-driven posts with a lot of content kind of are geared more towards an older audience. So to answer your question in short, yes, but it depends on how you're interacting with the platform. So if you're interacting with a platform as an individual, there may not be as many because they're assuming that most of the users who are on an individual basis with the platforms don't want to have access to all that. But if you're interacting as a business, there are a different set of tools, and if you want to stick around afterwards, I can give you my card, and we can get access to the more business side of things as well. Thank you. That was an excellent presentation. I actually have a three-step question, but they're all kind of tied together. So I'm novel at this, and what I was unclear is this handle and this hashtag. So let's say I put a hashtag on a post. What I don't understand is how is the whole world knowing about it? So if I put a hashtag on Facebook, does everyone on Twitter know about this? Do you subscribe to hashtags? Do you subscribe to handles? Is handles a way of pointing to a specific person, then people who are curious go to that person, and a hashtag is something that you subscribe to, like a news service, and everyone gets notified, like millions of people at once? So that's the first question. So the hashtags, some of them are prescribed, and some of them are just – you can think of it also as a trending topic. So things that people are talking about right now, like if the State of the Union address is on and people are putting on social media, they would put hashtag State of the Union or SOTU or whatever. So sometimes they're just organically generated hashtags, and that is a trending topic that you follow. Like for here, for this meeting, we have one that we created for people to follow. You can follow an account and see their posts, like an ad indicates your handle or your account or your profile, and you can follow or subscribe to an account page so that that person or that page's posts show up in your feed, and that's generally universally true across social media platforms. Hashtags are kind of an interesting phenomenon in that people, if there's something going on in the world, they will talk about it and just hashtag about it. Sometimes there's a lot of similar hashtags. On Twitter in particular, you can see what's trending. Like you can see what people are talking about. If something's happening, you can see that they're posting with a certain hashtag that just is organically something that people are talking about en masse. Yes, they can be prescribed. They can be generated by what's going on in the world, and so on and so forth. The second question goes on to posting. I'm sure a lot of people in the room may have a similar situation as I am. We are administrators, clinicians, policymakers. We're not sitting in front of the computer or maybe have a media department that actively does this. The turnaround time to reply to posts, the turnaround time to engage with your members, what is considered socially acceptable, and can you do this? Social media is the 24. It's like the globe, right? If I post something at 5 p.m. here, if someone's reading it in Jerusalem or in Moscow, it's going to be a different time zone. How does one deal with this in general? Are there any standards? Probably the short answer is they deal with it in the best way they can. If you're fortunate enough to have someone that can focus on social media and respond in a timely manner, it depends on how pertinent or urgent the topic is. Within a couple hours or at least within a day, if it's a business post, I would say a day. Do you guys have any thoughts? Sure. What I tend to do is I don't have time to write a lot, but I link in articles. I link in the facts. If I'm following, say, a news website and I'm hearing all these comments that are really not fact-based, I link the CDC journal article. And some people love, oh, my God, it's like they're finally being shown good information. So I generally, with my time, just link in articles and websites. Thank you. And the final, final question is many of us may have different roles. Like we may be employed. We may also have self-employed. We may engage as a community physician, you know, in public health. Can you have multiple accounts as the same person? And if you do, can you explain a little bit how you deal with it with your posting, especially, I mean, do you have pen names or names? I'm not talking about brands for companies. Sure. Absolutely. That's a very, very good question. So I'm an employed physician, and my hospital has a social media policy. And I am not allowed to post anything about the hospital or anything else like that. So I just tend to post on a, I have a blank, one, two, three, it's a girl name. And I post as a general. I don't post as a physician. I just post as someone in the community. So you have two options. It depends on your employer policies. If you, as a company, want to post as a practice, then you can post, you know, provide health information, interact with your patients, provide health education. My hospital, what they do is they've got a large YouTube channel. So any kind of videos that are uploaded for marketing tends to run through all the clinics. Any health education that's made is available. And it can be used in multiple ways. So if you are, and that CDC worksheet, strategy worksheet is an excellent document. Because if you are looking at it from a practice point of view, that has some great information. So as a separate name, I just want to clarify that. Yeah, you can have multiple accounts. So on Twitter or Instagram or even Facebook, all those, you can pick like an account switcher and flip between whatever accounts you have access to. So like on my Facebook, for example, I can go to my Facebook page or I can switch to, I'm a member involved in a roller skating group. So we have that Facebook account. I can switch to that one. I have access to my mom's. And I am an administrator on ACOM's page. So I can basically select which account I want to log into. So short answer is yes, absolutely. You can have different accounts that you can log into and access and post. But when you do that, you want to make sure you know what account you're logged into so you're not posting something personal on your work page or so on and so forth. We have a question online. I'm going to read that one next. Where did it go? Sorry, I scrolled down. There we go. Okay. As medicals for you guys and Dr. McKinney online, as medical providers, are there legal implications tied to posting information? I think we kind of addressed that. You want to make sure that if your company has a social media policy. So Dr. McKinney or these guys. Yeah, Dr. Frenchy, go ahead. Yeah, I'm not sure if Zeke has any comments, but I'll just jump in real quick. So please check your social media policies for your hospitals. I work at the VA, so clearly I post nothing about what I do at the VA. But, again, you can post material as long as it's educational, you're trying to raise awareness about a medical topic. I feel that this is our opportunity to use this platform to the best of our abilities. Clearly there are legal ramifications if you're using it through your employer or you're violating a person's privacy, for instance. I mean, there are all these specifics that we would have to kind of, you know, vet on a case-by-case basis. But really the short answer is check your social media policies. And many hospitals actually have a media person or someone that you can talk to about these issues. So definitely connect with that person at your hospital. I think we have time for one more. Go ahead. Any thoughts on using TikTok? Why don't we have our youngest person? TikTok is pretty cool. So TikTok is interesting in that it's very new in terms of being a platform. So all of the kinks kind of haven't been worked out yet. And believe it or not, there is a lot of medical misinformation and disinformation on TikTok because there have been a number of accounts that have been tied to, shall we say, foreign actors who are trying to spread misinformation about different health care issues. But ACOM will be launching a TikTok account. And it also, as much as it is, you know, has the ability to spread misinformation like any of the platforms, there's also the opportunity to really spread awareness about something like occupational environmental medicine and make it fun and interesting. MedTalk. MedTalk, yes. Are there any dances on TikTok? No comment. We were thinking about having an Octoc TikTok challenge. We'll see. Stay tuned. Stay tuned for that. Thank you guys so much for coming out today. We're happy to answer any additional questions you have after our online. Thank you. Thank you, guys. Thank you. Thank you.

social media

educate the public

maximize engagement

healthcare

effective engagement

hashtags

analytics

visuals

humor

raising awareness