The Keys to Speaking Media Language Unlock Potential for Institutions and Investigators

Joyce Ohm, PhD

Social media has become a vital resource for the dissemination of oncology news. Networking websites and applications not only serve as spaces to share images and data from clinical trials and conference presentations in real time, but also act as a job recruiting vessel and community platform for physicians to come together, according to Joyce Ohm, PhD.

“There are important discussions going on social media in the scientific and medical communities and it’s almost a requirement now that you at least be there listening, if not actively engaging…You will often start with listening and then people put their toes in the water and go further and further until you’re actively engaging, but there’s nothing wrong with listening either,” Ohm said in an interview with OncLive^®. Ohm is an associate professor of oncology, Chair of Cancer Genetics and Genomics, and the John and Santa Palisano Endowed Chair of Cancer Genetics at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, New York. “These platforms have also been used not only to promote individual work, but institutions are using it to help work on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts to solicit individuals from underrepresented and minority populations for new jobs. It’s become a huge component of employment on our end.”

Peter Soscia, a marketing communications manager at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, also joined the conversation to discuss how conversations between investigators and their institutional marketing departments can benefit from these collaborative efforts. In the joint interview, Soscia explained the behind-the-scenes of managing communications and Ohm detailed the significance of Twitter’s platform as she’s seen it grow over the years.

How and when are you using social media professionally?

Ohm: I [am from] the generation of researchers who have grown up with social media. To give you context, email was invented when I was in college, so this isn’t something I have lived with my whole career and it’s something we’ve had to adapt to. In terms of social media, for me, I spend a lot of time thinking about personal vs professional social media. In a new chair role, I also have to think about our departmental and institutional role on social media and I absolutely keep those things separate.

Professionally, I primarily use Twitter. There is a revolution, for lack of any better word, in Twitter right now. I don’t know where the scientific community is going to end up; my personal feelings [are that] it’s going to stay on Twitter and that a migration back [to the platform] may occur but we’ll see.

On Twitter, I maintain a professional individual account and a department account, and I try to keep those separate. Professionally, I use Twitter almost in replacement of searching for new science. I follow experts in my field and several related fields [and] you’re seeing the science faster there than even in publications; I use it as a source of new science to curate new publications and as a way to share those with my team and throughout the department.

The primary uses are information gathering and learning about what’s going on in the outside world. The second thing that we do on social media is promote our own work and share our own ideas within the field at an individual professional level, a lab level, and a department level. We use it as promotion for new publications, promotion for new grants, [and] to share recruitment strategies, that’s the third piece of this. We’re trying to solicit either feedback or fill new positions, [social media has] replaced what I would call the traditional job advertisement type functions. We don’t really do any of that anymore [departmentally] although I’m sure at the institutional level they probably still [use traditional recruitment], but faculty advertisements [are not found] in the classifieds of Science anymore. Investigators are finding them on social media, and it has replaced a lot of the traditional functions there.

It goes both ways now which is quite fascinating; not only are institutions and labs actively soliciting open opportunities through Twitter and other social media and individuals are actively advertising when they are looking for new positions and what they’re looking for using social media as a virtual resume in some cases.

Peter: It goes a little bit beyond that, too. People are actively searching stuff out and social media almost eliminates the need to be physically in front of someone to get to know them. From our Roswell Park accounts, we see that as an institution, we are getting tagged directly, but we’ll also get tagged in tweets that Dr Ohm is tagged in, or in posts that one of her fellows is making about their work. In getting themselves out there, it’s also building relationships.

What are top priorities for social that you have in mind as a Marketing Communication Manager from an institutional perspective?

Peter: From an institutional perspective, we have different audiences to consider. We have a patient population, the community at large, news outlets, our own researchers, other cancer centers, governmental bodies, etc. There are a lot of different things to consider when you’re putting messages out. For the most part, we’ve kept Facebook and Instagram about communications for patients or the general population. [For example], posts about cancer awareness months, the blogs that we’re writing, things of that nature, we’re not putting many press releases or science-related topics on those platforms unless it’s specifically written or filmed for a general audience.

Twitter’s platform is built for that peer-to-peer relationship both from a researcher or oncologist perspective on the individual level but also a center-to-center basis too. Twitter’s more of a catch-all for us where we’re putting everything out there, but our real goal there is to make sure we’re using that as a peer-to-peer, professional network boosting, reputation boosting of what Roswell Park is offering both from our physicians’ research to innovative treatment options. Our press releases go out on Twitter, and we like to amplify what our physicians are doing and what they’re putting out [in academia].

We’re fortunate to have a strong marketing staff here at Roswell Park, but we can’t promote every single investigator’s work individually. There’s a grading guide to what published work receives an individual press release, so we always encourage individuals, whether they’re a fellow, surgeon, researcher, etc., if you’ve had work published to share it with the marketing department. We also encourage our physicians to have their own Twitter accounts, and to have their department start their own departmental pages; that way, they can add to the conversation and let us know by tagging us, and then we’ll help you amplify that as well.

