Scientists on social media: The problems, the issues … and the solutions

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Participants on my workshops offer each other feedback on their own specific social media challenges. Now it is time to release some of it.

It is something that I facilitate at the end of my longer social media workshops for researchers, and it is a core component of the 2-day ‘Boost Your Research Career with Twitter, LinkedIn and alternative social media platforms’ workshop that I hold at the University of Copenhagen:

A feedback exercise where participants walk around the room in groups of two and respond to each other’s social media challenges and bottlenecks. Participants also email me their challenges between the two workshop days, so I have the chance to respond to them myself.

I realized that some of the issues and problems were solved by previous participants. So I would be doing everyone a favour by re-using the previous responses to the same problem.

The feedback session is one of the high points of the ‘Boost Your Research Career with Twitter, LinkedIn and alternative social media platforms’ at the University of Copenhagen.

A participant’s issue could be something specific like this:

‘I need 40 more people to sign up for an upcoming conference that I am organizing and need to find an expert to take part in a panel session. What is the best way to go about it?’

Or it could be a general problem like this:

‘I have a fear of sending things out in the open: I want things to be completely correct before I tweet or post.’

I write the issues at the top of a large A1 flipchart sheet of paper. As each group walks around the room, they have 3 minutes to discuss and formulate their response to the issue.

‘I need 40 more people to sign up for an upcoming conference that I am organizing and need to find an expert to take part in a panel session. What is the best way to go about it?’

When I ring a bell, the groups switch places and move on to the next question, where they both relate to the original issue and the first group’s response to it. There are five or six rounds.

The exercise also works at online meetings. Here the large piece of paper is replaced by a shared google doc, where participants (in breakout rooms) simultaneously update their solutions in the same fashion.

The thing is: After many feedback sessions, I came to realize that some of the issues were already solved by previous participants. So I would be doing everyone a favour by re-using others’ previous responses to the same problem. So I started doing this also.

Participants offer technical solutions to specific technical problems, and some of these solutions are too specific to be released. But participants also offer cognitive strategies and ways to keep up motivation. So it is a good thing if their strategies are used for workshop participants going forward.

I am now going to go one step further!

I release here a selected list of feedback problems, with the participants’ solutions in blue.  I have anonymised all the responses, as well as the references to specific institutions and events. If relevant I have added my own previous responses (from the time) in red.

THEME: Twitter and LinkedIn for recruitment, events and networking

  • How can I use Twitter/Linkedin to support the recruitment of students and research staff?
  • I need 40 more people for the forthcoming conference and expert panel session.
  • I want to promote my teams participation in a conference at the end of the year. The organisers, however, are slow to publish the material. How can I build up to it, and get the networking benefits?

Selected feedback from participants:

  • Make sure that posts and tweets are regular: basically just events and deadlines relating to the group

THEME: Developing a social media culture at an institution

  • My section or department does not have a policy or culture of social media – How do I get my colleagues/labmates to tweet?
  • I administer an institution’s account, but I lack inspiration and fear looking uninformed
  • I need to have a more proactive approach, but corona makes it a bit difficult to engage more vividly with the researchers
  • How do I get my colleagues to tweet, and to post more on LinkedIn?
  • In my research coordinator role, I lack the scientific knowledge to tweet and assess the value of someone’s tweets to retweet from the institutional account. How can I do it anyway the best I can?

Selected feedback from participants:

  • Focus on the Altmetrics tool.
  • Reach out to colleagues on how to better reach out to the target groups, and use my account as a good example!
  • Tag them in a tweet or post and ask them to retweet or share
  • Live tweeting
  • Post a tweet or thread about THEIR recent work (papers)
  • Inform them of the benefits, connections, ideas, conferences. Invite Mike 🙂 as speaker to a research group meeting to share the advantages from academic visibility to the group. Share this experience in section and group meetings to encourage others.
  • Do a rotating account with the other people in the group, so you do not feeling overburdened with the task
  • Delegate to researchers
  • Tag them / Hold a water cooler talk about how great it is and how many new project/job offers you got.
  • Mike: Set up a rotating Twitter takeover for your scientist colleagues. This will get researchers excited, and more followers! As for content native to the institution’s account: Setting up a LinkedIn search string would help you find original content to post on Twitter. Set up Tweetdeck and monitor for keywords

THEME: Creating engaging content

  • I am a first year PhD student, and I don’t think I have anything unique to contribute to the scientific community yet – what should I do?
  • I am an informatician and I spend my time sitting behind the computer, writing lines of code and making data visualizations – I do not consider my daily job tasks as “sharable”, any thoughts?

Selected feedback from participants:

  • Retweet other peoples stuff until you have more of our own – but have a plan for what is relevant to retweet
  • Leverage your own colleagues first (get a bubble then break out of it)
  • Create a hub of those who are known or important in the field and start from them
  • Look at interactions of colleagues and do retweets based on this
  • Ask for a simple summary of their work and tweet that!

THEME: Strategies for increasing engagement

  • How can my posts on LinkedIn get more attention?
  • How can I get more followers?
  • I would like a bigger follower group – I need to be better at selecting good and meaningful @ and # to my tweets. And settle on a good topic.
  • My tweets for Friday’s lectures are not getting enough traction. How do I get more likes, follows, and people turning up?
  • Finding groups and experts in the field of reasearch have proven difficult. Most of the ‘hotshots’ are either inactive or simply without accounts.

