Altmetric Bluesky

Garth Sundem  00:00

Garth, welcome to this episode of the Medical Affairs Professional Society podcast series, Elevate. I’m your host, Garth Sundem, and today we’re talking about the newish social media platform BlueSky, which is quickly emerging, or maybe even overtaking X as an alternative for scientific engagement and many other things. Joining us are Mike Taylor, Head of Data Insights at Altmetric, and Carlos Areia, Senior Data Scientist at Altmetric. This sponsored episode is sponsored by Altmetric parent company Digital Science. So Mike, you’re gonna have to catch me up. BlueSky kind of came out of nowhere. I’ve been to the site. I’ve looked a little but I don’t really know the history, and I understand you’ve been there since the start. So what is it? Why have you been there?

Mike Taylor  00:58

Well, blue sky would probably be very familiar to you when you went to visit it. It looks like old school Twitter in many, many ways and better, has an equivalent platform called threads, and these blue sky has been around for a while. In fact, the the founder of Twitter was investor in blue sky. It was originally intended to be kind of an infrastructure underpinning infrastructure to Twitter. It wasn’t originally conceived it was being a competitor to Twitter x, but that’s certainly what it’s become under its new management over the last few years. Threads, in contrast, was launched 18 months ago, two years ago by meta directly as a director. Um, so the experience of blue sky, and, for that matter, the experience of threads, although we’re not going to talk about threads today, is very familiar to anybody who used x. There are followers, there are hashtags, there are links. You can share your quote you post. Um, recently, they’ve added the ability to really customize the control you have over your posts so that you can limit, you can limit interaction to your followers, that kind of thing, like all those kind of things that are so important for enterprises. Um, the tone of blue sky is very different. There’s from how x is at the moment, that there’s a lot of content creation. We’re going to talk a little bit about that. So there are lots of people posting original content on blue sky. And we’ve been looking at this data since, since October last year. We added to add it to Altmetric, and we’ve been kind of watching it, and every now and again, it jumps up a little bit. And then just over four weeks ago, I went to look at it. I was heading off to do a presentation at a an MA event in London, and I was thinking, okay, so what can what can I need? What can I talk about today? And I looked at that metric, and I looked at the volume of posts on blue sky or x, and sorry, posts on x and posts on blue sky new research. And I saw that for the first time that blue sky had more posts than x. And did I mean, what happened when I did classic mic drop at this event is that most of the people in there went, what is blue sky? And many of them came up to me afterwards and said, huh, so we’ve all been installing blue skies on our blue sky on our phones, which is probably not a bad thing. I should put in as background. I’ve been working in this space for 1516, years. I would have never thought that Twitter would have been overtaken by anything. This is something which is is this is an epoch. This is an epoch going back to COVID days we were looking at the time we were getting something like half a million posts on Twitter linked to research or trials every week, right? It’s huge numbers, like hundreds of 1000s a day. On some days, it’s dropped back a little bit since the since the since the pandemic, and up until a couple of years ago, we were still seeing sort of 60,000 ish a day, a day, 60, 70,000 so really sizable content. And what Altmetric do is that we collect anybody, any tweet that people mention, where people have mentioned, mentioning publications or trials. And obviously that’s been dropping a little bit, and we’ve been watching that with some concern. My biggest concern was that that we’re going to see fragmentation. We were going to see the end of this incredibly important venue for discussing research. Oh, interesting. I wasn’t expecting to see a clear cut migration from one platform to another, but that seems to be where we are at the. Moment. Okay, so that’s not that wasn’t the only day when blue sky beat X. It does. So probably three days out of five during the week. X always wins at the weekend. I think Carlos is going to talk about the data a little bit more. Okay, let’s,

Garth Sundem  05:18

let’s, let’s go to the data a little bit more. But that’s very interesting. You bring up the the fear or the challenge of fragmentation, I can imagine that aggregating across, you know, 15 or 20 social spaces where conversations could take place would be very difficult, but you’re saying you’re not necessarily only seeing fragmentation. You’re seeing migration to blue sky. Carlos, can you pick up the story and talk about what some of the data is showing in terms of what’s going on in blue sky right now?

Carlos Areia  05:52

Yeah, of course. So yeah, like Mike said, we’ve been monitoring this since since October, and what prodded us to, yeah, well, do a blog on it and start writing about it was like the tip over when blue sky did indeed on original posts surpass x for the first time. And since then, it’s been like a constant pattern, if we look, for example, original posts. So original content, instead of people just clicking repost, if you ignore those and it’s always linked to research the kind of posted Altmetric tracks since pretty much the end of February, blue sky has been consistently surpassing X almost every day, except, like Mike said on the weekends, if we consider the whole volume of posts related to research, if you consider the brief posts and the original everything to mind, X still as a Yeah, still has a considerably higher number than blue sky, which is quite interesting, because it seems like the creators seem to be migrating towards this new platform. But the overall activity, if you combine everything together, and then we can discuss it, if there is some automated services and bots in the mix, mostly inside x. So originality seems to be mostly migrating towards blue sky, whether the, you know, the, although I call it, the bots, the automated services and the people that just repost or just see a publication or a post about their field or therapeutic area and just repost for the new trial or the new study, seem to be still mostly Nice. So like, it’s a

Mike Taylor  07:54

little bit like a load of the actors have gone to a different theater, but the audience, a lot of the audience, is still in the original theater. There’s just no act. There’s just no actors anymore. It’s an interesting moment in time

Garth Sundem  08:07

or automated actors over, over on the stage.

