All right. Thank you everybody for coming here today, people that I know in real life, people that I know from social media, and fellow colleagues here at the conference. Even though my main talk is on exercise, I do want to talk about other ways that I have experienced community building through social media. For me, one of the best examples that I have of this is that at the last conference that I went to in 2016, I think, for SCCM, I knew some people. I knew people at my program. I knew people I had trained with. I knew a couple of other people. But I was fairly self-contained at that conference. I spent time with a few people who I knew very well. This time, the difference is just extraordinary. I've gone to other conferences and had similar experiences as well. Where I meet people, people come up to me all the time, and I'm so grateful for that. I go up to people that I meet on Twitter or other forms of social media and have genuine relationships, and genuine conversations with these people. Like Gretchen said, some people, even though I've only met today or yesterday, I feel like I've known them for a very, very long time. Then, it's a way to build up and support other people. Dr. Balut, in the back, in the pink, waving her hand over there, did a talk on social media a couple of days ago, and really did an outstanding job of uplifting other people in the audience, especially women. Dr. Ken, over here, known as PCCM doc on social media as well, is here to support Gretchen and I in part because of our work with Peloton Med Twitter. We were talking last night that he's probably just as much of a leader, and maybe not, if not more than the two of us in that community, and we really appreciate everything that he does. Then, several other people that I see in the audience that I know from Twitter, that I just think is really neat and special that they came to see all of us talk about resilience and community building. So, just a couple of types of social media, and Gretchen talked about this a little bit, and I'm going to try to keep my eye on the time because I know everybody's time is valuable. I agree with Gretchen that I primarily use Twitter for a couple of reasons, similar to her, so I'm not going to go into too much of that. But I migrated over to Twitter in 2016, shortly in November 2016, no apparent reason for that. But after the election, I came over to Twitter to find my advocacy home. So, I got much more involved in advocacy through the American Academy of Pediatrics and with PEDS ICU at that time, and it was an outlet to connect with other people who were doing similar things. Over the last few years, that community has grown where I have a lot of different communities. One of the ones that is very important to me is Peloton Med Twitter, which I'll talk about in a few minutes, but also the AAP Tweediatrician Group, the PEDS ICU group founded and often curated by Sapna. I'm in an impact for healthcare group that is a group of physicians and healthcare providers in Illinois who work to combat myths and disinformation about vaccines, gun violence, all kinds of things. So, promoting health literacy, promoting accurate information, and then a couple of other things. I've just recently started to use LinkedIn, and I think other people in the audience are probably better than I am about that, but I'm learning. I have not yet ventured into TikTok, although I know that some people who have have been very successful about that. Then, I've been on a couple of blogs and podcasts and things like that, which are other ways of disseminating information. If anybody wants, this is my Twitter account. For whatever reason, well, actually, I know the reason. This is my old account. For my new account, I left my Twitter profile open one day on my personal computer in my office, which always a mistake. So, my fellow put up, like Gretchen was saying, a big Taylor Swift banner, and it had a little picture of her thinking of me, and I just thought it was funny, so I left that up. But I thought that was less professional to put out at a conference, so I did not post that particular picture up here. Another way that Gretchen has already talked about, and other people have talked about, is that connecting during a pandemic has been difficult. So, there's loss of real-life connections that you see at meetings, as well as in work or in personal life. A lot of people did turn to virtual platforms to make these connections, which has been very valuable for a lot of people. Again, it's a way to spread accurate information and collaborate with peers. But I do have a couple of tips and tools before I go into the mechanics of some of the things that we've been doing. One is to be professional. So, if you are promoting yourself on Twitter in your personal account, some people have different personal and professional accounts, and you want to talk about inflammatory things, that's fine. But do be aware that people might be following you like your boss, SCCM, legislators, journalists, whoever. So, you want to make sure that you're engaging in a way that is authentic to yourself, but also the kind of person that you want to put out there. I would say that probably if you've met me in person versus on Twitter, I'm very similar