How to avoid trouble on social media
A few years ago I gave a lecture to my emergency medicine co-residents about using social media as a physician. Before starting, I asked how many thought the lecture was going to be a warning about the dangers of social media, reminding them what not to do (it wasn’t — the lecture was about how to use social media for good, just like this series).
Nearly every hand in the room went up — everyone was expecting the HR lecture on how social media can get you in trouble and ruin your career.
For many of us (especially in medicine), it has been engrained in our minds that social media is something to fear. We’ve had lots of lectures about that, but very few about how to use it for good.
I suspect this institutionally-engrained fear is one of the biggest reasons that people in medicine feel hesitant to be online. And it is important to follow certain rules to stay out of trouble. But this fear has scared away many excellent communicators from trying at all, which means that the doctors and scientists who know what they’re talking about stay silent, and those who spread falsehoods are getting all the views.
Can I say that one more time?
If you scare away all the people who know what they’re talking about, then social media will be full of people who don’t know what they’re talking about. This is not a good plan.
With that said, this episode of The Communication Lab is about staying out of trouble as a science communicator on social media (with a focus on clinicians, as med school had far more lectures about this than grad school). In my experience doing scicomm as a PhD student, med student, and resident, it’s not very difficult as long as you follow some basic guidelines. The goal of this post is not to scare you like the HR lectures are, but to give you some practical tips and hopefully encourage you that this is far less scary than all those HR lectures made you think it is.
Here we go.
