Outreach Through Social Media

Christie WilcoxUniversity of Hawaii at Manoa

Hawaii Institute of Marine BiologyDiscover Magazine

#OSMSocial#2014OSM

@NerdyChristie

Internet = Information

University of Chicago, National Opinion Research Center, General Social Survey (2008)

Where do you get information on specific scientific issues?

The Internet is the main source of information for learning about specific scientific issues such as global climate change or biotechnology

PaywallJargon Wall

Barriers to Communication

Social Media: Tools To Break Down Barriers

Beyond ComputersJust shy of 50% of Americans own a smartphone, and two thirds of them will use it to access the internet on a daily basis.

mobile accounts for 10% of internet usage worldwide

17% of all time spent online is spent on

social networking sites

57% of Americans say they talk to people more online

than they do in real life

In 2011, social media overtook looking at porn as the number one online activity.

Social Media = Internet on Steroids

15,358

tweets per second when Italy lost to Spain in the

2012 European Championship

700,00

pieces of content shared

every minuteon Facebook

of video is uploaded to YouTube every second

1 hour

15,358

Social Media = Internet on Steroids

143,199

tweets per second when Japan aired Castle In The Sky

700,00

pieces of content shared

every minuteon Facebook

of video is uploaded to YouTube every second

1 hour

All The Kids Are Doing ItClose to 90% of 18-30 year olds have at least one social media

account…

… and almost a third will check their

networks before they even get

out of bed.

All The Kids Are Doing It

"Younger generations aren’t going to look for your company or society in print—they’re going to go directly to your Web site and then maybe your

Facebook page, and, if interested, they will follow you on Twitter.

If you’re not there, neither will they be—and you’ve lost them at a critical point of contact."

- Kea Giles Managing Editor at the Geological Society of America

“One of the things I hear most frequently about a new hire is how

disturbing it is that he doesn’t have a web presence.

danah boydAssistant Professor, NYU; Visiting Researcher, Harvard Law

Something must be wrong, right?”

Social Media: Curate Your Online Presence

Social Media: Develop New Skills

Online Communities

The Largest Social Network

of internet users are.

of < 30 y.o. use it as their primary news source

Don't think you need to be on Facebook?

BILLION pieces of content are

shared every day

72% 48% 2.5

• For an individual• Viewed by friends, subscribers• Many privacy options• No statistics• Is you• Single administrator

• For organizations, things, celebrities• Viewed by fans/anyone• Public• Provides some analytics• Can be separated from individuals• Can have many administrators

Which? Depends on what you want to use Facebook for!

Professional Networking

Keeping in Touch

Sharing Personal Opinions

Smaller Network

Privacy

Finding/Creating an Audience

Separating Work from Home

Large Fan/Interest Base

Lots of Contributors

Exposure

The Privacy Issue

“Participants who accessed the Facebook website of a teacher high in self-disclosure reported higher levels of teacher credibility

than participants who viewed a low self-disclosure Facebook website”

PERSONAL

PRIVATE

The key?be

not

Facebook Success Stories: Big Data

Facebook Success Stories: Collective Intelligence

“In less than 24 hours, this approach identified approximately 90 percent of the posted specimens to at least

the level of genus, revealed the presence of at least two likely

undescribed species, indicated two new records for Guyana and

generated several loan requests.”

— Smithsonian blog post

“We didn’t have really the time or resources to [identify the specimens] the way that we

would traditionally do it”

— Brian Sidlauskas, lead scientist

Don’t Think You Need To Be On Google +?

“Facebook is about connecting to people through who you know; and Google Plus is about connecting to people through what you know.”

— Kysimir, Soliloquy of Eloquence

Google+: Superior Sorting and Filtering

Google+: Easier to Find Interesting People

Google+: Video Integration

Google + Success Stories: Virtual Astronomy

“We pull together live feeds from multiple

telescopes around the world and broadcast

them into a live Google+ hangout…

The response has been overwhelming, as we’ve

made it possible for people without

telescopes or who have cloudy skies a chance to see the night sky from

the comfort of their home.”

— Fraser Cain, publisher of Universe Today

Microblogs

A web service that allows users to broadcast short messages to other subscribers of the service

#1 Microblogging Platform: Twitter

"The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-

baked are what make it so powerful." Jonathan Zittrain

Harvard University Law professor and Faculty Co-Director, Berkman Center for Internet and Society

billion new tweets every

two days

million active users per day

of online Americans use twitter, and the numbers keep rising

Don't think you need to be on Twitter?

2001 100 21%

Speed and Virality: A Case Study

Speed and Virality: A Case Study

150,000 pageviews in 48 hours.

