A framework for digital research communications

Create demand for an idea

Some forces of digital disruption of communications

Blogs

Some tools to use

Why use them?

What are they?

• To create blogs: Wordpress, Blogger.
• To find blogs: Technorati, Twitter, Google Blog search.
• To keep up-to-date with blogs: Google Reader.

• Your own/institution's blog can be used to respond to events and create immediate debate; put out findings as needed; publish draft papers for comment/ review.
• Guest posts on blogs open up work to new audiences.

• Online articles containing many links, written in an informal style, and offering others a chance to comment.
• Tend to have lots of people 'following' who have subscribed because they like the author/their style.

'Being there' communications

The media

Emails and mailing lists

Changing forms

of content

Some examples

What are they?

Why use them?

Some tools to use

How to use them?

Key ways to reach your audience

Why use them?

• Publishing a blog on comment section of newspaper: Comment is Free etc.
• Get a citation into an article on similar subjects.
• Push a video of interviews onto YouTube.

• Reach a large audience quickly and easily.
• Help to increase vital links to your papers (increasing credibility of research, and improving search engine ranking).
• Journalist can create 'digest' version of longer papers.

• Most common internet tool and therefore offers the highest impact.Quickly and easily get your research to as many eyeballs as possible.

• Online versions of more traditional media (newspapers, magazines, videos); new online-only media.
• Can have international, national or sectoral interest.
• Often offer specific online-only features such as blogs or resource libraries.

• For email: your email clients (keep emails personal for best impact).
• For mailing lists: search Google, CATAList, Archivum.info

• Email papers, or links to papers, to colleagues. Find common announcement mailing lists which will send out notices to thousands. Send notices to any mailing lists you are a part of.Include links to work in any institutional email newsletters.

How am I

going to measure the success of our efforts at research

uptake?

Twitter, Facebook

and LinkedIn

Natural territories for

influence are changing

Some tools to use

What are they?

Why use them?

• Two of the biggest sites on the internet - with an estimated 190 million and 500 million users respectively.
• Both are social networks - Facebook with many features, and Twitter limited to short, 140 character long, text message

• Sheer number of users means that getting a 'retweet' or being on a Facebook group can generate a lot of interest / influence.
• Unlike many research websites, people on Twitter and Facebook are in 'interaction' mode, so it can be easier to get comments.

• For Twitter: Hootsuite to keep up-to-date and use multiple accounts, Twitterfeed to send items direct to Twitter from your RSS feed, Klout to measure impact or influence.
• For Facebook: Facebook pages for your organisation, using Notes to import feeds.

The blogosphere

Harder to

define 'media'

ODI examples

Rise of social media

Old broadcast media

Our brains tell us that level of detail is impossible without lots of effort and expense... and perhaps not even then

Given this, you should be

pragmatic:

• 1. Only measure what you can measure
• 2. Don't measure everything you can measure
• 3. Don't let the desire to measure get in the way of a good strategy

It is easy to talk about

what works in communications

and what

doesn't

Empower researchers

Book publishers and sellers

Some tools to use

Why use them?

What are they?

• Companies allowing you to create books that can be published even in very low quantities, or sell existing books directly.

• For book publishers: Lulu, Morris Publishing. blurb.com
• To sell books or papers: Amazon Marketplace, Google Checkout

• Allows you to sell your papers in book format, opening up new audiences and making it easier for people to read longer papers without difficult contracts or extra costs.

'Cradle to grey'

research

Wikipedia

Support and develop your long tail

Sector resource libraries

Why use it?

What is it?

Some examples

Why use them?

What are they?

• Largest user-generated encyclopedia on the internet – anyone can edit.Articles on most subjects in hundreds of languages.

• Eldis, Zunia (formerly dgCommunities), FRAMEweb, GDNet and many other subject- or country-specific sites.

• One of the most visited sites on the internet – pages or documents linked to from Wikipedia often receive a large boost in visits and are pushed higher up search engine results.
• Even if it doesn't drive your page to the top, pages on Wikipedia appear near the top - including your ideas means your information is more likely to be seen at all.
• Research is at the core of Wikipedia – while edits linking to news or blog sites are often edited out, those linking to research are generally left

• Sites dedicated to collating research on international development.All you need to do is register, fill in a form, and/or email (depending on the site).

• Will store details of your research, link to it, email details to their subscribers and some will summarise papers too.
• Mailings of all/best new papers sent out to thousands of subscribers.
• Links to your papers will increase search engine ranking.

Those aren't the only things we can't measure. As researchers, our hearts might like to see into the mind of people using our outputs and know that...

