Research Comms Podcast: Amy Mollett talks about social media in higher education, in Parliament and its role in research communication
‘I think it’s about doing one thing and doing it well, which is a great comms rule anyway.’ Amy Mollett, on finding the right social media platform and leaning into expertise.
Amy Mollett is part of the team of writers behind ‘Communicating your Research with Social Media’. She formerly worked as LSE’s first Social Media Manager, establishing a number of popular blogs, before moving into the digital services team in the UK’s Parliament. Having seen the resignation of a Prime Minister and Brexit as well as the pandemic during her time at Westminster, Amy was recently appointed Head of Social Media and AV at the University of Cambridge.
In this episode of Research Comms Amy Mollett talks about the exciting early days of blogs and twitter, of her social media work at LSE, of the digital services team in Parliament. Tips for getting started, maintaining digital wellbeing and tracking what’s important abound.
SUBSCRIBE ON
or wherever you listen to your podcasts…
The below is a short excerpt. For the full interview download the podcast.
Tell us about how the book ‘Communicating your research through Social Media’ came into being.
My colleagues and I had been working on LSE blogs for a few years. Every year, the LSE blogs attracted 8 million unique readers and accounted for something like one in eight hits to the LSE website. So they were really visible, had really surpassed all our expectations. A few of us had written guides as well, for those blogs. One was a quick guide to Twitter, for example, and they did really well. 40,000, 50,000 downloads. A really substantial chunky number.
So with Cheryl Brumley, with Chris Gilson and Sierra Williams, we started talking to the team at Sage Publications who are great. They really champion new voices in social sciences and communications, and we had some great initial chats. They helped us focus on not just sharing our experiences, but turning that into something practical, something timeless. Social media channels put out new features and products every six months. So we wanted to write something that wasn't just ‘press this button’, but that had more theory and more ideas behind it.
We could see a need for the book as well. Every time we sat down face to face with an academic, we were answering similar questions and exploring similar ideas about how to use social media for collaboration or how to use it for research communication. So we knew anecdotally that there was a wide interest. The publishers were able to give us a bit more weight to that idea.
And the process of writing it, it was tough. We were all working full time alongside, you know, having families and homes and things like that. We split up writing the chapters according to our expertise. So my colleague Cheryl, who's now the global head of audio at the FT, she wrote the podcasting section. Chris focused on the blogpost writing and the more practical writing side of things. And then Sierra did a great job focusing on theory and putting all these things together.
If we think about research not just as thinking of something and then writing about it, it's much more about the whole lifecycle of research of ideas and collaboration, publishing and then that going on to inform somebody else's ideas and this whole cycle starts again. So I'm really, really grateful and really thankful that Sheryl, Chris and Sierra were up for for writing something together.
Have you listened to these other episodes of the Research Comms podcast?
How do you recommend that researchers and research communicators get started with social media, or kickstart a habit of engagement?
Social media can feel really overwhelming for anybody on that that journey. My advice would be to start with your own expertise and your own experiences. You don't need to to make a comment or send a tweet about everything that's at the top of the BBC headlines that day. But if there's something that's in your research expertise, or if there's something in your area of experience, that's your time. That's your opportunity to step in to those discussions.
LinkedIn is a bit of a more friendly space. It's such a great place for academics to share their expertise and meet collaborators because you don't have the noise of the rest of the public, as wonderful as the general public are! And for most folks, I think that first sharing of experience can come really naturally, and it doesn't have to be a 2000 word article about your opinion on something. It can be some photos of behind the scenes research or field work, that just shows the rest of the world a little snippet of what you're experiencing or this amazing thing that you've learned that you're writing about.
It can be about things like work-life balance. It can be about something light, that’s heartwarming, about having a pet sleep next to you when you're working and researching. I think there's room for all of this, this wider full self academic experience now. It's not just about being the best or publishing the most or being the most cited. There is this bigger discourse about the whole experience of academia and working at university. So my advice would be to think about the whole academic experience and how you want to be part of that in the digital space and take the opportunities when your research area is top of the news to share your ideas, to share your experience.
How much planning would you recommend goes into social media content and activity?
In the book, we think about the research life cycle, so starting off with inspiration and then going into collaboration. When you're writing during your primary research and then disseminating that, that could be a journal article, that could be blog posts, then we're going into the public engagement area, which hopefully goes into some form of impact and then taking that round the research lifecycle again.
There are points all through that research lifecycle that you can plan to write something. If you're thinking about how you're spending your time through that report you can plan to to spend a couple of hours writing a blog post or putting a few photos together and tracking engagement. You want to think of it in these terms, as part of the project dissemination, or as part of sharing with the world what your findings were.
For anything that you are working on long term, I would say it's always definitely worth planning a little bit. It doesn't mean that everything has to be completely fresh and starting from scratch. If you're writing a report for a funder and they want to see, you know, some behind the scenes updates and you can reformat those or you put those into blog posts or photos to share on your own social channels.
What would your suggestions be about tracking social media performance?
For me, there are two things that are always worth tracking. Number one would be how many clicks through to your resources or your reading that you're getting. So the amount of people clicking on to your research article who are getting there via your Twitter account, for example. If you look in your own Twitter analytics section, you can find that information. And if you click on your individual tweets, you should be able to see how many people have clicked through and completed that journey.
And the other thing that’s worth thinking about and keeping a note of is which senior figures you get some genuine social media engagement with. So if you post a LinkedIn update, photos from your fieldwork, or behind the scenes blogpost whatever it might be, and the director of a research centre at another organisation starts following you and comments, keep a note. If you're thinking about how to decide which social media channel you want to use, that's a great indicator that people in your expertise area are in that space. This person could be hiring in the future. They could be a future collaborator. Through other connections, you'll be able to see how you might be connected by a few different degrees.
So I think those are the two things worth looking at: which of your social media feeds is delivering the most clicks through to your resources or through to your journal articles, whatever it might be. And the number two would be to look at look at these high profile connections and where they're coming from too.
In the book you covered how to communicate using blogs, podcasts, data visualizations and - my favourite subject - video. What’s your recommendation to researchers who are thinking of using video to share their research?
In terms of video for research communication, in the book we talked about a few different options in terms of budget and in terms of formality and tone as well. So, if you’re at an institution, my advice would be to definitely get in touch with your communications team - they'll usually have links to trusted video makers and filmmakers, as well as really talented press teams, audio folks, events people. For all of these people, it's their full time job to to be experts in these areas, and they'll be able to give you great advice and advise you on what options there are in terms of availability or budget, that kind of thing. So I'm a huge advocate for working with video professionals, whether it's at an institution or with an agency, definitely.
The expertise is far beyond anything that you might be able to do yourself just with just your i-phone. But the other side of that is for some types of projects, using a phone to shoot quite informal behind-the-scenes video can really appeal to audiences. So it depends what you're looking for. But I think my advice would be start with the professionals. Take them out for a coffee. Learn about what they do and see how you can work together.
———
On that note - if you do ever want to grab a coffee, virtual or otherwise, and chat about how to use video to communicate research, feel free to get in touch! - Peter (peter@orinococomms.com)
Research Comms is presented by Peter Barker, director of Orinoco Communications, a digital communications and content creation agency that specialises in helping to communicate research. Find out how we’ve helped research organisations like yours by taking a look at past projects…
EXPLORE MORE FROM THE ORINOCO COMMS BLOG