Selected feedback from participants:

  • 1) Follow people; 2) Comment in groups in LinkedIn; 3) post novel and topical stuff e.g. genetics;)
  • Keep up regular flow of posts
  • Be selective in the content you put out and who you follow
  • Use popular and relevant hashtags. Follow relevant people.
  • Retweet a field-relevant tweet and include a critical comment / open a discussion
  • Streamline a Twitter list,  and then make it public
  • Laymanise your content to widen your reach
  • Retweet with emojis 😉
  • Big time following of others, hopefully they follow back 🙂
  • Fill out bio, and have interesting content
  • Participate in conferences+ post about it but also the other participants research
  • Mike: Remind yourself that the purpose of your activity is not to ‘increase your follower count’, but to meet new people and develop your own thought 🙂
  • Mike: Try the Twitter Circles function

THEME: Finding content, and creating a backlog for scheduled social media posts

  • How can I identify relevant people to follow and content to tweet?
  • How do I find and build up a backlog of content to share, without seeming ‘behind the times’ to others?
  • I am an editor of a journal – How do I get automated email every time one of our papers is published online, so I can tweet it?
  • Content generated from our own programme is inadequate. How do I create enough content?
  • How do I trace (find) stories (content)?

Selected feedback from participants:

  • Search for tags, terms that you are interested in
  • Use the explore section and search relevant hashtags
  • Tweet content from general newspaper (BBC has good popular science segments)
  • Find and follow specific (scientific) journals
  • Mike: Follow the people who follow the Twitter account of your favourite conference

THEME: Time management and scheduling, a systematic approach to social media use

  • I enjoy networking on Twitter, but it consumes a lot of my time. Any tips for developing a schedule, saving time?
  • I tried a Twitter thread and it took me maybe 1 hour or more – I am not sure this is sustainable. If I transform this into other things, e.g. a blog post, or other SoMe content, I could reuse this 60min work for more purposes. Now my problem is to find this one hour each week to do it!
  • When I have a busy work life – there are no new tweets
  • How do I find the time to think about and generate content to tweet or post?
  • Tell me how I can better schedule the time to be active on social media!

Selected feedback from participants:

  • Select 15 minutes a day at a specific time for active engagement
  • Use scheduling on Tweetdeck, f.ex. to streamline stuff
  • Use procrastination time, coffee time
  • Put it in the calendar
  • Mike: Use Twitter lists and bookmarked LinkedIn searches as your ONLY entry point to your social media. Only do it at one set time of every day

THEME: Personal barriers

  • Fear of sending things out in the open, wants things to be completely correct before I send them out.
  • I am reticent in sharing my thoughts on social media, and in retweeting contents I do not find relevant – Is there still a point?
  • I am new to Twitter and am not good at fast and catchy messages – What should I do?
  • I have just begun my PhD and still feels to broad to share any research
  • I am too nervous to write / link things in public; I overthink my phrasing; don’t respond to people that comment or respond – Any solutions? How to change my behavior?
  • My mindset is that most of what I do, is not really going to be of interest to anybody else. What should I do?
  • I feel most of the tweets are to promote yourself. As an introvert, it is difficult to post something.
  • For me, it is as if nothing is important enough for me to take a minute of time away from my followers attention. Help me not think this!
  • I am still learning the new field and I do not feel certified enough being a voice of authority.
  • I find it hard to identify what I should post and what content should I write. I start to question myself and after spending too much time to polish the language, I end up not posting anything.
  • I don’t have anything unique to contribute to the scientific community yet – What should I do?

Selected feedback from participants:

  • Tweet your thing and see who interacts, then change/improve your style accordingly!
  • Mindset: Your regular day is no-one else’s regular day. So your thing might be more interesting to the them than you think.
  • Take a moment to notice what you like about other tweets. What you do is interesting to at least one other person (you) and definitely to others
  • Retweet just to find what you like. You may recognize it in your daily life later on.
  • Post picture of lab/fieldwork
  • Retweet posts from people you find interesting
  • Ask questions
  • Whenever you are researching something, you are alraedy an authority
  • You have narrow knowledge compared to experienced researchers, but very deep knowledge
  • Mike: Using a social media management system to schedule posts, takes the edge off this. Schedule, schedule, schedule! Practice also helps. Try something new! see what happens. You can always delete it! Don’t EVER feel obligated to post or tweet. Only do it when you are in the place for it.

THEME: Challenges of sharing research and data on social media

  • It’s hard to create an overview on relevant tweets as it easily drowns . I guess I have to create lists and use # ??
  • How to not share unpublished data that you pick up during a talk?
  • I don’t really have a network of people to share the key point of my project and I don’t know properly how to use the apps – but I am here for this 🙂
  • I want to let other people know what project I am working on and create constructive discussion. But I do not want to give too much the idea of the project away for others to take at this early stage.

