Using social media to reach out
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My presentation and workshop at the General Practitioner Academic Clinical Fellow Conference 2018 in Oxford.
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Using social media to reach out
- 1. Using social media to reach out #gpacf18 Dan Richards-Doran MCIPR Communications Manager, Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford @_DanRichards | @OxPrimaryCare National GP ACF Conference, 13 April 2018 PLANNING FOR SUCCESS
- 2. Social media - why bother? • Scientists are a trusted voice for people without a background in science • Connects you with your research community • Supports the generation of impact* and broader communications activity • “Scientists need to: be more prominent communicators, communicate more strategically”** *Liang X et al (2014). Building Buzz: (Scientists) Communicating Science in New Media Environments. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly. **UK House of Commons Science & Technology Committee
- 3. Social media toolkit What’s the plan?
- 4. Planning: 5 key considerations Objectives Audiences Messages Strategy and tactics Measurement
- 5. A brief 30 second intervention, with a referral to a community weight-loss group, can help people to loose more weight compared to those who did not get a referral.
- 7. Objective setting There are three main types of communication objective: Awareness raising Attitude change Behaviour change
- 8. Objective setting Awareness raising • Raise awareness with UK health professionals that the BWeL study has found a brief intervention for weight loss that can be effective, takes little time, and the patients welcome it. • Make patients aware that they can ask their doctor for advice about weight loss.
- 9. Objective setting Future impact of the communications activity: - Support future work to implement study findings in medical education and GP assessments by achieving national media coverage of the study findings.
- 11. The public are publics
- 12. GPs CCGs Guideline developers Overweight & obese Friends & family Providers Charities Medical educators Campaigners Media Professional bodies
- 13. Key public Intervening Influentials Wilson, L. (2005). Strategic program planning for effective public relations campaigns. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt.) Segmenting our stakeholders Get the message to Pass the Message on Get onboard to ensure success
- 14. GPs CCGs & policy Professional bodies Overweight & obese people Friends & family Charities Medical educators Campaigners Media Key public Intervening Influentials Wilson, L. (2005). Strategic program planning for effective public relations campaigns. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt.) Segmenting our stakeholders Other researchersFunder
- 15. Wait right there – do you have enough insight? • Risks and issues • Limitations of research • Opportunities to hook your work onto e.g. national awareness raising week. • What do your key audience already think, feel, do?
- 17. Message development • Develop some good sound bites • Cut the jargon and consider your conversational style • Keep it brief • Rewrite your messages for different social media platforms so you can roll them out at a moment’s notice (brief, short, medium, long-form) • Consider whether you need ethical approval
- 18. Message development • Ensure messages are punchy, informative, accurate and robust. • Be specific, not vague “More than half of patients (52%) found that…” “The majority of patients (81%) responded well…”
- 19. Messages to address issues of concern “80% of patients report that the conversation is both appropriate and helpful…”
- 20. How will you get your message to your audience?
- 21. Strategy and tactics • Appropriate and measurable • Within budget and time constraints • Deliver on objectives • Don’t be afraid to get creative.
- 22. GPs CCGs & policy Professional bodies Overweight & obese people Friends & family Charities Medical educators Campaigners Media Key public Intervening Influentials Wilson, L. (2005). Strategic program planning for effective public relations campaigns. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt.) Targeting on social media Other researchersFunder
- 23. E.g. How do we reach other GPs? Where do your audience go? • Twitter or institutional website and newsletter • Trade press - PULSE, GPOnline etc • Via professional bodies (RCGP) or local healthcare networks (CCG, NHS Trust, NIHR CRN) • Other influencers on Twitter and word-of-mouth • Events – face-to-face networking builds relationships
- 24. What will other GPs react to? • Article in a broadsheet • Article in a trade magazine • Tweet from institution, CCG, Trust • Blog post from researcher or news item on institutional website • Clinical guideline/CPD resource • Webinar hosted by CCG or other reputable local group • Infographic – are they detailed enough?
- 25. Strategy for BWEL: • Broad media coverage • Utilise buzz generated through media coverage to directly engage with key audiences via social media • Develop online content relevant to our audience needs and seed it across the right social media platforms
- 26. Tactics: • Create the buzz • National & trade press release • Reinforce with extra content • Online news article and blog post • Infographic or factsheet for clinical CPD • Leverage content on social media • Reach out to health professionals via relevant groups • Target charities and campaign organisations with copy and social media content for FB and Twitter
- 27. Use the right tools to get the right content to the right audience
- 28. Don’t forget to promote your research article! Depending on your audience, your academic paper is going to be the most appropriate form of content to share on social media
- 29. Is it working?
- 30. Measurement • Measure OUTPUTS and OUTCOMES • Outputs: Number of news articles, retweets. How will you measure these? • Outcomes: Real world impact – e.g. a charity has incorporated your evidence into their campaign.
- 31. Social media - what to monitor • Audience engagement: is your audience interacting with your content? • Impressions: how many people see your tweets on their timeline? • Audience profile: Do you have a relevant audience? • Audience size and reach: What is your follower count and potential reach?
- 33. • 141 news stories • 718 tweets linking to Lancet paper: Audience = 1.4 million • Infographic: 335k impressions BWEL study media outputs
- 34. Social media – play the long game It’s about life-time value, not a quick win
- 35. Thank you! Slides available on Twitter: @_DanRichards
- 36. Over to you: what’s your plan? CONSIDER: Audience – who do you want to reach? Objectives – What do you want them to do? Messages – What are you going to say? Strategy and tactics – What is your approach? How will you do it? Measurement – What does success look like?
