Social Media Lessons from Space for Earth
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Did you know that the largest corporate Twitter account is managed by the US Space Administration? The account has over 7 million followers, making it bigger than those of all Fortune 500 companies, except for a few social media companies. In addition NASA is running many other very popular Twitter accounts and it is a major influencer on almost all other social media channels. At the same time its social media budget is only a small fraction of that of many commercial corporations. There must be some lessons to be learned for other organizations here! As a government institution NASA depends on political and public support for its activities. In the early days this was an easy sell. The whole world watched the US compete with Russia in the space race, which was finally won when Neil Armstrong put his foot on the surface of the Moon, with millions of people from all over the world watching in awe. But after this historic win attention faded and space exploration became a commodity in the public eye. For several decades the budgets for space exploration decreased and NASA struggled to keep public attention. Until it started to experiment with social media. NASA became a global leader in public outreach through new digital channels and public interest for space is on the rise again. This success story has many great lessons for social media marketers. Please follow me into space to learn about social media on Earth!
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Social Media Lessons from Space for Earth
- 1. Social media lessons from space for Earth Remco Timmermans | @timmermansr | @WorldSpaceWeek @timmermansr | #SMWRdam
- 2. @timmermansr | #SMWRdam UN-declared @WorldSpaceWeek is the largest public Space event in the world
- 3. Space is not a destination. @timmermansr | #SMWRdam It is a destiny
- 4. In the beginning, @timmermansr | #SMWRdam there was a race…
- 5. @timmermansr | #SMWRdam Mercury – “The Right Stuff” Vostok – Yuri Gagarin photo credit: RIA Novosti In the 1950’s and 1960’s astronauts were public heroes
- 6. @timmermansr | #SMWRdam The Moon was the ultimate prize in the Space Race
- 7. @timmermansr | #SMWRdam Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins photo credit: NASA The Apollo 11 crew became instant global super heroes
- 8. @timmermansr | #SMWRdam Cernan, Stafford, Young photo credit: NASA But the Apollo 12 crew remained virtually unknown
- 9. @timmermansr | #SMWRdam The number of #STEM students followed the decreasing @NASA budget
- 10. Space Shuttle:135 missions that nobody @timmermansr | #SMWRdam knew cared about…
- 11. The first shuttle launched exactly 20 years after Yuri Gagarin @timmermansr | #SMWRdam photo credit: NASA History Office Flight #1: 12 April 1981
- 12. @timmermansr | #SMWRdam photo credit: NASA Flight #25 – Challenger, 1986 In the 1980’s and 90’s people mostly heard about space incidents
- 13. @timmermansr | #SMWRdam photo credit: NASA Flight #113 – Columbia, 2003 First Space Shuttle Columbia became news again only when it exploded
- 14. @timmermansr | #SMWRdam photo credit: Javier Pedreira Flight #135 – Atlantis, 2011 In 2011 many Americans seriously thought the space program was over
- 15. photo credit: SpaceX image credit: XCOR @timmermansr | #SMWRdam image credit: MarsOne Never have we seen more development in space as in 2014
- 16. You can often see the International Space Station! http://spotthestation.nasa.gov/ @timmermansr | #SMWRdam
- 17. @timmermansr | #SMWRdam Social Media changed the publicity game for @NASA
- 18. #spacetweeps Five social media lessons from the most powerful science community @timmermansr | #SMWRdam in the world:
- 19. #1 – Social Media is a strategic choice @timmermansr | #SMWRdam
- 20. 7.5 million followers @timmermansr | #SMWRdam 3.6 million page followers 300 million+ views 32 channels 900,000 subscribers 187 million views 800,000 followers 6,800 photos 18 TV channels, always live! 600,000 followers 19,000 followers
- 21. #2 – Use Social Media for what it was meant @timmermansr | #SMWRdam
- 22. #3 – Storytelling: Make it personal @timmermansr | #SMWRdam
- 23. Difficult to engage? Connect to something people know @timmermansr | #SMWRdam
- 24. Astronauts are slowly becoming public heroes again @timmermansr | #SMWRdam
- 25. A Social Media success story: @ESA_Rosetta @timmermansr | #SMWRdam
- 26. Storytelling: How the world embraced @ESA_Rosetta @timmermansr | #SMWRdam
- 27. Community engagement as taught by @KirstenWagenaar and @ElseKramer. It works! @timmermansr | #SMWRdam
- 28. Space is not about hardware. It is about human emotion! photo credit: ESA @timmermansr | #SMWRdam
- 29. #4 – Build a community of brand ambassadors Feeding the #spacetweeps @timmermansr | #SMWRdam
- 30. photo credit: bunnicula Is it still a secret? Combine online with offline! @timmermansr | #SMWRdam
- 31. THIS is community management. Literally. @timmermansr | #SMWRdam
- 32. @timmermansr | #SMWRdam 2011 #STS135 #NASATweetup 6,000 registrations for 150 spots @timmermansr #SMC055
- 33. @timmermansr | #SMWRdam photo credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani 100+ #NASASocial events have attracted over 3,000 participants All staff is involved!