• they took the message in
• they changed their mind as a result
• they campaigned to change the world (or at least policy) as a result

Digital editions of documents or resources

A framework for digital research communications

Some tools to use

Why use it?

What is it?

• Digital editions of papers: Isuu, Scribd
• Digital editions of presentations: Slideshare

• Sites that allow you to offer free Google Books-style digital versions of papers, or presentations from events that can be clicked through direct from the web.

• Share your work in a form that can be read without leaving the web browser and on mobile phones.
• Can reduce the bandwidth necessary for longer documents.
• Can find a wider audience who are searching through the resource sites.

Using the information we have to identify where

we have the best chance of influencing and

informing policy and debate

• Strategy and direction:
• The basic plan followed in order to reach intended goals – was the plan for a piece of communications work the right one?
• Management:
• The systems and processes are in place in order to ensure that the strategy can succeed – did the communications work go out on time and to the right people?
• Outputs:
• The tangible goods and services produced – is the work appropriate and of high quality?
• Uptake:
• Direct responses to the work – was the work shared or passed on to others?
• Outcomes and impacts:
• Use of communications to make a change to behaviour, knowledge, policy or practice – did communications work contribute to this change and how?

Digital challenges for researchers

Luckily for us, the world is changing, and researchers have more metrics at their fingertips

google.com/alerts - new media or web

content around a search term (your

name, a project title)

In short, to get very limited statistics for a research communications output was usually a pain in the ass.

Views of blogs on other sites

Downloads

Questions about the cost

(and benefit)

Things you can't measure...

Number of readers of emails

Will it provide increased income for ODI? (Through better reporting of our success and more projects as a result)?

How much ongoing work will there be to keep it up-to-date?

Was it worth the time and effort it took to develop?

Topsy.com - tweets around a piece of content (just enter the address)

Is the private sector catching up anyway?

google.com/citations -

Google Scholar citations - can

create a profile for academics

ImpactStory.org - for academic articles,

a view of how much they have been

shared or bookmarked on social media

and in academic tools (like Mendeley)

The internet is huge... here are

some of the big players

And that is still only a tiny proportion of the whole

109.5 million

websites (2009)

550 billion

documents (2001)

How do you help your

research to stand out

from the crowd?

How can you measure

the success of research

communications?

And when you got them, the

statistics were a mess and hard for you

to interpret

But those communications people were SLOW! To get any statistics for a particular output

takes them time and effort

Too many statistics

Too many tools

Too much information

How to track citations?

How to identify good and bad links?

Taken from http://onthinktanks.org/2011/09/12/responding-digital-disruption-traditional-communications-odi-strategy/

You CAN get output-level statistics... BUT they are generally only available to the privileged few - those in the communications team

Search engine

optimisation

Have as many links into your site as possible. Get other relevant sites to link to your paper/site, and add links on other sites wherever you have the chance.

Also do as much as possible to get people to share your content on social media sites, as search engines increasingly use information from these sites.

You produce these...

How do you keep up-to-date with ever changing technologies?

Communicate on a tight budget

RSS news feeds to alert

you on website updates

Ensure your website uses:

• Useful keyword text in page addresses.
• Keywords in titles

Or participate in these...

How do you get your complex message across, when most web users 'scan' rather than read

What are they?

Some tools to use

Why use them?

Consider what terms you would use to search for your paper and:

• Easy way of keeping track with what’s new on the web.
• Create your own feed so people can keep up with your latest work (particularly useful for blogs)

• RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’
• Look for the RSS logo (above) on your favourite sites and subscribe to receive automatic updates when they add anything new

• To read feeds: Google Reader, Microsoft Outlook, Internet Explorer or Firefox
• To create feeds: needs to be built into your web system
• To monitor your own feeds: Google Feedburner

But organisations published statistics for the whole website

But those statistics tended to be reported at organisation or publication-wide level

• Try and get them into the paper/site as often as possible.Get people to link to your site using these words (rather than ‘click here’ use ‘see a research paper on the need for better sanitation to reduce poverty in the developing world’)

Document creators

and editors

What are they?

Why use them?

Some tools to use

And journals published impact factors for the whole journal

• Online versions of common software, such as document or presentation tools.
• Online website builders to create quick and easy pages

• For websites: Google Sites, Wordpress, SquareSpace.
• For documents: Google Docs (word processing, spreadsheets, presentations).
• For presentations: Prezi (like this presentation).

• Offer a number of easy-to-use templates that can set you out from the crowd.
• Can be more intuitive to create easy pieces of work.
• Outputs can be shared very easily with others, or worked on collaboratively.

Writing for the web

- drawing people

into research

There ARE lots of statistics out there...