Editor's Notes
- So why bother with social media We’ve already established that generally, scientists are the most trusted when it comes to science and social media is becoming the new TV for news. Twitter can also connect scientists with their own academic community, and perhaps of most importance – social media can actually support the generation of impact.
- When it comes to planning, there’s no “one size fits all” plan, but all the planning theories and frameworks tend to have these five things in common. What do you want them to do? Who are you speaking to? What are you trying to say? How will you do it? What does success look like?
- To illustrate this, I’m going to take you through a planning process for a real paper, some of you may be familiar with it – this study in the Lancet that shows, for the first time, how brief interventions by general practitioners, with a referral to a community weight-loss group, can support people to lose weight.
- At the very start you want to consider thinking about objectives and what we actually want to get out of communications activity – how can it give your impact plan a leg-up early on? There are three main types of communication objective. Raising awareness, changing attitudes, and changing behaviour, and deciding on these up-front will inform the rest of the communications strategy.
- For this particular piece of research, as a communications activity to support other knowledge transfer activities, we’re going to simply raise awareness, and increase the profile of the Brief Intervention study with GPs and health professionals. A second objective is to show to patients that they can talk to their GP about weight loss support.
- An intended outcome for this is to support future work that helps implement these findings in medical education and policy, by having a high-profile media story.
- There’s no such thing as public
- So, taking weight loss. A quick brainstorm of the different types of audiences could provide a list like this. Now, its clear from the topic of the paper and the audiences identified that there’s more to this than simply getting a message across to GPs and patients. There’s potential for a shift in guidelines, and other impacts like better medical education, increased funding for community weight loss groups etc. So its vital to decide early on what the focus will be for communications, and how this will integrate with the longer term impact plan.
- With the objectives firmed up, we can start to think about segmenting our stakeholders. The method I like use divides them into three groups, based on a model by Wilson. Our key public are those we want to get the message to. Our intervening public are those who will pass the message on, and our influential public are those we need to get onboard to help ensure our activities are successful. The influential can also be intervening, so on our side, but they’re just as likely to turn against us if they don’t agree with the research finding. This may require some longer-term relationship development,
- So for this study… we have:
- Before going ahead we need to stop and think about any risks or issues, like will the findings antagonise any campaigners for example? What are the limitations of the study, are there any upcoming national events to hook the work onto like an awareness raising week? We also need to get some insight into our key public, what do they already think, feel and do about this topic area? For example, some GPs may feel uncomfortable bringing up weight in a consultation, yet this study found that patients welcome it – so this will need to be addressed head-on as part of the communications.
- Other things to consider when developing a message – journalist love a soundbite. Cut out the jargon and think about how you might explain your findings to a 12 year old. Messages should also give people what they want to hear, if the research shows the NHS could save money or prevent so many deaths per year, then say it, and if you are confident with a number, say how much. Journalists will always push for numbers.
- Messages also need to deliver our objectives, they need to be punchy, informative and accurate. There’s a common misconception that the public don’t like statistics in research press releases. Journalists, for example, welcome those stats, and they can be used later on in an infographic. For statistics to be meaningful and accessible we can match them with appropriate language.
- And here’s the line to address that issue that GPs don’t like to talk to patients about weight.
- This is where we develop activities, like press releases, videos, infographics, blog posts etc which are appropriate for the study findings, the budget and deliver on the objectives. There’s a whole tool box of tactics, and its not always just about reeling off the same form of content on the same platform, the tactic needs to be matched to the audience, informed by what we know about our stakeholders.
- So for this study… we have:
- How package up your message?
- So, back to our example - what did we choose for BWEL? Well, the main focus here is on press activity given GPs are the target audience. We know from insight that they are the establishment advocates, so the mainstream media is the best place to reach them, along with the medical trade press. Many influential GPs and health groups are on Twitter, as well as those engaged members of the public who could advocate the message - so we’re going to develop some content for Twitter and we’ll target it towards various charities and campaign organisations who we know will advocate it for us. Our lead author will also go through an afternoon of media training, and we’ll prep a GP for interview just in case the media request it.
- There are various things that can be measured, funders in particular like to see outputs, such as the amount of media coverage. But its also important to think of outcomes – what’s likely to be the real world impact? For health-related news this can come much further down the line, and often requires further work – it’s also often challenging to attribute impact to media output, but its fair to say that making a splash in the media can help add weight to this work. This is where communications link in with supporting research impact.
- From Twitter analytics, the types of things you can monitor include: Audience engagement – is your audience interacting with your content Impressions: how many people see your tweets on their timeline Audience profile: Do you have a relevant audience? Audience size and reach: What is your follower count and potential reach
- Another incredibly powerful tool for monitoring the outputs of social media activity is Altmetric, Its not a perfect tool, but it gives a snapshot of the online reach of each paper.
- BWEL, you’ll be pleased to know, was a huge success in the press and on social media, and its still being talked about almost 7 months later, and full credit goes to the Lancet press office who were responsible for the media sell in. We even saw one of our key messages, that GP’s shouldn’t worry about causing offence, as the opening line in the Huff Post. But we learnt a really valuable lesson, the importance of providing the right images. While we were very happy with the coverage and all the varied debate about the results, there were a lot of headless torsos, and we could have provided better, more positive imagery.
- when it comes to incorporating social media into research communications, it’s more about playing the long game. If a press release is the fire cracker, then social media is a yankee candle. Yes – social media can integrate nicely into a broader dissemination plan, and the key is to get the content right, like a video or image, but building a following is a long-term labour of love.