All right. Good morning, the you brave few making it out the final morning early on ENDO. It's a pleasure this morning to host our session on social media and personal branding and developing your presence on Twitter. My name is Matt Sikora from the University of Colorado Entrance Medical Campus. And our speakers today will be Dr. Joshua Joseph from Ohio State and Dr. Joy Wu from Stanford. They're two forces on MedTwitter and ENDO Twitter. And I just snark on academia behind them. But Dr. Joseph will get us started this morning. I'm gonna hand out some evaluations while we're doing this. So if you don't mind before you leave, please fill out a paper evaluation and leave it in the back corner on your way out. Thank you. How do I make this be able to go down? Oh, I just take it out. 25 feet of cable. I'm gonna take it out. He's working the room. Oh, that's good. Here. Perfect, perfect. Good morning. Can everybody hear me? Good morning, good morning. Everybody hear me? Good morning, good morning. All right, I know it's 8 a.m. It's Tuesday of ENDO. We are all going to be getting in some mode of transportation here soon to get back to our homes, our families. But we have one more important session. We actually have a couple more today. Really, really important sessions. And so we're gonna be talking about building your personal brand. And honored to present with Joy Wu and Matt. Thanks for organizing everything for this session. I am Joshua Joseph, as he mentioned. I'm at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and College of Medicine. I'm also the chair of the Clinical Affairs Core Committee. So any of you interested in society service, talk to myself, talk to Joy. We got Ro in the room, got lots of great people. Rob, lots of great people who do society service in the room. And I'm also a faculty member for the Future Leaders Advancing Research in Endocrinology Program called FLARE. We really try to develop the careers of young trainees who are doing endocrine research and wanna be leaders in endocrine research. These are my disclosures. Mostly grant funding. You'll see a QR code in the top right corner. That will take you to our research group page. So if you're interested in learning about what all those disclosures are, we have them on our research page. And I encourage folks, this is just an aside, I encourage folks to use QR codes. A very easy way to get people to the places where you want them to go as you're thinking about building your personal brand. And it'll come up later, so you'll get to see it later. Anyone know who this is? Any thoughts? Anybody ever seen the face? Okay, so this is Sean King. And Sean King is a social justice activist. He was a person who was working in trying to improve the lives of animals. So he was working on saving dolphins in San Diego. And one day, he was watching the news. And on the news, he saw this story of Eric Garner. Eric Garner was in New York City. He was selling Lucy cigarettes. And when he was selling those cigarettes, he got stopped. And then he said, he got pulled over and something ensued there. And he said, I can't breathe. And he was having a hard time breathing. And unfortunately in this encounter, he passed away. Well, Sean King in that moment said, he felt like his life at that point was gonna take a different direction, right? He had loved working with animals, but he said there was something bigger that he felt called to do in that moment. And so with that, Sean asked this question. What is the issue in the world that breaks your heart? Anybody have any issues in here that break your heart? Anybody? My man right here in the front, what's your name? Sean, what's an issue that breaks your heart? So, one of your friends passes away, and maybe that breaks your heart, and maybe the thing that they pass away from, let's say that they passed away from cancer, for instance. Cancer may break your heart, right? Diego, what's something that breaks your heart? I live in a poor country, and many times we find small kids asking for money because of that. Homelessness, social disadvantage, things that break Diego's heart. Roe, what's something that breaks your heart, Roe? I got you. The bagel. Yeah, midstream on the bagel. It looks good, too, by the way. Immigrants who don't have healthcare services. Immigrants who don't have healthcare services, very, very important issue, particularly in Colorado. I've seen some of the presentations there, for instance, on end-stage renal disease by one of your colleagues, and very, very impressive work, and I know what you do in diabetes in caring for populations that often will be under-cared for, so yes, very, very important work. So, he asked this question, what is the issue in the world that breaks your heart? And he says, if people around you don't know the issue that breaks your heart, then you probably or maybe you don't have an issue, right? People have to know the issue that break your heart. He says, either you really care about it and no one knows it, or you really don't care about it. He also says, you have to decide what is your number one issue so that you can pour your heart and soul into that issue. And I know some of you do work related to your area of passion or that issue for you that breaks your heart. So then he asks you, what in the world makes you come alive, right? So what are the things that you really enjoy? I'll use an example. If Mariah Carey was in the room, everybody, I'm getting old, so everybody know who Mariah Carey is, right? She's a singer, she's in Las Vegas, all this stuff, right? So the thing that makes her come alive is singing, okay, just as an example, right? So when we're thinking about the things that make us come alive, what are those things that make us come alive? So right here, what's your name? Tony. Tony, Tony, what makes you come alive, Tony? Taking care of my patients. Taking care of your patients makes you come alive. I love it. I love it. Let's get right down here. Brenda. Brenda, what makes you come alive? Same thing. Taking care of patients. Perfect. Perfect. In the green. Science. Trials. So clinical trials. Science. Oh, science. Science makes you come alive. Anything particularly important, like within science that makes you come alive particularly? A lot of clinical-based questions. Clinical-based questions in science make you come alive. Good. Good. So what makes you come alive? Cooking and eating good food. Cooking and eating good food. I think we can all agree on that. That definitely makes us all come alive. And so he says, do the thing that makes you come alive to impact the issue that breaks your heart. And I'll have to use the example. If Mariah Carey cared about diabetes and heart disease like I do, she wouldn't necessarily be at the bench or doing data science or community-based work. She would host a conference, I'm sorry, a concert, and at that concert, she would raise a lot of money. Now, she may go to the bench, and she may do some outcomes trials and all that stuff, but the thing that she's really passionate about and really, really good at is singing. So she can raise a lot of money for any issue that she wants to to impact that issue. So in this room, I encourage you to think about this. Find the thing that makes you come alive to impact that issue that breaks your heart. And when you're thinking about building your personal brand, it makes it much easier to connect to that personal brand. All right. Now that that's out of the way, we'll talk about transformational change. It is defined as causing a metamorphosis in form or structure, a change in the very condition or nature of a thing, a change into another substance, and a radical change in outward form or inner character. Anyone in this room who's not interested in transformational change? Anyone? Anyone? Okay. So we all want transformational change, right? We're not trying to make these iterative steps along a path. We want big changes, right? And we need big changes in many of the diseases and disorders that we treat in endocrine care, right? When we think about diabetes, obesity, some of the pituitary conditions, some of the