Social Media – Science Sushi

Social Media for Scientists Part 4: On The Road

A couple weeks ago, I braved the freezing north to speak at the University of Washington for a workshop focusing on Social Media for Scientists. The event was co-sponsored by AFSUW, Washington Sea Grant, and COSEE OLC as a part of the Beyond the Ivory Tower series, a set of free public lectures that hopes to provide researchers with tools and techniques to reach audiences and broaden the impacts of their work. I was teamed up with the effortlessly incredible Liz Neeley, COMPASS’ super ninja of science communication, to try and convince a room full of hardy Seattle scientists that, indeed, every lab should tweet.

I truly do believe that Facebook, Twitter, and other social media are essential for every scientist to use. Not only are they the communication platforms of the future, they hold the potential to revolutionize how we do science in the first place. It seems foolish at best that in scientific circles we deride the use of these networks that, literally, two thirds of the world’s population are connecting through. I’ve laid out the arguments before (see the post list below), and will surely continue to talk about this topic until I go hoarse. Simply put, it’s not a question that scientists need to increasingly engage with new media platforms to stay relevant in this digital age. The question is how.

For that, I’m going to point you toward the freshly launched Social Media for Science Google+ Page and the workshop wiki, which is an evolving collection of information and resources, as well as the Storify of the afternoon by Jessica Rohde. You can also download my slides from slideshare, or watch the video of my talk:


Science and Social Media--Christie Wilcox from AFSUW on Vimeo.

More Social Media for Scientists:

Social Media For Scientists Part 3: Win-Win

I confidently believe that increasing the use of social media for outreach by scientists will positively affect how the public views and understands science. I stand by my statement that part of our job is to improve science communication, and as the world turns to the internet, social media is vital to that cause.

So let’s get selfish for a moment here: I’m telling you that you should take the extra time to add social media to your schedule (see my post on having time, too). But we all know that it’s hard to convince people to do something unless it directly benefits them (which is why we have tax write-offs for charitable donations, for example). So what do you, as a scientist, have to gain from engaging in social media?

A lot, actually. Here are five big ways that social media benefits you directly.

1. If It Was Worth Doing, It’s Worth Telling Someone About

Science is a labor of love. You do what you do because you think it matters, and you publish your research because you think it’s worth talking about. What better way to make sure your research is talked about than to start the conversation?

Just ask Peter Janiszewski, of Obesity Panacea. Last year, he and his colleague published a fascinating paper in the prestigious journal Diabetes Care. The problem was, it went unnoticed. For three months, his study wasn’t blogged about. It wasn’t picked up by the press. No one seemed to care.

But Peter cared. He decided that the paper fit well into his blog’s theme, and wrote a 5-part series on the topic of metabolically-healthy obesity, the final post of which was a discussion of his recently published paper.

The series was a hit. Peter’s blog posts received over 12,000 pageviews and more than 70 comments from readers during the week of the series. As Peter recounts, “Put another way, the same research which I published in a prestigious medical journal and made basically no impact, was then viewed by over 12,000 sets of eyes because I decided to discuss it online.” A few days later, an article about his study was published on MSNBC.com.

Sure, Peter’s tale might be exceptional, but the point is there is a lot of potential to expand the reach of your research over social media. This kind of exposure isn’t just for the sake of communication. As Daniel McArthur noted, “A fairly hefty proportion of the readership of most science blogs consists of other scientists, so having your work disseminated in these forums both increases your profile within the scientific community, promotes thoughtful discussion of your work and can lead to opportunities for collaboration.”.

It should be mentioned that multiple studies have shown media attention can positively influence how often a paper is cited^1,2. Sure, blogging, tweeting or facebooking about your paper won’t guarantee it’ll be cited more, but it certainly won’t hurt.

Even if you’re paper is already being talked about, it’s important that you are a part of that conversation. As Paul Knoepfler wrote in a comment for NatureNews, “Savvy scientists must increasingly engage with blogs and social media… Even if you choose not to blog, you can certainly expect your papers and ideas will increasingly be blogged about. So there it is – blog or be blogged.”

