Dec 14
Twitter has proven to be a useful tool in measuring impact, particularly when it is used in real - time. The LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog provides a case of successful research impact measurement with this social media platform.
The ODI digital strategy, first outlined in a series of blogs for onthinktanks.org, was awarded Online Strategy of the Year 2012 at the prestigious Digital Communications Awards, held in Berlin on Friday. ODI beat off competition from multinational corporations and specialist digital agencies to claim this major award. This post is based on the speech give to the jury and explains very succinctly what the strategy is and where/why it has worked.
Salma Patel at the LSE’s blog Impact of Social Sciences has put together a quick and practical list of tips for academics who want to have a stronger online presence, particularly for their research.
She first indicates that academics create a LinkedIn profile for themselves, and connect with all of their contacts who also have LinkedIn profiles. Creating an academia.edu profile is also helpful. Then she moves on to Twitter, and suggests that if this social media proves to be too difficult or complicated to understand at first, individuals can attend Twitter workshops, or ask a friend to help them out. LSE also has a guide to Twitter.
It’s important to create a Twitter account under your real name, as you will be identified more easily. A profile can also be written.
Start following people on twitter. Again you can find followers using your email address. Another really good way to find followers is to find someone on twitter who has very similar academic interests to you. Now look through who that person is following, and follow those people.
Twitter chats are also addressed, and a small list on the 10 ways researchers can use Twitter, in case you’re stumped on what to tweet about, is also included.
Blogging is also a great way for academics to put their research out there. However, there are a couple of things to consider, such as the name of the blog, tricks on how to come up on search engines such as Google, which host to use (like WordPress or Blogspot, or university blog providers). A website name and hosting can also be purchased, and costs around £10-£20 a year.
Other engagement tools mentioned are curation tools such as Delicious, SlidesShare, Pinterest, Bundlr, Storify, etc.
Finally, academics can contribute to existing blogs in their fields, like the Impact of Social Sciences Blog or The Guardian Higher Education Network, as well as other platforms.
Cameron Neylon of the LSE blog Impact of Social Sciences has recently written a piece on the possibility of tracking research impact via Twitter. Monitoring the way how research influences policy and how professionals use the studies they’ve read on their day-to-day practice has proven to be difficult for a number of reasons: professionals don’t usually write new research papers citing the work they’ve used as sources; identifying said sources can be tricky because they may be several steps behind from the new study; and sometimes researchers aren’t even aware of their work being used because they are so far removed from its practical application.
Neylon mentions an example of a research article on HIV status, domestic violence and rape, reaching a practitioner community, which he found via Altmetric, a web app that helps track conversations around scientific articles online. The article was tweeted by several accounts, particularly by two South African support and advocacy groups. This example shows that it is possible to identify where research is being discussed and by whom.
It is possible, however, to go further than this:
More recently I’ve shown some other examples of heavily tweeted papers that relate to work funded by cancer charities. In one of those talks I made the throw away comment “You’ve always struggled to see whether practitioners actually use your research…and there are a lot of nurses on Twitter”. I hadn’t really followed that up until yesterday when I asked on twitter about research into the use of social media by nurses and was rapidly put in touch with a range of experts on the subject (remind me, how did we ask speculative research questions before Twitter?) . So the question I’m interested in probing is whether the application of research by nurses is something that can be tracked using links shared on Twitter as a proxy?
The hypothesis is that the links shared by nurses and their online community via Twitter are a viable proxy of a portion of the impact of certain research on clinical practice. This, of course, could be used for other professions as well, by monitoring what research is tweeted, how much it is retweeted and how often.
The Impact of Social Sciences blog also has a guide to using Twitter in university research, teaching, and impact activities.
Apr 13
Social media is disrupting traditional media and conventional approaches to public communication. Platforms such as Twitter offer a timely and low-cost way for think tanks to disseminate and discuss their ideas and findings, and potentially to broaden their audiences. Are they seizing the opportunities offered by social media?
A few weeks ago we did a quick bit of research on which UK think tanks had the most Twitter followers (this was for the main corporate Twitter feed).
Another request for support in updating the Wikipedia page on think tanks. I could do it (and have) but it would defeat the purpose of Wikipedia if I did it alone. Can I encourage you, avid onthinktank readers to give it a go. There is also a page in Spanish.
