Social Media

Workshop

Social Networks

Web-based services that allow individuals to:

• construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system

• articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection

• view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system

Participation

• Active users of social media produce large amounts of content every day.

• Creative commons agreements expand the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share.

Social media theorist, Clay Shirky

"Participants are different. To participate is to act as if your presence matters, as if, when you see something or hear something, your response is part of the event."

Virtual Community

• Each platform offers different functionality and has its own culture, which is largely the product of its most active participants.

• Cultures grow and change in response to how participants use the service (Facebook is social, Twitter informational, LinkedIn professional, etc.).

Social Media Benefits

• Build global networks of professionals with similar interests—unbounded by time, place or funding—for learning, feedback, collaboration and publication

• Tools to filter, share, learn, recommend, review and comment on quality

• public and private spaces for themed discussions

• Create and maintain your online identity & reputation

• virtual community/support system

Risks

• Moving findings into the public domain before they are ready

• Identity deception

• Privacy controls

Social Media Services: Communication

Blogging: Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress, Tumblr

Microblogging: Twitter, Yammer, Google Buzz

Location: Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places

Social networking : Facebook, LinkedIn, Path

Aggregators: Google Reader, Netvibes, Pageflakes, iGoogle

Blogs & microblogs

• Weblogs are sites containing the writer's or group of writers' own experiences, observations and opinions, often having images and links to other sites.

• Informal spaces where new ideas and research can be reviewed and discussed in a way similar to conventional academic conferences, but unbounded by time and place.

Influence of Blogs

• Blogging helped to create a political crisis that forced Trent Lott to step down as majority leader.

• “Rathergate” scandal: the advent of blogs' acceptance by the mass media, both as a news source and opinion and as means of applying political pressure.

Multimedia Services

Photographs: Flickr, Picasa, Instagram

Video: Viddler, Vimeo, YouTube

Live streaming: Justin.tv, Livestream, Ustream

Presentation sharing: Scribd, SlideShare, Sliderocket

Virtual worlds: OpenSim, Second Life, World of Warcraft

Collaboration Services

Conferencing: Adobe Connect, GoToMeeting, Skype

Social bookmarking: Delicious, Diigo, BibSonomy CiteULike, Mendeley

Organization/sharing: Pinterest

Social news: Digg, Reddit, Newsvine

Collaboration Services

Social bibliography: CiteULike, Mendeley

Social documents: Google Docs, Dropbox, Zoho

Project management: Bamboo, Basecamp, Huddle

Wikis: PBworks, Wetpaint, Wikia

Wikileaks

Social Bookmarking

Tools to search, organize, store, tag and share vast amounts of information and aggregate the collective recommendations of a disciplinary community.

Folksonomies

• collection of tags distinguished from the conventionally ordered, official and hierarchical taxonomies of information

• dynamic and highly flexible, created ‘as you go’ in a way that suits a particular purpose

• users can define tags specific to their needs and see how other users cross-file information under multiple tags leading to serendipitous discovery of links they would not otherwise have seen

The Gift Economy

Collaborative consumption represents a shift in behavior brought about by the emergence of social networks and real identity online.

• the idea of accessing rather than owning

• based on trust, value and spreading resources

The Trust Factor

Startup TrustCloud aims to empower the social economy by developing a portable reputation system for the Internet. The company calculates a user’s reliability, consistency and responsiveness by measuring social presence across other sites, including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Renting vs. Borrowing

While it’s called the “sharing economy,” not everything is free. Some peer-to-peer marketplaces are transaction-based, while others encourage sharing free-of-charge. It seems the exchange of money has an effect on the culture that forms around a site.

It’s all about Value

“Collaborative consumption is common sense. The majority of car owners don’t drive their car every day. WhipCar enables them to earn money during this idletime — it’s even possible to totally offset the cost of owning a car by renting it to neighbors when it’s not being used.” –marketing director of WhipCar, Jonathan Clark

Funding Services

leverage the power of social media to crowdfund creative projects or help teachers fund urgent classroom needs

• Kickstarter is a funding platform for creative projects

• DonorsChoose is an online charity connecting you to classrooms in need

Misinformation

Investigators from the University of East London Cass School of Education determined that social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter can correct misinformation about natural disasters and other catastrophes as the events unfold.

Social Media & Activism

Google executive, Wael Ghonim, anonymously launched a Facebook page commemorating Khaled Said, a 28-year-old businessman in Alexandria who was beaten to death by two policemen in June. The page became a rallying point for a campaign against police brutality, with hundreds of thousands joining. For many Egyptians, it was the first time to learn details of the extent of widespread torture in their own country.

Wael Ghonim

“I want to meet Mark Zuckerberg one day and thank him on behalf of Egypt. This revolution started on Facebook in June 2010 when hundreds of thousands of Egyptians started collaborating content. We would post a video on Facebook that would be shared by 60,000 people on their walls within a few hours. I've always said that if you want to liberate a society just give them the Internet.”