Mike Taylor  08:11

It’s really hard to say with x what we see. One of the things that we see in x is that there’s still a lot of retweeting activity, any viral activity around MMR, vaccine, autism and and ivermectin and all those things. So you kind of have to take all that stuff out of the mix when you when you do the analyzes, which is why we chose to look only and look research for the digital study Republic.

Garth Sundem  08:39

So maybe there’s quality as opposed to quantity over at Blue Sky as well, where you’re seeing more posts from the creators themselves and more informed interaction over at Blue Sky, is that what you would say?

Carlos Areia  08:55

I would say there’s probably a bit more polarity in blue sky. So more discussions, more active discussions from humans, okay, whereas in x, it’s more likely the vol the old volume is bigger, but there’s probably quite more neutral in terms of, like this polarity of opinions and tagging research and discussing about it. Whereas before, we can see that in x. And now that pattern that seems to have mostly Well, this still happening in x, of course, but it seems to also been gradually migrating towards blue sky. And again, this is, and Mike knows a bit more about this. This is very field dependent as well. So this, this pattern is not, does not happen across every field. So, yeah, Mike, if you want to again, I know we’ve been digging onto the field data. Yeah, yeah.

Mike Taylor  09:47

I think this is really interesting. Because, you know, this is a little bit like the astronomer who sits in their field and they look up at the sky and they see a supernova happening for me on my career terms, this, this is. And over, we’re watching X diminishing, and we’re watching this new giant star emerging in the sky. So I’m obviously Richard metaphor today, but one of the things that we can see is that the first the people who we would normally think of as being early adopters. Now in academia, that includes computer scientists. It includes mathematicians and physicists as an example. They tend to be the first people to do anything. They’re the first people to really get engaged with Preprints, first people to get engaged with open access, first people to engage with, with Twitter and blogs. And as it turns out, they’re also the first people to leave x and join blue sky. Oh, interesting. So if we look at those fields and look at just look at original, new research posts there, you’d think X was over and done with. And this is why I think it’s a really interesting pattern beacon, if you like, of what’s going on in the future, because week on week, month on month, we can see this data changing and at the moment, if we look at bio medicine, health sciences, clinical, clinical sciences, it’s about 1/3 blue sky, two thirds x in terms of original content. So we’re not majority blue sky in our fields yet, but there’s no reason. If you look at the trials, and this is like looking at it, this is like, you know, looking looking at an experiment halfway through, I would be strongly suggesting that at some stage in the next few months, we’ll be saying, okay, that’s over and done with. We are no majority police guy everywhere. That’s my prediction that you asked that prediction, I’d say, September.

Garth Sundem  11:54

Okay, let’s, let’s put a, put a peg in September, because I think we need to re look at this, prediction has grew, but

Mike Taylor  12:04

we can have it. We can have some really interesting data for you by then, because hopefully we’ll have done our first experiments on the threads flap by then. So we’ve got this comparative study. We’re going to look at activity on X blue sky, and hopefully threads around ASCO 25 to see how those three channels perform, but, but we’ll come back to that. We’ll come back to that very, very excited about

Garth Sundem  12:28

this. So what does this mean now for medical affairs teams? And what I’m wondering is, I feel like medical affairs teams now have a strategy for X most, most do, yeah, yeah. Can you copy and paste this over to blue sky, whatever they’re

Mike Taylor  12:47

doing? And I think, I think you should do, I did a very rough and ready examination. I took the top 10 farmer this morning, yep. And I found that of the top 10, there are five accounts on blue sky, that ought to be five of the top 10. There are four out of the top 10 appear to be on threads, but neither has any content, and I’m slightly alarmed that they may or may not because they don’t have the usual disclaimers for compliance that we would expect to see. I’m slightly worried that some of those are going to be, you know, what we used to call cyber So Pete, there are some people out there in the top 10 who look as if they’re paying some attention to these platforms, but they’re not actually doing anything. And I think that we really need to as a as an industry, we need to be there, because we’re going to miss out. If we don’t, we’re going to be late to the party. Okay? So that

Garth Sundem  13:45

is looking at the use of these platforms from the user standpoint of the mothership. So you know the Pfizer’s and the Santa Fe’s, whatever they would have there, yeah. But then you know, medical affairs teams aren’t only disseminating data through the pharmaceutical med tech company main account. They’re also looking into these spaces, yeah, see who is talking about what, and what they’re saying is, is the way that medical affairs team would look at these other aspects of x, the same way that a medical affairs team would look at these aspects in in blue sky, or, Yes, either the level of APIs. I mean, can, can, can you look at Blue Sky the same way you look at x? Can you at Altmetric? Do the same studies in blue sky, you can do an X there are some differences.