Social media allows you to respond to and correct attacks or errors made by other bloggers, scientists, members of the press or politicians. As GrrlScientist explains in a post about scientists blogging, “a blog can be used to rapidly correct errors in mainstream media reporting, and to highlight the value of one’s findings while doing so. But perhaps most important, a blog provides scientists with a public platform where they can defend their research from misuse or misrepresentation by politicians and corporations that seek to abuse scientific data to bolster their agendas.”

In a nutshell, if you want your research to be out there and done right, there’s a strong benefit to you being the involved in the online conversation.

2. Networking x 1000

Part of social media is inherent in the name: you have to be social. Being social has this funny side effect of introducing you to new people and allowing you to create new contacts, both in the academic realm and outside it.

I don’t have to stress the importance of this kind of networking in a career. Scientists already go to meetings with the express purpose of networking. We know networking matters. Think of social networks as conference mingling on steroids: instead of rubbing elbows with a handful of scientists, you’re chatting with thousands of people from all walks of life, any of whom might become an important contact later on.

Yes, this might seem like choosing quantity over quality, but these networks aren’t just superficial – even those loose acquaintanceships can be beneficial. For example,social media can increase fundraising efforts by 40%. The more casual followers you have, the more the things you say will be disseminated through the ripple effect.

But even more importantly, a percentage of those online interactions will blossom into more. I know firsthand that this can occur – one of my collaborators on my PhD first met me through blogging. Others have shared similar stories. Bertalan Mesko of Scienceroll.com feels that “blogging and Twitter don’t just help me in my research but totally changed the way I interact with other researchers and collaborators.” Similarly, for John Fossella, who blogs at Genes to Brains to Mind to Me, social networking has expanded his scientific network. “Instead of getting feedback from the same handful of folks I regularly see in the lab, I’m getting comments and new ideas from folks who I used to work with 5, 10 and even 20 years ago, not to mention new folks who I’ve struck up online interactions with.”

When I asked my twitter followers what they gained from social media, they echoed these sentiments. Kiyomi Deards (@KiyomiD) said that social media has opened “publication, collaboration and speaking opportunities that would have been otherwise closed”. MarieClaire Shanahan (@mcshanahan), too, noted that she has made great connections to colleagues through twitter, and even gotten speaking invites. And for Sara C (@SciencingSara), tweeting is her “favorite way to keep up with current research and what technology scientists are currently utilizing.”

3. You Want Broader Impacts? I Got Yer Broader Impacts Right Here

You don’t have to make blogging or tweeting your primary form of outreach. Whatever outreach you might engage in, social media will amplify, allowing you to expand your efforts. I’ve had blog posts translated into Chinese, Romanian, and French, for example – my small effort broadcast out far beyond any audience I could reach on my own. This kind of expansion of reach is only good for you – after all, NSF calls them “broader” impacts for a reason.

All you have to do is be a little creative. Let’s say your lab currently does community outreach by going into local schools and talking about science, for example. Imagine how many more school kids could be reached if you made the materials you create or your lessons available online, complete with an outline of how the day was structured and reflections afterwards.

Or, let’s say you organize volunteering events which benefit the environment, like beach cleanups or invasive species removal efforts. How many more helping hands do you think you’d get if you posted them as facebook events or developed a network of local tweeps who like to volunteer?

Yes, there are lots of ways to make a difference without social media. But for each of those ways, social media can enhance and expand the impacts, allowing localized, small-scale efforts to become global.

4. It’s Not Narcissistic To Google Yourself

I have two words for you: Personal Branding.

Once upon a time, opinions of a person were based on resumes and references. Then came Facebook and Google. Suddenly, in a little less than a second, a potential employer or colleague can learn a lot about you. After all, the internet never forgets.

