Slides from the Aug 6, 2012 workshop Social Media for Collaboration, Outreach and Impact, at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of American in Portland, OR. Thanks to all contributors near and far with the #esasocial hashtag!
2. Who are you and what do you
want?
• Do you tweet? Facebook? Blog?
• Who’s proficient? Somewhat experienced but looking to
be more effective? Just trying to figure out whether and
what to try?
• Are you students? Postdocs? Pre-tenure? Tenured?
Other?
3. Who we are
• Jacquelyn Gill (@JacquelynGill)
• Sandra Chung (@sandramchung)
4. Workshop goals
• See what you might be missing
• Learn how to have more meaningful and satisfying
experiences with social media
• Get your questions about social media answered
• Meet the #ESA2012 community
5. Workshop hashtag: #esasocial
• Experienced Twitter users: What do you wish you knew
about Twitter or blogging before you got started? Advice
for newbies?
• Newbies: say hello! Ask a question. Try something new.
6. Why social media?
• Keep on top of developments in your field & others
• Get help with your science
• Build your online presence
• Join the online conversation about science
• Science journalists, educators, non-scientists
• Online conversation translates to traditional media, nonscientific
audiences
• Data don’t speak for themselves. They need you to give them
meaning.
• Broader impacts!
• @NerdyChristie:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/2011/09/27/social-med
7. Common misconceptions about social
media
• It’s only for young people.
• Everybody’s talking and nobody’s listening.
• You have to be a power user to be successful.
• You have to give up all of your privacy.
• Your productivity will go down.
9. So You’re Going Social
•Explore. Don’t be afraid to try new things, make mistakes,
or ask for help.
•Be strategic. What are your goals?
10. Some basic rules for social media
success
• Be personal
• Be generous
• Give credit where it’s due
11. How to promote your work using social
media
• Build an audience by building a community
• Build a community by engaging with the community
• Share your work with the community
• The community will share your work with others (and
maybe even contribute to your work)
12. How Twitter works
• Text messages on the Internet, with some powerful
enhancements that the ecosystem evolved to use in many
clever ways:
• Mentions get someone’s attention and/or give them credit
• Shortlinks (bit.ly, ow.ly, t.co, point to more content in the form of
images and websites
• Hashtags (e.g. #ESA2012) make it possible to follow an event or
topic using a simple search
• Retweets (RTs or MTs) are a quick way to spread the word or
interesting content
15. How Twitter works Go to twitter.com/search
or twitterfall.com and
search for #esa2012 –
that’s the LT (live tweet)
of the conference, in
reverse chronological
order
17. How to get started on Twitter
• http://www.twitip.com/10-easy-steps-for-twitter-beginners/
• Choose a username
• Realname versus pseudonym
• Pseudonym reduces risk
• Realname increases credibility
• Start by listening and learning
• Experiment with a personal account before you go pro
18. How to get started on Twitter
• http://mashable.com/guidebook/twitter/
• Find people and hashtags to follow
• Twitter directories
• Search for someone on Twitter (make yourself easy to find!)
• See who they’re following
• Search for hashtags to see what comes up
• #ecology is not very fruitful …
• students, try #phd and #phdchat
• Watch for Follow Friday (#FF)
• Look for good Twitter lists
21. How to build a Twitter following
• Share good stuff, other people’s as well as your own
• Use event hashtags in a timely manner
• Participate in an LT
• Start or get on a good Twitter list
• Embed your Twitter feed in your blog or website (see
PLOS!)
22. Why blog?
• Keep an open lab notebook
• @cboettig or carlboettiger.info/lab-notebook.html
• Share the process of science
• Rosie Redfied at rrresearch.fieldofscience.com
• Gain exposure
• Solicit peer review/input
• Dare to cover science better than traditional media outlets
• @edyong209 or Not Exactly Rocket Science
• Generate discussion
• @DynamicEcology or dynamicecology.wordpress.com
23. How to get started blogging
http://learn.wordpress.com
•Read
• http://researchblogging.org/
• http://blogs.scientificamerican.com
• Ecology and big data blogroll: http://www.neonnotes.org/blogroll
•Comment
•Blog
•Engage and promote
24. How to build a blog following
• Leverage a Twitter feed and a Facebook following to
promote your posts
• Look for opportunities to write guest posts in established
blogs
• Include your blog URL in your signatures and profiles
• Link to blog posts you like (pingbacks!)
• Comment on other people’s posts
• Feature other people’s work on your blogs
• Join a blog network
25. Advanced social media use
• Once you’ve built an audience, you can
• Crowdsource answers and solutions, funding, entire books
• Promote other users
• And much, much more!
26. Evaluating how you’re doing (data!)
• Twitter
• # of followers/mentions/retweets
• Bit.ly stats
• tweetstats
• Klout, PeerIndex
• Blog
• Comments
• Google Analytics/Jetpack stats
• Social media shares
• Linkbacks
• New connections and opportunities
27. Workshop hashtag: #esasocial
• Experienced Twitter users: What do you wish you knew
about Twitter or blogging before you got started? Advice
for newbies?
• Newbies: say hello! Ask a question. Try something new
before you go to #ESA2012
• Feedback!
