Engaging the Family Medicine Community Through Social Media

Benjamin Miller, PsyD University of Colorado, Denver

This past December at the Conference on Practice Improvement, I had the opportunity to experience one of the most significant benefits of social media—the connections. Many of us involved in social media often talk about the importance of engagement. We know that without engaging, there is not a high likelihood we will establish a relationship with the person we are connected with.

Mark Ryan, MD, has written about how his conference experience was enhanced through relationships he established through Twitter. Social media has power, and this power can be realized through the meaningful connections and ongoing engagement in a larger health care community.

And make no mistake, social media can play a significant role in family medicine.

For example,

1. Social media allows for everyone, everywhere to get involved
2. Social media allows for timely action (advocacy – take SOPA as an example)
3. Social media allows for seamless communication (eg, between providers, patients and providers)
4. Social media technologies are often the first step in creating meaningful relationships
5. Social media can be an organizer
6. Social media can disrupt.

To offer a real life health care example of the power of social media in family medicine, consider what happened when Mike Sevilla, MD, used the social media platform to raise awareness around the pending cuts for graduate medical education. Mike’s #saveGME campaign was prolific. He was able to simultaneously educate masses through Twitter and Facebook the importance of these funds and encourage them to act. He used his connections through social media to make an impact on something that was important to him as a family physician and educator.

Looking back at Mark’s post and seeing what happened with Mike’s advocacy effort, I began to understand the true power of social media—what happens when we use these social media relationships to actually connect. What happens when these online “social” connections lead to real life engagement? What happens when we meet in real life and see that behind that avatar there is a person who can make a difference—a person that we can relate to?

While many involved in social media may have made this connection some time ago, it was not until the Conference on Practice Improvement while sitting at a table with Fred Trotter (@fredtrotter), Gregg Masters (@2healthguru), Jay Lee (@familydocwonk) and Mark Ryan (@RichmondDoc) that the true feeling of connection and how we could collectively change something in health care was felt.

In your family medicine role, are you connected to the health care community that exists outside of the walls of your residency? If not, you may want to test out those waters sometime soon as you never know what meaningful connections you will make that can help shape the future of family medicine.

Everybody Oughta Make a Change

Change in the weather, change in the sea,
Come back baby, you’ll find a change in me.
Everybody, they ought to change sometime,
Because sooner or later we have to go
down in that lonesome ground.—Eric Clapton
Listen to the song at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yc954MtcJkA

Stacy Brungardt, CAE STFM Executive Director

Anybody out there love Eric Clapton? What a talent to be an artist who can entertain and give a message.

This song speaks to the value of change. At STFM, we’re working to embrace change, not just for the sake of change, but because you can either react to change or be proactive and guide change for the future you envision.

How are we doing this? By scanning the environment, asking tough questions of ourselves, talking to stakeholders outside our leadership, and taking a hard look at what we do well and what we strive to become.

For example, we’ve taken on online education. We’re not great at it yet. It takes us a long time to develop online programs, and we don’t have great processes in place for measuring their relevance to members. But we believe that STFM has to be great at providing other types of education beyond our outstanding meetings, so we’re willing to struggle through this learning.

Changing our logo is another example. After thoughtful research and conversations, we realize the logo doesn’t communicate the level of professionalism that STFM and this discipline should expect. We plan to celebrate how well our logo has served us and give it the retirement it deserves. You can expect to see some new logo ideas in February.

My New Year’s resolution for STFM is to preserve what is special about STFM and make the right changes for moving the Society forward.

Thank you for making these changes with us. It is an honor to serve you and the values you represent.

We’re Listening – STFM Logo Take Two?

Jeri Hepworth, PhD, STFM President, & Stacy Brungardt, CAE, STFM Executive Director

Thanks to all of you who have commented on our logo drafts. As we discussed at the Board meeting, your input is an important part of our vetting process.

Please allow us to clarify this process.

The current logo has served us well, without question. It is a statement to members about our values.  However, as we increase our role with others, an internally-focused logo is not useful and can be detracting. Our role in medical education, transformation of health care, and advocacy work with governmental bodies and other professional organizations requires us to move forward with communications and messaging that convey the importance of the Society. Our recent communications audit tells us that others outside our membership (and even some within) don’t see our logo as one that communicates a professional, progressive organization. We celebrate our current logo, its history, and our founders who developed it. A new logo doesn’t undermine or ignore that history.