In fact, as the world turns to the web, if you don’t have a presence there, it seems odd. Just ask Danah Boyd, an Assistant Professor at NYU and a visiting researcher at Harvard Law. “There is no doubt that all faculty searches include a Google search,” writes Boyd. “One of the things I hear most frequently about a new hire is how disturbing it is that he doesn’t have a web presence. Something must be wrong, right?”

Being active on social media allows you to build and manage your web presence. Suddenly, you are controlling what appears as a top search result for your name. Potential collaborators or employers will find what you want them to, instead of what might be lingering around without you realizing it.

The best part is that they’ll get to see the real you. If you’re a good fit, they’ll be able to get that impression from your twitter feed or blog posts. Instead of being a name and a resume, you’ll be a person – and you’ve already begun charming them, even before they’ve met you face to face.

5. Practice Your Mad Skillz

No matter how good you might naturally be at anything, there is always room for improvement. I can say with full confidence that engaging in social media will improve skills which are beneficial to your career as a scientist. Most obviously, you’ll improve as a communicator. Tweeting, for example, forces you to express thoughts clearly and concisely. Blogging allows you to practice writing. As Drew Conway wrote, “a wonderful side effect of [blogging] is that the overall quality of your work will also increase, as you become a better writer, researcher and conveyer of complex ideas.”

Not only will you practice skills you already have, you might find you learn some new ones. I had never learned HTML before blogging – now, I’m in charge of updating and relaunching my lab’s website. Without a doubt, I am more marketable because of the skills that social media has forced me to learn and hone.

Citations

Phillips DP, Kanter EJ, Bednarczyk B, & Tastad PL (1991). Importance of the lay press in the transmission of medical knowledge to the scientific community. The New England journal of medicine, 325 (16), 1180-3 PMID: 1891034

KIERNAN, V. (2003). Diffusion of News about Research Science Communication, 25 (1), 3-13 DOI: 10.1177/1075547003255297

Posts In This Series:

Social Media for Scientists Part 2.5: Breaking Stereotypes

Ok, I swear I will get to Part 3 soon. But first, I want to comment on some of the critiques of my article.

There are two main ones: this post by Steven Hamblin and this one, by Kevin Zelnio. Both seem to suggest that I made the argument that “all scientists have to do is get a Twitter account and a blog and magic will happen.”

But both missed my point. I wasn’t saying “build it and they will come” – I was saying “don’t build it and they can’t come”.

More and more, people are turning to the internet for news, information, and conversation. If the scientists aren’t there, they won’t be included in the dialogue. End of story.

Kevin argues that it’s about reach. That blogging or tweeting won’t really reach anyone, and is thus not necessarily worth it, but I disagree. First off, Part 3 will go into detail about what the scientist gets out of all of this even if no one reads it. Second off, so what if my post only reaches three people? That’s three more people who can name a living scientist. Three more people who care about the research I am doing in my lab. Three more people who I communicated my science to successfully. I personally think those three people matter. They are worth my time and effort, and they are enough. As I said in my second post, it’s not about being popular, having a thousand twitter followers or getting millions of pageviews a month – it’s about making yourself and your research searchable and accessible.

For that matter, imagine if every lab reached three people. That wouldn’t be a total of three people – it would be thousands. And those thousands would actually be themselves plus the friends, family and colleagues they tell about what they learned and who they learned it from. Don’t underestimate the power of reaching three people.

But what disturbs me more is that both posts seem to operate on a flawed assumption. You can hear it echoed when Steven says “they do good science, but they make for terrible speakers” or when Kevin writes “we shouldn’t expect every scientist to want to do this and many should, in fact, NOT engage with the public!”. It’s the same assumption made by Randy Olson when he wrote Don’t Be Such A Scientist. It’s the assumption that the stereotypical scientist is the norm for the profession.

By the stereotypical scientist, I mean that gruff, elitist misanthrope with crazy hair and the social skills of a wet blanket. They’re not alone in portraying scientists that way – that is exactly what the public thinks scientists are like, too. But from what I’ve experienced in Academia, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Of all the scientists I have met, only a very small percentage fit the bill. Most are like most of the farmers, plumbers, lawyers, and salespeople I’ve met – that is, they’re just like everyone else.