Speed and Virality: A Case Study

Speed and Virality: A Case Study

Speed and Virality: A Case Study

Why Statisticians Love Twitter“The rate at which people

produce tweets about movies can accurately forecast the box office

revenue of the film, but only after it is released.

And the predictions from tweets are more accurate than any other method of

forecasting.”

— MIT Technology Review

Why Statisticians Love Twitter

“Measuring how calm the Twitterverse is on a given day can foretell the direction of changes to the Dow Jones Industrial Average three days later

with an accuracy of 86.7 percent.”

— Lisa Grossman, Wired Magazine

Twitter Predicts Citations

(in bottom and top quartile of tweets within 1 week)

Highly tweeted papers were

11x more likely to be

highly cited!

Twitter 101

A brief introduction to the Twitterverse

Filtering The DelugeThe key to success is filtering.

You have to accept the fact that you cannot, and will not, see everything.

The LingoUsername or Handle: this is your identifier, your Twitter “Name”. It is how users will identify you.

Following and Followers: your twitter stream consists of tweets from the people you choose to follow, much like an aggregation of subscriptions. Others who follow you, called your followers, have your tweets appear in their twitter stream.

Username

A running tally of a user’s

followers and who they

follow

The follow button: click to

follow this user

The LingoTweet: tweets are your method of communication via twitter, and are limited to 140 characters. Twitter automatically shrinks links of any size to 20 characters to help them fit.

Click on this symbol in the menu bar to compose a new tweet. A window will open that looks like this:

The LingoDirect Message: a direct message or “DM” is a tweet that is only viewable by the user it is sent to, like the twitter version of a text or email. You can only send DMs to people who follow you.

Favorites: Favorites allow you to like a tweet or save it for later without passing it along to your followers.

Lists: Twitter allows you to create public and private lists which can be used to filter different groups of twitter users. You can look at the stream of tweets from a list rather than your whole feed.

The lock symbol indicates a list is “private”, or only visible to youClicking here will show you all

of the tweets you have favorited

The LingoInteractions: all of the ways other tweeters interact with you. Interactions include new follows, if you’re added to a public list, mentions, retweets and favorites by others of your tweets.

Mentions: placing @ symbol before a username links a tweet to their account. Such mentions can be used to reply to a tweet, or simply draw another user’s attention.

Retweets: A special category of mentions, retweets are one of the fundamental twitter interactions. By clicking the square arrow symbol, you pass along another’s tweet in its entirety. You can also add commentary to another’s tweet by adding your two cents then pasting their tweet after the letters “RT” (retweet) or “MT” (modified tweet, if you had to alter their tweet to fit.)

Click to see your interactions

How mentions appear in tweets:

The LingoHashtag: the # symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark keywords or topics in a tweet. You can search twitter by hashtags, and thus follow the stream of tweets related to your interest without following every person that might tweet about it. For example, the conference hashtag #AAASmtg curates tweets related to the American Academy of Sciences annual meetings. When used correctly, hashtags are powerful ways of filtering through the deluge of tweets.

Search for hashtags

An example hashtag stream

“If you have, say, a thousand followers on Twitter, that’s like talking to a large

auditorium every time you tweet something about your science: a

powerful tool indeed. A direct line like that means the scientist can ensure

that their science is accurately portrayed and that they have an

opportunity to share with the public the personal passion that drives them

to science in the first place.”

Twitter Success Stories: The Power of Twitter

Twitter Success Stories: Live-Tweeting An Expedition

“We had arranged a text to donation number, and I tweeted that every dive in

PNG cost us about $5USD and that $5 donations to support the expedition could

be made by texting the number. That single tweet raised a couple of hundred

dollars.”

Joshua Drew, lead scientist

Twitter Success Stories: Online Journal Club

“I have read papers that I would never otherwise have come across and I have had the chance to discuss microbiology papers with other microbiologists which

results in different discussions to the ones that happen at the more general

journal club I attend at university.”

— Zoonotica, PhD Student

Microblogging Success Stories: Changing Stereotypes

“The project was definitely a huge success….

The site had over 100,000 unique visitors in the first month alone. The website

was initially shared on Twitter in nearly 20 different languages, and visitors have

come from all around the world.”

— Allie Wilkinson, co-founder

What is a Blog?

“Defining a science blog – heck, just defining a blog – is difficult. After all, a blog is just a piece of software that

can be used in many different ways.”

— Bora Zivkovic, Blogs Editor Scientific American

Blogs: The New Frontier “A new generation of young researchers has grown

up with an ever-present Internet. Publishers have been quicker than academics to react to this new

world, but scientists must catch up. Even if you choose not to blog, you can certainly expect that your papers and ideas will increasingly be blogged about.

So there it is — blog or be blogged.”