thyroid conditions, we know that we have to have transformational change in order to improve the lives of our patients that you were talking about treating earlier. And so as we think about building that brand, there are many narratives that people use to tell their stories. And I'm not going to go through all of them in detail, but some of them are like overcoming the monster. People tell their personal narrative or their story in that way. There's an evil force threatening our hero, their world, mankind. The hero must fight and slay this monster, which often isn't easy, but they come out triumphant and receive a great award, right? Anybody ever tell a scientific story like that? Anybody ever heard a scientific story like that? Right? Like, for instance, Human Genome Project, right? You know, they're out on this great adventure. They're trying to really get to the end of it. They want to get to the end of it, and they do, right? There are others. The rags to riches story, which we talk about in science as well. The quest. You know, the quest. Our hero must set out on a long, hazardous journey and will battle all obstacles until they are triumphant. Right? You can think about sitting in a lab, you're pipetting. Man, that is a long and hazardous journey, right? Especially when you don't pipette the right amount, which was me when I was at NIH. I had to do experiments two and three times. So another one is the voyage and return, right? Here the hero travels out in their normal world into the overwhelming and unknown before escaping back to the safety of their home, okay? There are a few others, because there's seven total. So comedy. So comedy always works. And there's a lot of comedy, hopefully, in science. Tragedy. This is a true... This is the story without the happy ending. All the archetypes have been seen triumphant heroes and slain monsters. This plot takes a different turn and ends in loss or death. And the last one being rebirth. And what's important about this is that you don't have to use all these archetypes as a hard and fast guy. But it's interesting to understand the different patterns and the narratives that you can follow in telling your own stories, and when and why you might use them to influence other audiences, okay? So now let's talk about building your social media brand. So now we talked about kind of what may be important to you. What's the why? How do you do it? We talked about some of the archetypes that you can use to kind of tell that story. What about building your social media brand? So the step one is creating your accounts, right? If you don't have an account, you can't do social media, all right? But what's interesting about that is you're always on social media. Even if you don't have an account, right? They just don't at you or hashtag you or those things. So who in here has a social media account? It could be any, Twitter, LinkedIn, okay, good, good, good. Anyone not have social media? Okay, we've got a couple people, okay. Are clinicians that like caring for patients? We're with you, we're with you. So we're going to try to convince you today to set up a social media account, all right? So on your social media account, one thing that I encourage, particularly as we think about the care of individuals with endocrine disorders and research in that area is professionalism. It's very, very important to have professionalism in your account. It's important on social media to engage in two-way dialogue, right? So be able to have that kind of call and response and call and response. That really increases the engagement across social media and then highlights the area that you're trying to impact. And connection, right, connecting with people, very, very important on social media. So step two is building your profiles, okay? So what does your profile say about you? What are the perceptions based on what your profile says? What do you treat about? You know, what is that, will I know when I go on your social media, what the issue is that breaks your heart, right? Will it be very abundantly clear, like, oh, this person cares about X, Y, or Z, right? And some of the core competencies of the social media profiles are credibility, expertise, passion, authenticity, and things that relate to your own personal why, right? The reason why you do the work that you do. And on that list, we have expertise. And I think that one thing that over time, the endocrine society has highlighted is the importance of us engaging and using our scientific expertise, particularly in lay audiences, right? There are many issues that are coming to a head these days, and it's important to try to get in front of these issues. And we need credible experts like yourself to be a part of that discussion, right? If not, people who are not credible experts are a part of that discussion, right? And so that is where you have a great opportunity to engage with individuals, get your own personal why out there, that issue that really breaks your heart, engaging in that, but bringing your scientific expertise or your clinical expertise to that conversation. Step three, you want to win friends and influence people. So there are peers, influencers, audiences, thinking about who are your influencers, right? So someone in here, if you were to go on social media, who would you want to influence you? Anyone. Who wants to be influenced on social media, and who do they want that person to be or that group to be, et cetera? Okay. Upcoming medical students, alumni, and then just doctors in general, just to learn more about the field. Okay. So upcoming medical students and then doctors in general are two groups that you're interested to be influenced by. You want to learn from them. You want to engage with them, et cetera. Great. Someone on who do you... Rob, who do you want to influence? If I can make Joy happy in a day, then that's a good day. All right. You want to influence Joy. All right. So you've got to hit her on social media. As the kids say, you've got to hit her in her DMs, you've got to send her a direct message in addition to posting on social media. All right. So step four, you have to post and interact. And I like to say like a real human, right? So not like an autobot, like a real person, okay? We don't control what other people do, but we can always share from a point of positivity. And so I know for me, I try to be very positive on social media. You can get into things that are less positive on social media, but even in those instances, trying to share from a point of positivity. And once again, earlier, like we talked about with professionalism, very, very important. We need people who know what they're talking about. I talked about that earlier. We need the experts to be engaged in social media. And those experts, that's you, right? That is you. You are the experts on these topics. When we talk about endocrine disrupting chemicals, we need to hear from you on that. When we talk about cancers, we need to hear from you. When we talk about diabetes or obesity or thyroid disease or pituitary disease or adrenal disease, you are the experts in these disorders. So step five is to engage. You can answer a question. You can ask a question. You can jump into a conversation. You can compliment someone, right? You can, you know, and I do that a lot. I really try to compliment the work of others. I think it's very, very important to do. You can share a random thought. So all ways to engage. And when you do, if you can tag or at someone, that's a great way to let them know that you're talking about their area of work or their area of passion or the work that they're doing, et cetera. You can also use a hashtag like we're doing here at Endo22, right, Endo2022 hashtag, right? And that's very effective. Like, Joy and I were talking about every morning, I'm getting on the hashtag Endo2022 trying to catch up from the prior day. And you can see all the tweets about the conference right there, right? Very, very easy way to share that area of passion with others. Step six is to promote others. And I kind of talked about that. Very, very important to promote individuals who maybe