Selected feedback from participants:

  • You can post about your hypotheses indirectly by asking questions based on the literature you read to make your hypothesis
  • Post ideas of methods and fieldwork, challenge these ideas? Broaden your perspective/network, people won’t know exactly what you are doing, and you will get feedback and new ideas
  • Find a ‘safe’ straightforward thing (that indirectly says something about your work) like an upcoming event, publiction, fieldworkk/lab situation
  • Post a current work/interest and ask a colleague in the same project for suggestions on Twitter/LinkedIn

THEME:  Promoting and positioning yourself as a scientist

  • I closed down my old account – How can I back the BEST of these followers on Twitter?

Selected feedback from participants:

  • Search for old Twitter handle and see who interacted with, and who retweeted it before – same as when celebraties close/delete their accounts
  • Mike: If we were into marketing, which we are not, you would list all the accounts that followed you before you closed your previous account, then automate ‘likes’ to their posts, making them aware of your present account (I know an app that can do that!). But don’t do this! Use your new-found freedom with few followers to your advantage, create a highly focussed feed and community.

THEME: Balancing social media as a tool versus a distraction

  • How can I avoid Twitter or LinkedIn being a distraction rather than a tool?
  • Information overload. On Twitter there is so much information out there. I feel like I cant keep up with the information coming my way.

Selected feedback from participants:

  • Give yourself a daily time limit
  • Be specific in the times I do Twitter and LinkedIn, like just give 30 min a day on the work schedule.
  • Still perceived as a extremely time consuming. Minimize tweeting and posting to a limited timespan could be a strategy of action
  • Mike: Use Twitter lists, hashtags, set up a social media management system so you only see interesting tweets and people. Bookmark a series of focussed LinkedIn search strings. Have it as your goal to NEVER look at the native Twitter or LinkedIn newsfeed 🙂 Use lists and search instead. Do SoMe work ONLY at beginning or end of day to avoid getting distracted in the ‘core’ working hours.

There is a more detailed course description of the ‘Boost Your Research Career with Twitter, LinkedIn and alternative social media platforms’ at the University of Copenhagen here.

Below is a short introductory video:

Apps to make Twitter more effective for scientists

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What are the best free tools and services to make Twitter more productive for researchers, scientists and science communicators?  

[This guide was updated in May 2021]

Twitter’s newsfeed is designed to be basic and addictive.

This is fine for the casual user. But researchers and science communicators need to do many other things on Twitter than just scrolling down the newsfeed, retweeting, and tweeting.

So I have decided to list some of the best free tools and third-party services based on my own experience in science communication and the feedback I get from the scientists who attend my workshops. These apps ensure that you get all the networking gains from being active on Twitter, without being distracted and losing focus on the job at hand.

[This is a blog post version of a Tweetorial, which can be seen here.]

I am going to start off with social media management platforms.

Social media management platforms allow you to monitor your research field on several accounts and platforms at a time, and to schedule posts. They are a big time saver, and let you off the social media hook during periods of deep work. The platforms work for me because they let me ‘forget’ my tweets after posting, and I am therefore not tempted to go back and see how a certain tweet is performing after I posted it! This really helps my concentration.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite

First off among the social media management platforms is Hootsuite, which I have been using for some years now. It does what it should do: Monitors search terms, lists, and hashtags, and lets you schedule posts on multiple accounts so you can easily cross-post one update on another platform. Unfortunately the free version only allows you to schedule five tweets, which takes away some of its usefullness.

For research labs, section and official department accounts Hootsuite is the thing, as it also works well at scale for multiple posters on one main account if you are using the paid version. Hootsuite is a big platform, however, and the downside of this is lagginess. Use the desktop version of Hootsuite.

Buffer

Buffer, another SoMe management platform, is easy and straightforward, especially on your phone app. Like Hootsuite you can use it for LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. If I see a tweet that I would like to retweet later, I can swipe it and ‘buffer’ it.

Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck is the simplest social media management platform if you only use Twitter, and not other social media platforms.

If you only use Twitter, and from your desktop, you might as well just use Twitter’s own management platform Tweetdeck however. You are already logged on with your Twitter, and it is speedier than getting in and out of other platforms. The interface is iconic for social media management, is by far the best in terms of keyword and hashtag surveillance, and it allows you to do nifty things like only see tweets with specific phrases from specific tweeters.

Now on to some third-party add-ons that do specific things to make Twitter more effective.

Tweepi

Tweepi

I have been on Twitter for a long time, and this means that over the years I follow thousands of people on multiple accounts. But people move on, and many of the accounts are now dormant, or are used for something else.

Tweepi  to the rescue! It allows you to segment followers on location, when they last tweeted, etc. You then just unfollow the people who are no longer active. If you need to quickly follow a defined group of people, then Tweepi makes it easier too.

Tweepsmap

How do you find the right people to follow? There are several add-ons out there that allow you to search for specific terms in people’s bio descriptions. Most are good, but you also have to pay up. Tweepsmap has a no-frills keyword search and follow function that is free.

Tweetbeaver

Tweetbeaver

Everything seems to be called Twee- something doesn’t it? Very confusing.

Tweetbeaver has functions that are handy if for some reason you need to export your own, or someone else’s, list of followers, friends or do anything else that involves extracting stuff into a CSV file.

TwitterListManager

TwitterListManager makes it a lot easier to manage your lists

I am a big fan of Twitter’s own native ‘list’ functionality. Lists help you organise your Twitter newsfeed, stay focussed, and only see the tweets that are relevant for a specific networking task.  The trouble is, once you have added the people you follow to different lists, it is a hassle to reassign them, or take them off again.  You can do it natively on the Twitter platform, but it takes lots of clicks and time.

