Extending The Conversation - Page 3

In fact, you might consider having a content-oriented Facebook, rather than one focused on you, the professional. For example, instead of starting an individual page about yourself, host a group page on cognitive psychotherapy. You'll want to invite as many appropriate friends as you can think of to "like" your page, which gives it a thumbs-up. Facebook makes it easy to do this by accessing your e-mail accounts and sending mass invitations to anyone you indicate. In addition, it's easy to use Facebook's searchbox to find pages that interest you or others. So anyone typing "cognitive" in the box will find your cognitive psychotherapy page listed. Whether you have a group page or a personal Facebook page for professional purposes, you'll need to monitor it on a daily basis to block offenders and delete anything unprofessional.

Personally, I prefer to use Facebook as a source of information rather than as a professional site. The large clinical associations mostly have wonderful presences here, offering knowledge and networking opportunities.

Facebook groups to check out include:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=10886145903—National Association of Social Workers

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=51180825307—American Counseling Association

http://www.facebook.com/AmericanPsychcologicalAssociation?ref=ts—American Psychological Association

YouTube

Since younger people (anyone under 30) are much more videocentric and would rather watch a two- to five-minute online video than engage in the torture of reading a paragraph of text, YouTube is the channel you want to use to connect to Gen Y worldwide. Ten percent of all Internet traffic goes to YouTube and, in May 2010, it hit the 2 billion-viewer mark. It's the second largest search engine after Google.

So first and foremost, YouTube is a kind of video Google—there's almost nothing you can't find there. Using the YouTube search window, you can discover videos on every clinical topic imaginable, from couples therapy to psychodynamic therapy, CBT, Buddhist psychotherapy, psychodrama, EMDR, suicide prevention, live case consultations, and on and on. One caveat: the quality of the videos range from terrible to outstanding, with everything in between.

YouTube is a great site for uploading video recordings of your speaking events or panel sessions. If people are looking for presenters and you have an easily found and distributed recording of your presentations, you're much likelier to be hired. You can import a video of yourself from YouTube to your own website, or have a link from your website to YouTube very inexpensively.

If you decide to create your own video, remember that in video, as in all social media, content is king, and shorter is better. Think five minutes of material, tops, with two minutes preferred. If you have more to say, create a series of five-minute videos. Believe it or not, you can get quite a lot of information conveyed in a few minutes of cogent, well-organized, engagingly presented video. Paradoxically, production values are relatively unimportant. Certainly you want your video and audio to be clear, but you can produce a high-quality product with a $200 Flip HD video cam.

Videos to check out include:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7cwa5X6zgk—Psychotherapy with the Unmotivated Patient, training video with Erving Polster

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpW2Sa5lAOM—My Psychotherapy Practice: Etan Ben-Ami, L.C.S.W.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9j1EQrd13U—Trauma, Suffering & Mindfulness—conference presentation by John Briere, Ph.D.

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One final thought: a major multinational corporation like Starbucks uses 11 different social media channels and employs six staff on their social media team to make it happen. As individual practitioners, most of us can manage at most two social media channels competently, unless we hire others to help us.

But even though all this sounds foreign and somehow not your style, at least explore these possibilities. Once you start looking at blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, I think you'll be enthralled in spite of yourself. Let yourself play with these new social media. Follow up the blogs you like. Get a Twitter account and start tweeting just to see what happens. Check into Facebook and start typing in search terms on YouTube for topics that interest you. Once you start investigating the Web 2.0, you may be surprised to see how many of your colleagues are already there!

Marina London, M.S.S.W., is the author of iWebU, a weekly blog about the Internet and new media for technophobic mental health professionals. Contact: marina@iwebuconsulting.com. Tell us what you think about this article by e-mail at letters@psychnetworker.org, or at www.psychotherapynetworker.org. Log in and you'll find the comment section on every page of the online Magazine section.

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