Wikipedia is still one of the main drivers of traffic to this site every day. So online readers are using the site for information about think tanks. Whatever your views on its reliability, the site matters.
Similarly, on the right column of this think tank there are a number of RSS feeds coming out of delicious. Any document or page tagged with Think Tank , Communications + Research, Knowledge Management, or YouTube videos related to think tanks or evidence based policy. You can contribute to these lists by adding your resources to the feeds.
And do not forget Twitter. If you find anything worth sharing, please do not hesitate to let me know. Not just information related to the study of think tanks but also announcements from think tanks (new jobs, appointments, new projects, etc.). Just tweet: @onthinktanks and check out the lists and suggest any updates.
From the LSE impact of social sciences blog: a guide to using twitter for researchers:
- Building your following and managing your profile
- Using Twitter to maximise the impact of your research project
- Making the most of Twitter alongside your own blog
- Using course accounts with students
- A step by step guide to adding a Twitter feed to Moodle
- Extra resources and links to blog posts and articles on academic blogging and impact
A few weeks ago Goran Buldioski published a post on transparency and I commented on an article by George Monbiot on think tanks’ transparency. Monbiot’s article sparked some debate on twitter and led Brian Dean from News Frames to put together a list of British think tanks’ twitter accounts to encourage the public to tweet asking them to disclose the source of their funding.
I have taken the liberty to use the list to put together a Twitter list of British think tanks.
I am not sure if as a consequence of this but Unlock Democracy already replied by publishing all their funding over £5000.
Sep 2
A discussion on the ebpdn online community reminded my of this blog (written back in 2008 for ODI): Watch YOUR space
(I have made a few edits and added new ideas.)
The world is not, as they say, getting smaller, and technology is not, as they say, necessarily making distances disappear. Rather, new communication technologies are creating a myriad new spaces in the real and virtual worlds where individuals can find and exchange information. Increasingly, they can also choose what they want to find there, and how. The BBC, and Google News for instance, allow users to decide what news they want through user-designed homepages. And as I have argued before, Twitter has become my new ‘Google it’.
Technology is allowing people to develop and join spaces where they can find all the information they need – both personal and professional. These spaces (networks:communities of practice, social networks, professional associations, knowledge networks, etc.) have developed their own languages, systems, norms and procedures, giving members ever more powerful tools to access and share the knowledge they need. Just think of the @s and #s and RTs and other codes and symbols that are used in Twitter. (What does FF mean, by the way?)
Many think tanks have traded successfully for decades on creating and sharing specialised knowledge by hot-housing groups of smart people. But they may not be able to do so for much longer.
First, new communication technology is decentralising the production of knowledge. Specialist knowledge is being created worldwide in informal spaces. As a result, individual think tanks can rarely claim to have the best in-house experts on everything they work on. There are almost certainly better ideas elsewhere – if we look hard enough. The difficulty lies in finding them.
A second challenge is that new technology is also changing the way that people communicate and access knowledge. Users don’t wait for knowledge any longer. There is an increasing reliance on syndication and mash-up technologies to aggregate knowledge from a multitude of sources without ever visiting them. Users no longer just ‘take it all in’; they are selective in what they want from each source. The location in which information is accessed is closely related to how it is accessed. Social and professional networks take time to develop – even online – and the time spent accessing information in these places is proportional to the value assigned to the knowledge obtained. So think tanks do not just compete with other specialist knowledge producers, they must also compete with the knowledge spaces their audiences are creating for themselves. This is the real challenge.
A third challenge is that the rules of these new spaces are rapidly being developed by ‘others’. Think tanks, often late adopters are having to play catch up. It is not surprising then, that many researchers feel apprehensive of joining these online spaces. But the longer they wait to join the longer and steeper will be the learning curve. And the opportunity to set the rules (or contribute to their development) will be long lost.
