Research Comms Podcast: Interview with Dr. Anna Blakney
‘My strategy is: people come for the entertainment, but stay for the science.’ - Dr. Anna Blakney on her viral TikTok videos that are teaching millions about vaccine safety.
This week’s guest is Dr. Anna Blakney, a vaccine scientist and recent viral sensation on the social media platform, TikTok, where her videos about vaccines have racked up millions of views since she started creating them just a few months ago, gaining her hundreds of thousands of followers. She uses her platform to teach people about the Covid-19 vaccines as part of an initiative called Project Halo that was set up last year by the UN and the Vaccine Confidence Project, with the goal of giving the public a better understanding of how the Covid vaccines were developed.
The below interview has been edited and condensed for the sake of space. To hear everything that Dr. Blakney had to say in the interview please check out the podcast!
Why is public engagement so important to you? And how did you get involved in this particular project?
Most of the research we do is taxpayer funded and so I think there is a duty to then return that knowledge to the taxpayer.
I find one of the most interesting things to think about is the lag between what has been proved scientifically and what people know about. For example, RNA vaccines have been worked on for actually a long time now. The first one was made around 1990, and the first one was tested clinically in 2013. But still to this day so few people know what RNA vaccines are. As scientists we're not doing a good job of getting the word out there.
I'd done a number of different outreach activities in the past and then it became clear working in the vaccine field that it was going to be a really important time to educate people.
There were a number of opportunities through imperial, and I ended up doing a Reddit AMA - for people that don't know, Reddit is just like another social media platform, they have a section called AMA, which stands for ask me anything.
As Covid-19 scientists we did a Covid-19 AMA. That was really successful, it got a lot of upvotes which meant it got to the front page of Reddit and lots of people saw it which was really good.
The next day I received a call on my office phone. I didn't even know my office phone number, so i'm always unnerved when somebody calls it. It was someone from Team Halo. They said they saw the Reddit AMA, and they told me about their organisation, which is a collaboration between the UN and The Vaccine Confidence Project.
They’re trying to get scientists on TikTok to educate people about vaccines. I had a few more conversations with them but I had never been on TikTok before, so I was skeptical whether this was a good use of my time.
Obviously, that has since changed!
Have you listened to these other episodes of the Research Comms podcast?
You say that you you hadn't been on TikTok before, was that even as a user?
No, I'm not in the target demographic of TikTok and so I hadn't experienced it at all which was one of the things I was a little bit apprehensive about when they first asked me to be a part of Team Halo.
This was a whole new social media platform that I had to figure out. What works here, what are all the little different features?
It is a huge amount of energy to start doing something like that.
Did they give you any guidance about what you should be creating, or what works on TikTok or was it left entirely up to you?
They provide a certain amount of assistance. Obviously, the point is that scientists and clinicians need to be making these videos themselves because the whole point is the authenticity, and showing people what you actually do in the lab, and answering any questions.
But they give some advice because it can be confusing when you've never done it before. Like, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.
They tell you you need to post a certain number of times per week, and informed us about really big things like the trends on TikTok.
Trends are usually dances or sounds or hashtags that go around and ‘trend’. And if you catch those trends at the right time then the algorithm will give your videos a lot more views.
That's actually one of the best strategies, just being able to be on those trends.
My strategy now is to try to spend as little time actually browsing TikTok as possible, but if I need inspiration it's actually great because you can spend five minutes looking through videos and you’ll find a new trend that you can tweak to make your own video.
Is that how you got 16 million views on one video?
Yes. My most viewed video now has almost 16 million views, which is crazy because it's, like, really dumb. But as we said, I just caught one of these TikTok trends.
The trend was a certain sound, and it was called ‘Oh no’. As the name implies it's kind of a dramatic situation, the ones that I had seen before I made my video were a kid falling down a water slide, and then in the last few frames right before the disaster it's just a picture, so it's quite a dramatic way of presenting the situation. Another one I had seen was a horse failing to jump over a fence.
So I thought, ‘How do I take this trend and make it more relatable for vaccines?’
The most dramatic thing I could think of was for a vaccine vial to spill, as it's being taken up, which is a totally non-realistic situation because actually vaccine containers have a rubber seal on them, so you can't spill them or get anything in there to contaminate it.
So it's not realistic at all but I made a video really quickly and it just caught the algorithm and the trend and now has over 16 million views, which is crazy because it's just so dumb!
What is the advantage of creating these videos and getting the algorithm to boost your views, even if some of the videos, like that one, aren’t particularly educational?
I always say my strategy is that people come for the entertainment, but stay for the science.
You have to make a certain number of more entertaining videos, then that means you get more followers, and then those followers also see your more educational videos.
That’s when you can show them why there are two doses in a vaccine or how we test the safety of a vaccine. It's never going to get 60 million views because it's just not as entertaining as one of these trends or a dance or something.
But it's a way to draw people into your account so then you have more people viewing your videos that have a real message in them.
Once you've got eyes on your content what's the engagement that you're having with people like? Presumably you don't have time to answer every comment that's on the video?
It could be my full-time job answering people's questions in the comments but what I try to do is make all my TikTok videos for the week on Sunday or Monday, and then just post them throughout the week, because it's important to have consistency for the algorithm.
Then I usually spend probably around thirty minutes a day interacting with people, and I think that's actually the value in it.
The algorithm really decides how many people see your video, but I think what people really get out of it is being able to answer a question. I’ll even ask people questions sometimes.
People will say that they’re never getting the vaccine. I’ll actually engage with them and ask why? And then we can really get into good conversations with people.
People have a whole range of reasons why they don't want to take a vaccine sometimes. They are fearful because of everything they've seen in the media about it and how fast it's been developed. Sometimes they have perfectly legitimate reasons why they shouldn't get a vaccine.
It’s interesting talking to people about that and I think the whole point of having TikTok and all these followers is that then hopefully more people see it in the comments section, and maybe it triggers something in their mind.
How do you engage with people who seem to have already made up their mind?
I'm pretty happy to chat with anybody, I try to remind myself to be really really open-minded, because you never really know where someone is coming from.
There’s a lot of conspiracy theories that go around that to scientists just seem completely irrational. But even with those people I think it's important to engage in a way where it's reminding people in a subtle way that we are relying on data-driven sources here.
Some people are more difficult than others, it’s hard with so many conspiracy theories flying around, but I just try to be unbiased and try to do my best.
Research Comms is presented by Peter Barker, director of Orinoco Communications, a digital communications and content creation agency that specialises in helping to communicate research. Find out how we’ve helped research organisations like yours by taking a look at past projects…
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