Social Media Marketing

The emphasis that social media puts on the creation of communities and the ability to collectively communicate, has some leaders in the field talking about the need to change the definition of ROI when it comes to social media.

Strategy

• Listening: involves searching for online conversations about your brand or industry using key words and phrases

• Engaging: gaining and holding the attention of consumers and prospects

• Measuring: virality, repetition, activation, engagement

Metrics

• Brand mentions/sentiment

• Activity ratio

• Engagement duration (generating links, activities, quizzes)

• Loyalty

Measurement Tools

• Klout

• Page views

• Facebook Pages Analytics (PageLever)

• Followers/Friends/Fans/Likes

• Google Analytics

Criticism

Some academics fear that the quality of public and academic discussion and debate is being undermined, and the ubiquitous use of the Internet and digital technologies like smartphones are potentially damaging to our thinking, our culture and our society in general.

Growth of Technology

• Encroachment of technology into every aspect of life has potentially damaging implications

• Technology moves faster than our educators and policy makers.

Information overload & Multitasking

• Social media have dramatically increased the amount of publicly-available information.

• Over-complexity is the enemy of efficient communication, leading to noise rather than information.

Personalization

Personalization tends to sort people into categories that may limit their options. It is a system that cocoons users, diminishing the kind of exposure to opposing viewpoints necessary for a healthy democracy.

The Echo-Chamber Online

Group polarization is the idea that group deliberation with like-minded people and insulation from alternate views creates increasing extremism.

New gate keepers must be sure that algorithms are encoded with a sense of public life and civic responsibility

The Filter Bubble

A a phenomenon in which websites use algorithms to selectively guess what information a user would like to see, based on information about the user– such as location, past click behavior and search history—that tends to exclude contrary information.

Social Search

Unlike traditional search technologies that return results based on algorithms and search history, social tools provide alternative approaches to questions based on intelligently-filtered information that helps to stimulate new questions, in the same way that a conversation with a colleague might.

Privacy

• culture of active personal and professional disclosure changes the interface between public and private spaces and misuse of data

• changing and complicated privacy policies, sign-ups and user agreements

• employer and government requests for access to personal passwords and activity

Peripheral

Some researchers believe that social media are still peripheral in research, and this leads some to argue that it is therefore not worth engaging.

Loss of an Authoritative Perspective?

Traditional publishing aims to provide a filter for quality whereas social media allow everyone to publish without constraint. This inevitably means that it is more difficult to identify which contributions are valuable or authoritative.

Work/Life Balance

Social media have the potential to extend your working day and blur the distinction between work and private life. People need to think carefully about boundaries, particularly if they are using mobile devices.

Networks for Researchers

• ResearchGate is a social networking service aimed at scientists and other researchers. It offers a range of functionality including a semantic search engine that browses academic databases.

• Graduate Junction is a social networking service aimed at postgraduates and postdoctoral researchers.

• MethodSpace is a social network service for social scientists run by the publisher Sage.

• Nature Network is a science-focused social network service run by Nature Publishing Group.

Elena Golovuskina (PhD student, Education)

“I prefer blogging, microblogging, social bookmarking, social citation like Zotero, writing tools, social & professional networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, and aggregators and dashboards like Netvibes. They are all integral in my everyday and professional life but for different reasons.”

Terry Wassall (Principal Teaching Fellow, Sociology)

“I think social media made me a better researcher because I find information a lot faster and have a network of individuals I respect that discover, filter and discuss. I have connected my research to the real world in a way that would not have been easy before and maybe not possible. For curriculum development and teaching, social media connects with real issues that interest and engage students and has helped them become student researchers in their own right with a broader and more critical take on issues.”

The Academic Research Cycle

1. Identification of knowledge

2. Creation of knowledge

3. Quality assurance of knowledge

4. Dissemination of knowledge

Identification of Knowledge

• enhances research capacity and saves time

• harnesses networks to discover and filter knowledge

• enables participation in seminars and conferences via podcasts, etc.

(literature/peer reviews)

Creation of Knowledge

• provides more effective collaboration and immediate feedback

• raises the profile of your work more rapidly than conventional academic publishing

• encourages research groups to work together across departmental, institutional and national boundaries

Quality Assurance of Knowledge

• competitive funding mechanisms

• ethical approval

• academic line-management

• peer review and peer scrutiny at conferences

• publication and post-publication review

• citation

Dissemination of knowledge

Disseminate your research more widely and effectively:

• consider the tone for publication of scholarly ideas via social media

• consider the audience (The Head of Department, your peers, your research subjects and the general public may all read what you write)

• consider the intellectual property and copyright implications of making your ideas and results available via social media?

Resources for Healthcare Providers

Interview with Lee Aase, Social Media Manager at Mayo Clinic

9 Creative Social Good Campaigns Worth Recognizing [MASHABLE AWARDS]

How To Create a Pinteresting Healthcare Social Media Strategy

References

• Alan Cann of the Department of Biology at the University of Leicester

• Konstantia Dimitriou and Tristram Hooley of the International Centre for Guidance Studies