They go out and hit clubs on a Friday night. Or they have happy, healthy kids who are athletes or musicians. They are, if anything, scarily normal people who all just happen to be good at and like science.

My whole point with saying scientists should be active in social media is that it’s not just about getting the research out there, it’s about getting the scientists out there, too, so we can break the very stereotype that Steven and Kevin use as a reason for scientists not to get engaged.

Sure, scientists could be better communicators. But by and large, I think we’re not too bad at it. Good communication skills are how we get grants from non-scientific agencies like National Geographic or NGOs. Social skills are how we network at conferences, not just with each other but media specialists, government officials, and the locals we meet at the bar after hours. De-jargoning what we do for a living is how we tell our kids, parents and grandparents about our research.

I know that not every scientist will do what I propose (though, to be fair, I didn’t say every scientist – I said every lab, but I digress). I don’t think every scientist has to be on twitter. But I do think every scientist should consider the dissemination of their research a crucial part of their job. It’s not naïve to think that social media is an important part of doing that – it’s naïve to think that we can make any kind of impact on the global scale without it.

** Given the comments, I want to add that I’m not arguing that social media is the only way for scientists to reach out to the community at large, and other ways are important, too. I will contend, though, that all kinds of outreach can be improved by adding social media to the mix.

Posts In This Series:

Social Media for Scientists Part 1: It’s Our Job

Scientists. We’re an enigmatic group of people. On the one hand, we are trailblazers. We’re the innovators and inventors whose job it is, quite literally, to expand the world’s technology through knowledge. We’re quick to see the merit in new methods like fluorescent proteins and hit the ground running with them.

Yet when it comes to social adaptation and technology, we’re more than behind the curve. Although 72% of internet-using Americans are on Facebook, less than 2/3 of college faculty are. Similarly, in one survey, more than half of lab managers said they have never used Facebook.

It may seem of little consequence whether scientists are using social media. That certainly seems to be the attitude of many scientists – social media platforms like Facebook are seen as little more than ways to tell everyone how good the omlette you just made was or convince yourself that your ex’s new girlfriend isn’t prettier than you.

But social media platforms aren’t just digital water coolers. They are the way the world is networking and communicating. They are how and where we share information – with friends, colleagues, acquaintances and any and everyone else.

Last Friday, I gave a talk titled “Science and the Public: Why Every Lab Should Tweet.” My slides can be downloaded here (keynote for now – will get ppt ones soon!), but I want to go over the argument I presented. I have broken this into two parts: this first post covers why, from a global perspective, it is important for scientists to engage in social media. My second post will cover what scientists can gain – personally and professionally – from doing so.

So who cares if scientists are slow to adopt social media? For one, I do. I care because especially here in the US, science is poorly understood. Only 28% of our population can pass a basic science literacy test with questions like “Does the Earth revolve around the sun?” or “Did modern humans live alongside dinosaurs?” Such results might be funny if science weren’t so central to current politics. How can our nation make good decisions on climate change, medical practices or research funding if so little of our population understands even basic science?

Yes, part of the solution to this problem is to invest in better education. But even assuming we do that, we are ignoring the millions of Americans who are no longer in school. We can make the next generation more scientifically literate, but we have to consider the current generations, too. Adults over age of 35 never learned about stem cells, nanotechnology or climate change in school, so they depend on the media to learn what they need to know. These are the people who vote. They are the ones whose taxes pay for scientific funding. We need to reach out to them, and to do that we need their trust.

Contrary to how it might seem, scientists as a group are highly trusted by Americans. We rank second only to military personnel. But this trust is only in a broad sense – as a recent survey by Scientific American and Nature showed, the minute you start asking about specific topics, especially complicated scientific topics like the causes of autism or climate change, that trust fizzles.

How to we build and maintain that trust? We have to communicate better. As Rick E. Borchelt and colleagues wrote in an essay for AAAS, “The scientific community needs to understand what ethical practitioners of public relations have long known: trust is not about information; it’s about dialogue and transparency.”

