Communicating Your Research with Social Media

A Practical Guide to Using Blogs, Podcasts, Data Visualisations and Video

Amy Mollett, Cheryl Brumley, Chris Gilson, Sierra Williams

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781412962216
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526414236
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This dynamic, engaging guide empowers you to go beyond bar charts and jargon-filled journal articles to bring your research online and present it in a way that highlights and maximises its relevance through social media.

Drawing upon a wealth of timely, real-world examples, the authors present a framework for fully incorporating social media within each step of the research process. From visualising available data to tailoring social media to meet your needs, this book explores proactive ways to share cutting edge research. A complete 'how to' for communicating research through blogs, podcasts, data visualisations, and video, it teaches you how to use social media to:

• create and share images, audio, and video in ways that positively impacts your research
• connect and collaborate with other researchers
• measure and quantify research communication efforts for funders
• provide research evidence in innovative digital formats
• reach wider, more engaged audiences in academia and beyond

Through practical advice and actionable strategies, this book shows how to achieve and sustain your research impact through social media.

1 Social Media: Why they Matter and What they Can Do

There are now a billion social-media posts every two days … which represent the largest increase in the capacity of the human race to express itself at any time in the history of the world.

– King, 2014

Monday 7am. Kira wakes up with her alarm. It was a long weekend of mostly writing – she’s trying to get the revisions to a paper she’s co-authoring back to the journal’s editors this week. Checking her emails on her iPhone while she waits for her coffee to brew, Kira’s excited to see an email pop up from the editor of a journal she submitted to late last year; her article is now available online! It won’t be in the print edition for another six or maybe even nine months (there’s a huge backlog, the editor says), but she now has the link for her piece. As she heads out the door, Kira posts a link to the article on her Twitter and Facebook accounts and to academia.edu. It’s still night-time on the east coast of the US, but she knows that it’s one of the first things they’ll see in their feeds when they wake up.

By the time she gets to her shared desk in the department 45 minutes later – no roadworks means a quicker than normal commute on her bike – she’s ready to put the rest of her plans to promote her article in motion. She first shoots an email off to the editor of a multi-author blog collective at a top university; after asking how his youngest is taking to school, she inquires if they would be keen for her to write a blog piece based on the article. The blog editor has a pretty quick turnaround, and she knows that there’s a chance they might be able to get her blog post up by Wednesday or Thursday if she’s quick. Kira also suggests that her publisher might be able to ungate the article for a month or two, so she can link her blog article to the piece. Maybe more than a couple of people might be able to find it and read it that way…

An email pings back from the blog’s editor just after lunch. He’s keen – when can she send something through? (And his son is doing great at school – though he did get in trouble last week for cutting someone else’s hair with safety scissors!) She replies that she should be able to send through her 800-word piece by the end of tomorrow; can he resend the blog’s style guide so that she can make sure that she formats the piece to reduce the amount of edits on the other side?

Kira puts together a ‘hit list’ over lunch of a dozen or so people she thinks will be interested in her new article – some are colleagues and past collaborators who work in universities, there are a couple who work in NGOs in Europe and the US, half a dozen are people working on similar topics that she’s met on Twitter, and, if she’s honest, there are at least two academic crushes on the list as well. It would be great if everyone could be connected with a tweet, but it’s not that simple. Max at Oxfam has given up Facebook for Lent, Shosh at Wisconsin-Madison hasn’t managed to get on to Twitter yet, and her adviser’s mailbox is bouncing again because it’s full. Ted’s on a bit of an Instagram binge at the moment – she introduced him to it last month and he’s been posting two or three times a day. Thinking for a moment, Kira pulls up free online infographic-maker Infogram and plugs in some of her headline findings. A few minutes later she shares the new infographic on her Instagram, adding the #dataviz hashtag; Ted’s seen it and replied within a few minutes. She adds a few more tweets and Facebook updates aimed at those remaining in her Buffer social media scheduling account. Checking her Instagram post, Kira sees that it’s already had a like from The Guardian’s dataviz team – brilliant! She hopes that they might showcase it on their Data blog. But now, back to those revisions.

Kira spends the rest of the day in the library, finishing off her revisions for her new journal piece. Back at home, she cooks dinner while listening to a podcast hosted by a couple of academics who work in her discipline. The episode is only a week old, so she sends a tweet to the podcast and to the hosts’ Twitter accounts suggesting that they check out her new paper. She’s hoping that they ask her to be a guest interviewee. After dinner she heads out to meet some friends for a drink locally. Checking her phone on the bus, she sees that one of her previous co-authors – who she did her Master’s with and is now at Uppsala – has tweeted her back. She’s keen to talk more about her findings, and suggests they take the talk offline. Kira pops her a quick email suggesting a Skype chat Tuesday morning. She knows that talking over the main points of her article will be a great way to get ready to write her blog piece in the afternoon – if she can get her article revisions finished off by then!

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We’re not all Kira, but if you’r a researcher, academic or scientist, then there’s a chance you might recognise something from her day as an academic who’s plugged into social media. What links all the media and dissemination activities she was involved with in the tale we constructed is that they are all social media, or they show the kinds of opportunities social media can bring to academics and researchers in general.

In this chapter, we’ll look at some definitions of social media, including what they are and what they are not; explore their history and how that relates to how social media are used today; and how knowledge organisations have been using social media, and where things now stand. This chapter aims to show any reader – no matter how much or little you use and know about social media – that social media matter, and that they can be incredibly important to your work and career as a knowledge worker. We’ll also be giving you an overview of the growth and influence of social media in many different areas of society as a lead in to the discussions in the rest of this book. This book as a whole aims to inspire and energise you as a knowledge worker to do more with social media to share and promote your work, and to use it in accordance with your research lifecycle, much as Kira does in our imaginary example above.

Given the title of this book, the relationship between social media and researchers and knowledge workers is perhaps the most important to us – and to you. Here, rather than box ourselves in, we use the term ‘knowledge workers’, which loosely means anyone working on research in an organisation. This can include academics in universities, researchers in NGOs, nonprofits and civil society organisations and think tanks, journalists and independent scholars. Social media can be of great benefit for knowledge workers who are also educators, and for how they do research and how this research is promoted.

1.1 What Are Social Media?

1.1.1 Defining social media

Ask anyone who works in social media what they actually are and they will probably give you a different definition. There isn’t a formal definition, and given the relatively disaggregated nature of online life, there isn’t one person or organisation who could legitimately set out a definition that would be universally agreed on in any case. Definitions tend to be based on the centrality of online communities – groups of people interacting online to communicate and share information and ideas. Kietzmann et al. (2011: 241) write that ‘Social media employ mobile and web-based technologies to create highly interactive platforms via which individuals and communities share, co-create, discuss, and modify user-generated content’. Similarly, Safko (2009: 6) states that social media ‘refers to activities, practices, and behaviors among communities of people who gather online to share information, knowledge, and opinions using conversational media’, while Xiang and Gretzel (2010: 180) take more of a consumer-based view that social media ‘can be generally understood as Internet-based applications that carry consumer-generated content’. Baym and boyd (2012: 321) argue that, compared to more traditional forms of media, a key feature of social media is its scale:

It is thus not the ability to use technology toward these objectives that is new with social media, but the scale at which people who never had access to broadcast media are now doing so on an everyday basis and the conscious strategic appropriation of media tools in this process.

Couldry and van Dijck (2015: 2) simply state that ‘we side with those who look to resist the redefinition of the social as simply whatever happens “on” social media platforms’. We will be returning to these concepts and exploring the specific characteristics of social media and what they mean for the Research Lifecycle in Chapter 2.

We should also note at this point that throughout this book we will be using the term ‘social media’ as a shorthand for other digital media, including podcasts, photo- and video-driven platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube and Vimeo. The fact that these media are digital means that they can be easily shared and at scale in ways that were only available to professional broadcast media in past decades. Without content, social media networks don’t exist – they require text, video and images in order to function as social media – digital media can be this content.

With the definitions of social media appearing to sprawl, in the spirit of Marshall McLuhan’s (1994) commentary that the ‘medium is the message’, it’s helpful to go to two of the internet’s well recognised – and crowdsourced – spaces for definitions. Wikipedia says that social media are ‘computer-mediated tools that allow people or companies to create, share, or exchange information, career interests, ideas, and pictures/videos in virtual communities and networks’ (Wikipedia, 2016). Urban Dictionary, a popular dictionary of online slang, says that it is ‘Your electronic Second Life’ (Urban Dictionary, 2016). While the latter definition is a bit facetious, it dovetails well with Wikipedia’s. In this book, we see social media as being the ways in which the traditional methods of knowledge exchange have been able to colonise digital infrastructure. Recognising this also means that we can see social media as acting alongside – not instead of – more traditional ways of communicating information. Social media just take them further – expanding their reach and bandwidth. Where knowledge workers could once only exchange ideas through the spoken word, by letter and printed article, now they also have the options of the podcast, the tweet and the blog post.

