How I used social media to get promoted to professor [PODCAST]

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“After my last promotion, my institution adopted new guidelines and criteria for incorporating social media into promotion. I understand several other academic institutions have taken similar approaches, and it is enlightening to learn that academic medicine is evolving to match the current state of medical education. I encourage anyone considering promotion to become familiar with your institution’s criteria and consider how to leverage that with your work. I also encourage you not to discount the work you do on social media and consider how you can translate into more traditional checkboxes such as teaching, advocacy, and national reputation.

Social media has fundamentally changed how the world receives information. Science, medical expertise, and fundamental facts are under constant assault. Thousands of medical professionals are engaged online and interacting in positive ways to help combat misinformation. It’s time for this important work to be recognized and rewarded by academic institutions. Good luck, colleagues, and please feel free to reach out on social media if I can help in any way.”

David R. Stukus is a pediatric allergist and can be reached on Twitter @AllergyKidsDoc.

He shares his story and discusses his KevinMD article, “How I used social media to get promoted to professor.”

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Hosted by Kevin Pho, MD, The Podcast by KevinMD shares the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from.

Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show, where we share the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from. My name is Kevin Pho, founder and editor of KevinMD. Today on the show we have David Stukus. He is a pediatric allergist, and he wrote the KevinMD article “How I used social media to get promoted to professor.” David, welcome to the show.

David R. Stukus: Thank you so much for having me. It’s really a pleasure to be here today.

Kevin Pho: We’ll get into the article in a little bit, but first off, can you share your story and journey to where you are today?

David R. Stukus: Sure. Well, this leads into the article, of course, but I started on social media as a medical professional about eight years ago. My reason for joining was because I kept hearing the same sort of myths and misconceptions from my patients and referring providers. As a pediatric allergist, these are common things, such as concerns about red dye allergy, or “Can I give my child the flu vaccine? They have egg allergy,” and things like that. I wanted to use a larger platform to try to dispel some of these misconceptions.

So I joined Twitter initially in 2013, and then I joined Instagram about three years ago, and I use those platforms really to just disseminate evidence-based information. Along the way, I’ve learned a lot about the psychology of how misinformation really impacts the medical decision-making of the general public and our patients at large. So I’ve learned a ton, and I’ve enjoyed my journey. As a person involved in academic medicine, I’ve used my social media involvement to help get promoted, first to associate professor and then most recently to professor of clinical pediatrics.

Kevin Pho: So in your eight-year social media journey, tell me some of the successes you’ve had in terms of dispelling misinformation or convincing patients to go to better sources of health information.

David R. Stukus: Yeah. Online, I hear from people all the time. If I give them information about how the majority of penicillin allergies are not true allergies, and we now have ways to evaluate and remove that label and allow you to receive it, they tell me their success stories: “Thank you for the information. I took this to my own doctor, and now we removed that.” I love that. That’s what I want to do. I can’t provide individual medical advice, but if the information I give can help raise personal questions with your own physician or clinician, that’s ideal, to see if it applies to you at all.

So there are those personal interactions, and then professionally, it has led me to places I never even imagined, Kevin. I got invited to become the first social media medical editor for the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, Immunology three years ago. So I help them with their social media efforts. I actually produce and host their podcast series as well, so now I’m a podcaster like you. I’ve written numerous articles for different outlets. I’ve done research on social media. It has just taken my career in a very fun direction.

Kevin Pho: Social media obviously has changed a lot in the last eight years, and especially during the last 18 months of the pandemic. So can you contrast the social media landscape for physicians now compared to what it was when you first started out?

David R. Stukus: It’s harsh. The recent political climate, and just anti-science efforts and anti-vaccine efforts and anti-expert efforts, it’s a harsh place to be if you’re a medical professional. So I get it, and it’s not for everybody. A lot of my colleagues have left social media, my patients have loved social media, and my friends and family. But I still think there’s a very important role, and I would argue it’s more important now than ever for us to be out there providing evidence-based information, perspective, and voices that people can trust, because there’s a large group in the middle that really wants to hear from experts, and there are people that we can’t help. So it’s definitely evolved in that realm over the last several years.

Kevin Pho: So go into more detail. Given the toxicity and the political climate on social media, and there’s a lot of backlash against physicians and medical experts on social media, why specifically should physicians continue to be on?

David R. Stukus: Well, I think it’s part of why we joined the profession. For most of us, it’s a calling. I don’t just go see patients and then go home and not think about these things. I think this is a way that we reach people where they are. Let’s face it, people aren’t going to wait two months to come see me because they have a question they have now. They’re going to go online and look for information. They want answers right now, and unfortunately, a lot of the information that they receive is just incorrect, or lacks perspective or context, and it’s just flat out wrong. So we can meet them where they are, and I think that there’s a real role for that.