TwitterListManager to the rescue. It is a no-frills desktop application that does the job.  There are a few apps out there that say they can help you manage lists. But this is the only one I know that does the job properly. It is easy to work with, and its free!

IFTTT

Finally IFTTT, or ‘If This Then That’. It’s an app that belongs to what I would call ‘automated social response’ or doing SoMe duty while you concentrate on editing and experimenting. It works by creating chains of conditional statements, called applets.

So you could have an applet that sends you a notification every time someone tweeted something with a specific hashtag. Or send a thankyou message after they follow you.

IFTTT is a way to automate actions on social platforms

The possibilities are endless on IFTTT if everything is interconnected: How about having your home’s lights flashing on and off when someone tweets about your research?

But for scientist users, one application would be to get IFTTT to add a user to one of your Twitter lists (like a list of people for a conference) on a specific research area if they tweeted using a specific scientific phrase.

So that’s it! I hope you liked my review!

The review covers only the free versions of the apps. Much more can be had if you pay for it.

Did I forget any useful Twitter add-ons for scientists and science communicators? Feel free to let me know in the comments!

I appreciate any feedback from other science communicators or scientists!

If you would like to share my original Tweetorial it is here:

Does your department, faculty or university need to boost the international impact and career of your researchers? Here is more about my courses in social media for researchers. See other Mike Young Academy services here.

Marcel Bogers

Innovation professor: I am a Twitter hub for others’ research

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For Professor Marcel Bogers, his tweets are intertwined with his work and career

With more than 8,600 followers on last count, he is only one tweet away from getting thousands of people to spread the word about his own new published research.

But for Marcel Bogers, who is Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Copenhagen, his work on Twitter is not really about getting people to read his own stuff.

Marcel Bogers

Open innovation professor Marcel Bogers at work

“I see my work on Twitter and myself as a kind of hub. When I read interesting research, maybe some new items that are relevant in my research domain. Then I share it with the assumption that others will find it interesting,” he says.

Originally from the Netherlands, Marcel Bogers’ main research field is open innovation. It is about how new ideas and projects get to flourish within, outside, and between organizations and businesses.

He moved to Denmark in 2009.

“When I originally moved to the University of Southern Denmark in Sønderborg, I wanted to make sure I maintained an active network. I saw Twitter as an opportunity to share interesting things that I found relevant to innovation and business. It was, and is, a way of getting in touch with people, especially in the industry and policy areas, and at conferences.”

“Twitter won’t replace good research, but Twitter is one element in the scanning of the relevance of it”

He got in touch with new collaborators when he moved to Copenhagen three years ago.

“The Department of Food and Resource Economics at the University of Copenhagen also provided a new empirical setting for me. And it was through Twitter that I met Harry Barraza, who used to be Head of Open Innovation at Arla Foods, and which I ultimately co-operated with. I met him via a discussion on the platform. And then there was Niclas Nilsson, Head of R&D Open Innovation at Leo Pharma, who I originally met in a Twitter discussion. And Timo Minssen, a professor in Biotechnology Law, I met through Twitter, and with whom I am now working closely together.”

“Sure, I may have met these people if I was not active on the platform. But it has speeded up the process. Twitter, in this way, has channeled the potential connections that were already there.”

Rigor or relevance

New specific research problems emerged spontaneously from these interactions.

“I look at it as a continuous source of ideation and ideas. There are specific people on Twitter that I follow that come up with good research ideas. This is an example of how the real world and the virtual world get mixed up.”

“… it is not so much competition as a mutual awareness thing. At most it will be a healthy, joking competition between colleagues. A high follower count on Twitter becomes a small part of your overall academic profile.”

“In my work with Carlsberg, for example, we were all inspired by the work we did through Twitter. The Chairman of the Carlsberg Foundation Flemming Besenbacher is also quite active on the platform and it speeded up the process of ideation and dialogue. To give a specific example, I wrote up a teaching case and some research on a wood fibre bottle, a fully biodegradable beer bottle, and on how to use open innovation for this sustainability project. Twitter helped us in this exploration on how to learn more about it.”

In ‘ideation’, the process of creating new ideas, Marcel Bogers contrasts rigorous research, and the assessment of its relevance.

Networking on social media might not replace focused, rigorous research. But the routine of scanning related research and methods by others in the Twittersphere, and the deep networking of collegial contact through platforms like Twitter helps ensure that the rigorous work is relevant and has the necessary scope. As Marcel Bogers sums it up:

“Twitter won’t replace good research, but Twitter is one element in the scanning of the relevance of it”.

Sometimes the ‘real life’ collaboration with other scholars and with policymakers is reflected in the virtual world of Twitter, resulting in hundreds of article downloads and a large academic impact. Like one of Marcel Bogers’ papers, which has had a high impact in this way. It was co-authored with the EU Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation Carlos Moedas and with Henry Chesbrough, a US business scholar who is considered the father of the open innovation concept.

“I was co-organising a conference with Henry Chesbrough, and Carlos Moedas happened to have been a student of him. And after we invited Carlos as a keynote speaker for our conference, we got him to write an article for a special issue together with us. This in itself was a neat thing. And of course, this had leverage on social media, as he has himself a large following when he retweeted it,”  Marcel Bogers explains (the tweet can be seen below).