you share similar work. Maybe you don't share similar work, but you share an area of passion or expertise, right? Really promoting their work and promoting others is important. Step seven, paying attention. So utilizing hashtags and conversations we talked about, tagging groups on related topics. So you'll see me tag like at the Endo Society a lot, right, because we're all related in one way or another to endocrine. Stay up to date on relevant news, very, very important. And then step eight, you got to keep it up, right? And this is sometimes the most challenging part, right? And Joy, I think, will talk a bit about this. But when we think about keeping it up, maintaining your social media presence, continuing to interact and engage with others over time on that area of passion really helps to grow the individuals that you're engaging with. And so that helps to increase your impact in the area because you're engaging with more individuals. And so you have to think about what makes sense for you and your lifestyle. So I'm kind of like a once a day kind of tweeter. I'll check in. I might fire off a tweet or two. Check to see what other people are doing. And then I'm good because I have a family, I got kids, I got work, you know, all these different things. Some people engage with Twitter throughout the day. You know, some people are like breakfast, lunch, dinner tweeters. You know, it's everybody kind of does it different. So you got to find for you what makes sense for you and your lifestyle. And so when we think about kind of building out that brand, part of what we do, whether we're clinicians or scientists, et cetera, is that we want to increase our impact. And so for those of you who publish, you can think about increasing impact in citation factors and all that stuff. And I'll talk about that here in a second. This is a paper from actually cardiology social media, where they looked at some of the tips on increasing engagement. So following engaging influencers in the field, using a popular cardiovascular hashtag, you know, meeting hashtags, which we're doing here with Endo 2022, creating a concise summary, using image, videos, figures to drive engagement. Tips on increasing engagement was once again, hashtags, recording podcasts, adding visual abstracts. Visual abstracts are huge for engagement on social media, telling the story of your paper in one image, very, very effective. And following key stakeholders. Some of the cautions there in the bottom right was do not discuss specific questions with patients, right? So you're not going back and forth with a patient on specific questions, right? That's HIPAA violation and all kinds of things. So we don't, we try not to do that. Refrain from discussing controversial topics like religions or politics. I often say I will discuss policy, but I don't discuss politics, right? Big difference between policy and politics, at least prior to the last six or seven years. Never post HIPAA identifiable information and avoid posting content that could be negatively viewed in the press. So what I say about that is that if my mom read it on the front page of the New York Times and she was like, Joshua, what are you doing? I don't post that, right? So that I have kind of the mom litmus test, right? If my mama sees it and she's okay with it, we're good to go, right? And then suggestions. Set time limits, follow institutional policies. All of your institutions have a social media manager, and so you can check with them on what the policies are at your institution. Ask for accuracy, quality, and give credit, and share perspective and best practice. So when they've studied this, and this is the European Society of, European Heart Journal and ESC, and what they did was they looked at the papers in which they actually tweeted about them and engaged with them. So this was ESC kind of doing the tweeting for them. And what they found in a randomized trial was that when they tweeted about them, they had a higher altmetric score and a higher number of citations one year later, compared to the ones that they did not tweet about, and they had a lower altmetric score and a lower number of citations. And the European Heart Journal, I think their impact factor is like 28 or something, so it's not like a small journal that people don't read. So even with that journal, they saw a greater altmetric scores, number of citations with tweeting. So some of the conclusions from this first part are, in building your social media brand, are to create your accounts, build your profiles, win friends and influence people, post and interact, engage, and once again, engage like a real human being, promote others, pay attention, and keep it up. And all of that can then lead to the transformational change that we talked about in the very beginning. So once again, trying to hit that transformational change that we are all interested in. So our next activity will be to craft a tweet about your science or your clinical care. So either way, you got 280 characters, the most common length of the tweet is about 33 characters. Historically, only 9% of tweets hit the 140 character limit. Now it's like 1%. And so we're going to take five to seven minutes to work with a partner on developing a tweet about your most impactful research and include at the end of the society as well as hashtag not flair, you're going to use hashtag endo2022, okay? So partner up, pair up, create a tweet about your science or your clinical care. Everybody gets to have a friend here, okay? And we'll take about seven minutes to do this. All right, all right, great job, great engagement. Give yourselves a warm round of applause for sure. So there were a couple of questions as I went around about, you know, does using Twitter really increase impact? And so I talked about one paper, I want to let you know that these are all the other papers out there that demonstrated kind of the impact of using Twitter. So you can take a picture of this slide, you can kind of check some of these out. They also did things about communication, knowledge, they also did stuff about citation factor, impact factor, all that kind of good stuff as well. And then I will leave you with this last slide. This is my wife, Reversa, who was out last night at the presidential reception. These are our two boys, Joshua and Jeremiah, my mom and my niece on the lower right part. In the middle, I have the, once again, the QR code. QR code takes you to our website, talks about the research and some of the work that we do there. I will say that more recently, when I'm giving a scientific talk, if I reference a paper or something like that, I actually use a QR code there now for the other papers so that people, when they're taking that picture of your slide, which they always do, they can, boom, click right to the paper, which hopefully in the end will help increase, you know, citations and impact factor for those papers, right, whichever ones that I'm referencing in talks. So QR codes are another area that I've kind of been delving into more recently to share science, to communicate with individuals, et cetera. And with that, I will pass you off to Dr. Wu. Let's thank Dr. Joseph. We'll do some Q&A after both sessions, too. I know, since, okay, is this on, and if I could have my slides, since Dr. Joseph looked like he was really working the room and contributing to the energy, I'm going to try the same thing. Give him a minute for my slides. He was so engaged. I know. He's engaged in our hashtag here. I can't even keep up. Fantastic, all right, so it's really great to be here. This is my favorite topic, as you probably all know to talk about at Endo. And so this will be a little bit more on nuts and bolts and also different things that you can get out of Twitter. So one of the reasons that many of us are on Twitter is that of all the social media platforms, this is the one that is most popular among academics. So this is now an old paper, but let's see, 2014. Showing sort of each social media platform, and in the top are sort of how people use it. So green is sort of not particularly engaged, you're just listing your name