Disseminating research through social media..

This is long (!), but i just sent it to my brother for an EU research tender and thought it might be useful to share.. 
Caveat! - its written by someone struggling their way through this, not an expert.. Enjoy!

Overall approach:

• Market segmentation – who is your audience? Researchers, practitioners, people in devel countries.
• Who are your delivery partners. I would give away the kudos of it – if people feel like they’re working for you then you’ll have to pay them. Make them feel like they’re working towards a common objective that you both care about and you’ll be amazed.
• Instead of pushing a message, go to where people are. Where are these conversations already happening? What can you bolt it onto or link with..? Could you have guest bloggers who use your platform..? who wants to be associated with you..?
• Can you use an “open innovation” process (it just means crowdsourcing), and prototyping (pilots) is really popular at the moment.

Volunteers – id write a load of role profiles and see who wants to take them on. Things like updating the blog, researching certain ‘chapters’ or organising around a particular date. You can put them out through your networks and see who bites.

Framework:

1. PROMOTION: Promotion, raise awareness and visibility
2. PARTICIPATION: relies on the involvement and participation of regional Stakeholders on the strategic thinking process
3. DISSEMINATION: Dissemination of programme progress, outputs and results following a transparency and accountability spirit
4. EXPLOITATION: Efficient exploitation of the projects outputs and results ensuring their influence on further
5. NETWORKING: follow up discussions, progress ideas collectively

Or use: 1) inspire, 2) educate,3)  reinforce.

Tools:

Crowdsourcing via wiki –  This often has low interaction levels, but is a good way. I’d do a Blog – people will generally read but hardly ever reply unless you make it very personal. I’ve used http://www.wikispaces.com/ or googledocs https://docs.google.com  is a pretty good way of crowdsourcing information (spreadsheets are really good, quick and cheap way of collecting info)

Facebook has voting polls and is a really good way of reaching an audience using ‘events’. Mostly people get driven to blogs.

Twitter is the best way of publicising blogs and updates and building easy communities of practice (have a look at other people’s lists and follow some lists. ).

Newsletter You can do a really easy newsletter using http://paper.li and people can subscribe to it (I’d just do the blog personally.) or use mailchimp

Linked-in has practitioner groups so you can invite people to join a group, and anyone can publish anything that gets emailed to all in the group.

Don’t link twitter, FB or linked in together – they’re separate audiences. But you can automate posts (eg automatically post from a blog to FB.) or time your posts if you have to.

You could try using Google AdSense. It’s been on my list for a while. For charities its free for a bit, but it will target people searching for “development” or whatever and your advert will show up on the right hand side of the search.

Geographic – people like maps, and seeing themselves on maps, so you can make a Google map with pin points of all the relevant places. People click on the links and it takes them to different places. http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?ct=reset go my “myplaces” and “create map”

Mobile apps – early days for this in academia.  I’d suggest maybe publishing a book/ report summary when you’re done and sell it through mobile apps.? Even 100 copies at £30 a head is a decent return for very little effort (it’s what I’m planning to do next year) http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1541053

QR codes – very good if you have a shop window or location to display them..? Or an advert on a bus – people have to be walking past and want to find out more (but wouldn’t type a url into a phone browser)

Videos are excellent. Use a vimeo account and link them to other topics (using hashtags like twitter). See the one I did for yorkcvs here: http://vimeo.com/30538238

Animations - I don’t know if you’ve seen the RSA animate videos, but they’re excellent and worth replicating rather than a simple headshot..

http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/videos/

Stories – tell them as a journey, and involve people in the journey. No one is really interested in finished products anymore. You can use http://storify.com/ to capture some of this on route (eg summary of thoughts around a particular theme.)

Put PowerPoint slides online – its human communication and people like looking at pictures. (or use prezi to be a bit flash)

Maximise the use of what you have; email, website, e-bulletins, databases, events, meetings, networks.

I’d suggest you spend some money on infographics (see http://visual.ly) as a way of presenting data. I don’t know anyone who reads formal academic papers anymore.. Thats it..!

Useful links:

Social media dissemination: http://worldviewsconference.com/announcements/social-media-is-inherently-a-system-of-peer-evaluation-and-is-changing-the-way-scholars-disseminate-their-research-raising-questions-about-the-way-we-evaluate-academic-authority/

EU programmes on Open Innovation - http://www.euris-programme.eu/en/homepage/open-innovation

Innovation in higher education – by Geoff mulgan http://pearsonblueskies.com/innovation-in-higher-education/

Wikis in the classroom: http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-with-technology-articles/wikis-in-the-classroom-three-ways-to-increase-student-collaboration/

York CVs social media guides.. http://yorkcvs.org.uk/ycvs-publications?page=2