It seems that SM are more and more used in PH. Whether they are useful or not depends on how “usefulness” is defined and how it is measured: societal impact should be measured in addition to scholarly impact, as public health is a field that per definition should have social impact. As a lot of the evidence for the impact of SM is still anecdotal (Bik and Goldstein 2013), we echo Moorhead’s suggestion (Moorhead et al. 2013), namely that further research is needed with more robust methodologies and possibly RCTs to determine the role and effectiveness of SM for health care communication. We are excited about the results of such endeavours while at the same time we are trying to contribute to research ourselves (more on this soon). In the meantime, we are awaiting the announcement of next word of the year. Being part of SM seems to improve our chances to know what it means!
Via Giuseppe Fattori