Okay. Thank you very much. I'm going to do an obligatory selfie from the stage, and then I will shortly tweet it. So my plan is to stand up just for a few moments to review some of the basics of Twitter and then sit down so we can hear more important people speak about their perspectives and what they gained and what they bring to Twitter. Obligatory conflict of interest slide, which has nothing to do with this. So just in terms of a definition of terms, you know, what is Liver Twitter? And it is the space in which we interact with each other. We disseminate our research, and it is the only social media platform at this time where you can find people on the same plane. These are researchers, clinicians, teachers, patients. They are journalists, and they work within the broader research and pharmacologic community. And for this time, there is no more efficient way that we are all connected. And for this reason, Liver Twitter is really what you make of it. For many people, it could be a way to form connections or research collaborations to promote oneself, to advocate for their specific causes or foster a community of like-minded individuals. And from these various different purposes, you form the reason why it's worthwhile for you to spend those few minutes a day to search through your feed, to learn about new insights in liver disease, to catch up on the research that's presented by our society's journals, or to just see where our friends are at and what they're talking about. What I'll talk about for a couple of minutes is a little bit about how one engages. And there are many different levels of engagement, and the easiest, the simplest one is to become a lurker, where you join, you set up an account, and maybe you don't want people to know that you're on Twitter. And in that case, you can gain most, if not all, of the benefits by simply following others and seeing what they have to say. And if you don't want anyone to know anything about you, you can maintain privacy by locking your account, thereby efficiently learning what our journals have to say, what others in our community are tweeting about, but at the same time protecting your privacy. I'll talk a little bit about who to follow and how. You may say, well, I don't know exactly where to start. Start with the ASLD. You just search ASLD. You see, the first thing that you do is you choose to follow them. And then you may want to know, well, who's the ASLD following? That might be a good place to find those who I'd like to hear from. That's what I did, and here's a good list. Hepatologists from around the world who intermittently share thoughts of value. If you are interested in presenting yourself, your opinion, your perspective, then I think it makes sense to take a few moments to craft a public persona. And I've chosen a few stellar examples from across the country. And you get a sense of what they have in common. One, they're all very good looking. And then two, they have chosen something that represents what they're interested in. Dr. Oufere never leaves the hospital, so here's MGH. And then Dr. Abbey has work-life balance, and she's always hiking in the mountains. And then Dr. Booth, he's focused on a very specific 40X magnification of our field. But, you know, they're describing who they are. Like, these are the key words that one would attach to an abstract. And this is what you want to be known for. There's a link to a professional website that can be added, and if you'd like, a location. As you start thinking about tweeting, if you take that plunge and you move beyond becoming a lurker, you choose to compose something. And here you have just over 200 characters, and that's a bit limited. So you have to work on refining your message. And there are certain ways to speak with some symbolic economy about the concepts you're trying to get across. So here's the tweet that I just sent out, where you're using a combination of emojis and other symbols as shorthand for precisely where you're at and what you're doing in order to avoid going over character counts. The Dewey decimal system of Twitter is the hashtag. It's not a great way to search for things, but it's best indexed by using any time you put a hashtag in front of something, it becomes hyperlinked. And so for the purpose of this meeting, hashtag before livermeeting19, which was agreed to prospectively, will give you all of the tweets that people have made about livermeeting. The hashtag livertwitter, which maybe it will catch on, a little bit, a little bit, will also allow you to index anything that somebody has to say about Twitter. And if you want to link to someone in particular, you put the at sign in front of their name. And searching, sometimes you need to know how they describe themselves, and that's particularly hard for my friend Dr. Nihar Parikh. But if you start typing in Nihar, actually Twitter will offer you that as an option. I actually took that picture, that selfie, I added it to the tweet down here, and that allows you to overcome some character restraints by tagging people underneath that picture. So I'm going to sit down, but first just briefly to introduce the various perspectives that we look forward to hearing from. The first person we'll hear from is someone who I hope would inspire you. Technically a trainee, but actually an expert in palliative care in the field of cirrhosis. Dr. Ufere from MGH has been a fellow for many, many years. And what she has done is she'll tell you a little bit about her experiences, but from the outside I've watched somebody interact with other experts in the field, promote her own research, and create a niche that will serve her hereafter. My partner in crime who leads Michigan Liver's Twitter account, Dr. Parikh, will talk about how to represent a division on Twitter. And many of us are part of divisions that would like someone to do that without any protected effort. And hopefully he'll give you some tips and tricks. We're joined by Dr. Adam Mikolajczyk, who actually is the lead social media for hepatology communications. I'm very interested to hear what he has to say, because his task is not only to promote the research published by that journal, but also to think about how one interacts with publishers. And finally we'll hear two talks, one from the consummate medical educator on Twitter, Dr. Tony Brew. Not quite a hepatologist, but actually the most effective teacher about liver disease on Twitter. And he'll tell you exactly how he accomplishes that. And then finally our wild card, Dr. Garcia-Sau. She is the author of my favorite moment on Twitter when I was having a discussion about stool pH in the evaluation of hepatic encephalopathy. And she chimed in with a story about Harold Kahn rounding with stool paper in his pocket. pH paper in his pocket to determine when lactulose was effective for a patient. I asked her to comment on whether Twitter is a fad. We'll see what she has to say in the end. Okay, so thank you very much for your attention. Thank you for joining us.

Liver Twitter

professional networking

liver disease community

engagement strategies

medical education on Twitter