Science and Social Media:The Importance of Being Online
Christie WilcoxUniversity of Hawaii at Manoa
The Connected World
of Americans use the internet
78%
more than
The Connected WorldIn 2000…
360,985,492 users
In 2012…
2,405,510,175 users
…an increase of more than 660%!
1996 20061996 2006
250,000 sites 80,000,000 sites250,000 sites 80,000,000 sites
45 million users 1 billion+ users45 million users 1 billion+ users
User Generated Content
Collective IntelligenceCollective Intelligence
Internet = InformationWhere do you get most of your news about national and international issues?
PEW Research Center, Dec 2010
Internet = InformationWhere do you get most of your news about national and international issues?
(< 30 yrs old)
PEW Research Center, Dec 2010
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
Internet = CommunicationDo you use social media?
PEW Research Center, Feb 2012
57% of Americans say they talk to people more online
than they do in real life
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.
17% of all time spent online is spent on social
networking sites
Social Media = Internet on Steroids
15,358
tweets per second when Italy lost to Spain in the 2012 European
Championship
684,478
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
Stereotypical Scientist
Draw A Scientist
Actual drawings made by 7th grade students when asked to draw a scientist
“Can you name a living scientist?”In 2009, Research!America polled the average American to name any of
the 7.1 million or so living scientists worldwide...
“Can you name a living scientist?”…65% didn’t even try.
“Can you name a living scientist?”… another 18% got it wrong…
Albert Einstein?
Albert Einstein?
Marie Curie?Marie Curie?
“Can you name a living scientist?”… only 17% were able to correctly name one.
Albert Einstein?
Albert Einstein?Stephen
Hawking!Stephen
Hawking!
Barriers to Communication
- Rick E. Borchelt, Lynne T . Friedmann, & Earle HollandManaging the Trust Portfolio: Science Public Relations and Social Responsibility
"The scientific community needs to understand what ethical
practitioners of public relations have long known: trust is not about information; it’s about dialogue and
transparency"
1. Know your audience
2. Identify precise, key main messages
1. One size does not fit all
2. Learn from your experience
Successful Science Communication
1. Know Your Audience
NOT “Dumbing Down”
This is not your audience…. … THIS is your audience
2. Identify Precise, Key Messages
Imagine you have exactly five minutes in an elevator with an influential potential funder…
What would
youwantto
say?
2. Identify Precise, Key Messages
You need to focus on what matters
so your target audience isn’t overwhelmed.
3. One Size Does Not Fit All
3. One Size Does Not Fit All
≠ ≠≠
What works for others may not be right for you!
4. Learn From Your Experience
You have to know what you’re hoping to accomplish…
… and, most importantly, how you measure success
4. Learn From Your Experience
MessageMessage
Methods & StrategyMethods
& Strategy
MeasureMeasure
Success!Success!
FredCavazza.net
The Social Media Landscape
FredCavazza.net
Diversity of Access Points
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.
FredCavazza.net
Niche Uses
FredCavazza.net
Niche Uses
While these are useful in certain contexts, I won’t be talking about them
FredCavazza.net
The Big Ones
Digital Water Coolers
• Chat• Discuss• Share• Gossip• Debate• Connect• Keep In
Touch
FredCavazza.net
Blogs, Wikis, Websites
Content Producers & Curators
FredCavazza.net
Multimedia Creation & Curation
Creative ContentMultimedia that can supplement other content…
… or stand alone
• Videos• Podcasts• Music• Images• Artwork
FredCavazza.net
Networking
Digital Business Cards & Resumes
FredCavazza.net
It’s All About Synergy!
Online Communities
of internet users are.
of < 30 y.o. use it as their primary
news source
million links are shared every hour
Don't think you need to be on Facebook?
The Largest Social Network
Bigger IS Better
more people means more possibility to
your efforts!
• 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”
The key?be
not
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
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
Facebook Success Stories: Big Data
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 ZittrainHarvard University Law professor and Faculty Co-Director, Berkman Center for Internet and Society
1
billion new tweets every 3
days
million active users per month
200 20%
of online Americans use twitter, and the numbers keep rising
Don't think you need to be on Twitter?
5,106 Tweets Per Second
Speed and Virality: A Case Study
Speed and Virality: A Case Study
in 48 hours.in 48 hours.
Speed and Virality: A Case Study
> 80,000 > 80,000 pageviews…pageviews…
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 Deluge
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
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
RSS: Digital Subscriptions
RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a family of web feed formats used
to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and
video—in a standardized format.
The Emergence of Science Blogs
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
Major Blogging Platforms
To determine whether fish were responding to chemical cues from the seaweed or the coral, we used 60-ml syringes to pull in situ seawater from: among the filaments of C. fastigiata alone, the C. fastigiata–A. nasuta contact area with C. fastigiata still present, the C. fastigiata–A. nasuta contact area after removing C. fastigiata 20 min earlier (allowing loss of algal odor but retention of odor from the damaged coral), and the water column well away from the benthos (as a control) and then slowly released these odors into corals containing G. histrio. Olfactory cues from C. fastigiata alone generated no response by the goby. In contrast, odors from the coral-algal contact point or from the stressed coral alone caused 17 and 19, respectively, of the goby pairs in 20 separate A. nasutacolonies to move toward the odor source. Thus, the goby responds to chemical cues from the host coral, not to cues from the seaweed (Fig. 2, Υ = 559.12, df = 2, P < 0.001; G test,).
Clarity, Without Jargon
...the scientists took water samples from next to undamaged corals, corals damaged by algae while the algae was still present, corals damaged by algae after the algae was removed, and the algae alone away from coral. They exposed gobies to these water samples and watched how they responded. In less than 15 minutes, gobies were drawn to the water from damaged corals, but didn’t react to the chemical signature of algae by itself. “We found that the gobies were being “called to” the area damaged by the algae, and that the “call” was coming from the damaged coral, not from the seaweed.”
“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
115
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?”
GoalsGoals
ActionsActions
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!