Medfluencers: Medical professionals by day, influencers by night, these clinicians and researchers use their social media clout to educate, enlighten, and entertain their large following with the most pressing medical topics.
When scientist Morgan McSweeney entered the TikTok space, it was with the goal of correcting the unscientific COVID conversations he witnessed across social media. Known as on TikTok, the PhD in pharmaceutical sciences and immunology spends his work day researching COVID-19 therapeutics and his evenings over the past 16 months accruing a following of more than half a million people.
His 60-second-or-less videos often feature speed diction straight to camera, sometimes with graphics and text overlaid, most correcting COVID myths with a bit of humor alongside the science.
In a post from last month, he bluntly -- and with a little snark -- corrected a myth about a lipid ingredient, SM-102, found in the Moderna COVID vaccine.
"These people don't know what they are talking about," he said, before explaining that the products that are being highlighted and circulated online are SM-102 combined with chloroform, ignoring the fact that the SM-102 in the vaccine does not contain chloroform. The video ends with a shot of himself, fully dressed in the shower, fake crying.
The post received nearly 2,000 comments, most reflecting on his point: don't mix things with chloroform, and you'll be fine.
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Dr. Noc recently spoke with Serena Marshall of "Track the Vax" to explain how he leveraged TikTok's organic growth to "medfluence" the misinformation on social media.
Watch the video above and read the abridged transcript below.
Marshall: You didn't really get into the social media, science-communication side of things until COVID started. Why did you decide to go with TikTok as your medium and start "medfluencing?"
Dr. Noc: Back at the beginning of the pandemic, I was seeing all this COVID misinformation on the platform, and there was essentially no science ... so I figured maybe it was ripe for an opportunity to try to give some scientific facts.
The selection of TikTok as a platform was not a well-thought-out decision. TikTok seemed to be where the most organic growth was happening.
You can have 100 followers and your video can reach 200,000 people. That doesn't really happen on most other platforms, maybe all other platforms. As someone who didn't have a big following, I wanted the capacity to make content and [reach] more than the three people who were following me at the time.
Marshall: And your name ... why Dr. Noc?
Dr. Noc: One recommendation to me was to have a username that is short, that is easy to spell, that is easy to remember. And so TikTok, Dr. Noc. It's short ... easy to remember, easy to spell. It doesn't take up too much space down in the caption.
Marshall: On TikTok, videos are only a minute long. How do you keep science down to a minute?
Dr. Noc: A 1-minute video is not representative and you don't kind of realize that until you start trying to produce that type of content regularly. It takes a really long time. It can easily take an hour or 2 hours ... coming up with a topic people want to hear about, reading the research study, coming up with what you're going to say, and then editing it down.
It's far easier to make a 3-minute video than a 1-minute video, which it seems like wouldn't be the case, but it's definitely pretty tough to cut things down.
Marshall: What was your trick at the start of things to figure out how to distill that information down?
Dr. Noc: Largely trial and error. My background is in science, lab science, immunology, pharmaceutical sciences. Not much experience in social media or, you know, media at all. And so it was a lot of trying things out.
You have to keep putting out content. Don't be afraid of failing, because it's going to happen the vast majority of the time, at least in my case.
Marshall: Give us an example of something that failed and something that went viral.
Dr. Noc: It's often not what you would expect. You can put together a really fun video, spend a lot of time working on getting the graphics exactly right, and all these stickers that pop up that are fun, and everything like showing some data figures and you think: "God, this is gonna be a home run video." And then it totally flops.
And then you're sitting there with your phone talking into it, in like one shot, you record it in 5 minutes. And it goes super-viral or something just because it resonates as being authentic.
I think that's a big part of both TikTok and all platforms these days. People are kind of desensitized to hyper-professional productions, it just doesn't seem real.
Marshall: Do you think that is why you have such exponential growth, especially on TikTok? People do feel like they can trust you?
