I was therefore delighted to read a blog post on Nature’s community guest blog, Soapboxscience, by Matt Shipman, a public information officer at North Carolina State University. He writes about using social media (like Twitter and Facebook) and science blogs for taking science to the public.

Building networks takes time

Apart from the simple and convincing argumentation, what I like about the blog post is that Matt Shipman points out the fact that it takes time to build up the necessary network to get the full value of social media. This aspect is not that often acknowledged. My own experience is also that it takes time, and that you need to be patient in the beginning and that it requires some work. Just like you need to be patient when building up networks in real life. As Matt Shipman writes:

“Just because you set up a social media account doesn’t mean that anyone will know about it. You’ll need to take the time to cultivate a following.”

And how do you do that? Matt Shipman has a few suggestions, which match very well my own experiences.

“You can start by figuring out your desired audience. Who do you want to be following you? Other scientists? Relevant science writers? Potential grad students? [...] Once you’ve defined your target audience (or audiences), you can begin reaching out to friends and colleagues who are already online. They can help point people to your Twitter account, Facebook page, etc”

In my experience making searches on e.g. Twitter and looking at who pops up is also a good start for finding out who to follow. And just like looking at the references in a scientific article can give hints on where to find more knowledge, so does it help to look at who key people are following – making chain searchers so to speak.

Getting people to follow you

One thing is finding out who you should follow, getting the relevant people to follow you is also a challenge, and probably a bigger one. Without followers you are missing the whole point of social media. To get full advantage you need to have the relevant people to follow you – and not only that:

“.. if you really want people to pay attention, you need to have something to offer. Content is king, and you need to contribute something to the online conversation. In other words, why should people be listening to you?”

Social media like Facebook and Twitter are good for drawing attention to things, and communicate short messages but not always for more extensive communication:

“Social media platforms can be very limiting. For example, can you define genotype and phenotype in 140 characters or less? ”

“If you want to use social media to communicate effectively, you need to drive readers somewhere.”

‘Somewhere’ could be an already published article, a new report or an event, but it could also be a blog. Matt Shipman goes on to write about the blog and how it is useful for science communication. I won’t repeat that but encourage potential new science bloggers to read the blog post.

Lots of advice on how to get followers

Searching Google for tips on how to get followers on for example Twitter, lots and lots of websites pops up. For new comers to social media and science, Matt Shipman’s blog post on Nature’s community guest blog, Soapboxscience is a good starting point on why the combination of social media, blogs and science communication is not such a bad idea, but also that it requires some work.

On Thursday 26^th April, accompanying the opening of Experiences of Ageing, we invited guests to investigate some of the overlooked aspects of medicine with their pen, lens, and hands, guided by photographer Mette Bersang, sculptor Joanna Sperryn Jones, and Lucy Lyons, whose artistic research is displayed in the exhibition.

We’re working hard to make an online gallery of all the photos and artwork from the evening, along with a short film, but in the meantime here’s a taster, with some reflections from the artists…

Photography: Focusing on the overlooked

Mette Bersang kicked off the evening by showing us some of her photographs of the often overlooked spaces of hospitals, homes, and parks. The silence of the audience spoke loudly of the photographs’ bewitching, surprising quality, and the evening light flooding into the auditorium was a perfect backdrop to our encounter with Mette’s use of light to make ‘cuts’ in photographic reality.

Mette then proceeded to shake us up with some eye yoga exercises, stretching our arms wide and squinting at our moving thumbs to explore the limits of our vision. Armed with these physical reminders of the ‘tool’ of vision we scattered through the spaces of Museion, looking for things that might be overlooked, and with the challenge of choosing only one photo to share – an interesting idea in the age of digital snapping… Mette writes:

It was very interesting for me to experience the wonder the participants expressed when being encouraged to spend time looking, when being slowed down in the process of taking a photo.

Drawing: Valuing the everyday

After the participants had reluctantly chosen a single photo from Mette’s photography workshop, Lucy led them downstairs to the exhibition room, where they were greeted by her exquisitely detailed pencil drawings of rollators, medical devices, bones, and residents of Lotte Care Home, as well as a selection of the objects featured. Lucy uses drawing to look very closely, and in doing so uncovers new knowledge – in previous projects she has helped surgeons and scientists discover new aspects of bone disease and microscopic features of seeds, and reflect on their own ways of looking.

In her research project at Medical Museion, Lucy turned this lens onto experiences of aging and the medical devices that support us as we age – and onto their location in the museum. In this workshop she challenged participants to draw fast – sketching at least 10 fragments of the objects seen through a little paper view-finder. Laying them out together on the floor at the end, we asked ourselves what we’d been drawn to, and what we’d ended up seeing. Lucy writes:

I usually ask participants to look slowly, spend time looking, drawing, getting to know unfamiliar objects. I myself take a very long time making meticulous drawings full of closely observed detail. For this workshop I wanted to take myself and the other participants out of my comfort zone by asking everyone to make 10 very quick drawings using a viewfinder. This helped prevent concerns about making a polished finished drawing – impossible under these conditions and stopped preconceptions about the objects seen. When seen through a viewfinder and drawn at speed, we were forced to see the objects we think we know, very differently, and appreciate them in new ways.

Sculpture: Breaking is also making

Back in the auditorium, participants heard about how Joanna was inspired by her own experiences of broken bones, and by crutches used in Japan to hold up struggling tree branches, to create the delicate bone china twigs you can see in the photo. The twigs are individually molded, cast, assembled, and finished, and and make a surprisingly musical sound when handled…. Or broken!

