Dennis Meredith’s career as a science communicator has included service at some of the country’s leading research universities, including MIT, Caltech, Cornell, Duke and the University of
Wisconsin. His newest book, Explaining Research: How to Reach Key Audiences to Advance Your Work is the first comprehensive communications guidebook for scientists, engineers, and physicians. Meredith explains how to use websites, blogs, videos, webinars, old-fashioned lectures, news releases, and lay-level articles to reach key audiences, emphasizing along the way that a strong understanding of the audience in question will allow a more effective communication tailored to a unique background and set of needs. In the original post below Meredith looks at how to best use twitter.
While the Explaining Research Web site includes an extensive list of tools to enhance Twitter, there have been major questions about how people can best use Twitter and those tools to their professional benefit. Fortunately, communication experts are now beginning to come up with excellent guidance. Understanding Twitter is particularly important because it has become a ubiquitous communication tool since its launch a mere four years ago. Each minute, about 30,000 Twitter tweets sluice through the Internet, according to the nifty tracking service TweeSpeed. Perhaps like many of you, I’m a Twitter twit—reluctant to leap into this raging torrent without knowing how to “swim,” that is, how to use Twitter to communicate responsibly and advance my work. Although I have a Twitter account, @explainresearch, so far my only tweets have been feeds from my blog The Research Explainer.
Despite, or perhaps because of, its ubiquity, there is an active debate over the value of Twitter. For example, journalist James Harkin declared in an article in the Guardian that social network sites have “created only a deafening banality.” And New Yorker writer George Packer declared on his blog that Twitter is “crack for media addicts.” New York Times reporter Nick Bilton countered such assertions on his blog, citing Twitter’s extraordinary utility in uses from companies scheduling freight deliveries, to an astronaut tweeting answers to science questions from the space station, to Iranians reporting atrocities by their government. And Bryan Howland points out in his essay that, like television, Twitter can be both mindless babble and a useful information tool. What’s more, he says, one’s person’s babble can be another’s information gold.
Indeed, in Explaining Research, I point out that Twitter can provide useful, instant communication among people who are members of a group, field or center, or attending an event— as well as enabling communication with broader audien