- 34. #NASASocial: Brand ambassadors for life, 100 at a time @timmermansr | #SMWRdam photo credit: NASA/Bill Ingals
- 35. NASA has evolved into a world leading ‘Social Brand’ @timmermansr | #SMWRdam
- 36. @timmermansr | #SMWRdam Wanna build a Community? Just add Astronauts!
- 37. #5 – Let the community do the hard work When the community @timmermansr | #SMWRdam takes over…
- 38. What if the Social Media department breaks down? @timmermansr | #SMWRdam @timmermansr #SMC055
- 39. @timmermansr | #SMWRdam #ThingsNASAMightTweet 15 days 15,229 posts 42.3 million impressions
- 41. Community Management: Support Community Initiatives! @timmermansr | #SMWRdam
- 42. Let your community do the hard work! @SpaceApps @timmermansr | #SMWRdam
- 43. Social media lessons from space for Earth @timmermansr | #SMWRdam
- 44. @timmermansr | #SMWRdam Summarized #1 – Social Media is a Strategic Choice #2 – Use Social Media for what it does best: Interact #3 – Storytelling: Make it Personal #4 – Community Management: Feed the Ambassadors #5 – Put your Community to work!
- 45. @timmermansr | #SMWRdam Thank you #SMWRdam @TimmermansR @TravelsInOrbit @WorldSpaceWeek
Editor's Notes
- Space is cool! All kids want to become an astronaut. This was certainly the case in the beginning of the space age. This space age started with the space race between the Russians and Americans, fiercely competing for space firsts.
- The people of the early space race became heroes, often bigger and more famous than sports or music stars.
- The highlight of the space race, and the biggest prize of all was to put the first person on the Moon. Thanks to full government support, a lot of money, superb technology and a lot of luck the Americans won the last battle. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the biggest space heroes ever. This period also marked a high in science and technology graduates. Inspired by the great technological developments engineering became the coolest subject to study.
- So who knows who these three gentlemen are? This is the crew of the second Moon landing, in the same year as the first. But Gene Cernan, Ed Stafford and John Young did not become heroes. After “winning” the space race the general public lost its interest in space. The race was won, time to focus on more important things. This was the beginning of the end.
- The waning public interest followed a waning political interest. Even before the Moon landing the US government started to cut back on NASA’s budget. After the Moon landing NASA’s share of the federal budget only decreased. Also from a political point of view the target, set by president Kennedy, was met. Because of this, NASA cancelled 3 more planned Moon landings. In Russia the Moon program was plagued by technical failures, and the Russian Moon project was cancelled completely in 1972. The Russians focussed on their space station program, which they dominated until the end of the 1990’s. The American space station program with Skylab was a lot less successful. The general public didn’t really care at all. Space had very quickly become a commodity.