Right now, science is almost entirely a one-way conversation. Scientists, as a group, pride themslves on doing cutting-edge research and publishing it in the top-tier journals of their field – then most feel that their part in the conversation is over. The problem is, these publications aren’t really communicating science to anyone but other scientists. Articles are kept locked behind expensive paywalls, and even those that are published in open access journals are still inaccessible, as they lie behind what I like to call jargon walls.

It’s not that non-scientists are too stupid to get science. Far from it. The average person simply doesn’t have the specific vocabulary to understand a scientific paper. I’m not stupid, yet when I take my car in to the mechanic, I don’t have the specific vocabulary to understand exactly what is making my check engine light keep turning on.

This jargon wall breeds distrust. Do I overall trust mechanics to know how to fix my car? Sure. But when one starts going on and on about how my timing belt needs adjustment, my fuel injectors need to be replaced, and there’s an oil leak in my engine that needs fixing, do I fully trust that he’s not just making up problems to get me to pay more for repairs? Not for a second.

Even worse, scientists pass the buck when it comes to communicating science. We write the papers, but then hand them off to journalists and say “here, explain this to everyone else.” We hand what we’ve committed years of our life to over to a writer that may have little to no science training and even less passion for the discipline as a whole. Then, we gripe and moan when the science is shottily explained or, worse, completely misinterpreted.

Guess what? As scientists, that is our fault. Sure, some science writers are worse than others. Some are perfectly content to publish hype-driven stories that neglect scientific integrity. Others are amazing – I would trust Ed Yong or Carl Zimmer with even my most precious scientific baby. But it is first and foremost the scientist’s job to share his or her research with the broader community. That means it is the scientist who is ultimately to blame when their research isn’t communicated well.

How can the public trust us when we’re not out there sharing what we do? When they can’t see our passion? When we say we ‘don’t have time’ to interact with them, to explain our research better or answer their questions?

Only 18% of Americans can name a living scientist. That statistic crushes my heart.

When I say scientists should be involved in social media, it is because we need to open that dialogue. If people don’t know who we are or what we do, they will never really care about or trust what we say. Once upon a time I would have said this meant walking down the street and talking to people, but we now live in a digital age. 57% of Americans say they talk to people more online than they do in real life. Scientists need to be on social media because everyone else is already, talking about their thoughts and feelings, having discussions about things they care about, and generally, well, being social.

48% of young Americans check Facebook first thing in the morning. 28% do so before they even get out of bed (including me). There are now more than 200 million tweets posted every day. If you’re trying to communicate but you’re not on social media, you’re like a tree falling in an empty forest – yes, you’re making noise, but no one is listening. It’s not much of a dialogue if you’re the only one talking.

Scientists need to be searchable. We need to be available. We need to take the time to open a dialogue about our research. Yes, it’s going to take up time, which is a rare and precious commodity to the average scientist. Yes, it’s going to take extra effort and dedication. But it will be worth it.

Alan Alda said it perfectly when he asked,

“if scientists could communicate more in their own voices—in a familiar tone, with a less specialized vocabulary—would a wide range of people understand them better? Would their work be better understood by the general public, policy-makers, funders, and, even in some cases, other scientists?”

The answer is YES.

Update: my slideshow for the talk (though it’s much prettier in Keynote… just sayin’)

Science and the Public: Why Every Lab Should Tweet

View more presentations from Christie Wilcox

I’ve gotten some questions regarding stats references in the slideshow, so here they are: The Facebook stats are put out every year by Facebook; this is a nice info graphic post which sums up their most recent set. The 28% statistic came from this Science Daily account of Jon Miller’s AAAS Symposium, and the number who can name a living scientists came from this Research!America poll. There were also some stats at the end from a couple surveys, summarized in this blog post. All of the stats on use of different media for news are from Pew Research Center (here’s a nice summary post). Social media image credit: ThumbsUp

Posts In This Series: