Wake Forest, happy to be here and thanks for the opportunity to talk a little bit about social media to try to bring together a lot of these concepts, disclosures or through the academy. I'm going to make two comments, they're not really related to this talk. I'm part of a hip preservation group, if anybody here is interested, we have a great meeting coming up and we're going to be here in D.C. next year. So if you're interested in coming back, we'd love to have you. Dr. Planter runs Ortho Summit, which is a great meeting as well that's going to be in Boston this year. So again, these are great ways to focus on a lot of these concepts. Why do we care about social media? Don't be a dinosaur. You don't want to be out there wandering around wondering what's going to happen. Then you get the impact and then unfortunately you're at the end of your lifespan there. So what's coming? Well, it's actually here and what's fascinating is you'll hear metaverse, you'll hear a lot of these terms. There's a lot of immersive media that's coming out and I would say the last six months have been very fascinating. Obviously, the turnover of Twitter, we'll talk a little bit about that. And then if you follow the stock market, obviously AI, the chip technology, all this is driving what we're seeing not only in healthcare but in the social media space. There's definitely a fight between Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, right? And so what ultimately happens, I don't know, but I would say for this room, this is actually good for everyone because as Dr. Palencia was saying, the competition is helpful, right? The metaverse, what does it mean? What you're trying to do is integrate 3D virtual worlds. Some of this does involve headset management. You're expanding the relationship between people and business. And what traditional companies are trying to figure out is how do you leverage this technology to improve your opportunities, right? You want to be prepared for this because healthcare at some point is going to figure this out and hopefully we as providers are going to be leading this rather than following. What's fascinating is this, this is actually from 2020, so this is the most modern data I could get. But the overall downloads, TikTok is number one, right? Facebook number two, Instagram number three, Snapchat number four, Twitter is actually down to number six on this list, right? And the reason why this is important is when you have to decide where you're going to invest your time, your resources, and we'll talk a little bit about this. I think it's very hard to do six different social media platforms, right? There is some technology that will integrate that and cross over. At the end of the day, you've got to pick your poison and figure out where your target market is. The hottest ticket lately is this concept called Threads, right? It just got launched last week. And last week, they had 100 million downloads in five days. So this is actually part of Meta, which is the former Facebook company. This is Zuckerberg. But the idea is this is supposed to integrate with the Instagram app. It's designed to compete with Twitter. So it's kind of a messaging app. And the answer is, what does all this mean? The answer is, I'm not really sure, but just recognize that things are changing rapidly. So you have to be aware that maybe Twitter was the hot thing a year ago. This may be where patients are moving their attention spans. TikTok, even though it's controversial, they've actually launched their own business platform, right? And so this whole TikTok phenomenon, it's very popular amongst, I would say, patients between the ages of 15 and 30, right? It's not necessarily the older set. And it's also undergoing a lot of governance scrutiny, right? I think Montana has outlawed TikTok as of January 1st of this coming year, right? So you've got to be aware of where these regulations are going. The problem is the market doesn't care, right? The market is actually making these decisions. There's all kinds of opportunities, right? Spotify, the whole point is there's creative content being generated, and you as a provider have the opportunity to get into these podcasts. I call them micro-podcasting, right? You don't have an hour to sit down and go through a procedure, but you may have a minute to basically have a little blurb and find out where that is. But there is a lot of controversy with this. So our goal today, enhance your professional visibility and drive demand. Develop your social media strategy, organize your content, maximize delivery, and minimize risk, because there's a lot of risk with that. You really have to think about what your brand is and what does this mean? It's what's your message, right? You have a professional footprint. And a lot of these statements are permanent, right? Even though you go in and delete, a lot of these platforms will recycle them, right? And it can be used in litigation as well as licensing decisions. Word of mouth is always driven medicine, right? If somebody hears that they had a great experience, it's positive. And you want to basically have a happy patient. You always hear about country club networking, right? Somebody goes in, they get an injection, they come out, they're swinging great, and they say, oh, you need to go see Dr. Plancher because he fixed me up, right? So that's good. You got to learn from others, right? This is an unfortunate situation where a physician decided they were going to post on YouTube them dancing in the operating room. And it ultimately ended up in their license suspension and malpractice litigation, right? So be obviously wise about what you do. I was with a friend of mine over the July 4th holiday, and he uses this social media around amounts, he's IMG, so he's professional athletes. And I said, what are the three things that somebody in this room needs to know next week? And he goes, I don't know about doctors. I said, it doesn't matter. I said, marketing 101, what is it? He goes, identify your market, build your channel. And he said, commit your paid. Paid is like what they, I guess that's the verbage they use, right? So it's how much you're going to spend. Brevity is the soul of wit. You want to keep things simple. Content, content, content. And what's nice is social networking is low cost and high yield for most people. It's really the time. So what do you want to do? Build your framework, devise the channels that we talked about, avoid the pitfalls. What is your message, your brand? In the era of patient and providers, you've got word of mouth, expertise, coverage networks. Interestingly, over 50% of patients will choose their doctor based on their online profile. And it's probably higher in subspecialty care, right? So if you're interested in saying, well, where am I going to get my ACL done or how am I going to do this, it probably makes a huge difference. Target market makes a big difference, right? Do you want to reach out to patients? Do you want to reach out to your colleagues, the providers? Do you want the community to know? And you can get out certain age groups. If you're affiliated with a certain sports league, are you interested in joint preservation, pain management, sports medicine, things like that? So you can talk about your brand, expertise, what's your story, where were you trained, where did you grow up, what do you know about the community, what kind of technology are you offering? Testimonials, Dr. Plunkett brought that up today. So you want to tailor your message to the