Summary
Lead partner: Science|Business
Other participants: all partners
In order to ensure broad distribution while still targeting audience segments, the consortium will exploit social media as an increasingly popular platform for science. This will enable us to reach new audiences that have less interest in conventional media channels, and to interact with people who consume information through multi-media on a regular basis. The campaign will establish its own branded platforms on YouTube, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter and Vine. It will also seek to incorporate influential bloggers, Tweeters and YouTubers at a local, national and international level by proactively engaging with them on topics most relevant to their followers and providing a resource of readily available and packaged content for re-distribution. In addition to the activities carried out by the museums and science centres, social media will assist in reaching a younger audience more attuned to smaller clips of information, while creating a bridge to more traditional media content such as articles and discussions.
Social media have had a very powerful presence in popular science and will continue to be an increasingly viable option for researchers to get their work out to a larger public. One of the most obvious examples of the successful use of this platform is the website IFLScience. Within less than 3 years of being on Facebook, IFLScience (http://www.iflscience.com/) has registered over 18 million likes and always ranks among the top of Facebook’s engagements statistics due to the large amount of discussion generated by individual posts.
A more European-focused example is the online organisation Maldiinfo (http://network.mladiinfo.eu). It currently operates in eight countries throughout eastern and central Europe and caters to a younger audience. The goal of the organisation is to promote possibilities for formal and informal education and scientific-research work, as well as help students, researchers and science workers get scholarships, grants and entry to diverse conferences and trainings. They currently have more than 145,000 visits per month to the website, 15,000 subscribers to their newsletter and around 50,000 fans and friends on Facebook and Twitter.
These are just two examples of the resources readily available on this platform. Many sites in this category, including IFLScience, operate with a single author. In order to stay relevant and current, these authors are in constant need of free content to publish on their sites. A key aspect in producing content for the ERC is to do it in a way that it is neatly prepared for immediate distribution on a range of social media. We believe that a lot of the research being funded by the ERC can have mass audience appeal if it is packaged correctly.
SCIENCE IN SOCIAL MEDIA: Big audiences, great potential for the ERC
Momentum for the ERC = Science² social media campaign will be developed by regular postings of a mix of themes, formats (video, articles, tweets, cartoons, ambassador testimonials, etc.) from the consortium, content created by the grantees and host institutions, and content from external social media sites that fits the narrative. This mix is essential to maintain fresh and varied content to drive traffic to the website and other associated platforms. It is important to note that not every blog or Twitter account holder is going to be interested in all of the themes or formats we produce. Relevant external content will help to fill any gaps that may occur throughout the campaign and help to build a loyal following.
Today, the ERC Facebook has 6787 likes and 446 visits, the ERC Twitter has 873 Tweets and 11,400 followers, the ERC linkedIn page has 405 followers. Conscious that the ERC is already active on several social media channels, we won’t be looking at diverting the current ERC audience. On the contrary, we will aim to produce quality content that will, if the ERC decides so, supplement t
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