there. And for me, this is true, LinkedIn, I have my profile up there, but I don't actively engage very much. There's sort of how to follow things, looking for jobs and that kind of thing, and that's certainly helpful. But in blue, the wedges are all about active engagement. So following discussions and learning about research and communicating with other people. And you'll see that Twitter is the one that has the most engagement. All right, so apparently I just jumped in on my slides. So there are a number of things that you can get out of Twitter, in addition to your own sort of branding, which is super important. So one of them is that it's a great source of following the latest publications and the latest news. So this has become my go-to site for the latest papers in my field, which is osteoporosis and bone endocrinology. What you can do is you can just follow all these journalists, journals. I'm a scientist, so a lot of the basic science journals, but also JAMA, Lancet, Diabetes, of course our Endocrine Society journals down in the corner. And in the old, old days, you got print copies of the journal and you flipped through the table of contents. Nobody does that anymore. Then we transitioned to email tables of contents where they came to your email once a week. Now they come straight into your Twitter. So most journals tweet regularly, especially when there's a new issue. They talk about the latest publications. Even more importantly is people that you follow then have conversations about these publications. Oh, and I do wanna say, I think it's pretty obvious by now. I know you'll see later that Endo has these respect the science slides, don't take photos, blah, blah, blah, but that doesn't count here, right? Photograph and tweet as much as you want about any of these slides. We have, as you can see, been blatantly tweeting away from podiums. We're working hard right now. This is not just me screwing on my phone. He's not watching TikToks, he's actually tweeting. So definitely feel free to keep taking photos and tweeting. So this is just some examples of how Twitter can be an incredibly useful source of the latest publications. So I follow various scientists. Joel Burkle is a developmental biologist in bone. Pradeep Natarajan is a cardiologist who does some basic science investigations. And so when I follow them and they have a new publication, then I get to hear right away. And sometimes Joel Burkle in particular is very good about writing threads. So threads are just a series of connected tweets and he gives a lot of background. And it can be a great way to get the take-home message for a paper directly from the source. And so this is a great way, and this has become my go-to way for seeing the latest papers. Plus, people will reply, they'll have conversations. Other people will start commenting about papers. So you can very quickly learn what is the latest hot paper and what are people saying about it. So I heard earlier in the what really matters to you, people talked about clinical trials. So often in clinical trials, there are discussions, right? Was that the best control? Is this a high-quality trial? How was the enrollment done? You can very quickly learn what people are saying, right? So is there a concern about whether the controls were done properly? Was the randomization adequate? That kind of thing. Okay, the other thing that you can do on Twitter, which Joshua also referred to, is you can use it to promote yourself, your trainees, your colleagues, and it can be helpful. So for instance, here's on the left, okay, this little pointer doesn't really work. On the left is a paper that we published in JCEM a couple years ago. And when I was a new assistant professor, I'm in a department that has 600 faculty. My chair happens to love Twitter. And so when I post something like this, and he likes it, he hearts it, I know that my chair just saw that Little Joy published a paper, right? And so over time, that can be helpful. And it can sort of raise your profile in your department, and that comes with benefits. So here's another one in the middle, a paper we published a couple years ago on, let's see, direct reprogramming, in which I'm calling out the first author, who's not on Twitter, sadly, but at least I can highlight her work. And then on the right, I had a visiting scholar who's a former pediatric orthopedic surgeon who spent a couple years in our lab, and he had this amazing story where he had published a case report 30 years ago, and reported an interesting finding relating to bone and the eye, an ophthalmologic finding. And then now 30 years later, a group in Europe had identified another patient, done the sequencing to find the causal mutation, and wanted to name the disease after him, because they found his original paper. So I wrote a story about that. Okay, next is the networking. So we were talking about how you can really meet people on Twitter. So this is, I think, my up-to-date slide. It's all the countries from which I have followers, and you can see great representation from North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa. We're starting to see more and more engagement. But it really is a global network, and so you can have friends around the world on Twitter. And this network can be hugely supportive and beneficial. It can offer things like collaborations. I've had collaborations that have come up because people have met me on Twitter. It can lead to seminar invitations. On the left, the ICCBH asked me to come speak to them there in Europe, and so I spoke with them virtually during the pandemic. Camaraderie and support. Rob Folks is one of my greatest supporters whenever you do science or you do medicine. There are days when you just think, like, this is kind of tough, right? You get your third manuscript rejection in that week, or your grants didn't get funded. And when I post that, I can count on Rob to come back with something funny to cheer me up. And then as is happening already here, one of my very favorite things is people that I know from Twitter that we engage regularly in conversations, and then meeting them in real life. So this photo is from the Bone meeting last fall, in which Joel Burkle and Chris Hernandez had been two of my closest Twitter friends, and we've now become close friends in real life. So that's also very fun. And then, you know, Joshua talked about the impact of this on publications. There's also impact on your career in ways that you can't always necessarily predict, right? So I've had several serendipitous opportunities come my way because of my vociferousness, of my work on Twitter. So for instance, a few years ago, in romasosomab, which is the most recently FDA-approved anabolic therapy for osteoporosis, when it was approved by the FDA in the US, Medscape invited me to write a commentary for Endo. Maybe the coolest one I've had so far, I don't know how many of you are familiar with Jen Gunter. She's an OBGYN who trained at UCSF. Her main thing now is taking down medical misinformation, and in particular, she's been very brave about taking on Gwyneth Paltrow and her Goop website, which is sort of full of medical misinformation. So she is a very prominent author, speaker, and she had a TED Talk series of a podcast, and she invited me to be on that. So that was super cool. All right, so the next thing I wanna say is you don't always know how these opportunities might arise, right? So Steve Jobs in 2005 gave a very famous commencement speech at Stanford, you can watch it on YouTube, I highly recommend it, in which he talks about connecting the dots. And his point is that things that happened decades ago can lead you to where you are, and you don't always know how that's gonna play out. So I think in academics, we tend to think of the dots in a very linear fashion, right? So I'm gonna get my PhD, I'm gonna try to get on the faculty, I need to write a lot of papers, I need to get grants, and then I'll get tenure, and this is all gonna be a very linear process. And it's totally not, right? So these are the things that when I think back about I've been on Twitter maybe 10 years, these