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Social Media for Research
Friday, March 13, 2015
Krista Jensen
Knowledge Mobilization Officer Office of Research Services York University
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eUeL3n7fDs
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Agenda
• Why Use Social Media?
• Overview of Select Tools
• Developing a Social Media Strategy
• Social Media Strategy Activity
External Research Context
CIHR Legislation
• The objective of the CIHR is to excel, according to internationally accepted standards of scientific
excellence, in the creation of new knowledge and its translation into improved health for Canadians, more effective health services and products and a
strengthened Canadian health care system
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Knowledge Mobilization Services
Brokering research partnerships
Supporting events
Capacity building
Grant support
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Why Use Social Media?
• Disseminate knowledge and research in an iterative and interactive way
• Build communities for
partnerships, collaboration and sharing
• Get academic research into the hands of people who can use it
• Cited in KMb strategies
Image adapted from http://webbiquity.com/social-media-marketing/the-four-cs-of-social-media-marketing/
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Overview of Select Tools
• Blogs
• Videos
• Collaborative Online Platforms
• SlideShare
Blogging
• Allows you to share stories and information with a wider audience
• Way to promote research results, services, events and activities
• Information you would put into a newsletter can go into a blog
• Often a good way to get started using social media
• You don’t often get a lot of conversation with blogs- it is more of a push type of communication
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Blogging
• Send out short (140 character) messages called tweets
• Allows you to share updates, opinions, resources and information with followers
• Good way to connect with other people with shared interests and build communities of practice
• Aim for at least one tweet a day
• Be sure to retweet other people’s tweets- it’s all about sharing!
• Try to include a link to something in your tweets
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• People can follow your updates and activities and post questions or comments on your wall
• Includes facebook Insights which gives you some analytics so you can see who is visiting your page
• Set up a vanity URL www.facebook.com/projectnamehere
• Set up a “page” and post updates there to keep it separate from your personal facebook activities
• If you decide to set up a facebook page, you need to post daily and monitor for any comments
• If you are concerned about inappropriate comments, it is fine to develop a policy that states that you will remove such comments- post this on your About page
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Videos
• Videos are a great way to tell a research story
• Viewers are able to put a face to research
• You can create a channel for all of your videos, as well as other favourited videos
• You can embed videos from YouTube onto your blog or website easily
• Videos should not be longer than 3 minutes
• Vimeo is another option if you aren’t comfortable using YouTube
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Videos
• Acts as an online resume or CV
• Allows you to connect with colleagues and others in your field
• You can add your publications or projects to your profile
• Good way to stay connected to people you meet at conferences
• LinkedIn Groups are another way to connect to others with similar interests
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Collaborative Online Platforms- othree.ca
Highlights
• Suite of social media tools including:
• Free for researchers and their partners
• Software developed by Canadian company (IGLOO), so data is stored in Canada
• Other options include- BaseCamp, Open Atrium
(Drupal), Blackboard Collaborate, Yammer, Wikispaces, Sharepoint, Huddle
•Document sharing
•Wikis
•Blogs
•Member profiles
•Forums
•Events Calendar
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othree.ca- Envisioning Global LBGT Rights
5 year, $1M CURA project housed
at the Centre for Feminist Research at York University, with partnerships in Africa, the Caribbean, India, the
Netherlands, the USA and Canada.
They are using an online collaborative platform to share legal and qualitative research, as well as participatory videography.