For your papers or websites to appear near the top of search engine results requires some work, but without it people may never be able to find them at all.

Search engines, like Google, are responsible for generating the majority of traffic to other websites.

As people find reading online harder than paper, it can be useful to make it as quick and easy as possible for a reader to decide whether they want to read a full research paper. Here are some steps to creating web friendly text that can act as a 'funnel' to a full paper

But taking steps to

actively measure

communications

success used to

be difficult

Without the right organisational capabilities, it is hard to move up the pyramid of online communications methods from basic work to more advanced work

Social bookmarking to

track your research

Some tools to use

What is it?

Why use it?

Easy tools to use that don't require an IT department

Wikis to produce

collaborative research

• Best known is Delicious.com
• Other services include socialmarker.com
• For research, citeulike.com and Zotero offer social citation and bookmarking services

• Online services that replace Internet Explorer 'Favourites' and Firefox 'Bookmarks'.
• Allow you to save good sources of information and see who else has saved the same sources.

• Help your research by browsing what others have saved in your areas of interest.
• Bookmarking your own work will improve its’ ranking on search engines.
• Add bookmarks as online resource libraries on your website

Some examples

What are they?

Why use them?

• pbWiki, Wikispaces

• Useful way of developing research papers and plans in the first place.

• Sites and pages that can be worked on collaboratively, with many individuals building them.
• Selectively make pages completely public, if you want wider input.
• Keep track of changes through versions, and receive automatic emails when things are changed.

'Reusing the wheel'

Social networking to keep

up with colleagues

Some tools to use

Why use it?

What is it?

Image libraries

• Dgroups, Google Groups, Eldis Communities, Facebook and LinkedIn

• Find people already working on the same subject.
• Create and participate in discussions.
• Let members know of any new research outputs.

Email subscribers

• Sites or mailing lists where people connect who work on similar subjects.
• Offer lots of features to share information, facilitate events, highlight documents or discover more about colleagues.

Some examples

What are they?

Why use them?

Use: MailChimp or organisation mailing list

• Online photo and image galleries where amateurs and professionals upload their image.

• For photos: Flickr, Google Picasa
• For photos and other media (including drawings, maps): Wikimedia Commons

Followers: how big is your online base?

• Huge range of photos uploaded on many topics.
• Many photos and images available under Creative Commons License.

Social networks

Survey tools to collect views

or statistics

Nick Scott

Use: Facebook 'fans' or Twitter 'followers' statistics

Some tools to use

Why use it?

What is it?

How do you use online

tools to help you

research?

Other online tools

RSS subscribers

• SurveyMonkey, SurveyGizmo

Use: Google Feedburner

How do you get it

into the hands of the

people that need it?

Use: Built-in indicators of followers, subscribers

Digital Manager

Overseas Development Institute (ODI)

• Websites with easy-to-use tools to create surveys, including surveys.
• Include the ability to automate questions so certain answers show certain other questions

• Build surveys very quickly and easily by using built-in fields (for example, countries) or survey examples.
• Easy to extract data through built-in reporting and export to PDF or CSV (for Excel).

Email clicks

Use: MailChimp or tracking through Google Analytics

Views: how many people are you reaching?

Social networks

Take advantage of the wealth of freely available content online

Use: Facebook insights to see number of page views

Email: n.scott@odi.org.uk

Webpage: http://www.odi.org.uk/about/staff/62&-nick-scott

LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/nicholasmscott

Web 'hits'

Downloads

Use: Google Analytics, web logs on your server

Use: Logs on your server, parsed by software like Weblog Expert

Online monitoring

and evaluation - things and ways to track your communications

Checking search

engine optimisation

of your existing site / research

Finding your

online audience and

developing an online

communications plan

2 billion people online

Contact and credits

371,000

results

2,100,000

results

• Search google for keywords relating to your paper/research. If it appears in the top 20 links (first or second page) then note the position. If it doesn't, try a more specific search until you find it.
• When you find it, check the link text (the blue text). Is this enough to understand the title? - for pages, this comes from the page title, for PDF files, from the document properties. You'll need to edit these to improve your ranking.
• Are any of your keywords in the file name (my-file.pdf or my-page.html)? If not, can you rename? Replaces spaces with dashes (-).
• How many times do your keywords appear on the actual page or in the file? If not many, you may want to consider editing the text or adding an introduction which uses your keywords (as well as variants, for example 'research', 'researches', 'researchers', researching').

Statistics and visualisations

In some places, there are huge numbers of content producers and pages competing with you.

Internet archives

Some tools to use

In other places, particularly African countries, there are fewer competitors, but also fewer users

Why use them?

What are they?