Dr. Noc: That may be part of it. That's why I'm also not hesitant to include some jokes or to use some funny audios to make jokes about science, or COVID, or whatever it is.
I don't try to keep it 100% like I'm presenting at a medical research conference, because that's not what people want to see. It's a careful balance between education and entertainment. If you leave out the entertainment side, your organic reach is going to be like one-tenth of what it would be.
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Marshall: You work in a lab full time. How much time would you say you spend working on creating the TikTok videos?
Dr. Noc: It's probably a good 2 or 3 hours per day, outside of work.
Marshall: Given the time commitment, especially as you just described it, do you get paid for it?
Dr. Noc: You do. Not very much. Not anywhere near enough to justify the hours worth of time. There's a function where you get paid per number of views [through TikTok].
So you can make a video with 50,000 views or 100,000 views, and you get some money, but it's not very much at all. And you can be paid through other ways, like doing brand deals and such like that. But the financial component is not a good motivator to spend 3 or 4 hours a day doing it.
Marshall: Are you being compensated in any way by pharmaceutical companies or those with an invested interest in pushing an agenda?
Dr. Noc: No. No one pays me anything to make any of the COVID information videos that I make. Even the company that I worked for, like in my actual job, has nothing to do with COVID vaccines.
In fact, we make therapeutics. So when you're thinking about treatments versus vaccines, if the vaccines work really well -- which they do -- the market for treatments is smaller. But even as someone who is involved in making treatments, that's good. Because we want society to go back to normal, and people are always going to need treatments, a small percentage of people who choose not to get vaccinated. But no, I don't make any money at all.
Marshall: What tools do you find most helpful?
Dr. Noc: Most of the tools I use are honestly analytics within the app. And I think you have to convert to a pro-type of account or something to see the analytical data in terms of watch time, and shares and likes and everything. I also have a $15 little mic here that I use and a ring light. That helps a lot.
Marshall: What would you say to somebody who wants to get started, but might be a little bit hesitant to jump into this space?
Dr. Noc: One of my favorite quotes is, don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Just start making content. It's gonna be awful at first. Probably for your first 30 videos it's going to flop. Totally flop. But eventually, you'll kind of figure out your style. Figure out what kind of information resonates with people. And what you'll find after a month or two of making content regularly is that your reach is substantially wider than whatever you can reach in real life.
I can post a video and talk to 30,000 people, 50,000 people, 200,000 people. The amount of time that would take me to do, you know, seminars with college classes or whatever, to reach 50,000 people is way longer than the 2 hours it takes me to make that video. And that doesn't happen at first. At first, you may only reach 10 people, but eventually, you sort of learn and it's a really rewarding process.
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Marshall: Were you surprised by how many people wanted to get scientific information from TikTok?
Dr. Noc: I was. In February 2020 or something, no one would follow the PhD immunologist on TikTok. A couple of people would have on Instagram. But it's sort of totally new and unexpected, which is a large part of why I didn't do social media ahead of time. There clearly was an appetite for scientific content, but nothing so much as like it is now. What I'm hoping is that this interest will translate even after the pandemic, after people get vaccinated, they'll still want to consume pro-health, medical scientific information on social media.
Marshall: So, is that your goal, to keep it going post-pandemic and maybe transition to some other topic areas?
Dr. Noc: Yeah, I definitely plan to keep posting. If it's not information about COVID vaccines, [it could be] information about how sleep affects health, or three tips to sleep better, or how pericardial fat influences your risk of heart failure and how you can reduce pericardial fat. Like these sort of "how-to" types of videos that have an actionable thing often related to your health that are also interesting.
There's no real reason I haven't started making YouTube videos and been more active on Twitter recently. Other than that I'm already kind of at a time cap.
I cross-post most of my videos, from TikTok to Instagram, . But I'd like to start making more Instagram-specific content. It would be a lot easier if I wasn't also, you know, doing actual work.
All TikTok posts from used with permission.
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