Psychology Today “Social Brain” Blog

using content and storytelling to Elevate a Rising organization

Challenge

Elevating the status and credibility of The Ohio State University Center for Brain Health & Performance and raising the profile of its doctors and scientists

Background

I was doing freelance communications and marketing consulting for a boutique agency in New York City focused on health care. My work included running one of their major accounts – the Ohio State University Ross Center for Brain Health and Performance. 

We were hired by the new head of the center who came to the university as a rising superstar in the world of neuroscience. With him came new donors, other groundbreaking doctors and scientists, and a rising tide of publicity. We fueled this sudden growth by arranging high visibility partnerships, launching a major annual conference on brain health and performance, and actively promoting the research and accomplishments of its faculty in mainstream and industry media.

However, the world changed when the lead doctor took a job at another university, leaving the center without its leader and main attraction. Soon thereafter, the national conference was discontinued, partnerships evaporated, and publicity for the great work being done by its faculty began to wane.

Facing smaller budgets and a leadership gap, we had to find new ways to engage faculty and bring their work to the attention of the public and the brain health academic community.

Solution

Spending time visiting the Ohio State campus in Columbus and speaking with the doctors and scientists about their groundbreaking work was inspiring. However, from a storytelling perspective, there were several barriers.

With limited budgets, we focused on solutions that did not require substantial overhead. We also quickly discovered that we could not expect quick turnarounds from the faculty on anything they would produce, given their workload. Further, while the faculty’s work was incredible, it was often extremely technical and required detailed explanation to audiences not in their field.

I focused only on content vehicles that could tell these remarkable stories while addressing these constraints. 

Psychology Today & The Social Brain Blog

I was confident we could create high-interest content, but to achieve our objectives, we needed a distribution channel that could reach our target audience. I was particularly interested in Psychology Today.  They are the online leader in brain and mental health content with over 50 million page views monthly. Their website is content-rich and heavily trafficked both within the brain health academic community and by the general public who have a personal interest in these issues.

I pitched the editor of PsychologyToday.com on the idea of having an ongoing blog of compelling brain health and performance articles featuring the top doctors and scientists from the OSU Center for Brain Health and Performance. She was enthusiastic about the idea, and we agreed to move forward.

We got started right away and several doctors signed on, excited about this forum to share their work and raise their profile. Quickly, our ambitious content schedule proved problematic. The issue was that anything written with a doctor or scientist received the same level of scrutiny usually reserved for their academic work. This was not feasible in the context of an informative and accessible blog.

I devised a solution which dramatically improved our output, participation, readability and impact/interest of the content. Instead of working with doctors to submit articles, I The Social Brain Blog interviewed them about their work and their area of expertise. I asked them the most compelling questions readers would want to know. Instead of doctors taking days to create and revise a piece, I simply used the transcript of our interviews to grab the highlights, summarized the most interesting questions and answers, and quickly received their approval. This was the perfect format for Psychology Today, and they responded enthusiastically, posting each article prominently on their homepage as soon as we submitted.

The Grey Matters Brain Health Podcast Series

We also were searching for a storytelling device that captured the enormity of their work in an accessible way for the general public. In essence, a tool that could recreate our awe when visiting each doctor’s lab and witnessing their remarkable work. 

We decided to replicate our experience by creating a podcast series – The Grey Matters Brain Health Podcast. Each episode featured a doctor and their work. We traveled to their lab, where we interviewed them in-depth about their efforts, how it has evolved, and their latest research. We also captured the sounds of the lab and spoke with patients and colleagues.

For our clients, this was the ideal format to share their experience in depth. The simplicity of the paradigm made it seamless in its execution. No preparation was needed, only a block of time to ask them questions and to shadow them. Consequently, since the goal was to provide visibility for their work to a new audience, refocusing the storytelling from our perspective, as novices learning about innovative, life-changing research, was ideal.

Results

Both of these storytelling tools were incredibly popular. The Social Brain Blog produced well over 20 articles capturing everything from suicide, stress, sleep, meditation, and even a multi-part series on the way our brains are wired and its impact on diversity and inclusion efforts. Each new post/article received front-page placement on PsychologyToday.com.

The Grey Matters Brain Health Podcast generated so much interest among the doctors at Ohio State who did not participate in season 1, that they commissioned us to produce a second season. Season 2 included a broader range of doctors and scientists, more in-depth stories about patients, and a focus on topical issues such as mental health among student athletes.