in person on Twitter and on Twitter. But I do know that my old high school English teacher follows me and talks to my mom. So, I am cognizant of that. So, you want to protect your online reputation. So, I almost never swear. I don't swear very much in real life anyway, very, very rarely in tweets. I try very hard to not promote anything discriminatory, to promote everything through a lens of inclusion and equity. But if I ever misstep, I rely on people to inform me of that. There's been once or twice where people have said, hey, maybe think about this in a different light, and I'll either take it down or I'll put up there why I think that that's important. I think as you build a following too, when I first started and you have 100 followers, it makes a difference between now, the amount that I interact with people and the amount that I work with other people hasn't changed. But I am cognizant that people do sometimes follow me and I want them to know that these are not things that I stand for or these are things that I do stand for. So, always try to be polite. I am also a liberal blocker because there's some people that you cannot engage with in any meaningful way, although I do like to debate with people as well. Then be careful and check your institutional policy on social media. Just as an aside, I also run a couple of other accounts. In addition to the PelotonMed Twitter account, my own account, I run an account for our fellows in my institution, and I run the Pediatric ICU Journal Club account, although I haven't been doing a great job at that lately. But when I started the Advocate Children's Hospital Fellowship account, I spoke to the public relations team and I spoke to our CMO and a couple of other people. A couple of years later, I got an e-mail from somebody from Advocate who said, it's a spam account, can you take it down? So, I just wrote back to them and I wrote all of the positives that had happened, what we got out of that, what our fellowship institution got out of that. Not only was I able to keep it up, but they follow it, they ask for engagement with that. So, there are ways to make your case that social media can be valuable, and that's one way to continue to build community. But be careful with your sources. So, there is a lot of misinformation out there. So, if you can, if you're going to say medical things, if you're going to talk about the vaccines, or if you're going to talk about all the stuff that you see at SCCM, try to include sources or go to the person's page. That's one of the neat things I think about SCCM, is a lot of people who are presenting at these talks are also on Twitter, and you can engage with them that way, or you can go and find what they've written about their own work and engage with that. Probably the most important role though to me, is to be very diligent about how you interact with patients. I very rarely post anything about patients, specifically unless I have asked the family if I can do so, or if I have completely made up or changed the details in a way, that the parents, family, whoever, would not be able to know that that was about them. Even if you don't use identifying information, obviously if you say, oh, I had the worst day at work today, and one of the parents is following you for whatever reason, then they might know that that's about them or their child, and I would never want that to happen. So, I usually don't post things like that. That's why I don't post about things on a specific event, on a specific day. I do understand for trainees, it's exciting to be like, oh, I got my first intubation, my first chest tube, my first whatever. But think about that something that's very interesting and exciting for your day, could be the worst day of somebody else's life, and think about that when you're posting things. Then don't give specific medical advice. If Jake asks me, what do I think about X, Y, or Z? I might say something generally, but I wouldn't say, I think you should take this medicine for this many days, etc. Then we talked a little bit about your brand, and I hate this term, and I've struggled with the term influencer. SCCM is very nice, and they put out a tweet today about influencers to follow, and I'm going to be live tweeting a session later. So, they included me on there. I internally cringed a little bit to be honest, even though the intention is so nice, just because of the way the term has evolved. But it is true, we are all on social media to have relationships, and to influence other people, and it is important to do that in a positive and meaningful way. Again, just keep in mind when you're developing who you want to be online that other people are watching. Then lastly, if something is out there, it will never go away. You can have a tweet up there for five minutes and take it down, and somebody will have seen it. There's a chance somebody could have screenshotted it. So, be careful about that. If you mess up, I find it better to admit it and just move on, rather than trying to hide it. Oops. So, I use Twitter for a number of different things, for connections that I've made that I've already talked about. I do a ton of advocacy work. That's my big passion in life. I do a lot of gun violence prevention, immigration, child