Online outreach: a personal view

As I sit here bobbing about aboard the research ship James Cook in the Antarctic, I have some time to reflect on the online outreach that we're doing, which we developed on a previous expedition.

Back in April last year, we were exploring the Cayman Trough in the Caribbean, which is the world's deepest undersea volcanic rift, in search of deep-sea hydrothermal vents to answer a major question about the patterns of life in the oceans.

The ingredients of seeing parts of our world for the first time, finding new species of bizarre creatures, etc, make a tempting recipe for public outreach. So I developed expedition webpages that allowed people to find out more about the work that we were doing, chat with our team, and generally share in our scientific journey.

The webpages are still available (although I've deactivated the interactive elements now that trip is over) at http://www.thesearethevoyages.net/jc44/index.html

I was inordinately pleased with the results, which I'd like to share as an example of something that "worked".

Creating the webpages

First of all though, a quick recap on how the pages came to be.  After a brainstorm with my wife (who, as a former subeditor, is brilliant at such things), I bought the domain name www.thesearethevoyages.net for the project (ok, I'm a huge Star Trek fan, but it seemed appropriate).  Total cost: less than 20 quid for a couple of years.

Then I adapted a webpage design that I already had. Having a basic layout designed by pros was very useful, and then tinkering with the html is easy (it really isn't rocket science, or even deep-sea biology; if you're an age like me and programmed computers in BASIC as a kid, then you should find html similar in some ways; I've never taken a course in it, but have learned from playing - e.g. if you see something cool on a webpage, then look through the source code to see how they did it).

Creating the actual information content for the webpage, particularly the background pages on the various science projects on our expedition, was admittedly not trivial.  But if you enjoy writing, then it is fun.  During the expedition, we posted a daily update on what we were doing, with photos and the occasional video.  Our weblink from the ship was very limited (a 256k satellite modem), but we managed fine nonetheless.

I hosted the pages on a commercial ISP for ~£15 a month (my home institution had just revamped its own webpages, and wasn't ready to add something like this to them, plus there were issues of "corporate branding" and "content approval" that frankly I wanted to avoid).

Finally, in addition to the "core" webpages, I put together a network of "Web 2.0" resources to promote them.  So we had a Twitter page for the expedition (bringing together all the tweets from our team members into a single list).  Plus a Facebook presence, and an expedition YouTube channel - all providing "portals" to the main webpages.  And where appropriate, these elements (e.g. a Twitterfall of team members' tweets) were embedded in the webpages to link back out as well.

To enable dialogue with our audience, rather than just one-way transmission of information, I included a "post a comment" feature on our daily-updated "diary" page. This allowed visitors to ask questions, which our team members then answered through the same comment system.  I thought post-a-comment might require heavy moderating, but it didn't - and the positive and supportive nature of the comments about our work gave us a real boost out at sea too.  Our "Schools" pages also included a "post a question" form for pupils, and offered a live webchat facility for classes.

Proof of the pudding

In terms of cost, the webpages for our one-month expedition cost me less than £35.  Ok, the basic design was something that I had adapted from another project (where it cost a few hundred).  And in terms of my time, I spent perhaps a total of a week on it, scattered across evenings and weekends, and during our transit time at sea.  But overall, it was not a costly project.

The results:

* the main webpages received more than 50,000 visitors from at least 89 countries during the one-month expedition (to put that in context, the government's recent "Science So What" webpages, created with a budget of £300k, received 200,000 visitors over one year).

* our expedition YouTube channel received more than 100,000 views in one week, making it YouTube's 38th most viewed channel for that week (and incidentally surpassing WebCameronUK during what was the first week of the UK election campaign).

So how did we attract those visitors to our online outreach resources?  It was a successful marriage of "new" and "mainstream" media.

Spreading the word

As our expedition set off, we put out a press release about it, including the link for our webpages where people could follow our work.  This got moderate coverage (we didn't have any new results to report at that point), but was nicely picked up by some of the IT trade press (e.g. The Register) and local media in the Caribbean, which then set the ball rolling to some extent.

During the expedition, we discovered the world's deepest known hydrothermal vents, 3.1 miles down in the Cayman Trough.  We press-released that discovery (taking great care to simply report the achievement of finding them, and not mention our actual research findings down there, to avoid breaking the publicity policies of the top journals where we hoped to publish afterwards).

Sure enough, that release got *very* wide coverage (The Times, New Scientist, BBC, CNN, etc etc).  Even now, if you Google the phrase "world's deepest undersea volcanic vents", it returns more than 15,000 webpages carrying news of our work.  And much of the coverage included the link to our outreach webpages, which we'd highlighted in the press release.

We were top BBC science news story for a morning, which meant around 400,000 readers of the article there, and plenty of click-throughs to our webpages from their link.  But our big coup was being top Yahoo! News story for the best part of a day - which meant around 1.5 million readers of the coverage there.  The link from the Yahoo! story became the top source referring visitors to our webpages.

But there were surprises.  We received more visitor referrals from our own "Web 2.0" portals (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) than we got from links carried in coverage on Discovery.com, NationalGeographic.com and the Daily Mail online.  And linkshare sites like digg.com also got us more visitors than links in coverage on Nature.com - so social media really do seem to help in spreading the word.

Working with mainstream media

What interested me, as a former full-time science journalist, was the nature of some of the mainstream media coverage.  Out of more than 520 news articles about our discovery that we tracked via Google news, the vast majority were effectively cut-and-pastes of text from our press release (great news for us, but symptomatic of the trend of "churnalism" that is worrying for society…).

Only ~30 media outlets actually contacted us directly to ask questions and get original quotes.  And only 3 - yes, three - articles included "independent comment" from someone else working in our field (i.e. not just taking our word for the importance of our discovery, but getting someone else to verify our claims and provide wider context).  Back in the days when I was a news editor, I would have spiked any copy that didn't have independent comment.  But with the pressure of 24/7 rolling news these days, no-one seems to bother with it, and hence credulous crap can spread like wildfire (sigh).

One exception who deserves kudos imho is Raphael Satter at Associated Press, who carefully crafted his article about our work through a couple of interviews and follow-up questions over 24h to get things right (incidentally, we used an embargo of a couple of days on our press release to enable folks to prepare their stories).  Raphael also got independent comment, and I think produced the most accurate and balanced article about our work.

It was worth spending time working with Raphael to help him gather and check all the facts etc that he needed, because it was a newswire - an article then carried verbatim by many other outlets, e.g. Time.com, USA Today etc.  It was also the article that topped Yahoo! News, which had the most readers.

So my tip for the future would be: if your time for interacting with the media is limited, invest it in working with journalists working for newswire services, because their stories are cut-and-pasted around the world, so it's worth helping them get them right.

Conclusions

Online outreach can be incredibly effective for spreading the word about what you are doing and why it matters.  It can support true dialogue with public audiences, rather than one-way transmission of information.  Social media can be useful tools in this effort, but mainstream media still have clout - and a strategy combining "new" and "mainstream" media can be very effective.  And perhaps most importantly, it doesn’t have to be expensive, or require specialist expertise.

From that initial foray, I've now revamped www.thesearethevoyages.net for outreach from future expeditions, such as the one I'm on right now.