Guest Post: Social Media Survey

This is a guest post from Dr. Jon Otter, an epidemiologist focused on Infection Prevention and Control at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust in London. Jon has a degree in Microbiology and a PhD in epidemiology. His research interests include the epidemiology of MRSA, CDI and MDR-GNR, the role of contaminated surfaces in transmission, and molecular typing methods including whole genome sequencing. If you're interested in reading more of Jon's excellent musings, he's a blogger at the Reflections on Infection Prevention and Control blog.

Social media (in all its guises) is being used increasingly in our personal and professional lives. The advent of social media brings with it a number of challenges (time-consuming, unhelpful interactions, new liabilities) but also some important potential benefits for healthcare professionals and patients (principally unique opportunities for reaching colleagues and patients). I've been asked to do a talk at ECCMID in Amsterdam next month on the use of social media among healthcare professionals. I was able to find some reasonable data on the use of social media among scientists, but I could find very little data on the use of social media among healthcare professionals in general, and IPC/micro/ID folks in particular. So, I've produced a simple survey to fill this gap, and ask that you share the link (https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/KWYMDPM) with your colleagues so that they can complete it too. It is important that the survey is circulated outside of social media channels, for obvious reasons! I’ll be including the results of the survey in my ECCMID talk, and will make the slides available afterwards here. Many thanks to the Controversies bloggers for the opportunity to tell you about this survey.

(Editor's note: Survey takes 30 seconds so please help Jon out if you can, Thanks!)

IDWeek 2013: Media, Social Media, and Open Access

One of the great things about sitting on the planning committee of a national meeting is the ability to put together sessions that are a bit "outside the box" if you will.  During the planning of IDWeek 2013, I had the opportunity to attend the ScienceOnline2013 Conference in Raleigh where I reconnected with Maryn McKenna and met Jonathan Eisen. I thought that many of the concepts that the science journalists (McKenna) and scientists (Eisen and Smith) discussed at ScienceOnline were directly applicable and perhaps urgently needed by the public health community that attends IDWeek. Specifically, I felt that public health was a little too heavy on the "health" and a little too light on the "public." So I worked with my colleagues on the planning committee, including Scott Fridkin and Dan Diekema, to craft a session that focused on three major methods for selling public health science to the public.

The first important topic was open-access publication. If the public and journalists don't have access to your science because it's buried behind a paywall, then it doesn't even exist.  The second topic was social media, which is a method by which scientists and public health practitioners can communicate their science or policies directly to the public including science journalists. Finally, we needed a speaker to help explain how best to interact with journalists to communicate our science and messages. So, we were very lucky to have Jonathan Eisen, Tara Smith and Maryn McKenna speak at our session at IDWeek earlier this month in San Francisco.

There are several sources available for those of you interested in the session's content:

Jonathan Eisen wrote a nice post describing the entire session and also created a Storify (a collection of live tweets associated with the session) covering all three talks, both of which you can read here at one of his blogs. He's also posted his slides on slideshare.

Tara Smith posted her slides on social media at Figshare. She also posted the slides from her excellent S. aureus in animals talk, which you can access through her blog.

IDWeek and Social Media

Note: This isn't meant to offend - I post this because I genuinely want to see this meeting succeed and worry that we are missing tremendous opportunities to advance our cause(s)

For the past year, I've been suggesting through discussions and emails that SHEA and IDWeek could utilize social media to engage scientists and the public. I've even written about the importance of marketing your science earlier this year. So far, nothing has happened. For example, I just reviewed the number of twitter followers of SHEA (171) and IDWeek (57).  If you look at APIC (1,163 followers) + AJIC (362), ASM (2,816) and IDSA (1,749) they do much better. That is, someone seems to care about social media...

How can a huge meeting with expected attendance of >5,000 have only 57 followers, only follow 5 "people" and have 28 total tweets (close to zero about science)? It's because they don't take it seriously. If I had submitted an abstract and it was selected as a poster or podium presentation, I would want the meeting to advertise my science to a huge group of attendees and science journalists, but IDWeek has been close to useless on that front so far. There have been numerous times that authors, attendees and our blog have mentioned IDWeek in a tweet or blog post and there have been almost zero retweets, zero follows and zero interaction. If the meeting is not engaged in the science and its promotion, why should I submit my science to IDWeek? What do I get out of it?

We have 8 weeks or so to the meeting - there's still some time, but it's running out. Let's step it up IDWeek.

EOR