For the past 15 years, I’ve maintained a web presence online to showcase my computer arts, source code, and designs. It’s common for software engineers, artists, and web designers to maintain a strong online presence, their own domain, their own blog, with a portfolio and downloadables, and I thought nothing of it while I was at UC Berkeley and while working in Silicon Valley. We students even had berkeley.edu web accounts on OCF (a student-run Open Computing Facility) where they gave away free webspace for our own websites.

But when I entered UC Irvine, I realized I was in a very tiny minority of students who had a website.

On the other hand, anyone can still have a web presence by maintaining Twitter feeds, Facebook pages and LinkedIn profiles. Having a web presence doesn’t necessarily equate to having one’s own dedicated domain name. If you include the aforementioned social networking services, then yes — nearly all of my med school classmates have an online presence. For starters, all but one or two students have Facebook accounts. Some of them have private Twitter accounts (mine is public). And all of my MBA classmates actively, aggressively use LinkedIn.

Should medical students have a web presence? And what kind of content should they post? Whom should they target? Friends? Family? Professional contacts? I’ve started realizing that next year, I’m graduating and finally getting the M.D. degree. Should I include patients as a target audience as well?

I’ve researched this issue and the medical profession has quite a few horror stories: just check out the Mayo Clinic’s Center for Social Media’s running blog on doctors’ and nurses’ slip-ups. There are quite a few colorful stories on people uploading OR (operating room) photographs online, posting lewd and unprofessional content, and subsequently getting fired from work or expelled from medical school. And I’m sure stories like this are common at individual university institutions (not just my own) because people aren’t aware of the policies and best practices with online communication. I’ve attended the California Medical Association’s Leadership Conference last year, and one physician mentioned how his colleague was Facebook friends with his patients. His patient sent a Facebook Message to him:

“Thanks so much for your help, doctor! I feel better now.”

In reply, the doctor posted on the patient’s Facebook Wall, “Glad your herpes is doing better.”

He didn’t know that Wall posts are different from Message posts because Wall posts show up on all Facebook Friends’ newsfeeds. His colleague is now getting sued.

On the other hand, many leading physicians who blog about technology strongly support having an online presence. Kevin Pho, MD, wrote that “doctors who are not on Facebook, Twitter, and blogs risk becoming irrelevant” because more patients rely on the web for their health information “rather than endure the inconvenience of a doctor’s office.” In fact, he gives some tips on how doctors can use Facebook responsibly. And Bryan Vartabedian, MD, a pediatric gastroenterologist, writes that med school applicants can position themselves “as a social health innovator…the potential upside outweighs risk” in his piece, “Does Twitter Belong on Your Medical School Application?”

In fact, when the mainstream media contacted UC Irvine for information about their newly-launched iPad initiative, reporters wanted not just our school of medicine’s website URL, but also the location of our Twitter feed and our Facebook page (which we didn’t have at all last year!). There’s already an expectation in the real world for institutions to maintain an online presence, and that expectation is fast becoming the norm for individuals.

So, I think I’ll continue maintaining this website.

After all, it’s critical for professionals to take control of the information that’s out there about themselves, so they can take the opportunity to frame any conversation that people may have about them. Otherwise, someone else will frame that conversation for them. For example, physicians have an opportunity to tell their story, but unfortunately, they don’t take that opportunity. As a result, plenty of websites — like Vitals.com, Healthgrades.com, and even Yelp.com — tell the story for them in the form of ratings. For most physicians that I search using Google, those are the sites that come up first. And that’s unfortunate for those physicians. They won’t get to be the first ones to tell the world about themselves.

Framing the conversation is important to me because, after all, future employers and interviewees (namely, my residency directors and senior residents) will search for me on Google and Facebook to try to sniff out who I really am (hint: I’m pretty much consistent both online and real world). Employers do this already. Residents do this to dig up dirt about their medical students; and vice versa.

And, besides, it’s fun when your friends start calling you “steve chan dot com.” :)