Social media is not going away. The train is off the tracks. I think it’s been well established that there are a lot of perils that we all get from the way we use social media, but there’s a lot of good that can come from it as well. That’s what I’m here to do: try to help all of our colleagues better understand some strategies and best practices for how to engage in social media from that health care professional standpoint.

Kevin Pho: From your experience, where are patients getting their health information, and why are those sources incorrect?

David R. Stukus: Well, a lot of times it’s their social media feed, so Facebook or Twitter, or their private groups that they’re part of. This is where the concept of echo chambers comes into play, because people often want to hear information that confirms their own previously held beliefs, even if they’re incorrect beliefs. So if they hear from other like-minded individuals, it just reinforces what they think they know, even if it’s incorrect. So a lot of times it’s just that personal connection.

But it’s really fascinating, because oftentimes they don’t know these people in person. I liken it to this: A lot of people post their information online saying, “Hey, what do you think of this rash my child has?” The information they’re getting is from complete strangers. How many people are going to pull their car over on the side of a highway, flag down the first hundred cars that drive by, and say, “Hey, what do you think of this? What do you think of this?” and then trust that information? So there’s a real void that we can fill there.

Kevin Pho: All right, so let’s transition into your KevinMD article, where you talk about some of the professional ramifications of your social media use. It’s titled “How I used social media to get promoted to professor.” Now, for those who didn’t get a chance to read that article, can you just walk my audience through it and share the story of why you decided to write it?

David R. Stukus: This is a follow-up to an article I wrote for your platform five years ago, when I got promoted to associate professor. This started when I went up for promotion to associate a few years ago. I was telling my story to our associate dean for faculty affairs, and I was telling him about my clinical work and research and quality improvement, and then I brought in social media. He said, “Hold on a second. Tell me your story again, but start with the social media stuff, because that’s really interesting.” So I did, and he said, “You know, there’s a story here, but you need to translate that into metrics that the promotion and tenure committee understands.” They’re used to just checking boxes: How many publications have you had? How many committees are you on? National presentations, things like that.

So I was able to translate my social media work into metrics that they better understood. I used information such as, based upon this number of followers on Twitter at the time, I mean, this percentile among all users, let alone physicians, and it was the top fifth percentile. So I was able to demonstrate to them, “This is the platform that I’ve developed.” Anybody out there listening or watching right now, it’s very different than just saying, “You know, I have a Twitter, and I have Instagram, and I tweet some stuff, so therefore I should be promoted.”

I was able to translate that to my invitations to be involved in committees, or, as I mentioned, the social media editor, and how I was able to help develop a podcast, which is basically medical education. So as I went up for professor, I was able to translate all this: My work on social media really is about medical education and providing evidence-based information to various groups of people, which is the same as what they’re used to hearing from people who are teaching residents and fellows in the clinic setting or doing traditional research, and how social media can reach a larger platform, and things like that.

So that’s why I wrote this article. When I first went up for associate professor, our institution didn’t have clear guidelines for those using social media, and now they do. So I was happy to be a part of a group of sort of initial people going up for promotion using social media. Now it’s a little bit more mainstream.

Kevin Pho: Now, when you talked to the promotions committee about your social media metrics and the influence you had, did you have to do a lot of educating in terms of convincing them that you did have an impact, or were they already receptive to that?

David R. Stukus: Well, by the time it gets to committee, it’s too late; that conversation doesn’t take place. But I got wonderful feedback from our own department of pediatrics before. So I put my story together in our dossier, and dossiers take hours upon hours to complete, and you have to try to put everything into traditional boxes. But then they give you narratives, and the narrative section is where I could really explain: This is what my work entails, this is what it has led to, objective measurements of my work, and things like that. So that was the story I was able to tell. Based upon feedback I received from my colleagues before it even went to the P&T committee, I did change my narrative a little bit, so that was very helpful.

Kevin Pho: So we have a lot of academic physicians already on social media. Outline a framework or strategy that they should use in case they want to use their social media experience whenever promotion comes up.

David R. Stukus: Well, first I’d say I’m glad that you’re out here. We need everybody involved in fighting the good fight. But think through how you are using social media. Can you directly tie that into any type of academic progress, whether it’s invitations to give talks at regional or national meetings, any research that you’ve done, or any mainstream media sites that have published your work? What does that look like? So really, you have to be your own best advocate when you go for promotion, and it’s hard, because a lot of us are humble and we’re just doing this because we think it’s the right thing to do. But try to think outside the box, or have other people look at your work and say, “Oh no, this is why I think it’s important.”