Your comments are part of an important vetting process that includes our membership, Board, and staff. The two logos that were presented are not the final logo choices, and we have not spent extravagantly in the design process.

Here’s what we are learning from our feedback gathering process.

1. Our members read our communications. Within 24 hours, 1,522 of you had opened the email, 689 had clicked through to the web page, and 701 had clicked through to President Jeri Hepworth’s blog post. It’s good to know our messages are reaching you.
2. Our members are engaged and feel a real connection to STFM. If you weren’t connected, you obviously wouldn’t care what our logo says/looks like.
3. Your suggestions are constructive. You didn’t just say, “I don’t like it,” you explained why, and provided recommendations. Overall, we didn’t get the sense that most of you are opposed to change, per se, you just don’t like the change direction.

We wish we could sit down with all of you and have a conversation to listen, learn, and discuss. It’s clear that many of you want a family symbol in the logo, and we understand how important the family and the relationships it represents mean to STFM. But, we’ve also had members tell us that the definition of family is changing, and the three-person image is not inclusive of all families.

If we show a family, how does that image differentiate us from, say, a family services agency, a church, a community park, or a YMCA? If we add a medical symbol to the family, perhaps we’re then showing family medicine, but that seems like it might make more sense for an AAFP logo. We’re really about education, so do we add a book or an apple to the family and medical symbol? That would be one busy logo.

Then, consider the logos for organizations that have probably invested mega-bucks for logo research. How do golden arches visually represent cheap hamburgers? And what does Walmart’s star/flower say about discount retail? Wouldn’t a picture of a car be a more literal logo for Mercedes than a triangle? Do we really need to repeat what’s in our organization’s name in images?

Logo design principles say logos should be simple, relevant, scalable, and memorable. Your feedback indicates we may have missed the mark on “relevant.” So, we ask you to continue to share your comments, below. This is a process and everyone at STFM is listening closely to what you’re saying.

The Time Is Right for a New Logo

Jeri Hepworth, PhD STFM President

In October, your STFM Board of Directors asked staff to move forward with development of a new logo. I have to admit an affinity for our current logo. It’s friendly and comfortable, like STFM. It conveys our emphasis on family. However, it’s also dated and hard to read and doesn’t reflect the progressive, innovative organization STFM has become. In fact, during a recent communications audit, STFM members described the figures as play-dough people, aliens, and gingerbread men. And while we may like our 40-year-old play-dough people, they don’t communicate the level of professionalism earned by STFM and family medicine education.

Our messages to Congress point out the need for innovation in primary care training. Our new strategic plan challenges us to be the authority for innovation and research in family medicine education. Innovation is what’s driving family medicine education; our logo needs to send this same message.

I’m excited about the new doors that will be opened with the launch of a new logo. A “rebranding” campaign provides a rare opportunity to raise our profile and let our government, our colleagues, our students, and our patients know about the work we do to prepare the doctors who care for families. This is our chance to communicate that innovative family medicine education is the foundation of the health care system.

I invite you to be a part of the transformation. Shoot me an e-mail, or post a comment here to let me know what you think about the work we’re doing and the direction we’re taking. And please take a few minutes to vote on which logo you feel best represents the professionalism you and your colleagues bring to your job every day.

Too Close

Stacy Brungardt, CAE STFM Executive Director

Have you ever become so immersed in a project that you looked past items critical to the initiative’s success? My recent example of this is feedback I received on the STFM strategic plan. There’s nothing specifically wrong with the plan, but when our Foundation Trustees, who had not been involved in creating the document, reviewed the plan, the document failed to communicate the breadth, external linkages, or the importance of the initiatives the goals and strategies listed in the document.

What helpful feedback, particularly since we are in the early stages of communicating the plan to our members! To begin to address this, STFM President Jeri Hepworth, PhD, identified the larger themes that are implicit within our strategic plan. Check it out.

That brings up a key challenge for our staff and leadership. Combined, STFM and the STFM Foundation have more than 40 (yes, I counted) active programs and initiatives. We have liaisons to or are partnering with more than 20 organizations. How do we effectively keep our leaders, members, and even staff current on all these initiatives? That’s a tall order, but it’s one we are trying to tackle. Sharing expanded information on Board meeting discussions is one step among several tactics to demonstrate the important work that is happening within STFM. We’re working to make STFM communications vehicles tell more of our stories. Stay tuned.

Thank you for making the choice to be a member of STFM. It is an honor to serve you and the values you represent.