Moedas tweet

Tweet from Carlos Moedas

At last count the article had 9,877 downloads and 201 tweets from 121 different Twitter users.

The article on open innovation was in this way caught up in a perfect storm of real life networking and conference organizing, a retweet from a Twitter ‘influencer’ with many followers (the EU Commissioner), and a positive narrative, as a successful pupil paid tribute to his teacher.

The competition for followers

Will you admit to friendly competition between you and your peers in terms of your follower numbers?

“Yes and no!” Marcel Bogers says with a laugh.

“In a local context, it is not so much competition as a mutual awareness thing. At most it will be a healthy, joking competition between colleagues. A high follower count on Twitter becomes a small part of your overall academic profile. At some point. It becomes a part of your ‘story’. But this is mostly when you meet other colleagues who are active on Twitter and at conferences.”

For those who are not on the platform, of course, a high follower count has no meaning. And many people may not even be aware of it.

“I look at who it is that follows me. For me, this is also about respect for this person, and I often follow back,”

But in an international context, according to Marcel Bogers, there can be instances where organisers deliberately boost the fame (and vanity!) of the top tweeters through competition, especially at conferences.

“I was at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management a few years back. It attracts more than 10,000 people and the organisers really embrace Twitter. They had a competition going, and a generated list of top tweeters. It was very interesting, and I was once the top tweeter at the conference!”

The academy announced it below:

academy of management

Tweet announcing that Marcel Bogers was ahead at the Academy of Management conference

“The year after I was asked to organize a workshop on how to use social media for research. Now the crazy thing was that one year subsequent to this I was not even physically there, but I was still ranked as one of the top tweeters.”

How do you, in practice, use Twitter at conferences, then?

“It differs from context to context. Most of the time I am also there to listen to people’s presentations and I don’t want to be looking at my phone tweeting all the time,” says Marcel Bogers.

But just like for many conference-goers, when a good slide goes up, so does the smartphone.

“I have one strategy that I use if I want to be present and focused, yet still share the topics with others. I take a picture of the presenter with the first slide. This is very low level informative. But it shows what it is about. And I also feel I offer a service to the presenter by showcasing their work.”

“Then I do sometimes use another strategy and tweet a photo of a slide with a specific interesting point, if I feel that it somehow starts a conversation.”

He responds to others’ tweets from the conference under the hashtag if he thinks that he can add a perspective, he adds.

Do you automate anything?

“I use the Hootsuite dashboard to schedule some of my posts. This ensures that people aren’t being hit by flurries of my tweets at a time of the day when they may not see it, or may see it too much. To be truthful, I have actually lowered the intensity of my tweeting of late, and I find Hootsuite very useful to space things out a bit.”

One sneaky way in which some tweeters get large follower counts is by using a bulk following/unfollowing tool. The tool will indiscriminately follow, and subsequently unfollow, hundreds of accounts just to garner attention. But Twitter has started to monitor accounts for this follower churn and to crack down on the practice.

…like for many conference-goers, when a good slide goes up, so does the smartphone.

Marcel Bogers doesn’t use these tools. His, for academia, relatively high following and follower numbers have come about through many years of Twitter activity in his field, he says.

“It is organic, but if I am at a conference, I might follow a bunch of people at one time. And sometimes I follow people on Twitter’s own ‘Twitter suggest’ function.”

Respect for other users

“The main thing is that I am curious about the people who follow me. I try to check and look who it is that follows me. For me, this is also about respect for this person, and I often follow back,” he says.

Many Twitter accounts in academia are institutional accounts, representing a research group, a department, a faculty, or an annual conference.

“With the exception of obvious bot accounts, I respect these organizations too. And I follow back because I know that there is always a real person behind it,” says Marcel Bogers.

“I started to just have a [Twitter] list with people who I really wanted to see on my timeline. Then I got a second list with people I, actually, really, wanted to see on my timeline.”

For those who follow many on Twitter, like Marcel Bogers, the result is a cluttered Twitter newsfeed. If you choose to follow many people on Twitter, the timeline becomes unmanageable. The solution: To set up Twitter lists, with specific earmarked groups of accounts under specific topics.

“I do lists,” says Marcel Bogers.

“I started to just have a Twitter list with people who I really wanted to see on my timeline. Then I got a second list with people I, actually, really, wanted to see on my timeline. And now, well … now … I have many lists!”

In the meantime, Marcel Bogers’ twitter account is a hub for anyone interested in the fields of innovation and entrepreneurship. And, almost as a side effect, people become aware of his own work.

If you were to put a winning formula on Marcel Bogers’ strategy, it would be like this: Be a hub first, and then, and only then, a sharer of your own work. It is your function as a hub that gives you the goodwill and legitimacy that has people ultimately downloading your articles, and maybe even collaborating with you in the future.

“My hub function is part of the impact. That I, as a service, share this and that with the wider world. But this said. When you do have a new article that is accepted in a journal, you can also put that on your Twitter feed to showcase some of the things that you do. And If you do it in a balanced way this can be useful.”

Does your department, faculty or university need to boost the international impact and career of your researchers? Here is more about my courses in social media for researchers.

