How to host a successful chat on Twitter

4 June 2019 by 7 Comments

Helen KaraDr Helen Kara has been an independent researcher since 1999 and writes and teaches on research methods.

She is the author of Creative Research Methods in the Social Sciences: A Practical Guide (Policy Press, 2015). She is not, and never has been, an academic, though she has learned to speak the language.

In 2015, Helen was the first fully independent researcher to be conferred as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. She is also a Visiting Fellow at the UK’s National Centre for Research Methods. Her latest book is Research Ethics in the Real World: Euro-Western and Indigenous Perspectives (Policy Press, 2018).

Helen’s website is helenkara.com and she tweets at @DrHelenKara. You can support her work on Patreon. Her ORCID is 0000-0001-7348-0963.

Image by Marc Wathieu | flickr.com

Image by Marc Wathieu | flickr.com

I have hosted and co-hosted a number of chats on Twitter under existing hashtags, and last month I set up my own Twitter chat on creative research methods.

In case you’re new to all this, a hashtag is a way of keeping track of topics and content on Twitter. For example, if you want to know what people are saying about marmalade, you can search Twitter for #marmalade (pro tip: then click ‘latest’ for most recent content) and you’ll find that marmalade is not only a foodstuff but a popular name for pets. You can use hashtags, follow hashtags and invent hashtags. They’re a great tool for reducing bazillions of apparently random tweets to a string of tweets that you actually want to read.

I write about creative research methods. It’s a topic that holds great interest for me and I know for a number of others too. So I decided to set up a monthly chat on Twitter. I played around with a few ideas for hashtags. The obvious #creativeresearchmethods and #creativeresearchmethodschat were too long and cumbersome. In the end I settled for #crmethods (for discussion in between the monthly chats) and #crmethodschat (for the chats themselves). To my delight, neither of those hashtags were in use on Twitter. It’s always worth checking that before you make a final decision. I remember going to a conference where the event’s hashtag was also being used by a European music festival with some quite, er, liberated practices, which meant the conference Twitterfeed was entertaining in rather more ways than the organisers had intended! Read more of this post

Filed under Networking, Research communication Tagged with , , , , ,

What I like seeing researchers post

11 September 2018 by Leave a comment

Photo by Jason Leung | unsplash.com

Photo by Jason Leung | unsplash.com

‘But I haven’t got anything to say!’

This is one of the most common laments I hear when I’m running social media workshops, particularly from emerging scholars.

Researchers – many of whom we know are rather fond of holding forth (it’s tough to make them stop) – suddenly clam up when they’re staring at their newly created Twitter account or Facebook page. They’re sometimes wary of the exposure, often anxious of doing something ‘wrong’, and rarely at ease with platforms from the start.

To address this stumbling point in my ‘Researchers and social media’ workshops, I indicate what might be good content for a researchers’ social media stream. It’s a starting point to think about what types of information to include, how they’d source that information and what they might ‘sound’ like.

This post is a more detailed version of my earlier post about what I tweet (when I was running three different types of accounts…which was before I was running four different types of accounts!).

Small caveat: What I include in that workshop is not definitive; it’s not based on scads of data. It’s what I find in others’ social media streams that I think is valuable, and the people and organisations who share this kind of stuff will probably be followed or liked by me.  Read more of this post

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Why I’d unfollow you

21 August 2018 by 6 Comments

This article first appeared in Funding Insight on 2 August 2018 and is reproduced with permission of Research Professional. For more articles like this, visit www.researchprofessional.com.

Photo by Jan Tinneberg | unsplash.com

Photo by Jan Tinneberg | unsplash.com

The longer I’ve actively been on social media, the more certain things grate on me.

I’ve written before about why I’d follow an account—a person or organisation—on Twitter.

So, you can imagine that if an account started to become the opposite of what it was when I followed it, it would turn me off.

With longer-term use, other aspects become salient when it comes to unfollowing an account. This article isn’t about whether I’d follow back, or decide to follow (or ‘like’, depending on the social media platform), rather I’m going to look at why I’d stop following (or liking) an account.

Most of the reasons are to do with consistently hitting my irritation threshold. There’s a rough formula here, and unfollowing only happens when the account starts irritating me more than I find it useful or fun.

