Navigating the social media maze for academics

Life for an academic these days seems to be getting more complex. In addition to the traditional tasks – teaching, researching, and publishing – the job has expanded to include endless grant applications and the need to develop a public persona to publicise their work. All of this is in addition to having some kind of personal life and human relationships.

The advent of social media has made life for academics more complex and has opened up new ways of publicising their work.

Earlier today I saw an interesting interchange among some science researchers on Twitter. The conversation was inspired by Cameron Webb, a.k.a. @Mozziebites on Twitter, who posted on his blog about Putting a value on science communication. The conversation then moved onto how challenging it can be to manage multiple social media and media channels and how best to collate and curate these. Here’s a few of the tweets:

@Mozziebites @DrMaggieHardy @_PHAA_ @iamscicomm great blog Cameron. Finding the time to keep a record of outreach activities is hard!
— Prof Emma L Johnston (@DrEmmaLJohnston) July 25, 2015

@DrEmmaLJohnston @Mozziebites @DrMaggieHardy @_PHAA_ @iamscicomm @whereisdaz Hardest to track/quantify is the social media.
— Dr Siobhan O’Dwyer (@Siobhan_ODwyer) July 25, 2015

Many people working in universities tell me that social media just seems like too much on top of an already busy schedule. They ask me how it is possible to fit more into their limited spare time. The trick is to create content once and reuse it across social media platforms, it is also to share other people’s work to build your online communities and networks.

Some ideas for managing multiple social media platforms with minimal effort

Use tools

Merely using the native Twitter or Facebook apps is neither efficient nor effective. Consider using a tool that enables easy cross posting between social media platforms. There are a number of free or low cost tools that serve this purpose. Examples are Hootsuite which gives a dashboard for sharing context to social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn; or Buffer which schedules posts to various social media sites.

Find a place to save interesting links and posts

It is worth finding apps that you like to collate the links you find in your travels across the internet. For academic items I tend to use Zotero, for general links I use Pocket, and Feedly to track websites that are worth regular catchups. Both Pocket and Feedly apps enable sharing of the content that is bookmarked across other social media sites.

Collate interesting content from yourself and others for future reference

It is not sufficient to spread your wit and wisdom across the social media universe, you need to collate your own and others’ content for future reference. This is where tools like If This Then That (IFTTT) come in handy. This free site enables you to create simple processes (called recipes) to share information between various applications. There are many pre-built recipes to use or you can create your own recipes. It is a very powerful yet simple tool for curating your own and others’ content. For example it is easy to create a recipe that automatically posts any items you have favourited via Pocket to Buffer for scheduled posting to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Some handy IFTTT recipes include:

Archive your Instagram photos in an Evernote notebook
Save your Tweets in a Google Spreadsheet (which archives your new tweets to Google Drive)
Create link notes in Evernote from Feedly articles saved for later
Post new SoundCloud tracks to your WordPress Blog

Invest your time parsimoniously on social media

This is a really useful post by Kevan Lee that outlines how you can spend 30 minutes per day on social media to good effect, it’s worth reading: What’s the Best Way to Spend 30 Minutes of Your Time on Social Media Marketing?

Work out which social media platforms are worth investing time in & which you can simply cross-post to

I spend a lot of time on Twitter because I enjoy the open conversational nature of the platform. However, for academics there are a few other ways to share information and build a public profile you might not have considered:

Setup a public profile page on Facebook so you can share professional information separately to your personal profile (it is much less annoying for family and friends)
Setup a LinkedIn profile and cross-post interesting articles and information there (I rarely log into LinkedIn and use Buffer to post links there)
Don’t forget the emerging academic social media networks, such as Academia or ResearchGate – by posting your published materials to these kind of site you can boost citations and downloads of your work. They can also be handy for asking questions and finding new collaborators.

Disclosure: I am an Adjunct Senior Lecturer in School of Computer Science & Engineering at UNSW Australia and publish in academic journals from time to time

May 16, 2015May 15, 2015

Mobile and social media – what it means for business

Mobile and social media have created a new business landscape

If you’re not already working out how to disrupt your business and your industry then you will be disrupted…

Who succeeds at amazon? “Explorers and pioneers”. Who fails? Those who focus on killing our competitors. -Bezos
— Spencer Rascoff (@spencerrascoff) May 9, 2014

The web 2.0 revolution and social media changed the game for business. At a basic level brands discovered the notion of customer ‘conversations’. But for the most part this was not strategic, rather it often consisted of random tactical efforts.