Ian Burns and Rasmus Mortensen

So … someone secretly made a clone of you. Now what?

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How would you feel if you found out someone had deliberately duplicated your genes and made exact copies of you?

Would you be flattered (the more of me, the merrier!) Disturbed? (My unique value hinges upon me only being one.) The same? (My identity is not only my genes).

When I put this question to the live audience in Copenhagen before the human cloning play ‘A Number’ last Wednesday, the vast majority responded they would be ‘disturbed’. Likewise in a poll on Twitter that ran in parallel: Most would be disturbed by someone duplicating them.

Ian Burns and Rasmus Mortensen

Ian Burns and Rasmus Mortensen as father and son in ‘A Number’

But some, or actually most, of my panel of experts admitted, to laughs from the audience, that they would be ‘flattered’.

This was just one of the many surprises that popped up in the debate ‘How will human cloning affect society?’ on 21st February that Mike Young Academy organised for That Theatre Company.

Human cloning is not just ‘human cloning’. Developments in biotechnology that allow individuals like, say, parents, to enhance childrens’ abilities will have wider societal repercussions.

People already ‘clone’ each other on Instagram

As stem cell biologist Joshua Brickman put it: We have the ability to manipulate the genome. However, we don’t know what the implications of this sort of meddling will be. And it may not necessary lead to enhanced abilities.

Tweet with survey on human cloning

Twitter poll showed people disturbed by the thought of cloning, just like the audience.

Priest and Kierkegaard expert Pia Søltoft had the audience reflect over how human cloning has actually already taken place as people copy each others’ personalities, looks and individuality on social media. The 19th century Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, she said, transported to our 21st century, might interpret human cloning as something that has already happened, as individuals are subsumed into a crowd.

What about the soul?

And bioethicist Mickey Gjerris, a former member of the Danish Council of Ethics, suggested that genetic similarity may not imply that individuals will not be, or experience themselves as, unique.

The whole question of whether human clones will actually change people’s experience of having a unique identity is discussed in this philosophical analysis of Caryl Churchill’s ‘A Number’ which was penned before the debate.

A member of the audience stunned the panel, only momentarily, by asking them if they “believed we had a soul?”

On Facebook, in the run-up to the live-debate, someone asked whether human cloning had actually already taken place secretly in military laboratories. Sadly the debaters didn’t have the time to get into this.

But in the bar, afterwards in Café Krudttønden, I was told by someone that the panelists’ musing on questions like these were ‘thought-provoking, wide-ranging and intelligent’. This compliment I send on to the panellists.

Planning a conference or event? Need a panel moderator? See Mike Young Academy’s conference and events page here.

Overskrift, sensation

Clickbait! Overskrifternes dynamik i en Twitter-tidsalder

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Zahle’s Gymnasium i København bad mig lave en interaktiv workshop om overskrifter. Vi havde det sjovt. Men der var også alvor bag.

At skrive overskrifter, der ‘klistrer’, så folk ‘klikker’ på en overskrift har altid været en kunst. Men i de senere år er det også blevet en data-dreven videnskab.  Også for de typer af overskrifter, der sender læsere videre til artikler, der ikke efterfølgende leverer et indhold med substans.

Sensationalist headline

Man kan nærmest ikke modstå overskrifter som denne fra NT News i Australien (se link til artiklen nederst i artiklen).

Det offentlige rum har udviklet sig til et våbenkapløb mellem snarrådige overskriftskribenter i medieorganisationer og nyhedsvante læsere, der kræver mere og mere før de vil klikke.

Læsere vil være mindre og mindre tilbøjelige til at klikke på de enkelte overskrifter på grund af det forøgede antal af dem, der alle konkurrerer om at få deres opmærksomhed på alle platforme. Modtrækket fra de, der producerer medieindhold, er at bruge avancerede A/B testmetoder, fokusgrupper, og differentierede overskrifter for forskellige målgrupper.

Nysgerrighedskløft

De vindende overskriftsproducenter håber at fænge eller ‘klistre’, læseren med deres overskrifter. Nogle gange er det ikke det underliggende artikelindhold, der kan bakke overskriften op, og overskriften er dermed ren ‘clickbait’ (på dansk: ‘klikmadding’) . Andre gange er overskriften og indholdet tilsammen så anstødeligt eller sympatisk at historierne bliver delte af så stor en procentdel af læserne, at de går viralt på de sociale medier.

I den workshop jeg udførte for N. Zahle’s Gymnasium med titlen “Clickbait! Overskrifternes dynamik i en tweet tidsalder”  viste jeg de studerende hvordan overskrifter kunne udnytte ‘nysgerrighedskløften’ – en kløft eller hul i overskriftens fortælling – så læserne klikkede. Og jeg viste, hvordan brugen af især Twitter oplærte offentligheden i clickbait metoder (og det er både godt og skidt).

Jeg præsenterede en serie historier uden overskrifter på skærmen, som de studerende derefter i realtid på samme skærm, skrev overskrifter til. Alle kunne se hinandens overskrifter, og vi prøvede i fællesskab at finde dem, der ville være bedst egnet til at være ‘madding’ for de fleste klik, før vi sammenlignede med den overskrift, som mediet selv valgte at bringe.

