Hello, everyone. Welcome to Building Your Brand, Generating Executive Presence for Personal and Professional Success in Social Media. I'm Faith Robertson. I'm a neurosurgery resident at Mass General Hospital, as well as the social media manager for Journal of Neurosurgery. For disclosures, I do work for the JNS, and some of this talk will relate to that work. So to begin, what is a brand? A brand is more than simply a name, term, design, or symbol. A brand is a recognizable feeling a product or business evokes. Simply put, brands are perceptions. And when you're talking about your own personal brand or your organization's brand, I think it's extremely useful to think of executive presence. This is a book by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, and what it does is it breaks down executive presence or branding into three different things. One is communication, how you speak. Gravitas, how you act. Or appearance, how you look. And Gravitas itself is difficult to define, but it comprises a few different principles. Confidence, poise, and grace under fire. Decisiveness, emotional intelligence. Integrity and speaking truth to power. Reputation, and vision. When you apply this to your personal brand, these are helpful points to think about. What type of content will you be posting? Written, visual, etc. What are your values, and how do you want to get them across? Who is your current audience, and what type of audience do you want to attract? What do you want to achieve with your brand? What are you most knowledgeable and passionate about? What tone of voice would you like to use? How will you best communicate your message to your target audience? And who are you? What is your position in the industry? This is something that I thought not only about my personal account, but also leadership positions, especially in the social media team of the Journal of Neurosurgery. I have an excellent team with Knife, Chris, Lior, Allie, and Joey. And together we think about what are we demonstrating as the JNS? What is our presence? What is our message? What do we want to get across? Who is our brand? And here is a small look at some of the data that can show you how powerful social media can be as a tool. JNS is the number one neurosurgical journal on Facebook. It's nearing 50,000 followers this year, which is 16,000 more than our friends over at the Red Journal. And we've also partnered with the Neurosurgical Atlas, which is gaining traction in online presence. In Twitter, we've now surpassed 20,000 followers, over 400,000 impressions per month, with 14,000 per day. And the group that we're speaking to on Twitter tends to be more academic neurosurgeons and institutions. It's a great way to disseminate literature, events, call for papers, other submissions, commissioning editorials. We've used Instagram, and now we're just surpassed 30,000 followers. And this is how we engage with a younger demographic of undergraduates, medical students, and residents. This also has an important measure for altmetrics. So altmetrics, as you know, are a new way to measure impact, as opposed to h-index or just citation score of a journal. And of the 20 altmetrics scores of articles published in neurosurgical journals from January 2019 to March 2020, JNS had overall the highest scored paper and 15 of the top 20 papers. So this is able to, again, enhance how the public perceives JNS, and really help with preferring a lot of people to our website, and is continually used to bring readership there. This publication is now on PubMed about how a specialized social media team increases online impact and presence. And we're beginning to do more work with visual abstracts and research as well. So let's go back to those three key features of executive presence. Communication, 28%, appearance, 5%, and gravitas, 67%. How do we enfold these into your personal brand or your professional brand? Updating your profile with professional photos, a short biography, career interest. This is what others will repeatedly see, and what they'll begin to associate with you over time. So if you're involved in organizations, you could add those sites or hashtags to your biography as well. Here's an example. If you're a member of Association of Women Surgeons, a surgeon at VU Medicine, you're a fourth year med student at Michigan, social media editor at the JNS, or a following hashtag like I look like a surgeon. Here are some examples of both my personal account and some of our colleagues in this excellent session today. In my bio, I use which hospital I'm affiliated with, so MGH, global surgery as a following or topic of interest, the JNS, women surgeons. I have a few things that are not linked, such as marathon running and travel or wanderers. Others, Dr. Yang here likes his acronyms, so neurosurgeon scientist human trying to MD, make a difference, at UCLA, you can love always. We have, of course, number 45 here who keeps it simple to a one-liner. You can use pictures, etc. And these are, again, personal accounts, and you can take a look at professional accounts as well. So JNS, neurosurgery, neurosurgical atlas, different institutions, University of Oklahoma, UCSF, New England Journal, and many of them have links to their websites. If it's your personal page, you can have a link to your LinkedIn or another personal website. So communication is 28% of what was described, and how do you do this personally? So begin connecting with surgical departments, surgeons, and colleagues to build your network in the field. Follow scientific journals and platforms that align with your interests and goals, and find others with similar interests to you by clicking a hashtag and seeing who the common followers or posters are for that