- The American space program in the 1980’s and 1990’s was dominated by the Space Shuttle project. Planned as a cheap way to get people and equipment in and out of space, a total of 135 missions were launched, on 5 different orbiter spacecraft. This slide has all mission insignia, but only very few missions are actually known by the general public.
- The first launch of space shuttle Columbia in 1981 was a novelty, covered on live television in many countries. It is one of my own earliest memories of something happening in space, sitting next to my parents on the couch to watch the launch as a 10-year old kid. John Young (yes, the same as on the Apollo 12 crew) and Bob Crippen became my heroes. But I was pretty much alone in my interest. I never saw another shuttle launch on TV until 1986.
- Unfortunately the Space Shuttle program became front page news only through major accidents. In 1986 the 25th Space Shuttle mission, featuring Space Shuttle Challenger, exploded minutes after lift off, killing all 7 crew members. The shuttle program was stopped for over a year, until the technical cause of the accident was found. The public then focused on other things until 2003
- … when Space Shuttle Columbia burned up in the atmosphere, again killing its entire crew. Again a technical failure was the main cause.
- In July 2011 almost one million people gathered at Cape Canaveral in Florida to watch the last flight of a shuttle. Space Shuttle Atlantis became the 135th and last shuttle to fly. The costs of the program had become too high, at over one billion dollars per flight. The Russians launched their Soyuz rockets for 150 million dollars, carrying three people to the International Space Station. To date Russia is the only nation capable of ferrying crew to and from the station. Many Americans considered this date the “end of the US space program”.
- But it is not only the ISS that is making space so exciting nowadays. We have probes that have been to all planets in the Solar system, we have rovers on Mars, preparing the arrival of the first humans in the next decade or two. We have many instruments in space protecting our planet against asteroids and solar flares. Satellites are monitoring our own planet to make sure it stays habitable. We have commercial companies preparing mass access to space, including tourists. This talk is not about space tourism, but we can expect a lot to happen in the next 5 years. And it is no longer just the Americans and Russians. The Chinese and Indians are catching up fast. Too much for a 30 minute talk!
- Now obviously 2011 was not the end of the space program. In fact, there has never been more exciting times in space exploration than this period in history. But without men walking on the Moon and Space Shuttles flying back and forth. In 2014 we can celebrate continuous human presence in space for 14 years. The International Space Station has been in use since 2000 and has been delivering thousands of experiment results to hundreds of thousands researchers all over the world.
- The first tweet from space was sent by astronaut TJ Creamer in 2010, although Mike Massimino – astronaut and one of the best PR people for NASA – had his updates from space also put on Twitter by the mission control team in Houston. Interesting to know: Mike Massimino flew two Space Shuttle missions. During his first mission Mike was one of the engineers that fixed the Hubble space telescope during s series of spacewalks. After his active astronaut career he became a critical element of NASA PR, by presenting TV documentaries and acting in several episodes of the Big Bang Theory. He is also said to have been the role model and advisor for George Clooney in the movie Gravity, although NASA disputes that claim. Anyway, the public picked up these live reports from the astronauts in space. Space suddenly reached directly into their social networks and the astronauts quickly became new role models. To date Mike Massimino is still the most popular astronaut on Twitter, with 1.3 million followers.
- Political support for space fully depends on public support for space. The low public interest for space was a problem for NASA, especially when it became clear that the “cool” Space Shuttles were being retired. The other NASA missions were a lot less sexy, although many people heard about Voyager and Hubble. But in the late 2000’s new channels for science communication opened. Social Media would become the weapon of choice to win back the public for space. NASA became one of the early adopters of internet communication.
- In 2009 NASA started to involve their social media followers in their work. Using the concept of “citizen reporters” and “tweetups” they invited these followers to exclusive events at their facilities all around the country, obviously with the goal to tweet about their experience. NASA was careful to select people from their most influential followers. At the first tweetup at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory attendants got to see the Mars Curiosity Rover that was under construction, and talk to the engineers that built the famous craft. The event became a big hit on Twitter and the term “spacetweeps” was born.
- Building a ‘social brand’