Mike Young

Clickbait-workshoppen er både underholdende og tankevækkende

Vaccination mod clickbait

Det hele var bare sjov.

Men de studerende sagde efterfølgende at de forlod min workshop mere vidende om hvordan medier arbejder, og med mindre chance for at falde for den type overskrift, der blot fisker efter deres opmærksomhed. Hvem ved? Måske har jeg gjort noget for at ‘vaccinere’ nogle af deltagerne imod clickbait i fremtiden.

I mellemtiden, hvis du er blevet ‘clickbait’et og virkelig, virkelig gerne vil læse om den flyvende-dildo-til-brylluppet-historie i ovenstående billede, så er historien her!

Er du gymnasielærer i Danmark? Denne workshop egner sig til et læringsmodul under rubrikken  “karrierelæring” eller til almen studieforberedelse – AT.

Det tager 2-3 timer og koster DKK 7.000 ekskl. moms.

Ring til 30 66 31 21 eller skriv til  mike@mikeyoungacademy.dk for at høre nærmere.

Maria biological experiments

143,000 people have seen Maria’s biological experiments

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Over the course of three years she reached an audience of do-it-yourself biology enthusiasts in 162 countries. This is the story behind her story. But it is also a story about how a niche interest can reach a global audience if it hits the right format and is shared to the right people.

Maria biological experiments

It was back in 2013, and Maria Constantin’s article was given the headline ‘Five Biological Experiments You Can Do At Home’. I was then editor of the University Post, a media platform for campus and science stories in Copenhagen and I hoped that this, Maria’s collection of quirky kitchen experiments, would fascinate budding scientists and help to motivate students to do their own stuff, no matter how nerdy or different they were from everyone else.

The article has now, in total, been browsed and read by 143,000 unique viewers. From the average of five minutes that each of them has spent on the page, it is a fair guess that hundreds if not thousands of these readers have been inspired to try the biological experiments themselves.

I caught up with Maria via a Facetime connection to Amsterdam, where she is now doing her PhD in plant pathology.

“I started the blog when I was an exchange student in Aberdeen, Scotland” explains Maria, who grew up in Romania and Spain.

Extracting your own DNA

Spit on the glass and add a pinch of salt. Add liquid soap, juice from a grapefruit, drops of alcohol. Stir … voilà. Photo: Mariana Bollano

“When I moved to Denmark, I saw this university media platform for students and scientists and thought it would be cool to write up my own experiments for it. And so I just started writing it, and it was just good fun. You, Mike, I remember, gave me some input for the formatting of it, and we had a photographer out who took a few photos of me doing the experiments, and that was that,” she says.

Hand bacteria

After some days you will see white spots in the gelatin. These are your hands’ skin bacteria. Photo: Mariana Bollano

The experiments included things like extracting your own DNA, cultivating the bacteria on your own hand, changing the colour of flowers, and cooking an egg with no heat.

Power of the niche

At first, the article generated just moderate interest, but after we posted it on niche platforms like Reddit, tagged others on Twitter, and some of the key experts and influencers in the field started to get involved, it started to take off. People with an interest in biology like a high school biology teacher in the US or a lab technician in Asia, started to comment and link to it via their own blogs and platforms, and soon the article started to take on a life of its own. As a result, the article started to appear at the top of the search page for Google searches related to science or biological experiments. This generated traffic and interest, day after day, week after week, month after month.

Biological experiments Maria Constantin

Maria at work. Thousands of readers have been inspired to try the biological experiments themselves. Photo: Mariana Bollano

The article started generating traffic back to Maria’s own site via the link to her blog in the article. Not only directly from people clicking on the link, but indirectly as a result of the higher authority that her own blog was getting from the search engine as a result of the ‘successful’ article on the University Post pointing to it.

The interactive article with pictures is no longer online in the same format after the University Post was merged into a Danish-language site, but you can still see most of the text here.

Cooking an egg with alcohol

Next time you want to cook an egg , place it into a bowl and add some alcohol to it. After some minutes you can see how it slowly ‘cooks’. Photo: Mariana Bollano

Four years after this article was published, any many science blog pieces later, Maria offers a piece of advice to anyone who has a narrow interest that has the potential to go global.

“Do not underestimate the power of your blog. First of all you will manage to start writing, and this will help you later,” she says. “Secondly, you never know what opportunities will turn up.”

Maria uses her own blog to express her own curiosity, asking, and then answering, questions like ‘why do leaves fall in the autumn?’

“There was a contest in Catalonia. And they gave my blog as an example of how to cultivate bacteria. Another person contacted me through my blog and said they were doing a project on cleaning water for underdeveloped countries. They wondered if I had any further ideas.”

While the people who reach out to Maria now are mostly from Europe, the readership on the University Post article was truly global at the time with the largest portion of readers from North America, the second largest group from Asia.

Helped her scientific career

Maria has moved on from being a curious student of biology in Copenhagen to being a scientist in her own right in Amsterdam. But her own amateur experiments, and her own subsequent articles in the field of biohacking, have helped her in her scientific career.

“I mention it on my CV. Just being a scientist is not enough nowadays. People want you to be able to communicate science. Now I am part of the Marie Curie programme for example. They ask you specifically about your non-research activities. Every term we meet up, and the question is: Did you start writing this publication, and how are you going to spread the knowledge about this project?”

