Racing ahead
Since the new Editorial team assumed the reins here at the BJUI in January 2013, we have worked hard to embrace social media as the transformative communication technology it clearly is. While our priority is to only publish papers of the highest quality, we have also ensured that the reach and engagement of these papers are maximised using our social media platforms – Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Blogs@BJUI.
In this month’s BJUI, there are two intriguing papers that deal with this area but that deliver contrasting messages. The first from Nason et al. analyses the Twitter activity of all urology journals over a recent 6-month period. It is clear that the major journals have adopted Twitter as a preferred social media platform and it is gratifying to see how well the BJUI performs when assessed using the metrics in this paper. However, Fuoco and Leveridge report that most urologists in a Canadian survey believe that ‘social media integration into medical practice is impossible’ and attitudes towards the professional role of social media were ‘generally negative’.
Nevertheless, the power of social media in enhancing our personal and professional communication is undeniable and we at the BJUI expect more and more urologists to embrace social media in the coming years. We will continue to evolve our social media strategy to ensure the BJUI is a highly ‘social’ experience.
On another note, the BJUI is pleased to support an excellent conference taking place in Dublin in April in the memory of our previous Editor-in-Chief, Professor John Fitzpatrick, who passed away suddenly last year. The Inaugural John Fitzpatrick Irish Prostate Cancer Conference takes place from 23–24th April 2015 and has attracted an outstanding International Faculty of colleagues and friends who look forward to exploring the most challenging areas in prostate cancer in his memory. Details here https://www.globalteamwork.ie/prostate.html.
Declan G. Murphy – BJUI Associate Editor – Social Media
Department of Urology, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Twitter @declangmurphy
Social media like any innovative change will have early adopters and subsequently trend followers. Both papers mentioned are probably correct for different reasons. Whilst I agree that social media has huge potential to reach mass audiences and to enable individuals to interact with each other in ways that were previously not possible, it is also clear that social media in any format is not currently used by the urology masses in professional settings.
We aimed to utilise the potential of social media in a professional educational setting at the recent WRSE24 event. Although twitter, Blogs@BJUI Facebook and Linkedin had good coverage and twitter in particular was very active with comments during and after the event, the direct interaction between the audience (viewers) and the ‘performing’ surgeons was slightly disappointing. Less than 1% of viewers posted a question on twitter using #wrse24
With the forthcoming EAU it would be interesting to record the number of tweets about the event as a percentage of the attendees and more interesting to have a comparison year on year at the main events. There may be some interesting variations between events and over time. However, it seems likely that the numbers using social media in professional settings will continue to increase over the next several years, until it is accepted as mainstream by urologists and other medical professions.