are the things that I think have been related, right? So I got on Twitter, I learned to do a little bit of self-promotion, I mentioned sort of how that helps to raise my visibility in a very large clinical department, and you can't convince me that it's not why I'm the vice chair of research today, right? I think that when the chairman is looking for someone to fill a position, you've sort of inserted yourself in his brain, and so I think that was very helpful. I've already talked a little about how Twitter can lead to things like invited articles, and writings, and publications, and talks. We'll get to in a little bit, and Joshua's already given a great talk about how you can use Twitter for advocacy. And so that's been something that I've become more and more involved in later, and I'm convinced that that led to what so far been the greatest highlight of my career, which was that I had the opportunity to run for president-elect of this society last year. So all of these things I think flow from having a social media presence, and it's been hugely beneficial to me. All right, you can use Twitter for education. So there's incredible resources available. Let's see, on the left, this is for patients. So the Endocrine Society's Hormone Health Network has a great deal of information for patients that they're regularly tweeting about. And so here on the left is just a general one about glands, and then one on rapid-acting insulins. If, you know, for medical students, there's all kinds of resources, like USMLE practice questions. I'm married to a cardiologist, so my Twitter is actually full of cardiology information, but there's the daily EKG challenge that you can practice. One of the things that I think is really amazing are online journal clubs. So the Nephrologists, I think, were out front. They started what's called the Nephrology Journal Club, or ATNFJC, and twice a month they pick a newly published article. They hold two Twitter chats at different times so that the entire globe can participate. And they have live chats. They often invite the author of that manuscript, and they have these really vigorous and engaging discussions. And then at the end, they publish and archive all the tweets onto their website. So it's a hugely valuable resource. And I'm very pleased that a few years ago, the Endocrine Journal Club, EndoJC, was also started. And so here's just a screenshot. Somebody was discussing, I can't even see. There's a bone on there, so it's probably osteoporosis or vitamin D. And then also, people can discuss. So here's an example of a discussion from one of our members on a recent JCEM publication on measurement of vitamin D, and had some comments about the techniques that are used. Okay, so advocacy. Joshua's also mentioned how you can really use this. So there are a couple of issues that I really care about. Osteoporosis and fractures, NIH funding. And so you can post tweets yourself. So I also belong to the ASBMR, which is the Bone and Mineral Research. They have this fracture cast that moves around. So it's the number of fractures across the United States in a day. And if you look in the back, you can see a person. So it's actually, when you're there in real life, it's a massive cast, so it's quite impressive. And so certainly I take pictures of that. FASA, Endocrine Society, many societies are very active in advocating for more NIH funding. And then there are, let's see, that's probably from a virtual Hill visit. Or that one's from an endocrinology awareness campaign. So you can sort of both advocate on Twitter, but show your efforts, and that can be hugely important. It's also, over the years I've gotten more and more vocal about diversity and equity issues as well. And so this, I think to date is my most, popular doesn't seem the right word, impactful tweet, which was on the day that a gunman murdered eight women in Atlanta, including six Asian women. In the context of all sorts of racism, there was the murder of George Floyd. There was a lot of racism directed against Asians. This was early in the, a year into the pandemic. I fired off a series of tweets that really hit an impact, and then from that I was encouraged by friends to turn it into an essay, and was really moved that the annals was willing to take it. So it can turn into a very powerful way to have a voice and to share your thoughts with the community. Okay, about this, so medicine can feel like you have to be very loud and extroverted. You have to be the first person to jump in on rounds to answer the question. Last week I had a thread about being an introvert that's been making the rounds on Twitter. And so one of the things that I really love about social media is that it's a great space for introverts, right? And I see a lot of people nodding around the room. So the environment in medicine, can feel intimidating if you're not an extrovert. And what's wonderful about Twitter is that you can just sit there and think about it. You don't have, often I think something happens and you're like, I wish I'd said this. But on Twitter that doesn't happen. You can just sort of think about it and craft your own tweet on your own time. And then you can send it out when you're ready. And you can be the only person in the room so you're not intimidated by anybody else. And you send it out, and it I think gives us a voice, right? Susan Cain wrote a very powerful book on the power of introverts. And I think that we as a society lose if we don't consider all of the contributions that introverts have to offer. But it's just a little harder for us to get it out there. So social media can be a great way to do that. Okay, so now nuts and bolts. And I think many of you have gone through this already. But just in case there are still some questions, this is my anatomy of a tweet slide. So sometimes people ask me, what's a hashtag, what's a handle? Your handle is the name of the profile, okay? So it starts with an at sign. So this is a tweet from the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, and they're at Met Museum. The Met is just the name. That's what shows up on the thing. But they're at Met Museum. So you can see here there are two handles. There's at W. Mary Beard. She's a famous feminist author. And she had a lecture there. Hashtag is just anything that you wanna call attention to. So sometimes I hashtag endocrinology. I am now the division chief at Stanford of the endocrine division. And my admin was asking if they should put all my tweets on our webpage, our division webpage. And I thought about it for a second. And I said, well, every time I tweet about our division, I include hashtag endocrinology. And I said, maybe you wanna filter for that. Because otherwise you'll get, I might be ranting about the Warriors, or I'm a Duke basketball fan. And I said, you might not want all of my sports rants showing up on our webpage. So maybe you should filter for hashtag endocrinology. Joshua's already told us about hashtag endo2022. It's been an amazing hashtag for this meeting. And then you can include websites. And Twitter will automatically shorten it for you. So you know that there's a 280 character limit on Twitter, but the websites never take more than, I think it's 20 characters. I really strongly believe in the value of visual elements. So almost every tweet that I put out will have either a photo, or if you don't have a photo and you put a website, usually the website homepage becomes the visual element. So it's totally fine if you want to tweet text only. And there are some very impactful tweets that only have text. But I think the engagement is a little bit higher from your audience if you have visuals. And then at the bottom are all the ways that you can interact with it. So you can reply, you can retweet, you can quote tweet, which means that you write on top. And again, if you follow this panel, I think the three of us have been busily tweeting and retweeting and quote tweeting. So you can see all the examples. Okay, so this is the page. I think about 75% of Twitter accounts never tweet. And that's totally fine, right? I was telling somebody yesterday, you can read