topic. So if it's neurosurgery, clicking hashtag neurosurgery so he's posting on that. If it's cat videos or baking or skydiving, all those things, if they're your interests, whether it's just personal gratification or you want that to be part of your gravitas, then you can follow those and engage with that on social media. When you're posting, it's useful to you can post yourself or you can also retweet and retweet with comment. Here's an example from the CNS meeting last year. Joey Lindsay was showing off his surge socks and Maya Babu was, you know, celebrating that and recruiting people over to the booth to get theirs. And tagging other people in these posts allow more people to see it. It helps with dissemination. Hashtags at the meeting allow people to follow it more. Photos always gain much more traction in pictures. So if you want to get a lot of engagement with your posts, you know, not only post yourself but engage with others with all these cool tactics. You can use this to advertise your publications, your presence at meetings. It really is allowed for spontaneous meetups. You find out other people are there that you didn't know. And yeah, sometimes it's, you're even just sharing that you're watching the live webinar for neurosurgical atlas with Dr. Cohen Goodall and your cat's watching it too. And many people will see that and join in or that one or the next one. So it's really a catalyst for connection and education. Ungravitizing your presence, you want to remain a positive and professional in this. Think carefully before posting negative comments about others or controversial topics. Again, if you make a post, it can have lasting impacts irrespective of if you delete it or not. And workplace professional behavior standards may apply. You can post memes if you like, but again, keep them positive and lighthearted if possible. It's important to speak the truth and reputation and monitor your online presence. You're not the only one who's able to impact your online visibility and reputation. People may be tagging you, commenting, and that can change what you're associated with. So for just as you would Google yourself intermittently and see what others are posting and talking about, being sure about what tags you're in, what mentions you're in. If it's spam, you can report that, but it is important to occasionally take inventory on what things are being linked to your profile. Another thing on integrity is familiarize yourself with institutional policies. The majority of these will address issues already discussed here, including professionalism and HIPAA compliance. However, some of the consequences of policy violations can be significant. So it's really worth taking time to look at your institution policies on social media. Most places have their own office where you can ask questions if needed, but always avoid posting things that have the patient's name, protected health information, etc. And these seem simple, but we turn the line sometimes. Don't post anything that you don't want others to see. Slander, libel, just speaking bad of others. Ensure your content is relevant to your potential audience and aligns with your goals of having an online presence. Never post PHI. Some common questions we get are, how do I keep my personal and professional life separate? Are they separate? This is something that you'll have to decide for yourself. Some view social media platforms as almost a political profile. You are a public figure and you're looked to to be a leader. So things that you feel like you wouldn't want your colleagues or your boss to know, maybe you shouldn't be putting on online. Others have discussed the fact that you have very strong political preferences. I've seen instances where extremes were posted on someone's account because it was their personal beliefs. And then there was retaliation against the institution this person belonged to. And the institution ended up asking this individual to close their social media account. So these are things that if you do have very strong beliefs, you know that by putting it out there, this isn't just like having a conversation with someone. It is putting it out there for the world to see. And if that is your strong belief, just know that people will be able to see that. And sometimes there are serious consequences. A few years ago, there were Harvard students who were active on a Facebook group posting sexually explicit memes and messages that targeted minority groups in a private chat. These were reported and the college actually rescinded the admissions to 10 prospective members for the class of 2021. So what do you do when one of these things happens? You know, first, please try to avoid it. Be sensible in your posting. Unfortunately, there are strong beliefs that exist. But if you find yourself in one of these scenarios where you post something you wish you hadn't, you take it down immediately, contact the appropriate groups, and apologize and make a public apology if needed. And know that it's probably going to be a long way for recovery, and you may never gain the trust of those that you lost. So to summarize, there are many pearls, perils, and pitfalls of social media. It is an incredible tool that can be used for good, but also can be used for evil. So these are ways that you can establish your brand, connect with others, monitor, and build your digital presence. And I encourage you to focus on reflection for how you're communicating, how your portfolio looks, and most importantly, your gravitas, how you act. Thank you all for the opportunity to talk today, and feel free to follow at Faith C. Robertson on Twitter or the JNS.

social media

personal brand

executive presence

communication

online behavior