It is amusing to see that even in 2015 many brands are only just now discovering the notion of metrics and measuring their online activity:

“…many brands moving towards measuring audience impressions, clicks, and thinking cross-platform”
– Tania Yuki , Shareablee CEO and Founder

Then we often hear statistics like this:

“…Instagram delivered these brands 58 times more engagement per follower than Facebook, and 120 times more engagement per follower than Twitter.”

The real question to ask about all statistics like this is “so what?” What does that engagement translate to as business outcomes?

“There is no ROI in anything if you don’t learn how to use it.”
– Gary Vaynerchuk, Founder VaynerMedia

The simple fact is that hardly anyone is driving direct revenue from social media, and many businesses are not optimized to sell via mobile. And the big question for businesses is what is the goal for their social and mobile activity?

But now all business online presence must be mobile friendly – Google and customers will punish businesses that do not embrace this. Increasingly users are accessing digital content via mobile devices, and this means that businesses need to ensure a good quality experience.

Social media was only phase 1

Social media was phase one of the new digital revolution, next coming is the collaborative economy and internet of things ( IoT).

The present of social is mobile. The future of mobile is IoT and wearables. and these offer huge monetization opportunities:

Cisco [former] CEO John Chambers Values Internet of Things at $19T #CES2014

People

People, both customers and staff, now have a default position that assumes access to any resources they want. And they want it online, on demand, real-time, anywhere, and on any device they choose.

This is all part of the democratisation of communication enabled by the digital revolution. It leads to an inversion of power relationships and puts the means of production for communication in the hands of the populace.

It leads to opportunities and growth in peer-to-peer and mobile. Kevin Kelly sums it up nicely as:

“…a shift towards the individual as the centre of a network of relationships mediated and enabled by technology…”

The shift is from customer channels to a customer continuum mediated by social and mobile.

This means that businesses need to connect social media activity to purchasing activity, they need to make it work on mobile and tablet. And it must be friction-less.

Changes to team and organisation structure

In a fast moving context like this command-control management is dead. This is because the operational tempo of a digital business is not days or weeks or months; it is minutes and seconds.

To support this shift in operational tempo we need employees with skills to work in a social or collaborative context. We need team members who can deal with ambiguity and a fast pace.

To support customers who do not have patience with internal silos businesses need to move towards integrated teams. This means using ideas like DevOps and agile to support cross-functional teams to meet customer needs and deliver across organisational silos. To achieve this all parts of the business will need to bring together expertise:

Tech
Marketing
Sales
Operations
Customer service

Workforce changes mean that new ways of working will emerge, such as co-working and collaboration. These will lead to increased decentralisation of the workforce and be accompanied by much shorter change cycles.

And these changes will all lead to issues with boundaries between public and private; between personal and business. With this blurring between roles it will be increasingly difficult to establish role clarity. And this means that team members need to be able to manage through ambiguity and across functional lines.

Risk and governance

In the fast-paced world of digital business we still need to consider how to manage risk and how to enact effective governance. Some factors to consider in this regard include:

Monitor your business online
Assign responsibility for online channels
Include social & mobile in digital strategy
Link digital strategy to marketing strategy
Ensure cross media planning in place
Develop mechanisms to track progress
Create and manage loosely connected networks
Grow a business in a networked world
Engage people and garner advocates for your business
Focus outward while protecting your brand

Top 10 checklist for digital business

Digital strategy: is just part of it, includes websites, email marketing, etc.
Tactical plans: For implementation of campaigns
Resource plan: Social is not free, it needs people and tools
Tools: Required to enable management, tracking and monitoring
Metrics: Need to be decided prior to implementation to enable effective reporting
ROI: Need to track investment and results
Reporting: For good governance
Roles & responsibilities: Defined and clear to all parties, in particular governance + cross-functional teams
Cross media plan: Integration with other digital and marketing activities
Risk management: Includes social media policies and procedures and crisis management process

April 24, 2015

LinkedIn and the power of networks

it's not the students that keep us young, it's all the stairs

I used to think of LinkedIn as a boring but worthy social network for business contacts. But I was wrong.

Over the years it has become a critical B2B social network, with multi-million dollar deals often being done via the platform.

LinkedIn has also disrupted the recruitment business and reshaped the way people find jobs. It changed the power dynamic in recruitment by enabling the jobs to find people. Clever recruiters embraced LinkedIn early. The rest clung to their clunky old proprietary resume databases.

