How can a researcher use social media?

I was asked if social media is good for researchers. Well of course! (And what else can I say as a researcher and as a social media holic?)

Source: uef.fi via Johanna on Pinterest

While I was thinking about the issue from my own point of view (I started a LinkedIn group for Finnish social media researchers last year and have got a lot of useful information from that) I found out a web page by University of Eastern Finland. They had lots of good hints on it so I wanted to translate some of the stuff for my own blog too.

Many of the tools in social media are free of charge for universities and specialists


True. But I add a warning: even if they are free now, it does not mean they remain free of charge in the future too. Keep in mind too that the services may disappear any day if they are profitable for the service provider.

With social media tools you can co-operate with people from different organizations without the mess of account bureaucracy

Yes. E.g. in Yammer you can have a secret group for your project people, invited by their emails.

You can reach useful tools that help working that your own employer do not provide

E.g. on my university laptop the only picture editing tool is Paint and I am not allowed to add e.g. GIMP that I am otherwise using - I lack the admin rights to my computer. However with help of Sumo Paint I can do some picture editing in the net without installing the software.

Get visibility for you and your research – build your web identity (expert brand)

The brand goes to two-ways - it is good for the university's reputation that it has researchers valued in social media networks while it is also good for the researchers themselves if their employer is seen as valued organization. So both are needed. The more links the university pages are get from social media the more they are valued by the search engines too.

Collaboration and networking
•Find the researcher community of your own field
•See e.g. services like LinkedIn, LeMill, Mendeley (sharing pdf’s) and ResearchGate.

Source: lemill.net via Johanna on Pinterest

ResearchGate is like LinkedIn but for researchers.
Xing is the professional network in German-speaking area. LeMill is started in Finland for sharing sharing open educational resources but it is maintained in English

In these groups you can ask ideas for good sources, tell about good conferences, get visibility to your publications and your projects. Maybe you get funding, maybe new projects or coworkers. You never know what can happen when you let the social media do its wonders!

Rich communication enabled by the tools (e.g. chats and video chat) gives you more presence in your interactions – all over the world and with help of instant messaging and Skype you can reduce the amount of emails - and phone costs.

I love the way Skype is working for groups of about 10 people. You can ask an opinion from your colleagues and the one who is online answers you. The others can go through the discussion when they are online too and add comments if needed.

In social tools it is easy to co-write, save and share documents, edit and share the pictures and use picture databases

The services I am using are GoogleDocs for co-writing and Dropbox for saving and sharing the documents. I use a lot of Flickr for finding pictures that can be used freely.

The materials and videos from conferences can be shared through social media

SlideShare and YouTube are good services for this. In our recent Mindtrek seminar I was tweeting for SOITA project and made some seminar videos to YouTube. The materials we provided were added to SlideShare and later on also to our Storify story of all SOITA presentations.  I do think that we have reached much more people with help of social media than we otherwise could have reached.

Social bookmark services researchers can not only collect useful links for themselves but share them with a group of people or in public

For links I currently use mostly Twitter and Pinterest. Pinterest is ideal for collection of links, we have e.g. one for CMAD event which our university project is co-organizing with others. I also use the new secret Pinterest board for stuff that is not public yet. I used to use Delicious and Diigo too but think they lack the social effects I get from Twitter and Pinterest.

Now - what would you add?  What possibilities did we forget?

One researcher people have praised me is Alexander Stocker. He even has a Facebook page for his blog where he tells about his research work and the conferences he has attended. After all the praise I just wish my German would be better. Another great example is Alf Rehn from Åbo Akademi in Finland. He must be busy with all of his projects but still he has time to be active on Twitter too.

MindTrek by @MerviRauhala

If you missed MindTrek last week this Storify story by Mervi Rauhala gives you a possibility to pick the highligts. :) Mervi did a good job in live-tweeting and I retweeted many of her tweets while I was live-tweeting for @soitaproject´s account. I have noticed it is easier to get followers for a human than for an organization and my aim was to get more followers for our project. I managed to double the amount of  followers in 3 days so I need to be content (not happy though). Soita project will be sharing our viewpoints of the MindTrek later in our blog.

Managing Customer Information and Knowledge with Social Media in Business-to-Business Companies by @jjussila

Here's a presentation I forgot to share from our SOITA project by Jari Jussila.

Managing Customer Information and Knowledge with Social Media in Business-to-Business Companies

View more presentations from Jussila Jari

SOITA - research is starting

I am now blogging more in Finnish than in English - it used to be the other way around. On Monday I how ever blogged about something I want to share in this blog too and to make a quick post I used Google translator to translate the text in English. So if this sounds weird, blage big G :).

My longtime dream has come true: I will continue my studies after ten years. I graduated from master's degree from the University of Tampere, majoring in statistics and even if I conducted a my studies pretty soon, I did not want to continue my studies then. A couple of years ago, during the Christmas holiday, I realized I wanted to do postgraduate studies relating social media tools.

Soon after I got more to think about, Nokia announced to leave the city of Jyväskylä and I began to focus on my new career, I jumped through Protomo to Ambientia and started a company of my own. In the background I was thinking about the studies and participated quite many seminars. E.g. last spring, the University of Jyväskylä organized a seminar about digital innovation which is the same subject I am now concentrating. I feel myself lucky to be able to decide how I use my time - and now half of my week goes to my new work at the university.

On Monday I started as a project manager in the Tampere University of Technology, Information Management and Logistics Department . Our project is called SOITA (social media as part of innovation process in customer interface). The project lasts two years and it focuses on B2B companies. Our our goals are not only to create companies good practices and encouraging examples but also disseminate them widely to Finnish organizations.

If you have something similar going on, do not hesitate to contact me, e.g. by johanna dot Janhonen at tut dot com.

Happy New Year! I do hope your dreams come true too:).