The concept of open innovation provides a possible solution. Open innovation is an innovation paradigm that argues that organisations can no longer rely on the intellectual property they develop internally. They must also be open to the idea of buying or licencing it from other organisations. Wikipedia provides a simple comparison of the principles of closed and open innovation systems:
|
Closed innovation Principles |
Open innovation Principles |
| The smart people in our field work for us. | Not all the smart people work for us. We need to work with smart people inside and outside our company. |
| To profit from research and development, (R&D) we must discover it, develop it and ship it ourselves. | External R&D can create significant value; internal R&D is needed to claim some portion of that value. |
| If we discover it ourselves, we will get it to market first. | We don’t have to originate the research to profit from it. |
| The company that gets an innovation to market first will win. | Building a better business model is better than getting to market first. |
| If we create the most and the best ideas in the industry, we will win. | If we make the best use of internal and external ideas, we will win. |
| We should control our innovation process, so that our competitors don’t profit from our ideas. | We should profit from others’ use of our innovation process, and we should buy others’ intellectual property (IP) whenever it advances our own business model. |
Source: Wikipedia/Open_innovation
Open innovation underpins two new approaches to research and communication: ‘think nets’ and, for lack of a better term, ‘being there communications’. (Being there comes from the brilliant Peter Sellers film of the same name, by the way.)
The term think net came to my attention in an analysis of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) by Stephen Yeo and Richard Portes. A think net, unlike a think tank, does not invest in a large cadre of in-house experts to guarantee quality research outputs. Instead, it invests in developing a network of experts working in different research and policy spaces and with access to different sources and types of knowledge. The think net maintains its flexibility and relevance by using the networks of its members as an open innovation structure. Through these networks, the think net can benefit from intellectual property developed elsewhere.
Think nets are critical knowledge brokers: filters and amplifiers of knowledge, as well as conveners of diverse experts and ideas. They are also smaller and more manageable than traditional think tanks. Not surprisingly, the idea has caught on and there is an increasing interest to explore how they may help think tanks manage the challenges that the web and the proliferation of ‘free’ knowledge has brought.
‘Being there communications’ refers to a new paradigm of communications that, rather than trying to bring audiences into a think tank’s own space, takes its messages to the audience. While I take the credit for giving it a terrible name, Nick Scott, ODI’s Online Communications Manager, came up with the idea. [Back in 2008 I wrote: Increasingly, think tanks are using RSS tools to facilitate this. Readers no longer have to visit websites but can browse through their previously selected RSS feeds. I cannot remember when was the last time I read an RSS feed. Back then of course there was no Twitter, Facebook was fairly new (for my generation at least), and the idea of an online strategy was not just bizarre but probably considered a waste of time.] In the very near future, it will be possible for users to further specify the type of knowledge they need (we can do this already) and when (we can, in a way, by the choice of spaces we join). ‘Being there’ requires think tanks to develop Facebook, Google desktop-like widgets, a twitter strategy, and other applications to ensure that their knowledge is just one mouse click away in the spaces in which their audiences ‘work and play’. An organisation’s page on Facebook is one of the ways it can attempt to establish its presence in these important ‘knowledge spaces’.
Both paradigms are compatible. Think nets allow knowledge producers to learn from each other. Knowledge spaces allow knowledge users to assimilate new knowledge in their own context.
The emergence of think nets and knowledge spaces present a real challenge to traditional think tanks. They can no longer rely on hot-housing smart people to generate and disseminate new ideas. They must embrace open innovation. But what are the implications?
Back when I first wrote this I had to add a paragraph about how ODI was moving in the right direction. No need to do it now, but it is fair to recognise that it has done so in terms of its presence of several knowledge spaces.
I know a bit more about the implications for think tanks in developing countries, now. The most significant implication is that to properly benefit from the knowledge that others have think tanks need to open up to let others benefit from their own knowledge. This is not that easy. It means letting go of people and ideas.
There are some interesting examples. The Center for Global Development has a few visiting fellows who are also fellows or researchers in other organisations. Nick Scott recently convinced ODI to let him work from CIPPEC in Argentina. North-North cooperation is easier. The CIPPEC case reflects the level of development of CIPPEC itself. But the challenge still remains with other organisations.
Embracing this idea properly also means being willing to give up the technocratic high-chair. Think tanks, specially international development think tanks or those supported almost entirely by international cooperation often hide behind technocratic arguments to avoid getting embroiled in more ideologically inspired debates. This is unavoidable. Politics, the process by which groups of people make collective decisions (the affairs of the city), cannot be divorced from the affairs of individuals; and individuals need ideology: a set of ideas that constitutes one’s goals, expectations, and actions, in other words, their values.
In these other spaces the conversation is no longer just technical -think tanks are not just followed by researchers. Inevitably, think tanks would have to open their arguments to new appeals: of ethics, political interests, even religious considerations.
Can they? Should they?
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