My presentation at Ocean Sciences 2014 in Honolulu, HI on how scientists can use social media for outreach and professional development. The internet is yours! #OSMSocial #2014OSM

1. Outreach Through Social Media
Christie Wilcox
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology
Discover Magazine

2. #OSMSocial
#2014OSM
@NerdyChristie

3. Internet = Information
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
University of Chicago, National Opinion Research
Center, General Social Survey (2008)

4. Barriers to Communication

5. Social Media: Tools To Break Down Barriers

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

7. 17% of all time spent
online is spent on
social networking sites

8. 57% of Americans say they
talk to people more online
than they do in real life

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

10. Social Media = Internet on Steroids
700,00
1 hour
pieces of content
shared
every minute
on Facebook
15,358
of video is uploaded to
YouTube every second
tweets per second when
Italy lost to Spain in the
2012 European
Championship

11. Social Media = Internet on Steroids
700,00
1 hour
pieces of content
shared
every minute
on Facebook
15,358
of video is uploaded to
YouTube every second
143,199
tweets per second
when Japan aired
Castle In The Sky

12. All The Kids Are Doing It
Close 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.

13. 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

17. “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.
Something must be wrong, right?”
danah boyd
Assistant Professor, NYU; Visiting Researcher, Harvard Law

18. Social Media: Curate Your Online Presence

19. Social Media: Develop New Skills

22. Online Communities

23. The Largest Social Network

24. Don't think you need to be on Facebook?
72%
48%
2.5
of internet
users are.
of < 30 y.o. use it as
their primary
news source
BILLION pieces of
content are
shared every day

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

26. Professional Networking
Finding/Creating an Audience
Keeping in Touch
Separating Work from Home
Sharing Personal Opinions
Large Fan/Interest Base
Smaller Network
Lots of Contributors
Privacy
Exposure

27. The Privacy Issue
The key?
be
not
“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 selfdisclosure Facebook website”

28. Facebook Success Stories: Big Data

29. Facebook Success Stories: Collective Intelligence
“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
“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

30. 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

31. Google+: Superior Sorting and Filtering

32. Google+: Easier to Find Interesting People

33. Google+: Video Integration

34. 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

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

36. #1 Microblogging Platform: Twitter
"The qualities that make
Twitter seem inane and halfbaked are what make it so
powerful."
Jonathan Zittrain
Harvard University Law professor and Faculty CoDirector, Berkman Center for Internet and Society

37. Don't think you need to be on Twitter?
1
200
100
billion new
tweets every
two days
million active users
per day
21%
of online Americans
use twitter, and the
numbers keep rising

38. Speed and Virality: A Case Study

39. Speed and Virality: A Case Study
150,000 pageviews
in 48 hours.

40. Speed and Virality: A Case Study

41. Speed and Virality: A Case Study

42. Speed and Virality: A Case Study

43. 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

44. 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

45. Twitter Predicts Citations
Highly tweeted
papers were
11x
more likely to be
highly cited!
(in bottom and top quartile of tweets within 1 week)

46. Twitter 101
A brief introduction to the Twitterverse

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

48. The Lingo
Username 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

49. The Lingo
Tweet: 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:

50. The Lingo
Direct 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.
Clicking here will show you all
of the tweets you have
favorited
The lock symbol indicates a list is “private”,
or only visible to you

51. The Lingo
Interactions: 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:

52. The Lingo
Hashtag: 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

53. Twitter Success Stories: The Power of Twitter
“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.”

54. 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

55. 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

56. 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

57. 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

58. 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

59. A Brief History of Blogging
First
online
diary
1994
Term
“weblog”
coined “Blog”
usage
spreads
1997
Blogging
becomes
„mainstream‟
1999
First
platforms
emerge
Bloggers become influential
and trusted as news and
information sources
2003
RSS
is
born
2006
Google
acquires
Blogger
Science blog
networks
first emerge
Today

60. The Emergence of Science Blogs

61. Major Blogging Platforms

62. Blogging Success Stories: Enhancing The Network
“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

63. 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

64. 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

65. 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

66. Free Wiki Platforms/Software

67. Innovative Uses: Open Notebooks

68. Innovative Uses: Evolving Resources
http://socialnetworkingforscientists.wikispaces.com

69. Be Creative

70. 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 +

71. Images
A 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

72. We ALREADY Visualize Science!
Graph of global temperatures over time
An animated gif of MRI images of a human head

73. Visualizing Science: GIS

74. Visualizing Science
© Dave Beck & Jennifer Jacquet

75. Image Platforms

76. Video
On Facebook, videos
are shared 12x
more than links &
text posts combined

77. Video Platforms

78. Audio

79. Podcasts

80. Podcasts

81. Creative Outlets

82. 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

83. “Facebook” For Scientists

84. ResearchGate

85. Academia.edu

86. Data And Other Products
86

87. Reference Management

88. Crowdsourced Funding

89. Bringing It All Together
Most likely, a
combination
of platforms
and media
types will be
the best way
to achieve
your goals.

90. Return on Investment
Social
media is the
definition of
“Broader Impacts”
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 UnionTribune (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.

91. Setting Up An Action Plan
Goals
What are you trying to achieve?
Actions
What platforms? How often?
Metrics
How will you know if things are working? How will you judge performance?
Personal Responsibility
Who does what? Be EXPLICIT.
Review and Revise
Track impacts, change actions etc as necessary.

92. Start by asking yourself: “Why?”
Goals
Actions

93. Measuring Success
•
•
•
•
Citations
Pageviews
Tweets, shares, likes
Community
involvement
• Fundraising
• Attendance at events
• …

94. Measuring Success

97. 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

98. Tragedy of the Commons
Especially for groups or organizations…
be explicit about who is responsible for what

99. 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

100. One more time…
Goals
What are you trying to achieve?
Actions
What platforms? How often?
Metrics
How will you know if things are working? How will you judge performance?
Personal Responsibility
Who does what? Be EXPLICIT.
Review and Revise
Track impacts, change actions etc as necessary.

101. The Internet is Yours!