If it’s super-useful and only occasionally irritating, I’ll stay. If the usefulness (or fun in engagement) fades and the irritation becomes constant or increasing, I’ll likely go.

Here are the top five reasons that would make me unfollow an account. Read more of this post

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Recruiting research participants using Twitter

15 November 2016 by 3 Comments

Andrew GloverAndrew Glover is a Research Fellow at RMIT University, based in the Digital Ethnography Research Centre and the Beyond Behaviour Change Group.

He is interested in sustainability, air travel, and remote collaboration. He tweets at @theandrewglover. His ORCID is 0000-0002-5786-0285. 

Recruitment for research participants is often time-consuming work.

Emailing people directly can be effective, but does seem intrusive at times, given the amount of email many of us deal with on a daily basis.

Sometimes, you just want to get your message out there as far and wide as possible, beyond your personal and professional networks.

If you cannot join the Army - Try & get a Recruit

British WWI Recruitment Poster, by State Records NSW on Flickr

Recently, I’ve used Twitter to recruit survey and interview participants for two projects.

The first was an online survey about academic air travel in Australia, and the second was a call for interviews with people who collaborate remotely without travelling. In both cases, I’ve been impressed by the extent to which the message was distributed across the networks of people I was hoping to reach. The air travel survey was completed by over 300 academics throughout Australia, with respondents from every broad field of research. I combined this with emailing universities and academic associations directly, asking them to pass the message on to their staff and members. For the project on remote collaboration, I had 13 people respond immediately who were willing to be interviewed, including from Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and the USA. Read more of this post

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How to run a shared social account

20 September 2016 by 2 Comments

Back in October 2014, my buddy @deborahbrian asked about running a shared Twitter account. I quickly wrote up a post and dropped it into the Banana Lounge (my personal blog). This is an updated, revised version of that post, informed by another couple of years’ experience and more trial and error. 

Photo by www.flickr.com/photos/carlos_maya | Shared under Creative Commons Licence 2.0

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/carlos_maya | Shared under Creative Commons Licence 2.0

Since getting into social media – especially Twitter – in a big way, I’ve had a fair amount of experience in running shared accounts.

  1. My research network’s Twitter (@aasrn) and Facebook group started as a shared account.
  2. Research Whisperer (@researchwhisper) and its Facebook page has always been a joint one with @jod999.
  3. Since the beginning of 2015, I’ve run the La Trobe Researchers accounts (@LTUresearchers | Facebook page) with my colleague Jason Murphy (@murphy_jason).

I should present this post with the caveat that I have no formal communications qualifications or training. All my experience is on the job, and self-taught.

When I run social media and digital research profile workshops, I’m often approached about how to run institution-face accounts: research centres or institutes, specific major projects, social that’s associated with group research blogs, etc.

By institution-face, I mean the specific context of formal university units or academic groups, but this advice would apply across a range of situations.

Read more of this post

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Breaking boundaries

17 November 2015 by 2 Comments

This is the first half of a talk that I gave recently at the University of Melbourne Researcher@Library event. Thanks to all involved for inviting me, and making me feel so welcome.  It was great! [The second half, Breaking Funding Boundaries, is now published.]

A long high fence that has been built around a big tree branch.

Tree in the fence, by Jonathan O’Donnell on Flickr

When we work within organisations, the boundaries of our organisation can become limiting horizons.

More and more, I am finding that it is easier to do things with the whole world than it is to do them within my organisation.

Sometimes, it is easier to get my colleagues’ attention on Twitter than it is face-to-face (even though they work on the same campus  or even in the same building). The conversation can be richer online, too, because they often have more time to talk on the train going home than they do between meetings. And multiple voices can join in with different points of view.

Organisations want to engage with the outside world, but are bound up in their own identities. I’ve talked before about how I’ve failed to get my Twitter handle on my business card. RMIT recognises the Research Whisperer as part of my job, but only lets me put ‘official’ channels on my card.

At a larger level, national funding systems can fall into this trap, too. Even though they recognise that international research teams produce stronger research, they can sometimes find it hard to fund international collaboration. There is much encouragement to publish with international colleagues. Funding agencies love it, but they often find it difficult to fund the work that leads to those publications. I suspect that they don’t want to give ‘tax-payer dollars’ (nation-based funds) to people from other nations, even though that will probably create better research outcomes.

Read more of this post

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