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The cover on TRIUMF's Facebook page. |
TRIUMF’s new endeavour – Social media – has recently taken off. In a month of jumping feet first into this vast new world, we now have 61 people “liking” us on Facebook and a regular following on the Quantum Diaries. We have been using Twitter, for a number of months now, and as of today have just under 300 people following us.
So what does it all mean, and why is this useful to TRIUMF?
Overall, the purpose of jumping into the social media sphere is to take part in an easy way to get more people knowing about, talking about, and sharing information about the lab.
Last month David Harris, a recognized social media expert for science labs, came to TRIUMF for the official kick-off of TRIUMF’s initiatives in social media. David, who has worked in science communications through his career, spent two days discussing with a small group how TRIUMF could use the various social media tools available. The most prominent tools in use right now for sharing information are Facebook, Twitter, and Blogs.
One of the key points that Harris stressed on his visit here is that social media tools, are just that — tools. Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Blogs… all of these are just different online platforms to share information. Some are better suited to getting conversations going between the lab and its interested audience (Blogs, Twitter), and some are better for just posting information that people are then free to share with other people (Facebook, YouTube, Flicker). At TRIUMF, one of our main goals in social media is to engage an audience that is already there—people who are already interested in TRIUMF as a lab, and those that will be through sharing and conversations. As David put it—People are already talking about TRIUMF. Why not jump in and join the conversation?
Looking more closely at the tools, according to David, a majority of people who use Facebook, use it for the main purpose of sharing interesting information. They come across something interesting, share it with their friends, they share it with their friends, and voila! It’s a virtual word-of-mouth machine. TRIUMF’s Facebook page is now set up to automatically update when a new tweet is posted, a new headline news stories from the triumf.ca home page is posted, or new posts on our YouTube of Flickr accounts are made. This generates a lot of content that people can easily share with their friends.
Twitter—by far our most-used social media tool right now—is a great place to share information, forge relationships, and be updated in real-time with short messages on what’s happening now. The term “microblogging” is often used in relation to twitter - it’s personal, it’s short, and it’s in real-time. At TRIUMF, we’ve been using it to promote the stories from our website, posts on quantum diaries, and, when the quake happened in Japan last week, news from our colleagues.
Quantum Diaries is a blog that began a number of years ago through Interactions. Interactions is a collaboration between the communications teams of particle physics labs around the world. On the Quantum Diaries blog, we have a section for TRIUMF posts where any TRIUMF member who is interested in blogging has the opportunity to create posts. To kick it off, TRIUMF’s director Nigel Lockyer, has put virtual pen to paper and has been sharing thoughts about water & physics, construction around the lab, and his latest posts are from India.
On top of all that, we’re also using YouTube and Flickr to share videos and pictures, telling more of TRIUMF’s story.
At TRIUMF, we encourage TRIUMF staff to explore using these tools and sharing personally and following normal usage and etiquette guidelines for what is appropriate. At TRIUMF, our main twitter account (@TRIUMFLab) and Facebook pages will and are being used to amplify and highlight items of interest to the whole community.
All of these sites are just tools to let people know who we are, what we do, how awesome we are, and we welcome curious people asking questions! It’s another way to share the TRIUMF story beyond our fence.
If you work at TRIUMF and would like to write a short blog post for Quantum Dairies, please email Jennifer Kaban. The more writers, the more diverse and accurate picture of TRIUMF we will have to show everyone!
-- Written by Jennifer Kaban, Web Publishing Coordinator