Similar to Dr Ohm’s point of not growing up with social media, I’ve been at Roswell Park for almost 6 years, and we have a presentation that we give to physicians when they approach us about starting Twitter accounts. Now I’m finding that when we hire physicians they’re often already on Twitter. So it’s been a big shift just in the time that I’ve been working in health care marketing.

It's been interesting to watch platforms that were designed to be for personal interaction also work for professional interactions as well. For [Roswell Park], the shifts in platforms algorithmically due to monetary reasons and sometimes political pressures have been intriguing to see over the years. It’s a bit of a cat-and-mouse game, as it always has been with social media — figuring out a platform's algorithm, how it’s changing, and what type of content is going to perform well. That’s been the biggest challenge for us: trying to figure out what’s going to work best today and in the future.

What are some of the strategies that you have in place, either at the individual and institutional level to make sure that the word is getting out there?

Peter: I’ll use conferences as an example, but some of this applies to publications, too. The key is communicating with your marketing departments. In the past couple of years, for major conferences, we have tried to make an effort to reach out to the chairs of the departments in advance. For example, at the [64th] American Society of Hematology [Annual Meeting and Exposition], we made sure we reached out to the investigators in the Hematology/Oncology Departments who will likely be attending. It’s important because it lets us know what investigators will be presenting so that way we can get ahead of the game and not wait for the agenda to get released, and then we see the names of our physicians and follow up after the fact. In advance we can get quotes and promote the presentations as the conference is on-going, both with a formal press release and a quote card on social media. We use the conference hashtag, tag the conference, and tag the investigator if they’re on social media to amplify it.

We always encourage individuals to tag the institution when posting or tweeting at conferences, both in relation to their work and the work of colleagues, because we’re not going to be there on-site and can’t see everything that’s going on. We want our physicians and our researchers to be our eyes and ears on the ground and we can help amplify [what’s] going on at the conferences.

Ohm: That’s a big piece of it. The institution wants to promote the work at the institution, but one of the roles that we [as investigators] have to play is amplifying the attention on the institution by live tweeting these conferences. I’ve done a couple, it’s a lot of work to live tweet a whole conference and so sometimes you have to pick and choose, but it also has been one of the most effective tools that I’ve had in my entire career in terms of building visibility in a field.

It does work if you do it. We can see how the online networking has translated into real-life networking and can help build an individual laboratory or individual principal investigator’s reputation. I try and make sure that I’m tagging my department and tagging Roswell Park because it increases visibility for us.

You’ll be amazed if you live tweet a conference at how many of your colleagues will start to follow you and that’s panned out for me into real world invitations to speak, join multi-institutional research groups, and build those networks out.

What are some of the important tips in terms of follow-up on social media and staying an active member?

Ohm: I’m a work in progress in this area. I can live tweet, and promote work, I’ve built some interpersonal relationships, but I’m not the best at it. There are individuals who are better at it at Roswell Park and who are better at the follow-up and the repeat engagement elements of this. That’s the hard part, right? Sustaining these social media connections.

Those who have been more successful at that than others are often individuals who infuse a little more personality in with the professional and get more repeat-type interactions. That bit of personality or personal touch can help build those longer-sustained relationships.

Another tactic that does payoff is when individuals will tweet a tutorial on their work. You’ll see researchers who will actively tweet their publication with each figure and the major discoveries, and they’ll tag others in the field to bring into the discussion. When you do that, I think it can help.

How have your social media strategies changed?

Peter: Our strategy definitely changed during the pandemic. My biggest takeaway for someone who is either just starting out as a social media manager for a cancer center or someone who has been doing this for a long time who’s a little frustrated with how their pages are performing recently is that nothing is turnkey when it comes to social media, you must be ready to change. Something that worked last year, you can try it again, but you have to be okay with adjusting if it doesn’t work as well the next time around. Year to year, we’ve seen that in our numbers, they’ve moved up and down depending on what’s going on and what changes platforms have made.

Social media teams need to be actively engaged with the industry trends — how short posts need to be, is video working better, or is it photos? We have to stay ahead of those trends. So, when you have these big conferences or promoting big moments at your institution you need to have an inkling of what has been working for you on your page already so that you can transform your messaging to fit that.

Ohm: One of the biggest challenges of all of this is the constant evolution of the platforms and that’s ongoing as we speak. We don’t know what the next one will be or what will survive. That’s probably more challenging the older we get, but for our younger faculty, this is all kind of second nature, so they do it better than we do.

Peter: It’s been interesting these last couple years running social media. My biggest takeaway for someone reading this as a physician is to communicate with your marketing department no matter how small [or] how big something is. Send them a message when you have a publication ahead of time. Hopefully, that is already happening at your institution, but if it’s not, just send a message and say “I have this paper do you want to do anything with it?” That’s all it takes.

I would also say to anybody who’s starting a new departmental twitter account, an individual account, know that there’s a snowball effect when it comes to social media. That’s the message we present to new faculty—your first 100 likes or follows are the hardest to get. The more you do it, the more you put out there, the better and more engagement you’re going to get. Don’t get discouraged if it’s not happening right away it takes time but it’s a good time as any to get started.