the New York Times without writing for it. So you can follow Twitter and not contribute to it in terms of your own tweets. That's totally fine, right? I've given you a lot of examples of how Twitter can be valuable as a source of information. And so that's plenty, right? And that's what the vast majority of people on Twitter do. So if Twitter for you is where you go to get your articles, your news, I follow my sports teams, as I've already alluded to. You can follow your celebrities. I mean, you can get all sorts of interesting information on Twitter. That's great. You can have a very fulfilling experience. If you're ready to dip your toe in the water, and this for me took years. I spent about three years, they call it lurking, which is when you're on Twitter and you never post, you're just watching. So I spent about three or four years lurking. But if you're ready to engage a little bit, this is what I call my low-maintenance Twitter approach. So you can follow people. You can follow the Endocrine Society. You can follow the three of us. Joshua had a list of other Endocrine Society leaders on his page. You can follow hashtags. Like right now, you can follow Endo 2022. And then all you need to know are the retweet and the like buttons. So you can either just like it, or you can retweet it. And some people's threads are entirely composed of retweets from other sources. And it's still actually very informational. You can learn a lot about somebody's opinions and thoughts and ideas purely based on what they retweet, right? And so that's easy. And you can just listen. So that's totally fine. All right, I think Joshua has covered already a lot of the best practices. Never post health information. I think that goes without saying. Proofread. Many of you may remember Trump and his kefefi debacle. We're still debating what that meant. You do have to watch out for autocorrect. Sometimes some very funny things can happen. Social media posts are permanent and can be amplified. That's kind of what you want, right? Remember that Twitter is public. So I think Joshua used the do I want my mom to read it on the front page of the New York Times thing. I think that's also true. The other thing I think about is would I say it publicly in a room of a lot of people, right? So I think we both use them. We all use them predominantly for professional reasons. But as you'll see, I do post about some things that reflect the personal side. Maybe I was at a Warriors game or something like that. And some of that I do to intentionally normalize the life of a professor. But I think it's only things that I would say and do in front of a large room like this. Beware of privacy controls. It is true that your employers might check your social media feeds. You should turn that into a strength, right? So if I see that somebody is very active on Twitter, I know that they have a lot of advocacy work. That to me is a strength. So you can make that into your benefit. Of course, good judgment. Many people have a disclaimer in their bio that says tweets are my own. But still, everything you say and do reflects on not only you but your institution. So just be wary. And then respect copyright and intellectual property. All right, so this is the last day of ENDO, but next year you'll remember this. If you really, really wanna up your Twitter game, you can get involved in what I call live tweeting at ENDO. And there are several people in this room who are really, really good at it, looking at you, Rob. And so these are just some of my tweets. This really can increase your engagement. And the ENDO22 hashtag we looked right before this session is now at 36 million impressions over a week. So it's really phenomenal. People all over the world are watching what we're doing here at ENDO on Twitter. So if you wanna live tweet, I think this is the slide I was talking about earlier. We do have a respect the science policy, right? So we don't, you shouldn't be taking photos of anyone's unpublished data if they're presenting. You can link instead to their articles or their labs website If you look through my thread, you'll see that I have been tweeting about most of the plenary sessions. I take a photo of their opening screenshot. I consider that's fine because that's publicly available information. And then often I will either, if they're talking about something that's maybe interesting that's published or there's been a review article, I will link to that. If they highlight information like, this is a bioinformatics resource or a database, I consider that they're trying to tell people publicly. I consider that fair game to share. So I'll share resources on that. And you can summarize, give your impressions, try to be accurate, and then tag them with a hashtag. And so here are just some examples. It's hard to believe it was three years ago that we were last here in person. But okay, so I gave a similar talk at 2019 and afterwards I posted a few of the slides. On the bottom left, so there's an example of what I might do for a plenary. I took a photo in the room and then I linked to their recent publication. Other people are tweeting throughout Twitter. So people are showing the Global Leadership Academy. Dan Drucker, who if you don't follow, if you wanna follow one person in endocrinology, I would recommend Dan Drucker. I don't know how he does it, but he tweets about 100 articles a day on endocrine. He's sort of the go-to source for following literature in endocrinology. And so this was the transition between Dr. Mandel and Dr. Abel as our presidents for the society. So Dr. Abel, who is a past president and now chair of medicine at UCLA, is one of my favorite sort of Twitter stories. So I joined the board three years ago and I told the CEO that my goal was to get every single board member on Twitter by the end of my term, which was not successful, but Dale Abel did take to it. And that was because the year that he was president, Francis Collins was the plenary speaker. And one of our other board members, Lizzie Trevino, caught a picture of them all on the escalator. And so Dale creates this account and says, hello, it's clearly time to make my account. And now he has fully embraced it. He is one of the most active people I know on Twitter and I love it. And then I've already alluded to how much I look up to Dr. Drucker. And so I had a chance to meet him in person a couple years ago. So I think people just enjoy the behind the scenes. This session already is, I think, trending. I haven't checked now in a couple minutes. I'm a little afraid, but I think it's getting a lot of attention. Okay, so how do I physically do this? How do I live tweet at Endo? It's a little bit involved. So on the left is a screenshot of what my laptop looks like. So I'm sitting in the plenary session. I have my laptop open. This requires good Wi-Fi. So what you can see is the first tab I have is the program because I want to make sure I spell people's names right. And so that I can search. The next is Twitter so that I can search for their handles. I try very hard to make sure that if they have a Twitter handle, I tag it so that they can find it. I also try to tag their institution because that gives them some visibility. The third tab is my PubMed. I'm searching articles while they're talking. And then I also, because I'm trying to listen and learn at the same time, I use EndNote to take notes. So this was a lecture that Ron Kahn was giving on FGF21, I believe, at Endo 2018. I'm taking notes on the right. I'm Googling and searching up his articles on the left. And then at some point, I craft a tweet. So here is my summary that he was giving, a symposium lecture. Again, I'm linking to an article from there. I really like to clip a screenshot from an article, again, because I believe in the power of a visual image. And so often an article will have whatever image I think from their figures is the most interesting or summarizing. I'll try to include that. And so that's just an example of how I tweet in real time at the societies. Okay, so you're all here, so I think maybe this is less of an issue, but people have some common