Joanna has used the twigs in a series of installations; piled together as a carpet that crumbles underfoot, or woven into delicate walls that fall apart as people try to pass between them. Joanna’s work explores how breaking can be a creative act, and can change how we think about what was broken. After visiting a ‘behind the scenes’ room at Medical Museion, where medieval skeletons from Æbelholt monastery are being prepared for storage, Joanna gave us one final challenge – to each choose, and then break, one of the last existing twigs from her project. We gathered the fragments in tissue-lined boxes along with labels detailing the date the mould was made, and the date the last twig from that mould was broken. Joanna writes:

When people participate in my artwork there is always an element of uncertainty as each person’s reaction contributes to the event. I wanted each participant to experience breaking first hand because this is the best way to understand breaking on an experiential level. There is an empowering element of freedom in breaking that contrasts with the destructive loss. Before the event I worried that no one would be willing to explore the experience so I was relieved when a woman started the breaking and everyone (except for one person…) embraced the activity fully.

Discussion: Experience and emotion

The evening ended with a discussion over beers and snacks. The topics ranged from the difficulty of choosing a photo, or feeling shy about drawing in public, to a debate about peoples’ emotional experiences of breaking the twigs. There were also questions to the artists about their own work, and participants who themselves make art shared comparisons with their ways of working.

This event inhabited the space between an artist’s talk, and an art class for learning techniques: here, people were invited to step into the artist’s process for looking at the world in their particular way. My impression was that this both gave a sense of freedom to experiment, and a sense that different responses to that process were all valuable: no chastisement for getting the perspective or framing wrong here!

One of the elements that started to flutter up toward the end of the discussion was the sense of an experience shared; it was a packed evening full of challenges, and as the organizer I was relieved and moved by peoples’ openness to trying something new, together.

From PwC’s website the report including the statistical findings can be downloaded*, so I won’t refer them here, but just highlight a points which could be useful in public health science communication.

The public does seek health information through social media

According to the report it is clear that social media is a tool for the public when they need health information. The figure below illustrates this.

Of course these findings applies to an American population with a very different health care system in comparison to the Danish health system. The information is however valuable because it confirms that health information seeking behavior includes social media. This is of interest to health care providers but also to researchers in health care, who have a unique chance to communicate their findings, reflections etc. to people who are actually searching for them. And why is that relevant? Well, to quote Don Sinko, chief integrity officer of Cleveland Clinic who in the report states:

“One of the greatest risks of social media is ignoring social media. It’s out there, and people are using it whether you like it or not.”

I would argue that this goes for public health science communication too. If the consumers doesn’t find your research while searching social media they will just find something else. Social media is out there and people are using it whether you like it or not.

Listen, Participate, Engage

Although the report focuses on how social media can be used in marketing and in social business strategies, HRI’s suggested social media participation model for businesses does hold some useful tips relevant also for science communication. The Listen, Participate, Engage strategy is illustrated below.

Looking at the strategy with science communication eyes this could be a good starting point for scientists who are newcomers to social media.

Listening is to start knowing. Looking into what other research organisations are communicating, what patient associations are focusing on, what colleagues already on social media are writing about can be a way to get a feel for the media and how it works. And it is pretty risk free – it is about listening and learning.

Second step is to participate. Start sending out tweets or post links to your own articles on Facebook. Retweet others links. There is no need to actively engage or go into discussions, but being active can give a feel of what happens when you communicate.

Third step is then to start engaging. From my experience it is not a process that is strictly divided into phases but something that slowly progresses. All of the sudden it makes sense to comment on a blog post, to ask a question on Twitter or respond to a statement on Facebook. It is also a process to find out what kind of social media that works best for the individual. Slowly moving from listening, to participating and then engaging makes it clear that the different platforms offers different functionalities and that which ones are most useful varies between scientific disciplines, organisations, countries etc.

All in all very simple steps and nothing fancy, but it doesn’t always have to be so complicated.

A health care business focus report

Again, the report from HRI is focused on health care business and not on health sciences. It would be interesting to do a similar or extended survey including questions on scientific health information and interviewing research institutions about their use of social media. I do believe however that some of the findings from the consumer survey in this report, which indicates that social media is playing an increasingly significant role in health care, also applies to health sciences and that public health researchers who are not already trying out the media should start to listen, participate and engage.

* The report is based on a survey of 1.060 American adults and 124 health care executives.

If you click on the link in the tweet (or here), you’ll come onto the webpage of PLoS Medicine and an article by McKee M, Stuckler D, Basu S (2012) entitled: Where There Is No Health Research: What Can Be Done to Fill the Global Gaps in Health Research?

In the righthand side column (under: “share this article” – which is BTW primarily through social media) you’ll see a box from Twitter, called “What the community is saying”. In this box a roll of all the tweets linking to the article are shown in chronological order with the newest first. The reasons for why people chose to include links to a particular article in their tweets may of course be many. It could be a simple wish to spread word of the article, but could also be comments and reactions to the article and additional links to for example blog posts discussing the article.

For the authors of the article this easy access to the Twitter activity concerning their article provides and opportunity to see what the segment, who are on Twitter, are saying about the article – and not least who they are. And for the readers it is a chance to check out who else have found this article relevant. Who knows, they might be people in your area of research you were not yet acquainted with.

The Twitter box is of course not unique to the article by Martin McKee & co. but applies to all PLoS Medicine articles.