With the recent acquisition of Lynda.com, the reach of LinkedIn looks like growing into training and education. This is a more interesting play than MOOCs from an education perspective.

Remembering my LinkedIn story

Last night I caught up with a longstanding buddy, Des Walsh, as he visited Sydney. Des is a doyen of social media in Australia, as well as being a passionate networker and executive coach.

As we chatted I finally remembered to tell him the story of how one of his ideas helped me to get a great job.

LinkedIn ’30 day blitz’

Back in late 2012 Des contacted a diverse bunch of folks who were active on social media, noting that LinkedIn was our ‘orphan’ social network. He was right, most of us were enamoured with other sexier social media platforms. We were all members of LinkedIn, but at that time none of us were particularly active there, nor were our profiles up to date.

Des setup a social network challenge for November 2012, rounding up a diverse group to take part in a month of LinkedIn activity.

The concept was simple – “A collaborative project, in which each participant commits to take action on his/her LinkedIn presence and activity, over a 30 day period.” – 30 Day Linking Blitz.

I signed up for the blitz, and started with updating my LinkedIn profile with previous work and a decent profile picture.

The results were immediate

Almost immediately after that I was contacted by a recruiter. The recruiter had been trying for almost a year to find a candidate for a role that called for a diverse mix of skills. She explained that my name had popped up in her LinkedIn search that morning.

The rest is history. I interviewed for the role at UNSW Australia, where I’ve been working happily since then. All thanks to Des and his 30 Day LinkedIn Blitz.

June 11, 2012

What will change the world? Welcome to the hive mind of Twitter.

One of the things I love about Twitter is the way it enables serendipity on a grand scale. Recently, I can’t remember how, I ran across @blogbrevity (a.k.a Angela Dunn) whose Twitter feed resonated with me and we followed each other.

On June 9^th she invited me to join #Ideachat – Twitter Chat & Salon for Twitter Thinkers About “Ideas”. The topic for discussion was “What is the one long-term trend that will change the world?“. As food for thought Angela shared an interview with trend expert and curator Cecile Poignant of TrendTablet.

This topic fascinates me and it aligns nicely with other interests, like Social Innovation Sydney. Also the more that people start to talk and think about things like this then the more likely we are to take action.

The chat was dynamic and thought provoking. And it got me thinking.

One of the recurring ideas was collective action, and some of the themes are nicely summed up in these tweets:

“Self organizing to co-create a better future is the killer trend. Waiting for institutions to do it isn’t working.#Ideachat”
— Saul Kaplan (@skap5) June 9, 2012

“@blogbrevity most fascinating tech trend: seamless personal navigation of our world: mobile, gesture, voice, geolocation = access#ideachat”
— David Hood (@davidahood) June 9, 2012

“Twitter is the observatory of the future; that’s why its reciprocal knowledge engine is so powerful #ideachat #txed nigelcameron.wordpress.com/future/why-twi…”
— Nigel Cameron (@nigelcameron) June 9, 2012

I started to realise that the big trend is something that enables the self organizing of co-creation. The big trend is the evolution of the hive mind. It is only with social communication platforms like Twitter that something akin to a hive mind can emerge.

The always on and ambiently connected nature of Twitter is ideal for the emergence of a hive mind. We begin to shed our privacy and to live within the omnipresent gaze of the group. We are connected into the minutiae of other people’s lives in ways that were not possible before. We are connected to people in distant places and to the events that occur in their orbit as well as in our own.

Here the very minutiae of chats on Twitter, that so many disparage mindlessly, are important in creating the connections of the hive mind.

Once one becomes accustomed to the continual connection, to knowing the news before it makes the news media, to finding answers to questions faster and better than a search engine, then the connection to the hive mind comes to seem normal.

Then from the connection to the hive mind, one begins to sift out those individuals and groups who hold similar ideas and beliefs. And from that pool of people the self organization and co-creation can begin.

Some people will try to tell us that feeling weird and strangely out of touch when disconnected from the hive mind is a kind of psychopathology. But they have not yet understood or experienced the new reality of constant ambient connection to the hive mind.

Nor have they seen the results of loose ties in action, network amplification of communication, the reciprocal knowledge engine, and the power of a hive mind working together to co-create change. I suspect that this is just over the horizon.

UPDATE 15 June 2012

I post a query. I go and write in a thunderstorm for a few hours. I come back. The hivemind has sorted everything. What a strange new world.
— Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) June 14, 2012

Following are a few recent posts that have informed my thinking on this topic:

May 3, 2012April 13, 2014

What’s the big idea with social media? #media140

I was lucky enough to be invited to Media 140 in Perth recently to discuss what the ‘big idea’ is with social media.