family health, access to care for children, all kinds of things like that, and it's been an extremely valuable tool for me to get the message out there. I've had journalists contact me about things like gun violence, and I've done interviews with that on the news, with CNN, with NBC about some of the things that I've written and posted on Twitter, or that I've posted on Twitter and then written about, so it can go either way. From a professional relationship, I've gotten grants, I've gotten all kinds of things through that, and then we talked about advocacy and how important that that's been to me as well. We talked about how to build a network. So, for me, the engagement that you do with other people when you're trying to build a community or when you want to find a community that you want to be part of is much more important than the follower account that you have. Following hashtags such as hashtag SCCM2023 is really valuable, and make sure you're following the right hashtags. So, if you're following hashtag SCCM23 versus SCCM2023, you're not going to get the same kind of content. Then you can tag people to interact with them, which is fun as well. So, this is something that I thought was fun. So, this circle of connection that you can find. I put up there all of these accounts that I run that I told you about, and then also SCCM itself. So, this is the PelotonMed Twitter account on the far side that Gretchen and I run together. You can actually see, I always think it's a little funny that Gretchen and I are kind of actually far on the edges of the engagement with that account because we run it. So, I don't interact as much with it because if I want to say something about that, then I'll put that on there. SCCM, you can see like Dr. Glockenflicken who was here yesterday, Dr. Tasker who is the PCCM editor, the incoming SCCM president, all kinds of people through that. Then I put Gretchen's up there as well, just for fun. So, I am actually here. I know I spent most of my time talking about social media, and a very small amount of time talking about exercise. But I wanted to talk about how this kind of came about. So, Nicole Salvador created the hashtag PelotonMed Twitter several years ago. When I got my Peloton bike, I'm somebody who likes to use the bike in order to be more healthy during the pandemic. I try to use it a little bit every day. If not the bike, I like to use the app. One of the things that drew me to it because I am in some ways externally motivated was the opportunity to connect with other people. So, we do rides together, we high-five each other, we talk a lot about it, and it only takes 30 seconds to post, oh, I did this really cool ride that you might like, and then see other people in that ride which is really fun. So, we created the account. I created the account shortly after I got my own bike, and one of the first people that I had interacted with was Gretchen, and I said, oh, I'm getting my bike, I don't really know what to do, and she said, well, I'm doing my, I don't remember if it was their 250th ride. She's like, why don't you join me with that tonight? So, I joined the first ride. I didn't do any of the beginner rides or any of that. I just trusted Gretchen and jumped into it, and did the first ride that night with Gretchen, and what turned out to be a lot of other people, and I just thought it was so fun, and I was really hooked on it. So, then we created again the PelotonMed account in order to connect with other people who were experiencing similar things. One of the things that we do like to talk about is that you don't have to have the bike to be part of a community like this. It's really all about supporting each other. We lift each other up, we celebrate milestones, we do rides together, we have little challenges sometimes, we don't tolerate any shaming of anybody. So, I don't block accounts very often through the PelotonMed Twitter account. Really, the only time I'll block it, and I haven't had the opportunity to do so, is if somebody says something derogatory about somebody else. Most of the time, if I think it's good intention, like they were just trying to say something like, hey, maybe your form is this or that, then I'll just send them a private message. But if they say something like, I can't believe you're spending so much money and time on a bike, well, that's a personal thing. So, if it's a direct attack towards somebody, then we don't tolerate that. If it's something that's just like, hey, that's a really expensive bike and that's dumb, I mean, I don't care about that, that's fine. But if it's against somebody, we'll say something. But we also promote use of the app. So, we know that not everybody can afford a bike, and a tread, and a rower, and all of that sort of stuff. But there are a lot of people who can use the app to create a community as well. You can do a walk at SCCM, and we, well, we didn't, but we could have created a walk that we could all do together, and you can do that on your app. And the app is not expensive. I think it's like 10 or 12 bucks a month. And a lot of places, a lot of schools, a lot of insurance companies will actually reimburse you for that. So, it's a way to get more healthy with others, and you don't have to