Serendipity35

So, you're tired of your research languishing in some journal that no one reads anymore? You want your research to go viral. Good luck.

Right off, there is no formula for getting something to go viral. If there was a formula, marketers would be able to do it regularly. There are social media techniques - where and when to post, keywords to use, ways to encourage engagement. And there are ways to get more views that marketers do use that you wouldn't want near your serious research. (see clickbait)

Colleges produce a lot of research and are always hoping to get the information out into the field, but also into the popular press and media. As an article on chronicle.com points out, sharing discoveries with the "everyday citizens who pay the taxes or tuition that help keep them open" can be difficult. How do you engage them with esoteric research?  Researchers are generally not strong, and often not very interested, in media and self-promotion. Most of us are not Neil de Grasse Tyson

"Viral" these days is connected to social media rather than mainstream media. In fact, mainstream media monitors social media for stories on a daily basis.



The aforementioned article looks at how the University of California started a "research feed" on the social-media platform Tumblr as an experiment.They made the research Tumblr-friendly with things like animated GIFs. Visual are important. Keywords (tags) are important to improving search optimization. Following and reposting relevant posts from other research-related Tumblr feeds and media sites like The Washington Post and the Verge is important to build followers and hopefully they will return the follow and repost your research. A repost from The New York Times is great, and if it leads to the paper using the content in an article of their own, even better.

The University of California Research feed now has about 159,000 followers. That is more than double the number of followers of the UC Facebook page and Twitter feed combined, and they picked up followers such as public radio’s Science Friday and the Huffington Post.

I suspect that research might become viral or at least more popular because it is easy to understand, it seems to fit everyday observation and the implications of the theory are easy to implement. Plus, it is "marketed" properly, including by charismatic communicators. 

Should your research be on Tumblr? Yes, and Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, maybe even Instagram if it's very visual. Will it go viral? If the posts are engaging and the right people follow and repost your content, it may.

 

Comments. We don't have them turned on here at Serendipity35 any more. We were pounded over and over with spammers and so we turned them off more than a year ago. 

I thought about that as a read this piece on The New Yorker site that suggests that if the Internet were to receive its own Ten Commandments, one of them would be “Thou Shalt Not Read the Comments.”

The author says that there are "few online experiences more dispiriting, more arduously futile, than the downward scroll into the netherworld of half-assed provocations and inanities that exists beneath the typical opinion piece or YouTube video."

I miss our comments. The good ones, not the spam. I still think that part of the reason anyone should blog is to get some feedback from the world. But because this blog has such a long tail of posts, we became a target to spammers. last month we had 1140635 hits and that makes us a place a spammer want to put his link to Viagra and Beats headphones and Gucci bags and all the other crap that got sent our way. I have news for spammers and marketers: Tim and I post our own legitimate ads on this blog's sidebar to Amazon and such and they don't generate enough revenue after a few months to even get the two of a burger and beer at McGovern's.

I suppose I am shouting into the abyss with these posts if I can't even hear an echo of a comment.

That makes me think of when I was an undergrad at Rutgers and did some time at the college radio station, WRSU. We were just moving the station from AM to FM then and I got my FCC license and learned how to run the board and all that. I have always loved radio. But as a rookie, you got the unenviable time slots early in the morning or late at night and you wondered if anyone was out there listening.

At the time we were running The National Lampoon Radio Hour which was a very funny series of sketches. It was Saturday Night Live on the radio (with some of the same people, like Bill Murray). It was created, produced and written by staff from National Lampoon magazine and it lasted for a little over a year back in 1973 and 1974.

It originally was a radio HOUR but at some point while I was on the air, they cut it to 30 minutes, supposedly because they couldn't afford or didn't have the time to put together enough material required for a one-hour show.

That first half-hour show made mention at the end that some wimpy radio stations were not going to play the second half of the hour because that was the part with all the dirty stuff. Of course, the show ended there. And the station got calls from angry listeners that were mad because they couldn't hear the second half and because the college station was too wimpy to play it. I was unable to convince these callers that there was no second half and that it was just another gag. It was one of the rare times I knew someone was out there listening.

I am prepping for my fall graduate course in social media at NJIT and I'm looking at my list of  book titles for outside reading on social media, and some related digital design topics. The original list of titles was crowdsourced on this blog and updated  2 years later. The latest additions are based on outside reading by myself and recommendations from the last group of students who took the social media course. New suggestions welcomed.

1. The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success - Safko


2. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins - web 2.0 technologies and trends in the context of participatory culture.


3. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green


4. Social Media for Social Good: A How-to Guide for Nonprofits - Heather Mansfield


5. Social Media: Dominating Strategies for Social Media Marketing with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and Instagram


6. What Would Google Do? - Jeff Jarvis


7. Googled: The End of the World as We Know It   Ken Auletta


8. The Art of Social Media - by Guy Kawasaki & Peg Fitzpatrick


9. Power Friending - Amber MacArthur


10. 101 Social Media Tactics for Nonprofits: A Field Guide - by Melanie Mathos & Chad Norman


11. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations - Clay Shirky


12. Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies  Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li


13. Social Media Marketing All-in-One For Dummies - by Jan Zimmerman & Deborah Ng Yes, there's a "dummies" book for SM too


14. Building Social Web Applications: Establishing Community at the Heart of Your Site -  by Gavin Bell


15. Social Media Explained: Untangling the World's Most Misunderstood Business Trend - by Mark Schaefer


16. Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business - Erik Qualman


17. Designing for the Social Web - Joshua Porter


18. The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future - S. Craig Watkins


19. Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone - best practices for starting a social website with a focus on design focus


20. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler - though not a text on social media, law professor at Yale University, Benkler has made the entire book available for free download and a few chapters are very good at generating thoughts about the emergence of social software  http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/wealth_of_networks/


21. Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone. - Mitch Joel - a business focus on using Net marketing, especially. free tools and services


22. Shel Israel - Twitterville


23. Chris Brogan and Julian Smith - Trust Agents


24. The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging


25. David Meerman Scott's New Rules of Marketing & PR


26. Paul Gillin - The New Influencers


27. Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakenridge - Putting the Public Back in Public Relations


28. David Kirkpatrick The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that's Connecting the World (Jan 2010)


29. Tim O'Reilly and Sara Milstein -  The Twitter Book


30. The Zen of Social Media Marketing - by Shama Hyder


31. Bob Garfield  -  Chaos Scenario


32. David Meerman Scott  - World Wide Rave


33. Adam Penenberg' -  Viral Loop


34. Enterprise 2.0  -  Andrew McAfee ~ Web 2.0 for the enterprise


35. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation - Tim Brown


36. The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business - Hunt


37. The Cluetrain Manifesto - though ten years old, this book on the networked marketplace probably makes more sense today in its observations about how the Internet continues to change business.


38. Visual Thinking by Rudolf Arnheim - probably more in the art and visual design world, but his premise that all thinking is basically perceptual and the ancient dichotomy between seeing and thinking, between perceiving and reasoning, is false and misleading.

I can type some odd punctuation online and the Web sees and then the reader tries to apply some meaning and interpretation to those icons.

These emotion icons, now known by the portmanteau emoticon is meant to be a metacommunicative pictorial representation of a facial expression. They became part of writing on the Web in emails, on web pages and in text messages and social media posts. They rose from a need created by the absence of body language and prosody in this non-verbal communication.

The emoticon is meant to give the receiver soem clue to the tenor, tone or temper of a sender's message.

Through the use of a few punctuation marks, numbers and letters, we hope to communicate feelings or mood. With the rise and current dominance of mobile computing, devices now provide stylized pictures that require no typing of odd punctuation to generate an image. You can simply select an angry cat, crying face, champagne toast, pile of excrement or character from a movie.

Western emoticons are usually written at a right angle to the direction of the text, but users from Japan popularized a kind of emoticon called kaomojis (???. The word emoji literally means "picture" (e) + "character" (moji) but that term has a somewhat different use in the West. In either place, they can be understood without tilting your head to the left. The growth of digitally-mediated communicative tools (DMC) has been rapid and pervasive. Most tech-savvy users are comfortable using these on a daily basis. This is certainly more true among younger generations where DMC may actually be the preferred means of communication. Still, how do these users clarify their meaning, intent, and desires?

It's a topic that gets serious study. This blogger at scientificamerican.com says the emoticon and emojis role in "Democratizing Communication" might be that:

"... emoticons reinforces the need for a personal element in DMC. The nuances that emoticons add need to mean something to the audience—which is why a standard set of emoticons is not sufficient, even while the standard of using emoticons becomes widespread. The cultural development of emoticons also emphasizes how important emoticons have become to digitally-mediated communication and maintaining our social networks. The fact that we see cultural variations in emoticons reveals that emoticons are being used to connect people—to help people understand each other through methods that limit shared information inherent to social biofeedback. 

As we increasingly transact our lives online, and find ways to effectively communicate online, what we are able to share becomes important in shaping our world overall. Researchers propose “the creation and distribution of digital goods has been democratized.”12 The creation and growth of social networking has allowed for easy sharing of creative and intellectual property. To which I will add, that these efforts have been assisted by DMC tools, such as emoticons, which allow shared ideas to be understood—not just in terms of content, but in terms of the author’s meaning as well."



And to that, we might reply: