This document provides an overview of social media and its uses for research purposes. It discusses how social media can be used to identify knowledge through networking, create knowledge through collaboration, ensure quality through peer review, and disseminate findings more widely. Risks discussed include privacy issues and an overload of information. The document also provides examples of social media tools for different purposes like communication, multimedia sharing, and collaboration. Overall, it presents both benefits and criticisms of using social media in academic research.

1. Social Media
Workshop

2. 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

3. 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.

4. 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."

5. 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.).

6. 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

7. Risks
• Moving findings into the public domain
before they are ready
• Identity deception
• Privacy controls

8. 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

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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

12. Collaboration Services
Conferencing: Adobe Connect,
GoToMeeting, Skype
Social bookmarking: Delicious, Diigo,
BibSonomy CiteULike, Mendeley
Organization/sharing: Pinterest
Social news: Digg, Reddit, Newsvine

13. Collaboration Services
Social bibliography: CiteULike, Mendeley
Social documents: Google Docs, Dropbox,
Zoho
Project management: Bamboo, Basecamp,
Huddle
Wikis: PBworks, Wetpaint, Wikia

14. Wikileaks

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

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. 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

21. 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

22. 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.

23. 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.

24. 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.‖

25. 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.

26. 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

27. Metrics
• Brand mentions/sentiment
• Activity ratio
• Engagement duration (generating links,
activities, quizzes)
• Loyalty

28. Measurement Tools
• Klout
• Page views
• Facebook Pages Analytics (PageLever)
• Followers/Friends/Fans/Likes
• Google Analytics

29. 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.

30. Growth of Technology
• Encroachment of technology into
every aspect of life has potentially
damaging implications
• Technology moves faster than our
educators and policy makers.

31. 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.

32. 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.

33. 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

34. 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.

35. 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.

36. 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

37. 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.

38. 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.

39. 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.

40. 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.

41. 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.‖

42. 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.‖

43. The Academic Research Cycle
1. Identification of knowledge
2. Creation of knowledge
3. Quality assurance of knowledge
4. Dissemination of knowledge

45. 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)

46. 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

47. 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

48. 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?

49. 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

50. 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