Enhancing Science Communication through Social Media

1. Communicating Science to non-
technical audiences: Maximizing
web 2.0 and other social media
tools
Dorine odongo
15th May, 2013

2. What is social media/web 2.0?
•interactive
•web-based
•people
•share information
• collaborate online
•Is primarily a social, rather than a
technological evolution.

3. The social media landscape
People, content, access, impact, participation
Social media
Approaches
Tools
Curate, publish, collaborate, network, aggregate

4. 5 ways researchers can use social media:
Building own toolkit
Social
networking
Collaborating on
the internet
Contributing to the
internet
Content
aggregation and
curation
incorporating
strategic use
in organisation

5. Social networking
Key features:
- create profiles
- find people with
common interests
- share content
•Individuals connecting
and communicating
around a common interest
using online tools
•Real time updates

6. Collaborating on the internet
• Collaboration tools refer to social media
applications that facilitate the interactions of
working groups online
• provide group members with more options for
obtaining, changing and sharing knowledge within
the group

7. • collaboration is supported by groupware tools at
four basic levels:
Content
management
collaboration
conferencing
communication

8. • Communication- e.g. D-groups and list serve
– A list serve is an e-mail based tool that allows groups of
people to be easily connected together for discussions
and information exchange
– key feature message sent to the listserv, all the listserv
subscribers automatically receive the message in their e-
mail inbox
• Conferencing e-.g. using video conferencing

9. • Collaboration – e.g. through wikis, allows members
to add, modify and re-shape each other's work.
– Example: joint proposal writing online
• Content Management- allowing members to create,
share and organize content

10. Contributing to the Internet
• Creating and publishing user -generated
content
• level of expertise required is low
• tools allow users to voice their expertise:
publish articles, include links, publish video
and images, and even small audio recordings

11. Tools
Podcasting and
online radio
• distributing audio files over the Internet
• users access by subscribing and
downloading them.
• anyone with internet access can create
their own content, and people have more
choices of types of content they can get
Blogs
• shorter and less formal than scientific
articles
• more accessible to a non-expert audience
• Dynamic-can be easily and frequently
updated
• Enables one to have visibility and a
presence on the web,

12. A large amount of information is generated on the
Internet every day
There are a number of key strategies for working
with this content using social media
Instead of users checking on the website for new
content, the content reaches the user through a
feed reader or aggregated onto a central website.
Content Aggregation and curation

13. Aggregation: consolidate information into
one place. How?
Subscribing to content from the web and
having it come to one central place
cuts down on the time to visit many sites.
–ability to subscribe to website content is
provided by a “feed”-.

14. Using feeds- a stream of information over the
Internet
Feeds enable users to have an overview of
dynamically published content drawn from many
sites in one place on your computer
Curation takes the feed and adds value by
selecting, sorting, annotating and organizing
content.

15. organizing, filtering and “making sense of”
information on the web
Sharing that content with your network
Example?
Content curation
Content curation adds value to information.

16. .
compiles news feeds from a
variety of online sources for
the user to customize and
share with others
Feedly

17. tagging and book marking
–web supports production and sharing of both
formal and informal content,
–Thus, directories increasingly complicated to
produce and maintain.
–Tagging: human indexing of material on the
Web, in order to make it easier to find and
share
–Tagging provides content with context and
meaning

18. –Social bookmarking is one of the ways in
which users on the web use tagging to
share and aggregate their knowledge.
–Social bookmarking allows users to: save
web pages address on the web; under a
personal account; tag each page with
keywords

19. Building own toolkit
–Developing a social media strategy to
incorporated strategic use in organisation
–Issues to consider:
• What are the audiences you want to reach out?
• What are your communication objectives?
• What are the key messages you want to convey?
• What are the tools you will use and for what purposes?

20. Audiences to reach: policy makers, researchers
Organisational
Objectives
Communication
Objectives
Generate evidence to
support policy and
decision making through
the research programmes
Build awareness and
publicity about our
programmes and
projects- Facilitate use
of research outputs
Building own toolkit

21. Key messages for audience:
– Training opportunities available
– Courses offered and scheduling
– Advantages of these courses
Tools:
– Social Networking sites- Building on-line communities,
connecting with stakeholders, networking,
– Image and Video sharing-posting tutorials, sharing slides

22. http://weadapt.org/placemarks/maps/view/537

23. www.scinnovent.org