The online space is enabling the 22 member research team and 32 partner organizations to share research, knowledge and effect change at the local level in each community.
http://envisioninglgbt.blogspot.ca/
• Allows you to save or “pin” images to a “board” to create a virtual pin board
• A combination of social bookmarking and social networking
• Others can follow your boards and repin your pins
• Creates great visual impact that is great for arts based projects
• Create various boards based on themes
• Share other people’s pins you think are relevant
• Even if you aren’t using Pinterest yourself, make it easy for others to pin by adding visuals to your social media content
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http://www.pinterest.com/TxWRI/
SlideShare
• Easy way to store and share your presentations
• Makes them accessible from any computer with an internet connection
• Instead of emailing your presentation to people, upload it onto SlideShare and email the link to the presentation online
• Share your presentations with others on your website or blog by embedding
• People can get notified when you upload a new presentation by following you
• University faculty and staff qualify for an educational discount on Pro Accounts
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SlideShare
http://bit.ly/KMbYork
Social Media Strategy
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Developing a Social Media Strategy
Helps you:
• Avoid “shiny object” syndrome
• Plan in a thoughtful and strategic way
• Carefully consider what you will do before investing time and resources
• Plan content and a schedule for releasing content
• Identify who will work on what when working in a group setting
• Manage expectations
Social Media Strategy Building
Need to consider:
• Team
• Primary Goals
• Audience
• Current Conversation
• Selecting Tools
• Content
• Measuring Success
• Name and Design
• Evaluation
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Social Media Strategy Activity
Working in teams with the people at you table, brainstorm some ideas for the following
questions:
1. List 2 or 3 audience groups for your work 2. List 2 or 3 items that one of your audience
groups would be interested in reading about 3. List some ways that you can share the work
that your partners/audience are doing
Select Social Media Tools
Content Curation: Slide Share, You Tube, Pinterest
Engagement: Twitter
Discussion: Linked In
Broadcast: blogs
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Final Thought #1: where’s the traffic?
Final Thought #2: protect your brand
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Final Thought #3: social media strategy
Team
• If you are working in a group setting, put together a team of people to work on social media
• Identify the person or persons who will have primary
responsibility for populating, maintaining and monitoring your site
• Ensure they have the time and enthusiasm to devote to this project. List the team members
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Primary Goals
• What are you hoping to accomplish?
• Define your goal(s) for your social media presence
• Are you trying to communicate research results, find partners to collaborate with, generally promote your work?
• Keep in mind that you may want to do all of these and may need to select a collection of tools
Audiences
• Who do you hope to reach?
• Identifying your audiences will help you tailor your content and also choose the right tool
• List your primary audiences
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Current Conversation
• This is when the listening begins. Survey the social media landscape for the “thought leaders” in your field
• What are people already saying? Who is saying it?
What tools are they using?
• List the topics, people and sites that are leading the conversations that are relevant to you
• This will help decide which tools to use and the type of content to present
Selecting Specific Tools
• Now that you know your goals, audience and where the current conversation is happening, you can start thinking about which tools to use
• At the beginning, it may be best to just pick a few tools and concentrate on doing them well but you can plan to add new ones in the future
• Map out which tools you will use now and which you will work towards using
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Content
• What content will you share?
• Identify the content you already have to share, as well as the content you plan to develop
• Is it primarily news updates, research developments, or networking information? Photographs? Video?
• List the content you will be sharing via social media
• Also think about how often you will post content
Measuring Success
• Determine how you will measure the success, or lack of success, of all your social media tools
• Possible ways to measure include:
• Increased traffic to your website
• Better communication with prospective partners
• A new network of colleagues
• You can also count but remember that engagement is more than just numbers
• List how you plan to measure each tool’s
success, and what you’ll use to track that
success
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Measuring Success
Tools you can use for tracking:
• Wordpress has built in analytics
• If you use twitter, you can use
• Facebook has its Insights analytics
• If you pay for a professional account, you
usually get access to improved analytics and many tools offer a discount to educational
institutions like universities, for example
SlideShare
Name and Design
• Identify a simple and descriptive name for your profile that clearly identifies your affiliation with your university, research project or organization
• Do you already have a logo you can use? If not, do you have a photo you can use as your logo?
• Try to use the same logo, photos and colour scheme across all of your tools
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Evaluation
• How will you know you are being successful?
• Set a timeline for when you will conduct an evaluation of your tool’s success with your social media team
members
• Consider:
• What’s working?
• What’s not working?
• Do we need to change anything?
