Building your profile as a genomics champion
Are you looking to amplify your voice online? Following a special event for Faculty members, we’ve compiled all the key points and top tips
The Genomics Education Programme’s Faculty of Genomic Medicine held its first members-only workshop of 2019 on 13 March 2019 in Birmingham, entitled Social Media and Blogging: Building your Profile.
The one-day event featured specialists in communications and blogging: Darren Caveney, co-founder and director of comms2Point0, led a session on supercharging social media activity; and Beverley Moore, founder of Writing Point, showed the group how to turn raw information into an engaging article.
Supercharged social media
Darren’s session focused on best practice, top tips and good governance in social media. He highlighted great examples of ‘killer content’, where potentially dull topics had been communicated on social media in a lively, engaging way. He also demonstrated a range of useful tools to help plan and publish posts. You can see Darren’s presentation slides here.
As part of the session, Darren ran a SWOT analysis to identify the group’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to building an effective social media profile, which is summarised here.
Darren also provided a ’10 key take-aways’ from his session, available as a handy PDF.
Guide to brilliant blogging
Beverley’s session centred on the key stages of writing, from planning, to drafting, editing and proofreading, and provided hints, tips and useful examples for each point. She looked at why science blogging is important, and highlighted examples of successful science blogs. She also looked in detail at the craft of writing, such as the importance of a good headline and layout to grab readers’ attention. You can see Beverley’s presentation slides here.
Beverley also provided a ‘Top tips’ document on blogging, including a checklist on how to write a blog article and a list of topic and headline ideas.
‘An excellent motivation’
The feedback from Faculty members who attended the event was universally positive, with comments including:
- “I really enjoyed the workshop and gained so many tips. Thank you so much for organising it.”
- “Appreciated the chance to step back from the day-to-day and take time to think about what we do and could do.”
- “The speakers were knowledgeable and interesting.”
- “Brilliant content – really applicable.”
- “An excellent motivation to start blogging.”
The Genomics Education Programme is looking at running further events for faculty members and welcomes suggestions. If you would like to put forward a topic or theme of interest and importance to fellow Faculty members, please contact the team.
About the Faculty
The Faculty of Genomic Medicine brings together genomics specialists from across the NHS, academic institutions and other healthcare systems worldwide to create a professional community.
A key aim of the faculty is to share knowledge and best practice in personalised medicine and genomics. The expectation is that faculty members act as advocates for genomics within the health service. For more details or to join the faculty, please view our faculty page.
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