Maria Constantin in greenhouse

Maria Constantin is now doing her PhD in plant pathology in Amsterdam

Inspired by her experiences in communicating science, Maria is now one of the editors of the Amsterdam Science Magazine, and she scouts for stories for the editorial board:

“The article and my experience in Copenhagen helped me with this. For each science subject area we take on an expert, a researcher in a specific field, to write about something. The researcher pitches the article to us. Some people even put their articles on their grant applications.“

Mike Young Academy helps companies, interest groups and universities reach a wider global audience. Read more about my services here.

rasmus mortensen, that theatre

A Number by Caryl Churchill – a philosophical analysis

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Lillian Wilde is a graduate in the field of phenomenology. In this guest blog post, she asks some existential questions about a soon-to-be-staged play on human cloning.

That Theatre, an English-language theatre group in Copenhagen, is staging the play ‘A Number’ by Caryl Churchill in February 2018. The play, which explores the consequences of human cloning, will be preceded by a debate organised and promoted by Mike Young Academy. rasmus mortensen, that theatreThat is why Mike Young Academy invited Lillian Wilde, a philosopher and visual artist, to analyse the play in this blog post, and to interpret it in the form of a series of visuals based on photos of the actors.

The ethics of human cloning

Caryl Churchill’s play ‘A Number’ is about the ethics of human cloning – at least on the surface. I say ‘on the surface’ because to me as a philosopher, the questions she asks strike me as working at a deeper existential level. The play leaves out the debate we typically associate with cloning. Instead, Churchill takes human cloning as a framework for philosophical considerations. First and foremost, she discusses the question of personal identity:

Who am I?
What makes me me?
Am I unique?

A series of questions unfolds in the play from here.

The Problem of Twinship

Salter: Even one, a twin, would be a shock
Bernard 2: A twin would be a surprise but a number
Salter: A number any number is a shock.”

Caryl Churchill, A Number

visual collage of hands with the word uniqueTwins are natural clones: they are two organisms that evolved from one fertilised egg and carry the identical genetic makeup as each other. Often, we tend to think of them as one entity. But are twins actually identical? PhD candidate at the University of Kent and specialised twin researcher James W. Hoctor, disagrees with the widespread notion that twins form a singular entity or that they possess a ‘we-self’. He argues instead that twinship is “a joint enterprise which includes a sense of self and other.”

Personal Identity

ian burns and rasmus mortensen that theatreHoctor grounds his argument on a phenomenological theory of the ‘minimal self’: according to Dan Zahavi, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, the self in its most minimal sense – leaving out life story, social connections, personal traits etc. – can be understood as someone’s first-person-perspective.

Salter: because if that’s me over there who am I?

Bernard 2: yes but it’s not me over there.”

Caryl Churchill, A Number

The fact that I experience from my very own point-of-view that is different to everyone else’s is enough to account for the fact that I am me; whether I have a twin with the same genetic material as me or not. Why, then, would a twin be a shock?

Original and Copy

“Bernard 2: what if someone else is the one, the first one, the real one…”

Caryl Churchill, A Number

visual collage of hands In the play, the concern is raised about originality . The worry seems to be twofold: Is a copy less ‘real’ than an original? And does the original lose anything, its identity or value, by being copied? If we turn to the art world we see: even the most precise, magnificent forgery of an artwork remains a ‘fake’ and is worth nothing compared to the master’s original, which does not lose either its value or its identity.

There are two problems with this in applying it to a human (or any other conscious being): the concept of the minimal self tells us that there is, in fact, a unique self to every conscious being.

And then there is another question: Can we measure the value of a human being at all?

The Value of a Human Life

Bernard 2: The value of those people…

Salter: What? Is it money? Is it something you can put a figure on?”

Caryl Churchill, A Number

close up of an eye with the text a value of a human lifeHow do we measure how much a person is worth? Economists have come up with one answer: the ‘value of statistical life’ estimates first how much people are willing to pay to reduce their individual risk of dying by 1 in 100,000. Distributed over 100,000 study participants, this risk reduction would lead to one saved life, statistically speaking. Say that everyone was willing to pay $100, it follows that “the total dollar amount that the group would be willing to pay to save one statistical life … would be $100 per person × 100,000 people, or $10 million.” Easy, right?

But, granted we can put a figure on it, is the value of a person really impacted by the existence of a copy? Is the copy worth less? Asked differently, is a twin less valuable than someone whose genetic material is unique?

Nature vs. Nurture

“Bernard 2: someone like you couldn’t have tried harder… If you’d tried harder you’d have been different from what you were like and you weren’t.”

Caryl Churchill, A Number

ian burns that theatre with text you are youThis leads me to my last inquiry. How identical are identical clones (or twins, for that matter) really? Is the genetic material the main determining factor of someone’s identity? What role does upbringing, culture, and circumstances play?

Caryl Churchill addresses these issues entertainingly, and with increasing urgency in ‘A Number’. 

‘A Number’ premieres at That Theatre Company in Copenhagen on the 21. February 2018, following a panel debate moderated by Mike Young.

Lillian WildeLillian Wilde (right) is a philosopher and visual artist. All the illustrations for this article are by her.

Planning a conference or event? Need a panel moderator? See Mike Young Academy’s conference and events page here.