The idea was for a context setting discussion about social media and how it is changing business and society.

DIGITAL REVOLUTION
We are living through a digital revolution that is changing the world we inhabit as absolutely and as irrevocably as the industrial revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

That previous industrial revolution changed our relationship with time, with money, and with people. It created the wage labourer that we know, and the unions whom we’ve to come know encapsulated by the term ‘organised labour’. It created a society governed by the mechanical clock and the notion of work versus non-work time.

The digital revolution is on a similar scale, and this scale is based on a remarkable shift in the means of production. The digital revolution has at its roots a democratization of access to the means of communication.

EXPECTATIONS AND ACCESS TO COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY
As a result we are seeing a shift in the expectations of ordinary people about communications technology and their access to that technology. Further, we are seeing a rapid evolution of behaviour in relation to communications technology – mainly in the use of smartphones and tablets.

All of this is leading us to significant shifts in society, and it is all fuelled by innovations in communications devices. The smartphone and almost ubiquitous access to the internet have created a new baseline expectation in people that they will always be connected. I have often argued that with Twitter we are seeing the genesis of the hive mind of humanity.

The digital divide is no longer about access to technology – as my friend Mark Pesce notes, even poor fishermen in Kerala have access – it’s about your willingness or desire to be connected.

However, people are finding enormous utility in being always connected. For example, the number of ereaders in the hands of people is growing enormously, doubling since July 2011. And an example of a behavioural shift afforded by the technology is the growth in women’s erotic fiction sales. Romance novels have always been a big business globally, but a recent sales data indicates a substantial growth in sales of erotica (the so-called ‘guilty pleasures’ factor) that has been fuelled by the anonymity offered by ereaders.

As long ago as 2008 Australia mobile phone subscribers outnumber people according to ACMA data. This means that individuals have more than one device connected to the mobile phone network.

SOCIAL MEDIA, SOCIAL BUSINESS
Along with this embrace of ubiquitous mobile connectivity we have seen the growth of social media and social networking. This growth of social media is part of the landscape that makes up the digital revolution. Social media is revolutionary because it empowers the populace with access to the means of communication that were once the province of rich media barons.

This growth in social media fuelled by mobile connectivity has also changed the business landscape in important ways. There is a shift from command-control and pipeline driven businesses to social business that is focused on continuous engagement and conversations.

The kind of new business opportunities enabled by this digital revolution include:

the ability to compete in a new geography without even opening a local store (like Amazon);
the opportunity to reduce complexity for customers and remove friction from business operations (like Telstra);
subverting traditional models like recruitment where businesses build online talent banks of people who are interested in working with them (like Deloitte).

However, the shifts in society are not limited to business and consumers. They are also changing some things that we have always accepted. For example, we have always assumed that there is a just and valid separation between the domains of public versus private, or between business versus personal. But now those verities are being shaken by social media and social networking.

Social media is blurring the boundaries between the public, private, business, and personal. We are still working out how to negotiate this new territory. But already we see reports of people turned down for jobs because their online reputation score was too low.

We are now seeing a world where reputation is created, maintained, and mediated by online channels. There are increasing tools for measuring reputation online, such as: Kred, Klout, and Peer Index. Bouncers are even reportedly using Facebook as an identification check for entry into nightspots according to the BBC.

SOCIAL WORKPLACES
Workplaces are changing too, partly in response to the digital revolution. Open plan offices with collaboration spaces and hot desks are enabled because of wifi and portable connected devices like laptops and tablets.

SOCIAL EDUCATION
Our schools and places of education are being swept along by this digital revolution as well. With schools handing out laptops to all students and wifi in schools, libraries, and on public transport our children inhabit an always connected landscape. A teen boy said to me recently of my complaints about the poor wifi in Sydney: “but it’s just in the air, it’s everywhere”. It is a good example of the world that our young people inhabit. They live in a world where the connectivity is just ‘in the air’ around them.

The physical changes in workplaces are being reflected in schools too. They are becoming focused on collaboration rather than rote learning of facts. Students are learning how to discover, assess, and synthesize information rather than memorize facts.

WTF?
When we put together the shifting physical nature of the workplace and schools together with the blurring boundaries between public- private-business-personal, and the always connected devices in the hands of individuals many opportunities and challenges arise.

It is an exciting time to live. We are living through a revolution. The real question is will we drive the revolution or let it just happen to us?