1.1.2 What social media are

At this point, it’s also important to outline some of the main social media tools, focusing on those that we’ll be discussing more in depth later in this book. Xiang and Gretzel (2010: 180) write that social media includes ‘a variety of applications in the technical sense which allow consumers to “post”, “tag”, “digg”, or “blog”, and so forth, on the Internet’. As this quote illustrates, there are a large number of social media tools available, and an even greater number of actions that go with them; two of the four terms that they refer to are actions that can be performed as well as types of content. We’ll focus on the content rather than the actions for now – though we’ll also be going through the actions as we talk through each type of social media. Figure 1.1 shows some of the examples of social media we’ll be discussing throughout this book. Others, such as Thompson (2013), have suggested typologies of social media, dividing social media into the public/private and permanent/ephemeral typologies, but for this stage, we don’t need our framework to be quite this complex (and we’d actually disagree that such clear distinctions can be made – more on this in Chapter 7).

We divide each of the social media tools in Figure 1.1 into three categories: content, platforms and tools for collaboration. The y axis refers to the potential audience size that each form of social media can reach, while the x axis shows how easily shared each element is. Tools on the leftmost section are by their nature one-to-one, one-to-few or few-to-few, with tools approaching ‘native’ or inbuilt shareability as we move to the right.

Content. This is the ‘stuff’ that you’re trying to gain an audience for. It comes first, because it’s really central to the whole thing. Content is made up of your thoughts, ideas, reflections and insights. This includes blog posts, discrete chunks of text based on a specific blog platform (of which more in Chapter 3), podcasts (Chapter 5), infographics and data visualisations (Chapter 4), and images and video (Chapter 6). These are all things which will more often than not need to be leveraged by social media platforms in order to get an audience, hence their position midway on the ‘shareability’ index.

Figure 1.1 Social media shareability and potential audience size

Social networks. These are the platforms that help you get your content to an audience, which can also include your desired audience – though they are not always one and the same. The social networks shown are connective by default – it’s their main function and purpose. While their usefulness will obviously vary depending on how linked they have become with others who also use the same network, they facilitate content sharing far more easily than the tools in the bottom left of Figure 1.1. In terms of their potential audience, the sky is really the limit. Follower numbers vary from tens and hundreds to the thousands or even millions.

Collaboration tools. These are the tools of what could be termed the ‘old’ web. Skype was first released in 2003, and email can be traced back to the earliest days of the internet and was in fairly wide use by the mid-late 1990s. WhatsApp is a mere youngster by comparison, but its antecedents include Google Talk (2005) and even the humble text message, which is also a survivor from the 1990s. The key point about collaboration tools is that they are person-to-person rather than person-to-many. Even tools such as Google Documents only really involve tens or (at most) low hundreds in terms of collaborator numbers.

As you can see from Figure 1.1, there is some degree of category breakdown, and many of these formats are porous and interlinking with some of the others. As well as being useful for collaborative work, WhatsApp and Snapchat are increasingly being used as social networks to distribute content (Morrison, 2016). Most content platforms also have ways of self-distribution – in the case of podcasts, SoundCloud, for example, has its own native distribution network, as does Apple’s iTunes. Social networks can also be content. Twitter is famously regarded as a ‘micro-blogging’ site, and Facebook certainly allows for posts of several hundred words or so.

1.1.3 Social media platforms and their popularity

Now that we’ve looked at what social media platforms are and how they operate, it’s helpful to look at how popular each platform is and where recent growth has been occurring. Table 1.1 gives an idea of just how pop...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Author Biographiess
• Acknowledgements
• The Companion website
• Introduction
• 1 Social Media: Why they Matter and What they Can Do
• 2 Social Media and the Research Lifecycle
• 3 Creating and Sharing Blog Posts
• 4 Creating and Sharing Infographics and Data Visualisations
• 5 Creating and Sharing Audio and Podcasts
• 6 Creating and Sharing Photos and Videos on Social Media
• 7 Digital Strategies for Research Dissemination, Engagement and Impact
• References
• Index