market. Lots of terms, right? Most people in this room probably are aware of this, but the whole idea is that trying to get comfortable with things like a meta tag. A meta tag is basically embedded text within what you're doing that is searchable content. So even though you may not see it, it's actually driving the algorithms of what's happening, right? Handle would be your user ID, it's usually preceded with an at symbol. Hashtag, you'll hear hashtag AOSSN, you'll see stuff posted. DMs are direct messaging, and we'll talk a little bit about that, right? What do you want to do? Make sure you have a website, most people in this room do. It is the new phone book, and that's going to be the home base for your content. Number two, you're going to make a profile, right? And a lot of times your goal is to have complimentary profiles in what you see, right? And so again, figuring that out, we'll talk about that. And then generate searchable content, meaning if people search PRP, you want to make sure that that's what's embedded within what you're doing so that they can look for that. And you can have terms, you can have hashtag this, you can also have user IDs, app, whatever. What's fascinating is, and I found this out last week because I have three teenagers, right? People are using TikTok now as their search engine. They're not even going through Google anymore. So if they're like, hey, I want to know about how do I bake a cake, where do I find the best orthopedic surgeon, whatever. They're actually searching it through TikTok, and TikTok is actually providing the content. So they're not even going through the classic search engines that most of us are familiar with. How do you generate content? You've got descriptive things, you've got text, PDFs. You can have imaging case of the week, video, storytelling, podcasting. You can have Q&As, and then links. Let's just say there's certain sites that you think would be very helpful to your patients. You can actually broadcast that as well. This is becoming blurry. I've tried to say, well, certain, if you're trying to reach out to providers, meaning your colleagues going through LinkedIn, Doximity, Vumedi, Patients, Facebook, Instagram. What's fascinating is, I was in a conversation last night, and someone said, actually, LinkedIn is one of the number one patient-sourced areas to find a physician. And I was like, wait a minute, that messes up my whole slide. So I had to add it in and add an asterisk, right? So things are changing. How do you set things up? It's better to basically, I like Gmail personally. You can have any kind of email address. Create a professional username. You know, you can be, you know, SportsJockDoc or whatever it wants to be. But find something good. Have a secure password. Decide on a professional picture and a bio. And then it's easy to lose passwords, right? So make sure you've got sort of what I call a backdoor, which is authentication. And most of these platforms will help you with that. Importantly, withhold all non-essential information. People will steal your identity. They'll try to use things. So try to keep things out of your profile that someone could use, right? Your specific date of birth. It could be anything, right? What's interesting is when you get into this, these platforms allow communication, right? And so classically LinkedIn, Doximity, Vimedi, a lot of those are two-way, right? The other ones, say Facebook, Instagram, they're one-way. Meaning you can actually just broadcast out. This is changing. A lot of these platforms allow the direct messaging. So someone can actually come back, excuse me, and message you directly. How do you set up your account? Again, we talked about, let's just talk about you use these websites. So if you just went on, and I still use Google, so you would Google Instagram, business.instagram.com is the way to set it up with that. And actually the Threads account links in with that. So once you have your Instagram, Threads actually integrates with that. So if you already have an Instagram, setting up the Threads account will actually, you just give it permission, it will use that. There are some concerns about privacy because the Threads group now is starting to share their broadcasting. So if you post it on that, it's actually going to potentially go through multiple layers of servers. Meaning if you delete it, it may still be available out there. So just recognize, just because you see it on one platform doesn't mean that it's not getting leveraged through multiple platforms. LinkedIn is popular as well, and a lot of you have these things. So we'll just sort of move forward here. Again, Instagram, I found probably for our age group in the sports medicine field, for patients that are probably 25 to 50, seems to be what most people are familiar with and using, and certainly the numbers support that. It's got over a billion users now, and 90% of users are under 35, right? And it's easily managed. You want to be clear, concise, and cogent. Kevin Poe is a guy who has done a lot of this. He's got a book, Establishing, Managing, and Protecting Your Online Reputation. I'll just mention it here. It's helpful to know that. You can actually track things. There's a variety of performance metrics through a lot of these software sites. Just recognize that. So if you're like, am I getting hits from, if I'm living in New York, are people from New York looking at what I'm doing, or are they from Columbia, South America, right? AI is going to basically transform this entire space, because most of us don't have a lot of time. You may need a social networking manager. I know a lot of practices do this. These are the top 10 AI social media managers, right? And so you're like, well, what do I do with this? And the answer is, I don't know, because it's almost like saying, 100 years ago, there were 100 car companies. Now there's five, right? So I imagine a lot of these are going to consolidate, but just recognize that technology is evolving to make this easier. What are the pitfalls? HIPAA, number one. You don't want to have a problem with that. Social media policies. I work for an institution that has conflicting social media policies, so it's very difficult sometimes to know what to do. Intellectual property. As always, if you invent something, you want to get the patent first before you put it out there in the public domain, because you'll lose the patent. Conflicts of interest. I think a lot of people mix their personal and professional views. I don't agree with that, but that's something you have to decide on your own, and just doing stupid stuff. We talked about that, right? There are online reputation managers, so let's just say you're getting bad feedback. You've got a bad post, or there's some problem. There are actually companies out there that will give you a free risk analysis of your online footprint and help you optimize that, right? Sometimes, it's good to always consult with an attorney, but there actually are companies that will help you manage and promote positivity, avoid these risks, and help that. Ultimately, you want to define and build your marketing brand through this. Design your framework based on what you want to broadcast. Develop your content. Avoid these pitfalls, and really be aware that this metaverse phenomenon and artificial intelligence are very much going to dramatically change what we see and what we can do. Thank you so much.

social media

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immersive media

social media platforms