be, your goal doesn't have to be, well, your goal can be whatever it is for you. If you just want to get healthier, if you want to lose weight, if you want to lower your blood pressure, lower your cholesterol, be less at risk for all of these different things. Like, those things are personal, and we have people of all different fitness levels, and all different interests too. Some people really love the, like, hardcore EDM type things that I do not. I like yoga classes, and I like Disney rides, and I like, Gretchen and I like Disney rides, and we like the Taylor Swift ride, and we like some of that sort of stuff. And it's okay, I don't mind, everybody else can share what they like as well. So, it's just intended to be a supportive community that way. And just in the last minute or two that I have, I do want to point out that there is not only research on education, or sorry, on exercise and wellness, but also specifically Peloton and Peloton Med Twitter have had things published about them in some of the journals. So, there is a article about building an educational Peloton, so cycling together for success during uncertain times, and the power of, like, having a community. There are people who may not have the same social support network as other people, and really do feel a sense of connection if you're meeting somebody on the bike and high-fiving them, even if you've never met them in real life. It is a way to feel connected to people. And then, these are just some other ones that I thought were kind of fun to put out there. So, they use Hospitalist, combat COVID burnout during this. This was published in the Hospitalist. There was another one specifically, the Pediatric Hospital Medicine Group has their own rides that they do, and the creators of that group published an article on the PHM site about how they engaged and built a community that way. And then, these are just a couple examples of some of the ways that we do build community on that. So, you can see, I wish I hadn't had this on dark mode in retrospect, so I do apologize for that when I took all of these pictures, but one of them is just every so often, we'll just say, like, hey, if you're new here, throw up your user word name, and we'll all follow you back on the bike, on the app, whatever. Another, I talked about the PHM Peloton community. So, they have their own account, the PHM Peloton account that they use to coordinate rides, which is really fun. And then, occasionally, we'll just do our own group Twitter ride. So, last week, we did a little ride that everybody knows it's a live ride, when they can go on, and if they feel like it, they can jump on and give a high five, or if they are like Ken, they'll pretty much give a high five to anyone. We have a little term that we like to call the fly-by high fives, and so, maybe you're not doing that particular ride, but you notice that a friend of yours is on that ride, and just to say, like, hey, I see you. It's like a little three-second thing to do, but it does make you feel seen, like, hey, somebody recognizes that I'm here doing this, and is doing the same or similar things during that time, which is really fun. And then, our Peloton Med Twitter community has grown from when I started it, where we had 100 members a couple years ago, and when Gretchen and I have been curating it, and we have almost, well, 5,600 followers now, so a pretty decent-sized community, and I would say of the people who come up to me at conferences who I know on Twitter about, well, at this conference, obviously, probably half to two-thirds are peds ICU, or people in the ICU community, but there's probably been about a third of people who've come up to me and been like, hey, we love Peloton Med, we like that, or I've approached other people and talked to them about that as well. So, it's been, in conclusion, a really valuable tool for me to get healthier. I mean, I still have a long way to go, but I've used it to lower my cholesterol. My resting pulse is in the 40s now, which may be good, maybe not. I don't know, I'm a pediatrician. No, I'm just kidding. I did med feeds. And some other things, and I still have some other fitness goals that I'm working on, so that's what I mean. We have people at all kinds of fitness levels. And then the community people, or the community building part, again, I have people who I would consider genuine friends from all of those aspects that I talked about, who I literally met a day ago, and some people who I haven't met at all. So, if you have any, I know this was a little lighter on resources, research, and that sort of stuff, but what you can do, if you have a social media account, you can follow us on Peloton Med, or my own personal Twitter account, or we are newly on Instagram, but Gabby's gonna help us with that, because I'm not Instagram savvy like Gabby is. So, lots of things to do. I put some of this sort of stuff up here, things to do for fun, and I hope to see some of you guys throughout the rest of the conference, or on the leaderboard. Thank you for your time and attention, and I'm going to turn it over to you for a little bit further delving into that. Thank you.

building community

social media

Twitter

Peloton Med Twitter

medical advocacy groups

professionalism