• Develop a table identifying online tools you will use to support your research, to communicate research when it is completed and to develop your 'long tail'.
• For each activity, highlight the audience, channel, message and monitoring activity.
• Carry out searches of the internet as appropriate to identify key channels or sites your potential audience might use that you will need to engage with.

Web 'mentions'

Why use them?

Some examples

What are they?

• Now see which other pages link to your page. Put the following search into Google (replacing the address with the address of your research):

• For data: Gapminder, World Bank data, Climate Funds Update, Guardian Datablog
• For visualisations: Gapminder, Google Fusion Tables, IBM Many Eyes

Use: Social Mention alert, Google Alerts

• Sites collating common national or global datasets, as well as sector-specific data.
• Sites that can take datasets, and turn them into dynamic visual representations.

• Access datasets relevant to your work, and visuals that can allow you to compare datasets (how does inequality link to health in different countries/states, for example).
• Use visualisation tools to publish dynamic charts.

'link:http://address.of.your.paper'

Engagement: are you getting people interested?

• Sites dedicated to storing content for generations to come.
• Content can be in the form of books, websites, videos, or much more.

• For web history: Internet Archive Wayback Machine, British Library Web Archive.
• For books: Project Gutenberg.
• For scholarly articles: Google Scholar

Note who is linking to your paper, and what text they are using to link. If

the text is 'click here', consider asking the site owners to change to text

keywords (for example: 'see research from the Overseas

Development Institute on the Paris Declaration'

• Look back through the history of websites, content.
• Free access to scholarly articles from the past century.
• Free access to read and download all books out of copyright.

Social networks

Invitations to

speak or present

Use: 'Likes' on Facebook or retweets on Twitter

Continue going through the Google list, and note any important sites that are not linking to you that could (for

example, resource libraries) - contact the

owners or submit your

research direct.

Conversion: are people acting to help you?

Subscriptions

Blogs

Creative Commons

Email replies and enquiries

Use: Sign up to newsletters or further updates

Use: Comments on your blog or references from other blogs

Image credits:Elderly partners: flick/adwriter (http://www.flickr.com/photos/adwriter/257937032)Bookshop: flickr/_SiD_ (http://www.flickr.com/photos/_sid_/1985502428/)Town crier: Johnny English (http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnnyenglish/262249193/)Sunset scene: flickr/Christolakis (http://www.flickr.com/photos/43052603@N00/3391952890/)TV news of London bombings: flickr/kitta (http://www.flickr.com/photos/kitta/24273396)Network (Atomium): flickr/fatboyke (http://www.flickr.com/photos/fatboyke/2617432325/)School cheat: flickr/Mr Stein (http://www.flickr.com/photos/5tein/2347819459 /)Fireman/clock: flickr/Roby Ferrari (http://www.flickr.com/photos/roberto_ferrari/281640001/)Metal detector: flickr/nathaninsandiego (http://www.flickr.com/photos/nathaninsandiego/4201091665/)

Map of internet traffic around the world: Oxford Internet Institute data visualisation site (http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/vis/?id=4e3c0200)

Pyramid of online communication methods: adapted from Idealware (http://www.idealware.org/blog/2008/11/pyramid-of-online-communication-methods.html)Red/black icons from icons etc. (http://icons.mysitemyway.com/) and site icons from various locationsHot rod Google Icon (http://en.loadtr.com/Hot_rod_Google_Logo-437073.htm) Writing and pen: flickr / churl http://www.flickr.com/photos/churl/250235218/

Offers of funding for more research

Praise for your work

Exercises and checklists

• CC is a “some rights reserved” copyright
• It helps you choose what rights you’d like to reserve
• Individuals and non-profit organisations can use lots of free content

Monitoring areas taken from http://www.idealware.org/measuring-online-communications

Writing a

blog

Add your

research findings to Wikipedia

• Think about a piece of research you have completed or worked on.
• If you don't already have a blog, go to wordpress.com or blogger.com and create one.
• Write a short blog, in a personal style, linking to relevant other pieces of information on the internet.
• Remember the tips on writing for the web:

• Find a page on Wikipedia to which you’d like to add your information.
• Click the ‘edit this page’ button.
• Add your text, keeping in mind the tips for following Wikipedia style.
• Preview the text.
• If you are happy with it, add details of your edits and click save.
• You can track changes by checking the page history.

• highlighted keywords (hypertext links serve as one form of highlighting; typeface variations and color are others) meaningful sub-headings (not "clever" ones) bulleted lists one idea per paragraph (users will skip over any additional ideas if they are not caught by the first few words in the paragraph) the inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion half the word count (or less) than conventional writing