I saw a hard challenge for myself, my outreach work. I'm trying to talk about biology to people who really don't want to. The people who've had a bad prior experience with biology and have avoided it intentionally since finishing up school. The whole idea of rethinking biology, not just because it enriches our lives, but because engaging with biology is important for the health and welfare of society. Anyway, I was recently asked, "If you're trying to reach a population of people who avoid biology and science at all costs, then how do you reach them?" My answer is to go where the people are and start building a relationship with them. That's an idea we talked about in Module 1 of this course as well. People are on social media a lot. As of 2018, it was estimated that about 68 percent of Americans got their news from social media. In the United Kingdom, according to the National Coordinating Center for Public Engagement, as of 2018, people in the United Kingdom were spending two-and-a-half hours per day on social media. Of course, with the COVID-19 pandemic, people quarantined increased their social media usage. Social media is a place where we can find a lot of people and a lot of different people. Research suggests it's a place that people, especially young adults, go for science information. That's useful to know for many reasons. It's a way to have a broad reach with our science communication activities, it's a way to build connections with our audience, and building connections with our audience is really important to avoid so-called deficit models in science communication. Our role as science communicators isn't to go out there and spew facts about science to a crowd, but far more nuanced. We can avoid looking like an obnoxious all knowing scientists by first and foremost focusing on building a sense of connection. We can listen to what our audience is saying while also getting feedback about the effectiveness of our activities. Something we'll talk more about in the next video. Social media is a great place to network, both with other scientists and other science communicators. Many scientific conferences I've attended recently, often have Twitter handles or conference hashtags to create a different online conference experience is going on at the same time. Altmetrics are also gaining in popularity as a way of measuring the impact of scientific articles, and altmetrics include social media data. It's also a great place to learn from people around the world without needing to travel. There are a lot of social media options out there and more popping up every day, so how do you decide where to go? How to get started? I'll go over a few key pointers here, but I've also included a guide in the resources section at the end of this module to help you get started. Regardless of what platform you choose, the first thing you need to do is build your network and establish your credibility as a science communicator. I don't need to tell you that there's an awful lot of garbage on the Internet. Building your name and your credibility will help you stand out from the refuse. The headline on many social media sites is a good starting point for establishing credibility. Your university, your museum, or other professional credentials, books that you've published, high-profile speaking engagements, and the awards that you've won. You can pin an article you wrote, or a video interview, or a podcast, or whatever makes most sense at the top of your profile. This should be something that hooks an interested party in so they start following you on social media. By interacting with others on social media and adding to existing conversations, people will start to click on your profile. These little tidbits about who you are will help get them interested. Hashtags and retweeting bots can also be really useful for being found, especially across platforms. Now, I say bots with a grain of salt because they can also be a big contributor to garbage on the Internet, but some industrious individuals have created bots that will retweet anything with a certain hashtag, like #SciComm, and people who are interested in SciComm, follow these bots. It's a great way of getting your content visible to lots of people who might not be following you on social media. It also helps to be creative with your content, and what that looks like will depend on your audience. We'll talk about this a bit more in the next video on learning analytics and using data to drive what content you choose to communicate. But I found I have the best luck communicating to my target audience, people who don't like science using social media, with content that doesn't look sciencey; science content that's hidden in something else. For example, I mentioned the biology of bacon in my TED Talk. Part of why I included it was because the non-science people who follow me on social media strongly engaged with it. It was about what I had for breakfast, not a science lesson. When in reality, it was both. Knowing what to include and what is reaching your audience is an art, and it takes time to build up a following. You have to build up your following before you can start getting these data-driven insights on the effectiveness of your science communication. This is something we'll talk more about in the next lecture. Now, of course, we can't mention social media without talking about the pros and cons of creating a digital footprint. On one hand, you need that digital footprint to help build your community and communicate your science. Now, on the other hand, this digital footprints don't ever go away. Before putting it on social media, is it something that you really do want to share internationally and permanently? I'm often asked about Internet trolls as well. Criticism, founded or not, is a risk every time we put ourselves in front of others and is something inherent in doing any science communication regardless of the modality you choose. Trolling can be particularly troublesome and upsetting, especially for women or anyone belonging to a minority group. What can we do about the trolls? Don't feed the trolls. My experience, people who are overly critical, they tend to be really unhappy people. They get their jollies through making other people upset. Don't let them see you get upset. Said in psychological terms, don't positively reinforce their behavior. Now that we've covered the basics of science communication by social media and educational technologies, we'll move to considerations of how we can use the data from technology while learning analytics to enhance our science communication activities.
