Science & Social Media – Making Your Work More Visible and Engaging

The EBI Interfaces talk  on September 22 was “Science & Social Media – Making Your Work More Visible and Engaging“, given by Nicola Osborne, Social Media Officer for EDINA.

Click to go to the presentation

Nicola spoke about effective ways to use Social Media to communicate your work. This included strategies, tools, guidelines and ways to plan, manage and monitor social media to engage the people you want to communicate your scientific work with. She drew upon her extensive experience of advising JISC-funded projects, academic researchers and the wider community on social media.

Some key points

1. Social media channels give you a way to engage with an audience or community, and start a dialogue;
2. Go to where people are already, rather than trying to create a community in a vacuum (i.e. Twitter is not always the answer!);
3. You need a strategy to manage this effectively – goals, time, resources, measuring success;
4. You need to consider Who?, What?, Where?, and When? as part of that strategy;
5. Think about how to [re]use content across different channels;
6. Develop ambassadors. Create content for them, and let them communicate to their networks.
7. Tell stories (this is engaging!);
8. You must budget time and resources for effective social media activity
9. Guidelines, written well, can help content authors

To find out more about Nicola’s work, have a look at her EDINA blog. You can also download the EDINA social media guidelines, if you’d like to read them.

Content first

In which I expand (quite a lot!) on the “Content” bit of my post about the UX iceberg, and explain why I think it is important to put content first. I’m not saying anything new, and I do refer to the EBI content a lot, but I hope you can abstract this, and apply it to your situation. On the other hand, if you’re at the EBI, this is just up your street!

This is, as I say, quite a long post. You might want to get a cup of coffee!

Science and Social Media – Sept 22, 2011

After a sumertime hiatus, EBI Interfaces will be back with a talk  towards the end of September with a talk on ”Science & Social Media – Making Your Work More Visible and Engaging“.

Nicola Osborne, Social Media Officer for EDINA, will talk about effective ways to use Social Media to communicate your work. Nicola will talk about strategies, tools, guidelines and ways to plan, manage and monitor social media to engage the people you want to communicate your scientific work with. She will draw upon her extensive experience of advising JISC-funded projects, academic researchers and the wider community on social media.

WHERE: M203, Cairns Pavilion, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus

WHEN: Thursday, Sept 22, 15h00

As always (though it perhaps isn’t obvious), external visitors are welcome to attend this talk. Please contact me, though, to arrange your visit.

To find out a bit more about the kind of things Nicola works on, you can read her Soapbox Science article written for nature.com.