Mike Taylor  14:44

And at the moment, thread says API is being developed reactively, but it’s not quite up there. So there are some technical differences, and there are some they’re not quite 100% aligned in terms of their data and. How we access the blue sky data is more complex than the way that we access x data, but that’s, that’s why we are. We are. We have, we have a team of developers whose responsibility is to to make these connections. Carla and I just sit over the top of it and run our experiments. Fortunately, we don’t have to worry too much about the infrastructure

Carlos Areia  15:21

stuff. But I think the main message here is that, yes, there is a bit of learning curve and a bit of differences, but if you’re not on it, you are missing out proportion of what’s happening and the engagement that you that one can get. So work is definitely worth Yeah,

Mike Taylor  15:43

I think it’s worthwhile saying as well that the management of blue sky and threads seem to be really responsive to need. They are listening to people we’ve seen, like I said, in the case of blue sky, they’ve recently added this much finer grained control over who can interact with your posts, which I understand some of my colleagues in MA would have been a blocker. So that’s being released. It is much more, much more compliant than it was. So I think we’ll need to be looking at these things, because I just don’t want us to miss out. I mean, just to go back to what I was saying, the value of conversations on X, being able to see what Kol is talking about, being able to see what patient advocates are engaging with and what the thing, how they’re expressing it, the networks they’re building around them, these have been vitally important pieces of data, sources of insights for US for going back five, six years now. And you know, my worry was that we were going to see this fragmented. It’s not fragmenting. It’s going to other platform, but we can catch and repeat. We need to know this already, right? We did this analysis for ASCO 25 looking at the leading DOLs and KOLs. We looked at everybody who was hashtagging, asking a 25 we extracted the key ones already. You can look on their x profiles and they give a police guy handle. So this migration is already happening, right? We, yeah, exactly, exactly, right. I mean, one of, one of the, I’m not, I’m not going to mention her name, but one of the most outstanding patient advocates, who was produced some incredibly rich content around ASCA, 2024 25 her profile says that links it to a blue sky profile.

Garth Sundem  17:32

Okay, so we’re seeing this now. We’re seeing the migration for many reasons. We’ll just put that out there. But we’re seeing. Well, just gloss over that one. Yeah, we’ll gloss over that one. And so what are you watching for now? Maybe, maybe Carlos. You know, this is going to be a rich new area for studies. I’m sure you’re already creating a data wish list. What are you watching for in the next few months? On blue sky?

Carlos Areia  18:03

So, yeah, so we’ll, we’ll keep monitoring. Yeah, we’ll continue to, we’re going to maybe focus a bit more, instead of only post to focus on profiles. We also have the demographics data that we’ve discussed here in in previous podcasts, so we will know if there are clinicians, if there are researchers, patients, nurses. So maybe, like, monitor in a more personalized way in terms of, like, what kinds of demographics are migrate, migrating and for each speed, and if they are completely leaving x, or if it’s something they’re keep, keeping on both platforms. Yeah, we’ll keep monitoring the value of x as well. Like Mike said in the beginning, x is still pretty valuable to us in terms of volume. Is still the biggest social media platform that we have available, and it’s posting research. And then we will also explore, like, yeah, the narrative, like said, like I discussed previously, the polarization of discussions. So we’re just about to release sentiment as part of automatic. So we’re going to use that kind of data to see, okay, is it like what I said a couple of minutes ago, that like x is pretty neutral in terms of of posts, of post sentiment versus blue sky, that might be a bit more polarized. So I said that because that’s what I suspect, but that’s an assumption that we will be able to prove that if, yeah, in a few months,

Garth Sundem  19:28

and also therapeutic area that I imagine as well, where, where you exactly you know, as Mike said, the physicists and and the technologists are already over on blue sky, and we’ll see if the cardiologists and oncologists show up in that space as well.

Mike Taylor  19:46

It is worth while pointing out that a third of them already in our Yeah, okay, right. So you know, this is a like, I said. This is a star exploding. This isn’t, this isn’t. Which we’re waiting, waiting for. We’re watching it happen. Okay, well, okay,

Garth Sundem  20:04

so I think the takeaway is, if your medical affairs team isn’t on blue sky yet, you’d better get there. And it’s like you can mostly take your strategy over from x into blue sky, even if the implementation has some differences over on the blue sky side of the world. But if you’re not there, get there. So thank you, Mike and Carlos for joining us today to learn more about how your company can partner with Altmetric. Visit altmetric.com. MAPS members. Don’t forget to subscribe. And we hope you enjoyed this episode of the Medical Affairs Professional Society podcast series, Elevate.