concerns about Twitter, that it's time-consuming, there's a character limit, my leadership doesn't value it, platforms keep changing, et cetera, negative comments. So Joshua also talked about this. You have to decide on your value and time trade-off. I hope I've convinced you that it can be worth the investment. My own career has benefited tremendously from being on Twitter. I think that the character limit is good for concise writing. Scientists and doctors can tend to go on a little verbosely. And so learning to write pithy little tweets is a good thing. So if your leadership says it's a waste of time, why are you doing this? You show them the data. Joshua showed some of that. It really, there is more and more data about the impact of this. The complaint that platforms keep changing, well, so do the medications that we prescribe and the research tools that we use. It's just sort of part of our career in the biomedical field. I do wanna say a word about negative comments. People do worry about trolls and sometimes they can be unpleasant, particularly if you engage in advocacy, particularly if you are a woman or a member of a minority group, it can sometimes be unpleasant. And one example is the Endocrine Society I believe had to stop tweeting about their transgender guidelines because sadly it got swamped by so many negative comments. Largely, I say don't engage. There's not much that you're gonna gain. You're not gonna change minds. But I will say that on what I call academic Twitter, it is largely a very collegial and supportive environment. And I believe that's because almost all of us have our names on it, right? So there are people who have hashtags that are not a personal name, and that's fine. But most of us have our names, our degrees, our institutions. So I think that keeps us a little honest and polite. All right, and then I think it's worth being intentional about why you use Twitter. So for this talk, I came up with the reasons, many of which I've already covered, but the reasons I really believe in Twitter. So I've talked about using the literature, sharing publications, highlighting my own lab's research. Now that I'm tenured, it's more about celebrating my trainees and my colleagues. But certainly early on when I was on a tenure track, I thought it was very valuable to sort of get my name out there on what we're doing. I educate about my favorite topic, which is bone endocrinology. I use it to advocate for endocrinology research funding. I advocate quite a bit for diversity equity, especially in the academic medicine space. I try to give whatever career guidance that I can. And I think it's important to sort of normalize the life of a faculty member, right? So I think there's a lot of interest right now and focus rightfully on wellness. And so I think it's very important to show that on weekends, I'm off doing something like exercise or having fun or doing something with my family. And I've talked about my sports teams. Okay, so that's it. All right, so I think we'll take questions. Thank you. We think we have about 15 minutes for Q&A. So if you do have any questions, please come to the microphone or we have the QR code for the live platform. You can submit it there and I can happy to ask it as well. It's while we're waiting for us to come up. How much do either of you engage with maybe patient advocates on Twitter and how do you kind of strike the balance of the proper tone in those engagements versus maybe the rest of your Twitter feed, your personal engagement? I'm still trying to live tweet the end of the. I'm afraid to look at my notifications. It's gonna be blowing up. So I think that's a great question. I mean, we do wanna engage patients, right? So I share information that is meant for the lay public. One of my sort of clinical passions is bone health and cancer survivors. I'm a cancer survivor myself. And so it's very meaningful to me to work in that space. And I give a lot of talks to the lay public, to patients and survivors about their health and how they can care for their skeletons. And so I do try to share quite a bit of information. I have several followers who are patient advocates. I mean, the thing about followers is anyone can follow you, right? Like you don't really have any control. You can choose who to follow back. So I have many patient advocates who follow me. And I think that's an important space for getting out information. Hello, I'm just curious about what you guys think about the deal with Elon Musk and in his changes that he's proposing for Twitter. Yeah, so many people, when I'm trying to convince them to join Twitter, they have some very legitimate concerns. Particularly under our previous president, the tone on Twitter was quite negative sometimes and can be used, I think, for harm. That's true for any platform. And so now there's concern that another rich billionaire, single individual is gonna have a great deal of power. So I will say that in the weeks, in the days when the Elon Musk announcement first came out, there was a lot of chatter on Twitter about how we were all gonna have to find a new platform. And then somebody pointed out that every other thing that we use, Amazon, Google, Facebook, is also owned by a billionaire white guy. And so then we thought, well, I guess it's, you have to make your decisions. It's not clear how much influence he will or will not have. I think that there is a lot that the social media companies could be doing better to control some of the misinformation. But again, within what I call academic Twitter, it's a pretty collegial and professional space. So time will tell. And now he's threatening not to buy Twitter, so I don't know what he means. Hi, I am a solely clinician person, not tied to an institution. So my biggest influence will probably be the lay public, in which case I just did a quick search and Instagram's actually a better platform. Do you have any words of wisdom there? Yeah, so very, very important. And I've seen people use Instagram very effectively. I've seen people, depending on what your target age is, using Facebook very effectively for their private practices. So I think the big thing there is in your community, understanding what people use in your targeted department. Understanding your targeted demographic, and then utilizing that. So I think about when I go on Facebook, and that's not often, somehow Facebook is able to identify me pretty well. They have like the golf clubs on there that are kind of popping up, the things I try to buy for my wife on there. It really, really does a good job. And so for you, and we use that on the research side too, where we'll put ads for our research projects on there. Thinking about, one, what's the target audience? Two, what is the target audience that you want to use? And three, how can you use the platform to then target them and bring them into your business so that you're seeing more people and having even a bigger impact from a clinical perspective? I can comment from a research context too. So personally, I'm pretty much exclusively on Twitter. I don't engage a whole lot, especially with the advocate community on Facebook, but I leverage my advocate partners that work with my lab that are mentors and they kind of move our research and topics into Facebook for me. And it kind of provides a layer of insulation but still gets some outreach there. So there was actually, I'm catching up on my thread. There was a question on the thread, which I thought was really good, which is how do you, should you have a personal and a professional account and how do you manage that? So my Twitter, I consider a professional account and some people have also a personal one and it's totally fine. But I never forget that my Twitter is being seen by my colleagues. So again, when I tweet about personal things or my sports teams, it's something that I don't mind share. Like if I were giving grand rounds, I wouldn't mind sharing with my colleagues there. And then my Instagram is largely so I can see my friends' children's photos. That's personal and I don't really engage on there. But I think it is important. If you want, you can have a second personal account or sometimes people run accounts for their institutions or divisions. But mine is professional. Yeah, I'll say for me, mine is professional as well. I actually very rarely post on my family and you guys wouldn't want to see me posting about the Ohio State Buckeyes every day because I literally would. And so yeah, ours is really thinking, my Twitter account is really about what is the impact and what kind of things are we trying to advocate for and kind of push forward. So very much so. Now, I'll say some of my colleagues use Instagram and Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter and they use them. I have colleagues who use them both personally and professionally and I've seen some advantages and disadvantages to that, particularly on the advocacy front because, for instance, Facebook and Instagram as well as TikTok, I have colleagues who use TikTok, you can engage with a lot of people who are lay public members, I think, and sometimes a little bit better in some ways on those platforms. And then they'll also post, like one will be about their kids and their family and they'll get engagement there and the next one's about something they really care about, right? And so they're kind of engaging on both sides. For me, that calculus for me just didn't feel right and so I use mine more professionally. I just wanted to know your thoughts on what should we include in our Twitter bios because that's typically the first thing people see, if we should keep it longer or shortened and yeah. Well, I'm just looking at mine. Just seeing what I included there. So I said, endocrinologists and scientists addressing diabetes and cardiovascular disease prevention and treatment, hashtag health equity. So it kind of, for me, it goes right to that area that I'm trying to impact. So as soon as you go on there, and that's kind of part of that building your brand, right? Like I want people to know, these are the things that I really care about, these are the things that I'm trying to advocate for and these are the areas where we're aiming for transformational change. I agree, I think the bio is incredibly important and one of the things, when I'm tweeting and I'm at Endo and I'm trying to follow everybody's hashtags, a lot of people will follow me after a session and I will follow back everyone that I can tell is an academic. So if I can see either from your titles or that your bio mentions that you're somewhere, I make sure to follow all that back. Some people have just a name or some phrase or something. If I don't know who they are, I don't follow them and if I can't tell what they're doing. So I think it can be hugely helpful to have some kind of information. I'll say my bio includes a hashtag for my particular research community. So the hashtag Lobular, which is a type of breast cancer and that lets other scientists and patient advocates engage me more easily because they can find me quick. And one thing you said there, Joy, you said that when you were, after the session, earlier you said you were trying to find someone on Twitter and I'll say that I noticed some people are very easy to find. They've used an app that is very easy. It's their name and maybe their title or something. Some people it's like 1-2-3-4-5-6-96-24-H37, right? And so when you search for that on Twitter, it's hard to find folks like that. And so when you're thinking about what your handle looks like, trying to think about something that people can find will help other people to find you and help increase that engagement and that ultimate impact. I don't know if you had any comments on that. I think that's a great point. I think having your name is the most obvious. The other thing I would say is if you have a name that's very common, in other words, Jane Doe, and if I search on Twitter, it's gonna pull up 500 things, that's where your bio can be very helpful because I often search for Jane Doe Stanford because I know, or at this meeting, I've been searching for Jane Doe Endocrine Society to try to find people. And if it's in your bio, then it pops right up. And that way, I know I've tagged the right person because also, if I can't find you a Twitter handle, I'll just put the name. But I think, yeah, having an informative handle, not too long because you don't want other people to get annoyed that your handle is taking up too many of their 280 characters. Can either of you touch on, I think you both briefly did, but maybe examples of when one might run afoul of our institutional policies or maybe when Twitter might positively or negatively impact hiring and firing? Maybe the bigger cons that might crop up? I have some comments, but I know as a chief, you probably don't. Right, so it's very interesting. I mean, I think you always have to be careful and thinking about things. I, and especially when you're advocating, sometimes you'll get pushed back. And I think you always have to be aware of your organizations and the institutions that you represent. So, for instance, I'll give you two examples. I have been, until now, a member of the board of the Endocrine Society. It is actually my fiduciary responsibility to not say anything negative about the Endocrine Society. Not that I ever would, but I mean, I love the Endocrine Society. So, but I am aware that I have this responsibility and that I, you know, I don't know. Like, I won't even complain about the air conditioning in this building because I don't wanna be negative in any way. Contrast that with, you know, I am a faculty member at Stanford University. And there have been times where I have had opinions that I wanted to share about my university. You're probably all very familiar with the fact that Scott Atlas is a faculty member at Stanford University. And he was someone who tweeted quite often about things that were not medically correct using his faculty profile as a way to gain legitimacy. And as you might imagine, there was a lot of discussion at our university about, is this right? How much free speech should a faculty member have? I can tell you that, you know, it's especially, you know, challenging when you're talking about sort of medical consensus information and whether you're sharing or not. And maybe if you couldn't share this part on Twitter, I'd appreciate that because I'm just telling you in confidential information. But it became very clear to us at Stanford that we have a great deal of latitude in speech. So frankly, I feel very comfortable saying what I want about Stanford because I know that other faculties have said even more debatable things and nobody came after them. So I feel quite safe as a tenured faculty member at my institution. But I think you need to be aware of those nuances and you need to know what your institution's gonna do. Sometimes people push back. I'm lucky to be at one where apparently we have a lot of freedom of speech. Yeah, and I'm at a state institution. And so I represent the state of Ohio in anything that I say ultimately. And so, you know, what I would encourage is ultimately understanding what those social media policies are at your own institutions. I actually check with my social media manager on different things. Okay, hey, I wanna tweet about this or that if I think it's gonna be somewhat controversial. Some of that came up when, you know, for instance, the Black Lives Matter movement, right? There were people who wanted to tweet and, you know, finally we got, okay, hey, this is how we will approach that at our institution. And then everybody was good. So I think if there are things that you think may or may not be controversial, just check in, you know, before you do it and then boom, now that you have the, you know, kind of go ahead, you're good to go and you won't run afoul. So I think we're towards the end, Matt. Yeah, I think we would like to go ahead and get a picture of the room so we can all tweet it. You think we can selfie from that angle with the whole room or how do we wanna do this?

social media

Twitter

personal branding

professional development

medical field

engagement

networking

research

hashtags

privacy

authenticity