28. Other Resources
• Delicious stack on scientists and social
mediahttp://delicious.com/stacks/view/CCtxAA
• Twitter tools
• TweetDeck and HootSuite
• Social networking for scientists wiki
http://socialnetworkingforscientists.wikispaces.com/Twitter
• Us! Tweetup!
This is important information to help us tailor the workshop
We have different reasons for using social media and different approaches, and we get different things out of them.
We don’t know everything! But we’re willing to share everything we’ve learned and figured out. Some of you may even have been doing this longer than we have. Feel free to chime in. And if we’re going too fast or skipping explanations you need, feel free to ask questions.
Twitter is an extremely succinct and timely source of information. You may find it a valuable way to track discussion and news about many different topics. You may also find a lot of knowledgeable and helpful people you can connect with online and in person, and by having your own presence in social media you make yourself and your knowledge more accessible to others. You make an impact outside of your own immediate professional circle. Don’t forget, social media is outreach, and you need to do outreach to meet NSF broader impacts requirements. But far from just being a requirement, outreach is necessary to 1) get positive and accurate messages about science out to the world, to the people who pay us to do science
People of all ages are on Twitter. It’s particularly popular among 25 to 40 year olds. For most social media users, listening and building relationships is a key to success. We’ll talk about broadcasting versus conversing. The amount of information quickly gets overwhelming. Smart Twitter users filter their feed to find what they’re looking for. You don’t have to tweet or post every day and you don’t have to have a million followers or readers to get something out of Twitter. You can get a lot out of social media just by listening. Social media platforms give you some control over who sees your tweets and blog posts. And you are always in charge of what you share on the Internet. But keep in mind that while anonymity and restricting your audience reduces risk, they can also reduce your reach. Social media use can get out of control. But it can also help you get work done by making it possible for you to draw on the collective knowledge and energy of the social media sphere.
This beautiful and overwhelmingly detailed infographic represents an enormous ecosystem of social media tools and users that intersect in many different ways. This workshop will focus on blogging and Twitter, which we have found to be some of the most useful and commonly deployed tools among the online science community, and on their uses for collaboration, outreach and impact, which are key functions in said community. You’re welcome to ask questions about other social media platforms and tools, though we may end up crowdsourcing the answers.
Do you want to organize a movement? Get some help with R code? Spread the gospel of science? Find more people who nerd out about the same things you nerd out about? Get a bunch of high school kids to notice birds? Crowdfund your research? There are a million ways to use social media that we won’t even touch upon. It’s an incredibly creative space.
Whatever your goals are with social media, these three rules apply: Be personal. You’re representing yourself and joining a larger discussion with your own voice. In a forum where anyone can broadcast anything, candidness and realness earns you credibility. Be generous. The online science community is a giving and supportive network. We help each other succeed by listening, contributing, and pointing to each other’s good work. When it’s your turn to put forth a story or ask for help, the community and connections you’ve built will give back to you. Give credit where it’s due, for the same reason that we cite sources and list references in scientific publications. The whole ecosystem breaks down without some way of tracing good and bad and true and false work back to its source. We’ll get to specific examples of this in a bit.
You need to invest in other people’s ideas and work before they’ll invest in sharing yours.
With Twitter, you must be short and sharp. Next are two examples of some key uses of Twitter.
Example 1: a broadcast leads to a conversation. Chris Kopp is following NEON, meaning he subscribes to NEON’s tweets. Mentions are underline in red, shortened links in blue. Links are automatically shortened in applications like TweetDeck and HootSuite. Note that the NYTimes link shortens to nyti.ms, which tells you that the link is legitimately a NYTimes link. Ow.ly is the link shortener built into HootSuite. Some link shorteners are shorter but give you no tracking stats (which are good for evaluation purposes, especially if you’re at an institution where you have to quantify the success of all your communication and outreach efforts).
Example 1 continued: The conversation broadens as the mention of High Country News alerts them to the discussion.
Example 2: Conference hashtag. Hashtags tie together tweets on a topic; people can search for them and get real-time Following a live tweet is a great way to get your feet wet on Twitter. IF you’re signed up for Twitter, you can start following a live tweet by searching for #esa2012 right now, either right at twitter.com/search, or using tools like TweetDeck or HootSuite to save a search and watch all the tagged tweets. You can find interesting people to follow this way, too. Hashtags are great for breaking news, too. We got news about the #Highparkfire on Twitter before it hit the news websites. @LizNeeley once said in a workshop at CSU: “Live tweeting really sharpens your ear for sound bites.”
A word cloud of the first day of tweets. I hope Edmund does them for each day and for all of ESA.
This is a nice, simple tutorial. You start by signing up for Twitter and listening for a while. You find people and topics to follow, then when you’re comfortable you start participating in the conversation and increasingly employing hashtags and mentions most effectively.
Other ideas?
NEON scientists list
Miriam’s ESA2012 list
Other ideas?
Maybe you’re not so keen on the short sharp tweets and want more space to expound or muse. Keep in mind that a Twitter feed is an excellent complement to a blog.
You build a blog following the same way you build a Twitter following: by being personal and generous and giving credit where it’s due.
If you’re a data nerd, tracking your own social media portfolio will keep you busy.
There’s a whole community of artists, journalists, researchers, book writers, photographers, who share an incredible passion for sharing science and stories about science online and face-to-face. If you want to see a hoppin’ conference LT, check out #scio13 next January.