And then really become savvy in what your own institution is looking for in promotion and tenure. Some places, it is just checking the boxes of once you get this number of publications, or whatever it may be, and there are different tracks now for clinicians versus clinician scientists or primary researchers and things like that. So just becoming familiar with what that process looks like at your institution is extremely important as well.

Kevin Pho: Give us a sense of what kind of social media footprint is considered relevant. How many Twitter followers should you have? How many Facebook followers should you have? So give us a sense of some of the metrics that are considered relevant in the eyes of promotion committees.

David R. Stukus: Yeah, I think it’s consistency over time. I think this last round, when I went up for promotion to professor, I had about 20,000 Twitter followers and maybe 5,000 on Instagram. But then I was able to translate that to get all the talks that I’ve been invited to give, based on basically how you use social media as a medical professional, at some of the regional and national meetings. I also wrote a textbook, strategies for health care professionals using social media, so that was part of it. We have an elective curriculum at our institution that we developed, where we actually have medical students and residents rotate with us, and we train them on some of these strategies. So I was able to tie all that in together.

So I don’t know if there’s necessarily a black-and-white number, but I would say think about why you are using social media and how that translates to anything else that you do. There are online journal clubs that people can use. Are you a podcast guest, invite a guest, have your own podcast? All that stuff counts.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to David Stukus. He’s a pediatric allergist, and he wrote the KevinMD article “How I used social media to get promoted to professor.” David, taking a step back, I think now, like you said, it’s a little bit different from what it was 8-10 years ago when it comes to physician involvement in social media. It’s a much more perilous path right now, just the amount of backlash that medical experts are getting online, and a lot of physicians are going to throw their hands up and say, “You know, it’s not worth it,” right? So tell me, for those doctors who are interested in dipping their toes into social media, what’s your recommendation for that?

David R. Stukus: Think about how you want to present yourself. Do you want to be an anonymous account, for a lot of reasons, or do you want to present yourself as who you are? Cross-promote everything you do. So if your institution has a website that has your faculty profile on it, or if you have your own website or other social media platforms, give people a place to find you. Then set up a good professional profile, whether it’s Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, whatever it may be. When people do find you, what are they first seeing? So how are you presenting yourself to the world? What are your interests, what areas of your specialty, where do they lie, and what are you out here to do?

And then ultimately, as you’re putting information content out in the world, try to provide something of value, and that’s why you’ll gain followers. And if you’re consistently providing evidence-based information, think about what target audience you want to get. Is it just the general public? Is it just parents of children who have renal disease, whatever it may be? Think about your audience and then provide content that’s valuable to them. That’s how you grow your following.

And then with social media, it’s all about engagement. So if people repost your information, you can engage with them. If they ask you questions, you can try to answer them or provide them towards embedded resources, and just consistently post information. So it takes some strategies, and it takes consistent involvement over time, but anybody can really grow their own profile, and that’s the way the world is interacting these days.

Kevin Pho: So for those clinicians who have to deal with hostile pushback, for instance when it comes to vaccines, how do you advise physicians who deal with that pushback, because they don’t have a lot of training? I’ve certainly dealt with hostility on the internet during my social media journey, and I’m sure you have too. But for doctors who are just stepping in, that initial hostility can cause them to leave social media altogether. So how do you advise physicians to deal with the negativity when they’re online?

David R. Stukus: Well, each academic institution probably has their own social media experts running their accounts right now. So I would say meet with them, get their advice, and learn your institution’s own policies so you make sure you don’t violate them yourselves. It behooves all of us to be savvy about trolls and bots and botnets. It’s really interesting, Kevin: A lot of the conversation happening online is fake. It’s driven by these bots that are just designed to get people to get mad at each other, and that’s what it is. So identifying them when they occur can really help you better understand, and just ignore them.

And then after you’re doing this for a while, things change. Once you get to 10,000 followers, you get a different audience, and then 20,000 followers. So now I can easily just spot trolls and bots. I don’t even think twice about it. I just block them, I ignore them, I don’t let them into my world. Don’t give anybody out there the power to drive your emotions based on what they post on social media. Just get rid of them or ignore them. It takes a while to kind of get that comfort level, but with ongoing involvement, you sort of get used to it.

Kevin Pho: OK. My final question: What’s your take-home message you want to leave with the KevinMD audience?

David R. Stukus: We all have something of value to provide to the general public and our patients. They want to hear from us. We understand research methodology, we understand the importance of evidence, and we have perspective to offer, even if it’s our own personal journey in navigating health care. So I encourage everybody to use your voice as you feel most comfortable. It’s not for everybody, but if you want to be engaged in the fight, and it’s not always tumultuous out there, there are a lot of folks out there who truly value our input, and I encourage everybody to get involved.

Kevin Pho: David, thank you so much for sharing your time and insight, and thanks again for being on the show.

David R. Stukus: Thank you.

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