• Are there any new tools we could be using?
• Ongoing evaluation should also be part of your strategy.
Define your timeline
Analytics- Pinterest and Wordpress
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Analytics- HootSuite
$9.99/month
Free lite version available on Chrome or
Analytics- SocialBro
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Grant Proposals
Things to keep in mind:
• Reserve research project naming rights on social media
• Develop a social media strategy before you start the research project
• Allocate money for developing videos, purchasing pro accounts
• Make it someone’s job
• Social media strategy should support the knowledge mobilization plan which should support the outcomes statement and benefit to Canada
CIHR Chair in ASD Mental Health
Case Study- 5 year $1M chair in Autism Spectrum
Disorders (ASD) Treatment and Care Research Program awarded to Dr Jonathan Weiss
Chair objectives:
• Work with people with ASD, their families, services providers, and governmental bodies (our stakeholders)
• Translate research to inform stakeholders about mental health and ASD
• Study ways of addressing mental health problems in people with ASD
• Train the next generation of Canadian ASD researchers and clinicians
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CIHR Chair in ASD Mental Health
• Embedded KMb language right in the grant proposal
• Also embedded social media use into the proposal
CIHR Chair in ASD Mental Health
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CIHR Chair in ASD Mental Health
Resources- General Social Media
Bit.ly http://bit.ly
• URL shortener that lets you track who clicked on your links and creates a QR code for your shortened link that you can add to print materials
Cambridge Community Television
www.slideshare.net/cctvcambridge
• Good presentations on how to develop a social media strategy
The Conversation Prism https://conversationprism.com/
• Visual of many social media tools for various purposes
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Resources- General Social Media
JustPublics@365 Toolkit: A Social Media Guide for Academics http://justpublics365.pressbooks.com/
• Good overview of social media tools NameChk http://namechk.com/
• Let’s you see if your username is available on social networking sites
Nonprofit Social Network Benchmark Report 2012
http://nonprofitsocialnetworksurvey.com/index.php
• Report that summarizes how nonprofit organizations are using social media and the top factors for success
Resources- General Social Media
Online Database of Social Media Policies
http://socialmediagovernance.com/policies.php
• Links to over 175 social media policies and guidelines in use by various organizations, including many
universities
Vanderbilt University Social Media Handbook
http://web.vanderbilt.edu/resources/social-media- handbook/
• Very good resources on how to create a social media strategy and how to start using various tools
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Resources- Twitter
10 Ways Researchers Can Use Twitter
http://www.networkedresearcher.co.uk/2011/08/03/10- ways-researchers-can-use-twitter/
Introduction to Social Media Measurement with HootSuite http://www.slideshare.net/hootsuite/introduction-to-
social-media-measurement-with-hootsuite-7919595 LSE Guide to Using twitter in University Research,
Teaching and Impact Activites
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2011/09/29 /twitter-guide
Resources- Twitter
TweetChat http://tweetchat.com/
• Allows you to have a tweetup, a kind of twitter
“conference call”, using hashtags. This tool with show only conversations with your chosen hashtag
TweetStats http://tweetstats.com
• Show some statistics and analytics on your tweets.
Also can create a word cloud of all the words you tweet
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Resources- Twitter
Twitter Help Center http://support.twitter.com/
• Articles to get you started, as well as information about solving common problems and how to report a
violation
Using Twitter for Research
https://www.martineve.com/2011/05/23/using-twitter-for- research/
• A Prezi presentation outlining ways to use twitter aimed at researchers
David Phipps
Executive Director
www.researchimpact.ca
Website
researchimpact.othree.ca
O3 Space
Mobilize This! Blog
researchimpact.wordpress.com
Delicious
delicious.com/researchimpact twitter.com/researchimpact
twitter.com/KMbYork
LinkedIn Group
http://bit.ly/RIRgroup
YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/user/
ResearchImpact
[email protected] @researchimpact
SlideShare
www.slideshare.net/KMbYork