— Paul Knoepfler, Research Scientist & Blogger

A Brief History of Blogging

First online diary

Term “weblog” coined “Blog”

usage spreads

First platforms emerge

Bloggers become influential and trusted as news and

information sources

Blogging becomes

‘mainstream’

1994 1997 1999 2003

Google acquires Blogger

2006

Science blog networks

first emerge

Today

RSS is

born

The Emergence of Science Blogs

Major Blogging Platforms

“I view it as a fundamental part of my job as a scientist and an

educator. I use social networking to follow the

literature, to do outreach, to communicate with

colleagues, etc.”

- Jonathan Eisen

Blogging Success Stories: Enhancing The Network

Blogging Success Stories: Research & Peer Review

“Their most striking claim was that arsenic had been incorporated into the backbone of DNA, and what we can

say is that there is no arsenic in the DNA at all”

— Rosie Redfield

,

What is a Wiki?

“Wikis create a sense of shared knowledge, which may be carried across courses, curricula, or

countries.”

— Toby Coley, Wikis in Writing Education Research

Wikipedia

“Imagine a world in which every single person

on the planet is given free access to the sum of

all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.”

— Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia

Free Wiki Platforms/Software

Innovative Uses: Open Notebooks

Innovative Uses: Evolving Resources

http://socialnetworkingforscientists.wikispaces.com

Be Creative

Why Do Visuals Matter?

• More than 1/3 — 36% — of tweets are images

• Articles with images get 94% more total views

• Including a photo and a video in a press release increases

views by over 45%• Photo and video posts on Pinterest refer more traffic than

Twitter, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn and Google +

ImagesA picture is worth a thousand words.

Photograph from the mid-1870s of a pile of American bison skulls waiting to be ground for fertilizer

Five United States Marines and a United States Navy corpsman raising the American flag atop Mount Suribachi; by Joe Rosenthal

We ALREADY Visualize Science!

An animated gif of MRI images of a human headGraph of global temperatures over time

Visualizing Science: GIS

Visualizing Science

© Dave Beck & Jennifer Jacquet

Image Platforms

Video

On Facebook, videos are shared 12x

more than links & text posts combined

Video Platforms

Audio

Podcasts

Podcasts

Creative Outlets

The Best Part: Integration

Multimedia reaches out to a diverse set of learning styles and appeals to a broader audience

Most social media platforms, from twitter to blogs, allow you to

enhance text posts with images, video and more

“Facebook” For Scientists

ResearchGate

Academia.edu

86

Data And Other Products

Reference Management

Crowdsourced Funding

Bringing It All Together

Most likely, a combination of platforms and media

types will be the best way to achieve your goals.

Return on Investment

Figure 1. Monthly audience by communication methodology shown on a linear scale.Filled bars indicate traditional methodologies and unfilled bars indicate online methodologies. Data sources are as follows: 1. estimate; 2. estimate; 3. Scientific American (http://bit.ly/Z0dkaF); 4. San Diego Union-Tribune (http://bit.ly/WusyhV); 5. New York Times (http://bit.ly/14aktDi); 6. Twitter (http://tcrn.ch/146wWsy); 7. Wordpress (http://bit.ly/WVBwDa); 8. Facebook (http://bit.ly/10xUemL). Numbers reflect the potential monthly audience for each medium, and not necessarily the number of users who access a particular content item on that medium. All data accessed on January 22, 2013 and normalized to monthly views.

Social media is the definition of

“Broader Impacts”

Setting Up An Action Plan

Goals What are you trying to achieve?

ActionsWhat platforms? How often?

MetricsHow will you know if things are working? How will you judge performance?

Personal ResponsibilityWho does what? Be EXPLICIT.

Review and ReviseTrack impacts, change actions etc as necessary.

Start by asking yourself: “Why?”

Goals

Actions

Measuring Success

• Citations• Pageviews• Tweets, shares, likes• Community

involvement• Fundraising• Attendance at events• …

Measuring Success

Measuring Success

“Coming up with good metrics requires some critical thinking. Don’t rely solely on the easy analytics, like pageviews. Spend some time and mental energy to figure out what you really want… then spend some

more time and mental energy to come up with meaningful ways to determine whether you’re

getting it.”

— Matt Shipman, PIO and Science Writer

Tragedy of the Commons

Especially for groups or organizations…

be explicit about who is responsible for what

If At First You Don’t Succeed…

No one expects you to get everything right the first time.

• Use your metrics

• Experiment with new techniques and ideas

• See what works and what doesn’t

• Tweak the plan along the way

One more time…

Goals What are you trying to achieve?

ActionsWhat platforms? How often?

MetricsHow will you know if things are working? How will you judge performance?

Personal ResponsibilityWho does what? Be EXPLICIT.

Review and ReviseTrack impacts, change actions etc as necessary.

The Internet is Yours!