“Breaking down barriers to information sharing should be humanity’s collective goal, not building sand castle monuments to our achievement”- Hogan and Winter (2017)
“Social media is just hype, a fad. It will die a natural death soon.”- Anonymous
I’ve been blogging on five different niches since 2007. I’m advocating improving medical education, patient care, sustainable ecotourism, social innovation and research on social media. Ten years is a stretch considering how fast social media and other online tools appear on our screens. An audit of “accomplishments” with social media, should be in place right?
“What do you get from using social media? Help people? Advance your career? Earn money?”
Defining success in any field is never an easy task. Measuring the impact of a tool (such as social media) to that success, is even harder. If we define success as an observable change in a person or a society however, success is measurable. It follows then that the indispensable tools impacting these changes are also measurable.
Why am I asking these questions? Humans tend to replicate their successes and learn from their mistakes. The social, political and even economic changes we see in the 21st century occurred with the help of social media. Even healthcare, which is resistant to change, gave way to social pressures vis a vis social media. We should be able to measure the impact of a tool to that change. Or keep trying.
What’s more important to me was my motivation behind social media use.
T1: “Did social media helped in the success of my healthcare advocacy?”
I culled my ten years of social media practice into a series of blog post outlining how to’s of “successful social media campaigns”. I went further with moderating chats on the impact of social media to a HCP’s clinical excellence here. The SMART metrics I outlined here seem superfluous from a healthcare professional’s perspective, but it sure did help.
This comment by van der Linden (2017) in Nature suggest deeper engagements with both extrinsic and intrinsic motivations for social media advocacies. He suggested the reason for why advocacies last longer than viral hype. Extrinsic motivation like the social pressures mentioned by Linden in his SMART chart below, explains the viral but short lived success of some of advocacies.
This lead me to another question:
T2: “What were my motivation(s) for using social media in a successful advocacy?”
I looked back at some of my social media advocacies. I had varied motivations ranging from socially- desirable pledges of helping out a community, to a more intrinsic, personal ones like “learning this or that”. If I use the more extrinsic criteria like the SMART chart, I probably flunked. Medical education and patient care still needs improvement. Ecotourism is far from sustainable. Social innovations still languish and researches fail to pass even the lab doors. I can count a few more learning points from such failures but what I could not reconcile is this:
I am still here. I’m still using social media to further advocacies- mine or someone else’s. Many of my social media friends and colleagues from the past went on to some other endeavours. Others stayed and pushed forward advocacies I can only dreamed of. This got me thinking:
T3: “What made me/us stick to using social media for our successful advocacies?”
Van der Linden pointed some interesting observations. Intrinsic motivations favor more lasting and sustainable social media campaigns, along with a “yearly, recurrent event or behaviour”. I can think of the latter as akin to our weekly social media tweet chat and annual summit at #HealthXPh. The tweet chat and annual summit bound us for years.
The intrinsic motivation is well, deeply engaging for me. “Selfish” if you think of it as pushing a personal agenda. This is however the same personal agenda, that magic that happened to many healthcare professionals I look up to professionally nowadays.
The internet and social media made lifelong learning readily possible for me. Apart from breaking geographic, cultural and financial barriers, lifelong learning (though internet and social media) pushed both my professional and academic development, forward. I probably couldn’t quantify how much social media helped me, but I can’t imagine learning now if I have not.
Indeed medical education needs further improvements. Social media though allowed me to expand the depth and girth of my medical knowledge beyond the halls of institutions, the paywalls of journals and the monopolies first world medicine and education. I’m learning not only from my patients but from others who share their experiences online. You help patients and colleagues beyond your limited medical/surgical skills could offer. I can name a few dozen academic and advocacy headaches that have yet to be solved even with social media around. But those I did? Those wouldn’t be possible without social media and the internet.
Thanks to technology, we never stopped learning. To better quantify its contribution, we should have thought about success in and using social media for advocacies ten years ago. That’s the best time to adapt, in the field of medicine, healthcare and where ever applicable. The second best time is now.
Join us this Saturday September 22 9PM Manila time for an exciting #HealthXPh tweet chat discussion on motivations for social media success in healthcare. These are our guide questions:
- T1: “Did social media helped in the success of my healthcare advocacy?”
- T2: “What were my motivation(s) of using social media for an advocacy?”
- T3: “What made me/us stick to using social media for our successful advocacies?”
References:
Aguilar, R. (2016, April 29). Part IV: Assigning SMART metrics to social media channels [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://remomd.com/social-media/assigning-metrics-social-media-channel.html
Aguilar, R. (2017, March 11). Metric Matrix: How should we measure the impact of social media on clinical excellence? [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://remomd.com/social-media/assigning-metrics-social-media-channel.html
van der Linden, S. (n.d.). The future of behavioral insights: On the importance of socially situated nudges. Behavioural Public Policy, 1-11. doi:10.1017/bpp.2018.22
van der Linden, S. (2017a), ‘The nature of viral altruism and how to make it stick’, Nature Human Behaviour, 1. 10.1038/s41562-016-0041.
Hogan, A. M., & Winter, D. C. (2017). Changing the Rules of the Game: How Do We Measure Success in Social Media? Clinics in Colon and Rectal Surgery, 30(4), 259–263. http://doi.org/10.1055/s-0037-1604254
